Cynthia Greenwood

In his masterful Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate maps the fertile imagination of our greatest “play-maker,” whose prolonged writing and theatrical career is partly attributed to his instincts as a political chameleon. Soul of the Age bills itself not as a conventional study of Shakespeare’s life, but as a biography of the dramatist’s intellect. Scholars and enthusiasts will appreciate the fresh questions Bate raises about the assumptions literary historians hold dear.

Illustrating how Shakespeare and other Elizabethan schoolboys became practiced rhetoricians by today’s standards, Bate elegantly explores what the sonnets, poems, and plays reveal about the poet’s memory and intellectual growth. Rather than using the “deadening march of chronological sequence” as his organizing principle, Bate grants himself (and the reader) more critical freedom of movement. Noting in his introduction that “the events of Shakespeare’s life feel cyclical, not sequential,” Bate divides the book into parts that correspond to “the cultural moment and broad themes” subsumed under the “seven ages” of man elucidated in Jaques’ speech from As You Like It.

“Infant,” “Schoolboy,” “Lover,” “Soldier,” “Justice,” “Pantaloon,” and “Oblivion” – each of these section-title allusions allows Bate to move back and forth throughout the period of Shakespeare’s lifetime, painting a rich, intellectual landscape. Bate posits which poets, dramatists, and prose historians enlightened Shakespeare; that he held a realistic view of marriage; why he may have been sensitive toward the toll of battle; the provenance of Shakespeare’s legal knowledge, and the myth of his early retirement. The “seven ages” metaphor allows Bate to make intriguing deductions about the poet’s life, motives, and work, while being mindful of the speculative nature of his endeavor.

Bate plausibly suggests the extent to which Shakespeare, “the schoolboy,” would have been instructed around the clock in Latin grammar, the classics, and the art of composing Latin verses at the King’s New School in Stratford. He probes what plays such as The Merry Wives of Windsor reveal about Shakespeare’s Warwickshire origins. Moving beyond the likely ways in which Shakespeare was trained, Bate explores the breadth of literary and dramatic influence on the plays. He singles out Ovid’s huge impact on the comedies, and investigates Plutarch’s monumental influence on the Roman tragedies.

Mindful of how the plays reflect the culture and cosmology of Elizabethan England, Bate also explores Marlowe’s influence upon how Shakespeare conceived Richard III, Iago, and other great villains. He imagines what books Shakespeare is likely to have read and consulted, and which ones he may have carried back and forth between London and Stratford. For conspiracy theorists who deny that the Stratford poet wrote the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespeare canon, chapters devoted to “Second Age: Schoolboy” serve as a cogent argument in favor of the Stratford-born player’s authorship of the First Folio.