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Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare - Jonathan Bate - 23/06/09
Just when you thought nothing more could be written about the life and times of William Shakespeare, up pops Jonathan Bate with another breathtaking and innovative insight into the Bard ...
Bate never tries to explain away the gaps that still exist in our knowledge of this most enigmatic of men but he always gives a credible and challenging account of what did or could have motivated and inspired one of the world's greatest geniuses.
Relating his life and work in a roughly biographical order, Bate encourages readers to delight in the grammar school boy whose lessons were taught entirely in Latin and the adult who contextualised the greater part of the English language.
Ignoring the many now hackneyed debates over Shakespeare's secret Catholicism and sexual orientation, Bate sticks to the facts and what we DO know about his life and its effect on his work.
The result is a rich and dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, passions and intrigues and the colourful and violent world that informed so much of his thought.
Bate asks us to consider how the plague turned Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet and the first playwright to make a real profession out of writing plays.
He examines the reasons why Shakespeare's plays led to the deaths of an earl and a king, and why he was the only dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned despite writing dialogue and situations that bordered on treason.
Bate's aim in writing a new appraisal of Shakespeare was to investigate his 'cultural DNA' by reviewing the social, cultural and physical conditions that informed his world and also to examine the work he produced within those parameters.
The result is an almost mirror image of the 'Seven Ages of Man' famously proposed by Jacques in As You Like It and the format allows the author to delve into every corner of Shakespeare's life's journey.
As Bate so aptly put it: 'He was perpetually both inside and outside the action, both an emotionally involved participant in the world he created and a wryly detached commentator on it.'
Professor Bate's greatest gift to his readers is his ability to educate us about Shakespeare without lecturing ... and to place his life and work in a social context that makes them both interesting and entertaining.
His illuminating account is probably the closest we will ever get to understanding what Shakespeare was really like.
(Penguin, paperback, 9.99)
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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