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Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 7, 2009

by Jonathan Bate (Author)

4.6 71 ratings

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“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.

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

April 7, 2009
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

1400062063
ISBN-13

978-1400062065
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time!" Conversely, noted British Shakespeare scholar Bate (The Genius of Shakespeare) attempts to prove that the Bard effectively represents the politically and socially complicated 16th-century environment and that his work can then—theoretically—illuminate his mysterious personal life with the notable exception of his marriage. While much is conjectured here, the scant biographical resources are well-used to painstakingly define Shakespeare's careers as actor, poet and playwright and to refute popular myths such as his purported retirement from writing. Bate's approach is more successful in confirming that Shakespeare typifies his age than in providing substantive biographical information based on hints hidden in the prolific body of work. Even so, Bate offers an excellent resource for students of English literature and the Elizabethan era in this thoughtful, well-researched and even playful explication of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets as they resonated in both the Elizabethan sphere and the less austere Stuart court while remaining relevant today. Illus. (Apr. 17)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Whereas the recent crop of Bard biographies makes quite clear how obscure are the whereabouts of Shakespeare’s body during lengthy periods of his 52-year life span, Bate’s fifth Shakespearean book demonstrates that it’s much easier and no less fascinating to account for the poet-playwright’s mind. Using Jaques’ famous Seven Ages (i.e., life stages) of Man speech in As You Like It to plot the book, Bate runs to ground the sources of the ideas about and the concerns of each age that appear in the plays and poems. Shakespeare’s education, material circumstances, reading, and political and intellectual context affected him about equally overall, Bate shows, though each more or less greatly depending on the stage of life that was his immediate topic. Seasoned Shakespeareans already will know about how the works of Ovid, Plutarch, and Montaigne affect the poems and plays, but do they know how epicureanly skeptical Shakespeare was and from where that came? A book in which Bardolators may gratefully immerse themselves. --Ray Olson

Review

“Enthralling, the most eloquent evocation of Shakespeare one is ever likely to encounter.”—Times Literary Supplement, U.K.

“It is almost impossible to write something fresh about William Shakespeare. Yet Jonathan Bate has succeeded, with a sparkling and arresting portrait of the Bard and his world as discovered in his writings.”—The Economist (named one of the best books of 2008)

“Thoughtful, well-researched and even playful . . . An excellent resource for students of English literature and the Elizabethan era.”—Publishers Weekly

“Soul of the Age is the most artful, intriguing, and satisfying study of the mind of William Shakespeare we now possess. No other biography has used Shakespeare’s works so resourcefully to shed light on his life; few have so successfully mined the records of his life to illuminate the works. Each chapter shines with new discoveries, original insights, and dazzling prose. This is a major achievement from a master of Shakespeare studies.”—David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University

“Surprising, fresh and anything but le pot rechauffé . . . [Bate] has the gift of a true teacher–able at once to educate and to entertain. . . . After reading Soul of the Age I felt closer to the soul of Shakespeare.”—The Guardian,U.K.

“There can only be a handful of people in the world who know as much about Shakespeare as Bate, and it is intensely enjoyable to watch him bringing his knowledge to bear. He has the conjuror’s art of suspense, and you find yourself gasping with pleasure at the neatness of his conclusions. Few books pack so much new thinking about Shakespeare between their covers.”—Sunday Times, U.K.

“Bate is both a considerable scholar and an excellent writer, and he achieves a resonant and complex portrait, constantly alert to new lines of enquiry and unexpected connections. . . . [This] is a triumph of precision, learning and intelligent innovation.”—The Telegraph, U.K.

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

STRATFORD 1564

Here begins the plague

...

Exit pursued by a bear: antigonus is torn to pieces. a clownish young shepherd witnesses his death on land and many more losses on the sea as a tempest-tossed ship is swallowed by the waves. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” little Prince Mamillius has said, before being struck by death himself. But Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale veers from tragedy to comedy. Young Shepherd’s breathless description of heavy matters is counterpointed against Old Shepherd’s amazed discovery of new life in the form of the abandoned baby Perdita. “Thou met’st with things dying,” he serenely remarks to his son, “I with things new born.”

In Shakespeare’s England, birth and death went cheek by jowl. Each entry in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon- Avon, is encoded with a single letter: C for christened, M for married, and B for buried. A ceaseless procession of birth, copulation, and death: human life stripped to its essentials. Shortly after the entry that reads “1564, Apr. 26. C. Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere”—April 26, 1564, christened, William, son of John Shakespeare—the entries marked B begin to thicken on the page. There were no more than twenty deaths in the first half of 1564, well over two hundred in the second. The population of this small but prosperous market town in the English Midland county of Warwickshire was about fifteen hundred, so more than one in seven were taken in those few months of devastation. The cause is duly noted in a marginal annotation opposite the burial entry for Oliver Gunne, apprentice: hic incepit pestis. Here begins the plague.

In August, the town council met in emergency session in the garden of the Gild Chapel, hoping that the outdoor air would be less contagious than that of the Gild Hall. They discussed relief for the plague victims. “Burgess” (councillor) John Shakespeare gave a generous sum of money. The horror faced by the townspeople may be glimpsed from a contemporary account of a plague outbreak in London. If just one member of a family was struck down, the rest would have been closed up in the house to prevent the spread of infection:

What an unmatchable torment were it for a man to be barred up every night in a vast silent charnel-house? Hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly and slowly burning, in hollow and glimmering corners: where all the pavement should, instead of green rushes, be strewed with blasted rosemary, withered hyacinths, fatal cypress and yew, thickly mingled with heaps of dead men’s bones: the bare ribs of a father that begat him, lying there: here the chapless hollow skull of a mother that bore him.

The previous year, John and Mary Shakespeare had lost their infant Margaret at four months, and sometime before that, another girl, Joan. Cause of deaths unknown. But the loss not uncommon—everyone knew infant mortality.

They were doubly lucky this time. William was what every respectable couple wanted: a son to maintain the family name and estate. His sex was their first stroke of good fortune. Second was his survival of the plague. What John and Mary could never know was that he would not merely survive, but make the Shakespeare name live as long as humankind has books and stories.

Plague was the single most powerful force shaping his life and those of his contemporaries. John Stow’s annals of English history summarized the key events of the year of Shakespeare’s birth. The previous autumn, Londoners had suffered terribly: “Forsomuch as the plague of pestilence was so hot in the city of London, there was no term kept at Michaelmas: to be short, the poor citizens of London were this year plagued with a threefold plague, pestilence, scarcity of money, and dearth of victuals: the misery whereof, were too long here to write, no doubt the poor remember it, the rich by flight into the countries made shift for themselves.”

John Stow, denominated “Citizen of London” on his title page, would not have bothered to record an outbreak of plague in a small town in the Midlands. There is London and there is the rest of England. London is far bigger than every other conurbation. It is more densely populated, so the spread of plague is more rapid. And it is the location of the institutions that govern the nation: the royal court, the houses of Parliament and the law courts, Lambeth Palace (London residence of the archbishop of Canterbury and administrative headquarters of the Church of England). In bad times, the rich and their institutions could take flight to the country, leaving the London poor to shift for themselves. The royal court was supremely mobile, with the queen moving on a whim or a plague warning from Whitehall in central London to one of her other palaces—Greenwich downstream, Hampton Court upstream, Richmond or Windsor secluded in their deer parks, or Nonsuch deep in rural Surrey.

It was a litigious age. Stow measures the seasons by the four terms of the legal year, when the courts were in session. During times of plague, as in Michaelmas term (October to December) 1563 and Hilary term (January to March) 1564, the judges and lawyers met out of town. Throughout Shakespeare’s professional career, there were close links between the worlds of law and theater. Many of his fellow dramatists trained at the Inns of Court. Law students were a key element of the theater audience. Hack writer Tom Nashe railed against the “tedious dead vacation” when there were no lawyers to see his plays or buy his pamphlets. And, like the law courts, the acting companies traveled out of town when plague was severe.

So it was that plague determined several turning points in Shakespeare’s career. In January 1593, just as he was making his name as an actor turned playwright, an order went out from the Privy Council: “Forasmuch as by the certificate of the last week it appeareth the infection doth increase . . . we think it fit that all manner of concourse and public meetings of the people at plays, bear- baitings, bowlings and other like assemblies for sports be forbidden.” Save for a few weeks’ remission the following winter, the theaters remained closed for a year and a half. The actors toured, while a different Shakespeare emerged. The rewrite man, the patcher of old plays from the existing repertoire, turned himself into an original poet. In April 1593, he published “the first heir” of his “invention,” Venus and Adonis. Its stylistic brilliance and risqué content made his name among the smart set. It became the bestselling long poem of the age, the favored reading of undergraduates and Inns of Court men. Dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the third earl of Southampton, it was also a bid for patronage.

The dedicatory epistle that begins the more serious and rhetorically elaborate follow-up poem, The Rape of Lucrece, published the next year, suggests that the bid was successful. Where Shakespeare’s letter prefacing Venus and Adonis dwells on his “hopeful expectation,” the one attached to Lucrece speaks repeatedly of “duty” and devoted service: “What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” There is a strong possibility that Shakespeare spent part of the plague year in some form of service in Southampton’s household at Titchfield in Hampshire.

The association with Southampton had three key consequences. It transformed Shakespeare from jobbing playwright to courtly poet, marked him out as the crossover man who could appeal equally to penny- paying groundlings and powerful courtiers or even the queen herself. Politically, it brought him into the orbit of the earl of Essex, to whom young Southampton was devoted. This would have potentially dangerous consequences a few years later. And intellectually, it introduced him to the work of the Anglo-Italian man of letters John Florio, Southampton’s tutor, through whom he was exposed to Italian culture and, later, the essays of Michel de Montaigne, whose subtle, sympathetic mind was perfectly attuned to his own.

The plague of 1593–94 provided an enforced sabbatical after which Shakespeare returned to the theater with a new-minted verbal art. In the next couple of years, he wrote the plays in which his literary style truly matures: the dazzlingly intellectual (Florioesque) Love’s Labour’s Lost, the miraculously imaginative Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the quicksilver Romeo and Juliet, with its growth from love’s artifice to the heart’s authenticity. When Mercutio dies with the words “A plague o’ both your houses,” it is no idle oath: the play was written in the aftermath of a period when the households of many members of Shakespeare’s London audience would have been struck by plague. And plague is indeed subtly woven into the plot: the reason Romeo does not get Friar Laurence’s crucial letter is that Friar John is detained for fear that he might have been infected. Parents are supposed to die before their children, the old before the young. With plague, it is not always like that. The tragic irony of Romeo and Juliet is that the houses of both Capulet and Montague escape the plague, yet still the children die first. The final scene takes place in an ancestral tomb, but those who lie dead are the flower of a city’s youth—Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Juliet, and her Romeo.

Plague also shapes the deep structure of Shakespeare’s imaginative world. As Queen Elizabeth secluded herself from infection at Richmond and Nonsuch, so Ferdinand King of Navarre and his courtiers in Love’s Labour’s Lost enclose themselves in a garden world. As A Midsummer Night’s Dream counterpoints city and court (Athens) against green world and fairy lore (the wood), so S...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (April 7, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400062063
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400062065
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,462,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,308 in Shakespeare Dramas & Plays
- #1,720 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
- #7,585 in Author Biographies

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4.6 71 ratings

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Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, chief editor of The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works and the author of many books, including most recently John Clare: A Biography, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. A Fellow of the British Academy, he was awarded a CBE in 2006.

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Moviegeek

A thoughtful speculation.

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2015

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Here's the thing. Jonathan Bate holds no punches, and makes no promises. He is a guy interested in exploring the topic at hand. Shakespeare. A man who we know very little about.

From the start, and constantly throughout, Bate reminds his readers that we cannot fully know the truth, and we cannot base our claims on the plays as to who or what Shakespeare was or was not (and he backs up why we can't very well - read it!) We can only go on the surviving history of the time, and speculate.

This makes it hard to call this a biography, but rather I would say Bate analyzes the plays, the historical period, and what little evidence there actually is about Will himself to allow us to see that not only was Shakespeare a very real man, he also was completely capable of writing these plays because of his voracious appetite for reading, his rural upbringing, and yes - his grade school education (a more extensive and intensive education than most grad students get these days).

The format of the book (Jaques seven ages of man) makes it an interesting read that focuses less on a chronological life (though he does do his best to keep it in some sense of order) and more on the periods of his life that we can simply speculate made his plays endure.

If you're a scholar of the Bard (like me), or even just interested in trying to speculate on the mystique, this book is a great read and a great discussion. Just be sure you know the basics of his plays and sonnets, and at least a basic background of the historical period. Bate uses all of this to help paint his picture. This is not, NOT an introductory book, it is a book for those wishing to continue a discussion. It is for those already familiar with the works to at least some extent.

Otherwise, enjoy! My copy (bought used for 5 bucks) was in great condition. Arrived on time, and will be a hardcover I own and re read for many years to come.

5 people found this helpful

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Red Ryder

What Was He Thinking?

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2023

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Jonathan Bate provides an excellant read re: Shakespeare’s life and the life around him which may have influenced his writing. He could not have written in a vacuum, and Bate offers insights that help to explain the what and why of Shakespeare’s work. Enjoyable read.

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B. Wilfong

"Mental pleasures are greater than physical ones because they are more enduring."

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2016

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“Soul of the Age” is Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate’s attempt at “biography of the mind” of the Bard. His take on it is to examine Shakespeare’s life and works through the lenses of his famous “7 Ages of Man” speech from his play “As You Like It”. An intriguing idea, but not one that I am sure comes across as completely successful in this text.
First off, this is not a biography for the casual reader of Shakespeare. This book assumes a certain amount of knowledge of Shakespeare’s work, and of the historical period of his life in general. If you are not already inclined to be interested in Shakespeare, this text will not create that interest in you.
As someone who usually devours most things Shakespeare related, I have to admit that the first 146 pages of this book just dragged for me. They are tedious at best. Mr. Bate examines what educational and literary influences the young Shakespeare would have encountered and it is a lot of Latin and Greek, and frankly just too much of it for me to care. Interesting thoughts are presented here, but they are at best conjecture, and thus not as important as Bate seems to emphasize. The author states too many times that such and such a book Shakespeare would have no knowledge of, or that he would not have owned a copy of this or that book. Mr. Bate, you (we) don’t know! Period. Which you acknowledge when you point out theories about Shakespeare from others that you don’t agree with. “Physician, heal thyself”.
There is a bit of conjecture in this text, which any book about Shakespeare will have. I don’t mind that, usually. In this book, it bothered me. Maybe because the author rarely admitted when he was doing it?
When we get to the third age of man (Lover) the text picks up in earnest and I began reading with an eagerness and interest. The book keeps this momentum going (for the most part) from this point in the text to the end.
I’m glad I read “Soul of the Age”. Mr. Bate is an intelligent and close reader of Shakespeare. It has earned a place on my bookshelf. I just wish I had enjoyed it a bit more.

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Pamela Gilbreath Kelly

I am constantly being surprised, engrossed and challenged while ...

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2016

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I am constantly being surprised, engrossed and challenged while reading this. Professor Bate's knowledge of Shakespeare is very deep and wide-ranging, within a historical context and full of fascinating details which are put together in a very exciting read. I literally have to come up for air sometimes and am called to do extra research to keep up with the author. It's as if he's there, inside Shakespeare's life, taking it all in, through all his senses. I am so appreciative and am loving it!

2 people found this helpful

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BeeCP

Superb introduction to the mind of Shakespeare

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2022

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Eminently readable ,this book traces Shakespeare's education and places it in context of the age and shows how Shakespeare himself was regarded by his contemporaries.

One person found this helpful

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MozzGoggs

Wonderful!

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2013

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I have read several books on Shakespeare and this one is by far the most in-depth and fascinatingly fact-filled without reading like a textbook. The author has been teaching this subject for many years and is acquainted not only with Shakespeare, but his contemporaries and many other related subjects. He brings Shakespeare to life. I couldn't put it down.

3 people found this helpful

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Stephen Deasy

Another Gem

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2009

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Makes a wonderful companion to the author's earlier, "The Genius of Shakespeare". The pleasure derives from Bates' ability to delineate patterns and themes in the plays, staying attentive to each play's theatrical life. He is effortlessly academic about the period and its traditions, language and pre-occupations. Along with Wells, Greenblatt, Taylor and Kermode, he is among this era's Shakespearean scholars whose work will be enjoyed for some time to come.

11 people found this helpful

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letecia j.

good but high reading level for me

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2022

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I bought this book for a school assignment, turns out this book is at a college level apparently to my teacher, there's a bit of unnessescary information and facts in the biography about someone else that doesnt realate to William Shakespeare's life but overall the book is going great so far.

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Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 7, 2009

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