Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare »

Jonathan Bate is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Warwick. Widely known as a critic, award-winning biographer, and broadcaster, Bate is the author of several books on Shakespeare and principal editor of the Modern Library’s and Royal Shakespeare Company’s highly acclaimed William Shakespeare: Complete Works.

From the Hardcover edition.

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 list of a man's seven ages in As You Like It-infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and oblivion-Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare's life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a 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.

The Washington Post - Louis Bayard

…[a] beauty of a book, rich in insight, immaculate in scholarship, a work that is destined, like Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, to become one of the standard sources on its subject.

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction xv

First Age Infant

Chapter 1 Stratford 1564 3

Chapter 2 The Discovery of England 13

Chapter 3 The Boy from the Greenwood 30

Chapter 4 Old World, New Man? 53

Second Age Schoolboy

Chapter 5 Stratford Grammar 71

Chapter 6 After Palingenius 93

Chapter 7 Continuing Education: The Art of Translation 100

Chapter 8 The School of Prospero 116

Chapter 9 Shakespeare's small Library 131

Third Age Lover

Chapter 10 The Married Man 149

Chapter 11 Before the Bawdy Court 162

Chapter 12 The Perplexities of Love 186

Fourth Age Soldier

Chapter 13 The Famous Victory of Queen Elizabeth 223

Chapter 14 Essex Man? A Political Tragedy in Five Acts 233

Chapter 15 The Clash of Civilizations 268

Chapter 16 Shakespeare and Jacobean Geopolitics 282

Fifth Age Justice

Chapter 17 At Clement's Inn 293

Chapter 18 After Machiavelli 307

Chapter 19 The King's Man 319

Sixth Age Pantaloon

Chapter 20 The Myth of Shakespeare's Retirement 331

Chapter 21 The Principal Comedians 343

Chapter 22 The Foolosopher 360

Seventh Age Oblivion

Chapter 23 The Readiness is All 375

Chapter 24 Shakespeare the Epicurean 389

Chapter 25 Exit and Reentrance 403

Acknowledgments 425

Notes 427

Index 457