''Emilia was a bad lot and led Shakespeare a merry dance,'' he said. The 80-year-old authority on Elizabethan England, who looks like a twinkling pixie behind his horn- rimmed glasses and enjoys talking like a cultural revolutionary, last stirred up the scholars a decade ago by identifying Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the sonnets as Emilia Bassano Lanier, daughter of an Italian musician of Jewish origin at Queen Elizabeth's court. He insists there is method in his madness: to remove the footnotes and make the plays more readable and to enable them to be staged with fresh appeal to young audiences and theatergoers who may have been lost to Shakespeare. In some familiar dialogue, he is even substituting his own words to replace obscure ones. ''It should happen at least once every 400 years,'' said Professor Rowse of his series, ''The Contemporary Shakespeare.'' The Oxford University professor emeritus is smiting the thous and thees and hasts and spakes and removing what he calls ''superfluous difficulties,'' such as archaic grammar and unintelligible language.
To coincide with Shakespeare's 420th birthday today, the first six plays in this venture are being released by the University Press of America. Rowse, is about to strike again: He is turning the traditional language of 37 Shakespeare plays into modern English.
THAT formidable and controversial Shakespearean scholar, A.
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