The Genius of Shakespeare [Paperback]

Jonathan Bate's THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE takes issue with cultural conservatives and with politically correct radicals to explain how a dramatist of humble orgins became the best known author in history. In what is described as "a new kind of biography", Bate offers a two-part history of Shakespeare's talent and reputation. Instead of the usual life story or play-by-play account, Bate begins part one by discussing the anecdotes that were told about Shakespeare during his life, looking at how his contemporaries saw him. Then he moves on to dissect the sonnets showing the various ways they have been used to provide a biographical key to their author's life. Wielding Occam's razor, Bate attacks the tendency of the "life and works" approach to over-interpret the poems to illuminate the dark corners of the life.

Bate's willingness to admit that much will never be known is refreshing. His suggestion about the Dark Lady's identity is delightfully mischievous: she could have been the wife of John Florio, Italian secretary to the Earl of Southampton. Given the sources, this is as credible as most other interpretations, even though Bate is attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel's sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that would not have persuaded Othello. More daring is Bate's solution to the conclusion of "Master W H", the unknown "begetter" of the sonnets. This, he argues, is just a printer's error for "W S" (William Shakespeare).

When addressing the authorship question, Bate uses knockabout tactics to demolish alternative candidates - from Francis Bacon to sundry lords - but he does so in a more profound question: why should anyone doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays? As so often, the answer concerns class. Cultural conservatives could not bear the idea that a mere grammer-school boy and butcher's son was as talented as university-trained wits.

In part two, Bate deals with the gradual growth of Shakespeare's reputation after his death. Since the Bard's plays broke the rules of classical decorum, his eighteenth-century admirers were forced to "invent" a new category of "native genius" to account for his talent. Shakespeare's apparent weakness, his lack of a university education, turned out to be his greatest strength. Aided by sundry Romantics, Britain's national poet was defined a "natural" genius.

Other emerging nations also adopted Shakespeare as a cultural icon, but usually in opposition to the classical culture of oppressive rulers. In Germany, for example, the Bard was reinvented as a symbol of anti-Gallic, pro-Teutonic identity. As a large part of Shakespeare's rise to universal deification was his ability to inspire other artists, Bate considers the reworking of his plays by artists such as Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi and Henry Fuseli.

Although everyone knows that Shakespeare has been used for conservative propaganda, Bate is at his best when he reminds us that the Bard was once also the people's playwright. The use of Shakespeare by Quakers, Chartists and other nonconformists as a counter-tradition - "one nurtured in the dissenting academies in which those excluded from the old universities found an educational community" - powerfully suggests that Shakespeare's genius was rooted in the ability to represent so many different aspects of life that all social groups could find cofirmation of their world-view in his books.

Bate goes further. Rather than being a reactionary Dead White European Male, Shakespeare was also an inspiration to black writers such as George Lamming and Aime Cesaire, who used THE TEMPEST as a critique of colonialism and as "the voice of the recovered black identity". Examples such as these seem to prove Bate's assertion, following Jorge Luis Borges, that Shakespeare can be "everything and nothing".

Perhaps the most polemical passages are those in which Bate revisits the arguments between the conservative "vigilantes", who use the Bard to police educational standards, and the politically correct "new iconoclasts", who use him for their own ideological ends by arguing that Shakespeare was less a genius than a product of historical forces. At its most extreme, this view denies that his works have any meaning: it is we who give meaning to them.

Between the stubborn assertiveness of the conservatives and the absurd reductionism of the radicals, Bate occupies a middle ground - Shakespeare, he insists, became an icon of genius because he was a better playwright than his contempories. His reputation has become universal because his plays really do contain a rich store of images, ambiguities and the juxtaposition of different viewpoints convincingly imagined.

Bate ends his book by arguing that Shakespeare's dramatic techniques - he toned down, for example, the stark motivations of characters he found in his sources - have only been fully appreciated in the twentieth-century. After modern science and philosophy propagated new ideas about relativism, uncertainty and the coexistence of opposites, the way was open for William Empson to lead the appreciation of ambiguity in Shakespeare's work.

THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE is aimed squarely at the general reader. Cultural materialists are sure to be exasperated as conservatives and other Shakespeare specialists may cringe at the boldness of his assertions and the ambition of his scope. Like many popular accounts, this well written book excites and provokes while risking accusations of over simplication. It is manifestly counter-productive, for example, to conclude an engagingly fervent book about the unique irreplaceability of Shakespeare's genius with the claim that had history been a little different Lope de Vega would have done just as well.

Despite such quibbles, Bate succeeds in conveying a powerful image of practical genius. Instead of bardolotry, we get a vivid portrait of a man who "invented the profession of dramatist", a quick-witted outsider who broke all the rules, a creative collaborator who gloried in playing games with what was possible on stage. Not only does THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE say a great deal about the making of a literary reputation, it is also a fascinating account of how plays are lifeless unless they are performed.

I have recently read books and watched programmes on the late great Steve Jobs; as a confirmed Macintosh user with a well-used selection of his "iproducts", his driven genius certainly changed my world. Would his early life have shown this was likely?

I have a shelf full of well-thumbed books proposing a wide range of writers in Shakespeare's place, another still to be delivered and one as yet unread in the "unread" section of the 822.33 section. Reading them, I always feel like the sheep in Orwell's "Animal Farm", believing the writer I am reading at the time, so convincing are they all and yet, I remain unconvinced, a determined Stratfordian.

Jonathan Bate has not written a biography in the usual sense of that word, indeed it is refreshing to find someone who admits quite simply of the pausity of material to begin another endeavour of that kind but also that it is not necessarily a reason to suspect Shakespeare was a front for a playwright in Italy supposedly killed in 1595 or a lord with creative aspirations who did not want his real views known.

He also looks at the idea of "genius", the way the word has developed and been used in the Shakespeare context to describe this native talent when no other seemed to fit. (Having worked with gifted and talented students, I know just how different they can be, e.g. one who had seven As at "A" Level and three interviews to read as an undergraduate at Oxford in three vastly different disciplines - History, Economics and Chemistry - who lived in a post-war prefab and owned no books himself; no need - he just read them and remembered them.)

I enjoyed Bate's book, a refreshing, well-written and convincing look at Shakespeare with some unusual conclusions. It has no newly discovered material or evidence but he does look afresh with dispassionate eyes at this rarest of phenomenons. If English had not ecome the dominant language, would another playwright have become the genius? Is literature the only discipline to produce real genius? He argues the scientific and mathematical discoveries would have been discovered anyway by someone because they are essential but plays are different.

Readers will not agree with everything but he does present a new perspective and think out of the box, rather then trying to make tenuous links with the slimmest of historical evidence. He looks at the anecdotes about Shakespeare when he was alive before looking at the sonnets and the mystery of the dark lady, suggesting a few possibilities. Like the fairground stall, he sets up the suggested "Shakespeares" only to demolish them all one-by-one in a flurry of well-aimed missiles. Accepting the existence and authenticity of Shakespeare, he tries to explain why he became what he is, why his plays are so different and how this "natural genius" could have existed.

It is a recommended tonic.

Yes, its title is unpromising as well as rather passé (we don't like to talk of 'genius' nowadays. The word smacks of élitism). Such a title leads us half to expect yet another work of tedious bardology. Moreover, with lengthy analyses of the Shakespeare-inspired works of (C19 composer) Hector Berlioz and (C18 artist) Henry Fuselli, the book often seems only indirectly relevant to the works of the dramatist himself. But The Genius of Shakespeare is much more than a eulogising bunch of essays tied together by the common thread of Shakespeare's greatness. The common element, if there is one, is illuminating originality.

Concentrating on the rich after-life of the plays and the ever-changing historical contexts which have continually reshaped and renewed them, Bate's study not only throws much light on the works but actually has an unexpected coherence and a climactic structure. The last chapter, on C20 physics and philosophy, suggests how the work of such giants as Heisenberg and Wittgenstein helped inform the revolutionary insights of critics like William Empson. Shakespeare's continuing appeal in the nuclear age is partly explained, he thinks, by the new ways of seeing opened up by such developments as the uncertainty principle.

Bate is a very persuasive Shakespearean. He readily admits that Tolstoy was on to something in his criticism and that, indeed, psychological realism and motivation is often much stronger in Shakespeare's sources than in the plays he based upon them (Othello being a good example). But Bate sees strength where Tolstoy saw weakness. The playwright's refusal to 'explain' such things as character motivation is one reason why we are so endlessly fascinated by his plays and why productions of them are so rich in their variety of interpretation.

The book is also thought-provoking and contentious. Bate argues that while geniuses abound in such areas as maths and physics, only literature can produce unique genius. If Newton hadn't invented calculus, he contends, someone else would have (and in Leibniz's case, actually did); the same with Einstein and relativity. This is a claim that might seem too far-reaching. (What about the unique genius of Mozart, for instance?)

Bate's final thoughts are fascinating: if the English language hadn't attained global domination as a by-product of trade and empire, and that if, say, Spanish had become the dominant tongue, then Lope de Vega's plays would have made him the supreme world genius, not Shakespeare. His plays, Bate acknowledges, are equally complex, subtle and powerful - but unfortunately for him and his posthumous reputation, inaccessible to a non-Spanish audience. (He was also many times more prolific even than Shakespeare, with anything up to 1500 plays to his credit). A brilliantly rewarding read.