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

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Jonathan Bate's latest book is undeniably impressive for its author's extensive knowledge of the literature, history, and intellectual currents of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and his reluctance, for most of the book, to oversimplify the figure in the Shakespearean carpet. As he says in a signal passage, "Shakespeare's plays use history, but they subsume politics into interpersonal encounters. They are not overtly polemical: they present questions and debates, not propaganda and positions." All one can say to that is, "Exactly so."

Bate, too, is a far more accurate reader of Shakespeare's plays than the authors of many new books on the Bard's "ideas" that have appeared in the last few years. As an antidote to the widespread, fashionable anti-nationalist, anti-colonialist readings of the plays or to those unduly freighted with considerations of only race or ethnicity, Bate persuasively redresses balances, reintroducing, for instance, the often ignored centrality of religious implications in the works of this essentially secular playwright. He accurately reminds readers, therefore, that Shakespeare's "Lear," unlike its source, is set in pagan, not in Christian, Britain, that his character Othello is not left the stereotypical Muslim outsider of the source, but is turned in fact into a Christian convert, and that "The Tempest" has more to do ultimately with worldly renunciation than with either colonialism or imperialism. In the case of "Lear" however, Bate in my view does not speculate with adequate depth as to why Shakespeare might have so changed his source material, but it's undeniably refreshing at any rate that he points it out.

Further, however, even in the best parts of his book, Bate occasionally slips into demonstrably inaccurate readings, and as I'll argue, when he nears the end of his lengthy work, he does worse than just slip; there he reveals, sadly, that his usual brilliance is linked to a surprisingly contradictory, nearly total departure from his earlier sweet reasonableness regarding "propaganda and positions." Early on, Bate makes an admittedly minor slip in his claim that Shakespeare's better treatment of doctors in the plays after a real life daughter's marriage to one is supported by the character of the Doctor who comes to treat Lady Macbeth. The Doctor's closing couplet Bate ignores - "Were I from Dunsinane away and clear/Profit again should hardly draw me here." Why this stereotypically greedy Doctor of classical and European literature reveals an improved character when set against his laughable predecessors remains for Bate to clarify. More troublesome a slip is his contention that Cordelia "has to learn to lie," and that her magnificent "No cause" is just such a lie. Scholars less novel in their assessments would probably argue that the "natural Christian" Cordelia in fact has no cause to hate her father, but at best just an excuse for a cause, unless they mistakenly adopt the ethic of the World, as Bate apparently does here, that we should do unto others AS they do unto us. Just as troublesome, and a harbinger of more serious difficulties to come, is Bate's reading of Prospero and Caliban. In defiance of the clear thrust and proportion of "The Tempest," he presents a rigid Prospero who is the character with the most to learn and a Caliban who is regarded much too leniently, solely because Caliban speaks the "best poetry in the play." Surely the potential rapist Caliban, whatever his sensitivity to the music of the island or his final resolution to sue for grace, remains at best a pretty rough diamond. I'd argue that a helplessness before poetic splendor is Bate's own "fatal Cleopatra," were it not that the character of the wily Egyptian herself is later given that honor.

All in all, Bate's strongest suit - as well as his weakest - is his treatment of Shakespeare as a Counter-Renaissance artist. In "Julius Caesar," for instance, the glories and miseries of Stoicism and Epicureanism are set forth in the characters of Brutus and Cassius, with both philosophies questioned as guides to the good life by these characters' very inconsistencies and defections. Similarly, the Renaissance Humanist notions of the wisdom of folly and the importance of love are present in the pagan world of "King Lear," though they, too, by themselves, are questioned as adequate grounds for making life worth living. So far, so good. But then, unfortunately some passages from Montaigne in defense of certain observations by the bad boy Epicurus catch Bate's attention, leading him to fashion a Falstaff and a Cleopatra, admittedly fascinating characters, as each a species of Shakespearean beau ideal. Speaking of not advocating "positions!" Why Falstaff is irresistible but at the same time, and with increasing clarity, a "false staff," Bate ignores. Why a reader should have to choose wily Cleopatra (the pleasures of the Flesh) over cold boy Octavius (the power of the World), Bate never makes clear. Perhaps to Shakespeare, both of them - given their different glories and limitations - represented necessarily partial, and therefore inadequate perspectives concerning any notions of the good life.
So carried away does Bate become with his idea that Shakespeare may well have endorsed Epicurus' idea of "living in the moment" that he finally - and absurdly - berates Hamlet for being "bitter" at the fact of Gertrude's hasty marriage. Hamlet, to Bate, lacks the necessary Epicurean tragicomic perspective which might have taught him not to take things too hard but, like the rest of the court, to "go with the flow." Unfortunately this is the position advocated at its direst by Edmund the Bastard - "men are as the time is." In "Hamlet," it is best fulfilled in all its vulgarity by Gertrude and Claudius, the very exemplars of "mirth in funeral." In my view, Bate's largely brilliant book ends up revealing a sizeable hole in its head; his undeniably novel "take" is also a glaring reductio ad absurdam.

Soul of the Age is concerned with the intellectual, cultural, and personal influences and sources Shakespeare may or may not have been exposed to as a poet, playwright, student, actor, landowner, father, husband, company shareholder, etc. It also gives us a peek into Elizabethan and Jacobean English culture (at least the enclaves that Shakespeare would have found himself in). There are of course scores of other books and scholarly articles written on the same subject (by Bate himself even). It is nice to see an impassioned and unique articulation of the biographical speculations that have surfaced and sunk over the centuries. Bate has his own view of things, of course. Most of what he writes is surely speculative, as any critic, even he himself, will tell you. However, there are two types of speculation: what is probably a sure thing and what is dubious at best-- the "realm of wild surmise" he frequently mentions. To me it is a joy to read a learned scholar offer up so much human possibility (and humanity) about an author who enriched his works by doing just that.

I would like now to draw attention to the design of the book. For the most part Bate avoids paying strict attention to a set chronological sequence. He does follow a general course dictated by Jacques in his speech on humanity's ages from As You Like It. But this does not mean he refrains from mentioning a Jacobean-era play in the first chapter-- ostensibly about his infancy-- simply because it is anachronistic. As a result, this is a textually dense critical work intended for a popular audience, with numerous well- and lesser-known historical figures and events, poets and actors, plays and playwrights, inexorably referenced and discussed in rapid succession throughout single chapters and even pages. If Bate is correct in his argument that Shakespeare worked in a literary/dramatic world that evolved from complicated and dense inter-textual connections, relationships, and contexts, the formal design of his book-length study largely succeeds at matching what amounts to an understandably complex subject: Shakespeare and the culture within which and for which he wrote.

His method therefore works well for a few other reasons. First, a straightforward teleological approach has been done countless times before. Second, any "definitive" chronology would require so much speculation to be almost unreadable in its fancy, or would simply be another retelling of what we think we already know. What Bate does to offset these problems is to say whether or not this or that claim is unverifiable or possibly true. But more importantly, he offers copious amounts of evidence to imagine what someone like Shakespeare might have been influenced by or been immersed in or simply known of tangentially. These intellectual stimuli and sources of inspiration fall into several categories: the classics, texts used during his educational experiences, other plays by contemporaries, legal texts, and so on. One consistent theme, therefore, is Bate's perfectly logical statement that Shakespeare possessed an immensely powerful memory capable of interfusing the diversity of texts he may or may not have been exposed to during his life with important, as well as seemingly mundane, persons and events he may have known or been involved in.

As mentioned earlier, Bate references the plays in order to illuminate a moment in Shakespeare's chronology or early modern England within the context of Jacques' ages, and vice versa. For example, in the excellent "lover" section of the book, Bate discusses various plays (Othello, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well) within the framework of the bawdy courts, in particular cases that directly and indirectly involved Shakespeare, his family, or other individuals he might have known or heard about. As a result, the reader learns about the court system of the church, its influence on early modern England, the probable (or possible) influence on Shakespeare the writer, as well as interesting details about specific plays which do indeed make use of the language, codes, and contexts of English and church law. What Bate strives to do is draw intricate connections between Shakespeare's life and times and written output.

Overall, the author provides a uniquely designed, context-rich overview of Shakespeare by seamlessly intertwining what influenced and informed the thinking, reasoning, and linguistic properties, or "wit," of his poetical mind, with the dynamic period in which he lived. It is as much an overview of the time period as it is of the man. If you are like me, that is, someone who enjoys and appreciates the plays and poems but does not make a living as an English professor, I recommend Bate's book alongside a few others: Greenblatt's Will of the World, Nothing Like the Sun by Burgess, and Goddard's excellent two part critical overview of the plays, The Meaning of Shakespeare. Greenblatt is more apt to draw brilliantly from the plays and poetry while devising various speculations on the life, mind, and possible lifestyles of Shakespeare the man. Burgess peppers his fictionalized account, which stays relatively within the confines of the traditional story of the Bard, with his usual linguistic flair that only adds to the richness of his highly original and evocative novel. Finally, Goddard gives us timeless, wonderful insights into virtually all of Shakespeare's works. My personal favorite is Burgess because he gives us pretty much everything we need to know fact-wise in addition to a truly extraordinary narrative and aesthetic experience that simply cannot be missed.

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.

You could be surprised that such a intimate connoisseur of Shakespeare, what Jonathan Bate without any doubt is, would pick up Jaques speech of the seven ages as formal concept of a book about Shakespeare. He was probably so thrilled by the originality of this idea that he missed this could also have ambiguous implications.

Many, like for example the great Harold Goddard, think that Jaques in AYL represents a rather shallow kind of wisdom and the speech of the seven ages is rather a example for a limited and pre-arranged kind of wisdom the character stands for.

Anyway, I think that the title of the book, quoting Ben Jonson, was a even bigger mistake. As true this word is about Shakespeare's work, in connection with the prosaic life of the son of Stratford that this book once more describes you always feel a incongruity. And by this Jonathan Bate undeliberately emphazises the one point why so many doubt the authorship of the Stratford man.

Like in the cases of Goethe or Tolstoi which also somehow represent their ages, you expect the personality of Shakespeare whose work if possible is even more comprehensive and universal to be "bigger" in every sense, in Shakespeare's case this means also "darker". There must be more of Hamlet and King Lear in the creator of these plays. You just don't get this clever, pragmatic Stratford guy, doing a lot of business aside, together with the existential abyss of King Lear and Macbeth.

Nevertheless, this book is a must for everybody with deeper interest in Shakespeare. Putting all biographical controversy aside, Bate provides so much highly interesting insight into the work that you shouldn't miss reading this book by any means.

The orientation of this book is Jacques "Seven Ages of Man" speech from As You Like It. Bate uses the seven ages to examine Shakespeare's life, work and times. Solid scholarship.

It is astounding that so little is known of the private or public life of the incomparable William Shakespeare, the ultimate master on the English language. No one has ever been able to mobilize its mastery as well as him.

Astounding because he was so successful, so prolific, so respected and so well-known during his lifetime. He was a master playwright, a polished dramatist, a talented poet and even a successful actor. He was definitely in the spotlight all of his adult years.

In spite all of that high level exposure virtually no records and few first hand recollections exist about who he was. None of his personal letters, or drafts or manuscripts with hand written notes in the margins have survived.


Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of 52; well known but under documented. The first attempt to chronicle his life took place nearly a hundred years later in 1709. Family and friends were long gone and thus began the tradition of guessing. Most of his biographies are based on guesses; some pretty wild ones.

This book alas is no different. It is peppered with such allegations that Shakespeare grew up in a society where "idleness was a sin." Really? And even if it were so, did that affect Shakespeare? Further Bate's alleges that when Shakespeare's father found out his son wanted to be a actor, he was "flabbergasted." Maybe, but how does Bate know that? Once again rank speculation.

Jonathan Bate is an accomplished Shakespearean scholar. His scholarship has contributed significantly to our knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. But not in this book. Professor, leave speculation to others. Stick to what you do best: Hard core research and interpretation.
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Dr. Mellander was as a university administrator for 15 years and a college president for 20.

A present day biography of Shakespeare (or of his mind) that doesn't even acknowledge the ascendant Oxford theory? So much for academic freedom and open-minded inquiry. To those who want to read the real and much more interesting story, start with either Mark Anderson's "'Shakespeare' by Another Name," or Charlton Ogburn's "The Mysterious William Shakespeare." You will not be disappointed. You won't come across a more fascinating literary whodunit.