Scholarship

The inestimable service provided by local libraries goes from success to success. Shelf space saved must be already approaching six inches and I'm not counting the money not spent but with Amazon no longer taking Visa, my monthly bill from there is henceforth likely to be a paltry thing.

A.N. Wilson should by rights have his own tab on here but it's a bit late for that now. He is surely one of my most admired writers with such immense scholarship and so much of it. Current reading is his excellent The Elizabethans, so well-organized, so coherent, with such relevant detail and his fine ability with the telling adjective, like the 'randy' Ovid.

If the story can be summed up in one sentence it is of the Glory of England's Golden Age being built on foundations of piracy, horror, political expediency, unspeakable cruelty carried out in the name of religion or wealth-accumulation that Wilson explains we can't really judge one age by the standards of another. Well, maybe in many parts of the world it is still like that and it's us, reading our hardback library boks in cosy sitting rooms with our liberal humanities, 1970's university education that have yet much to be grateful for.

One suspects that Wilson has a weakness for the ritual, process and structure of both church and monarchy but is at least wise enough to acknowledge their absurdity. In the chapter on the theatre he stays with the generally accepted attribution of the Groatsworth of Wit to Robert Greene whereas Katherine Duncan-Jones's equally brilliant Ungentle Shakespeare had radically suggested it was really written by Thomas Nashe. The Elizabethans was published in 2011 and dedicated to K D-J, 'Elizabethan sans pareil', Ungentle Shakespeare in 2001, so he must have been aware of the alternative option. Shakespeare Scholarship can be a divisive, adversarial business, sometimes, one might think, as partisan as Montagues v. Capulets or the Protestant-Catholic disagreements of the C16th. Wilson and Katherine were married once but are no longer. One can see how such great scholars would have found each other so attractive and then imagine where they might have found an insurmountable difference.

Wilson is persusive in his argument that England, and Wales, including Scotland for much of the time, remained 'Elizabethan' until the C20th and more or less until the second Elizabeth and perhaps he regrets that it no longer is but that is what it seems history is like to me, that one historian will see it their way while another will shape it entirely differently but the joy of reading is in the reading itself. I'm never less than hugely impressed by A.N. Wilson and once this is finished, which won't be long, I'll move on to the novel of his I've borrowed, one of many, called Love Unknown.

He must have worn out a few typewriters.