Ivor - who, I hear you mutter? Well, when I saw his name on the cover of a slim book simply entitled Shakespeare I must admit that the name did ring some very faint bells. I seem to remember him vaguely as an intellectual type during the '50s when I was fumbling my way toward adulthood but, alas, I couldn't recall anything he ever said or wrote. He was just a name probabably from the old BBC Home Service or the cultural sections of the big Sunday rags. Anyway, whilst mooching around the splendiferous Bookbarn (every book a quid, no more, no less!) I spotted his book on Shakespeare, published in 1951, and bought it for a quid!
What an excellent buy! I do think literary/historical swots face a litmus test when they decide to opine on 'our Will'. Within a few pages you quickly realize that you are either in the company of a sensible man or a raving loony! Ivor Brown was imbued with sense and sensibility down to his fingertips. His Wiki entry is worth reading. Born in Malaya in 1891 he was soon packed off to school in England and thence to Balliol College, Oxford where his superlative results earned him immediate entry into the civil service. He left after two days! Immediately, I warmed to him.
A man of independent opinions, he became a pacifist during WWI and afterwards drifted towards the Left-wing of politics writing for several Left-leaning newspapers. But again, his ability to think independently during his life gradually weaned him away from the Left. Perhaps more extraordinarily, he quickly saw through the sham of modern 'poetry', laying into the likes of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, two bluffers of the first order whose rubbish has beguiled the fashionable literati for decades.
I am only part-way in to his life of Shakespeare but already I trust his judment implicitly. He is all too aware of the loonies on either side who either wish to place 'our Will' on a pedestal or do him down as an ignorant country bumpkin chosen by de Vere or Francis Bacon or William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby (delete according to choice) who was the real author of the plays and poems - yeeeeees, quite! Brown will have none of it and after 60-odd years of detailed study of his subject his book is a balanced, shrewd and realistic portrait of the elusive Master Shakespeare. If you can lay hands on a copy - buy it!
