- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade (12 Oct 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0812971817
- ISBN-13: 978-0812971811
- Product Dimensions: 15.5 x 2.5 x 23.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,578,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
“One man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.
Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew.
Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.
Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew.
Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book isn't for the kind of reader who merely wants to find out the bare bones of what we know - which, as Bate points out is a good deal more than we know of many Elizabethans if nothing like what we long for. A forensic biography, it jumps about using details from the plays to speculate about Shakespeare's life, what he can only have known about from experience (the nature of two rivers, for instance). The result is a kind of collage of a portrait, made up from tiny snippets of information, which comes to some interesting conclusions about how he wrote and why. If you are a Bard nut, it's a lovely book, but more of a cornucopia than a carefully reasoned biography like Bate's last. I recommend reading it with The Lodger (Charles Nicholls).
5 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A disappointing book, mainly because the structure is irritating, resulting in a work that skips about from subject to subject until the impression is - how to demonstrate what the author has studied. Such an expansive subject demands a more natural, less self-centered way to lead the reader.
This would be a good introductory book for an English undergraduate with a general interest in the time, provided they were content to go where ever they were taken and didn't read too critically.
The author's most counter-intuitive assertion was that Shakespeare didn't value books and probably only owned about twenty. I doubt that there is any evidence for this and I wonder what this implies about the writer's feelings towards his subject.
For most readers, Bill Bryson's much briefer book will be more satisfying.
This would be a good introductory book for an English undergraduate with a general interest in the time, provided they were content to go where ever they were taken and didn't read too critically.
The author's most counter-intuitive assertion was that Shakespeare didn't value books and probably only owned about twenty. I doubt that there is any evidence for this and I wonder what this implies about the writer's feelings towards his subject.
For most readers, Bill Bryson's much briefer book will be more satisfying.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Excellent, but some passages were exact copies from analyses of plays published in the RSC's The Complete Works. Bate writes well and holds your attention.
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