In 1982, Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead published Brothers and Friends, an edition of the diaries of Warren Hamilton Lewis. Lewis (1895-1973) signed his name W. H. Lewis, and to family and friends he was known as Warnie. He was the elder brother to C. S. Lewis, and his diaries provide invaluable information and insights about his famous brother and their circle.

On 4 July, 1967, W. H. Lewis wrote in his diary, “I often wonder at the mystery of heredity.” He went on, referring to his brother, “He and I, born of the same parents, he so brilliant, I so much the reverse. How and why?” Still, W. H. Lewis (from here on, simply Lewis) was no fool. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and he served in the British Army in logistics, transportation, and supply. He served in France during the First World War, and near the end of his military career, he was part of the evacuation of Dunkirk.

A lifelong lover of poetry, especially in English, Lewis also studied history, particularly French. In 1953 he published The Splendid Century, about the era of King Louis XIV, and over the next eleven years Lewis published six more volumes of French history. Lewis often joined his brother at meetings of the Inklings, where Lewis read drafts of chapters of The Splendid Century. On 31 May, 1944, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher, about a recent session of the Inklings, where “the chief entertainment” was a chapter from Lewis’ history. Tolkien told his son, “very good I thought it.”

Throughout his life, while Lewis enjoyed William Shakespeare’s sonnets, he found the plays tough going. From Lewis’ diaries, students of Shakespeare get a healthy reminder that an intelligent man with literary sensibility and historical perspective can nevertheless dislike nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays.

In his thirties, Lewis read a general history of English literature. “Every time I read a book of this sort,” he wrote in his diary for 8 April, 1930, “I am annoyed at my inability to appreciate Shakespeare: if I had no literary taste, it would not matter, but here is [a] man about whom the whole world is agreed.” Lewis said he would gladly trade everything by Shakespeare for poems by John Keats.

Three years later, Lewis saw his first Shakespeare play. It was the day after he turned thirty-eight, and he went with his brother to a local park in Oxford to see university students perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I went rather dubiously,” Lewis wrote in his diary on 17 June, 1933, “but enjoyed it immensely.” The setting helped, and Lewis found that the play was, “to my great surprise, amongst other things really funny.”

It seems to have been one of his few pleasant experiences with Shakespeare’s plays. In February, 1935, he went to see Oxford students do Hamlet. His friend and fellow Inkling, Nevill Coghill, directed, and Lewis thought Coghill did a good job. Lewis also liked the costumes.

From there, it went downhill. “There is one admirable character in this play,” Lewis told his diary, “Polonius, (very well acted I thought), and whenever he was on the stage, I enjoyed myself.” Lewis noted that, “his scene where he explains to the King and Queen what he thinks is wrong with Hamlet is capital fun.” Lewis added, “alas, all too soon he was killed, and from that point onwards I was desperately bored.”

While admiring Polonius, Lewis loathed Hamlet. “I have rarely conceived,” he wrote, “such a sudden antipathy to any character, and there was an intolerable deal of him.” To Lewis’ dismay, “every few minutes all the characters would hard heartedly sneak off and leave us at the mercy of this snivelling [sic], attitudinizing, platitudinizing arch bore for hundreds of lines at a stretch, and I could have screamed.”

For endurance, Lewis needed help: “In fact if I had not been fortified by a double whiskey and soda half way through, I would not have stuck it to the end.” As he finished writing about his ordeal, Lewis noted, “What dramatic merit the play had, seemed to have been supplied by Coghill and not by Shakespeare.” To underscore his point, he snorted, “The murders in the last ten minutes would have disgraced a Punch and Judy show.”

In the evenings, Lewis read poetry, and in December, 1947, he decided to read Othello. It was his first go at it, and Lewis noted “the absurd figure of Othello and his idiotic suspicions . . . and the ridiculous overheard conversations,” but Lewis tried to be generous. “But what a man, this Shakespeare!” Lewis wrote, adding, “In spite of all this nonsense, he faces the ‘willing suspension of belief’.”

Twenty years later, Lewis tried another of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Of King Lear, Lewis wrote, “sorrier stuff I haven’t read for a long time.” (Probably since he read Othello.) Lewis mused, “I wonder what it is in Shakespeare that most other people find to admire and I cannot see at all?” He had no answer.

“From Lear’s wildly improbable treatment of Cordelia at the start, right onwards,” Lewis grumped, “I could get nothing out of it except old blind Whatsisname’s soliloquy on Dover cliffs.” Lewis saw the characters as “a set of ranting dummies,” where “the villains are so villainous that they become ridiculous, whilst the good people are just plain bores, and one doesn’t care what happens to either class.” Lewis ended this diary entry with a prayer: “But the Fates preserve me from ever seeing Lear!”

Later that year, Lewis began reading Shakespeare’s history plays. He wrote that he was doing so “in the hope of correcting my ignorance of English history.” As an authority on early modern French history, Lewis thought it would be silly to “go to my grave in utter ignorance of anything which happened in my own country except between the years 1643 and 1714!”

In January, 1968, Lewis finished Shakespeare’s histories with Henry VIII. Lewis enjoyed it, observing that, “as a piece of Stagecraft I’m inclined to think Shakespeare’s best play.” Lewis thought he might someday re-read one or two of the tragedies and comedies, but, in an interesting lapse of memory, “probably none of the histories except Falstaff.” On the whole, however, he sighed, “I’ve regretfully confirmed my old opinion that Shakespeare is not for me.”