Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare
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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 xiiiIntroduction xvFirst Age InfantChapter 1 Stratford 1564 3Chapter 2 The Discovery of England 13Chapter 3 The Boy from the Greenwood 30Chapter 4 Old World, New Man? 53Second Age SchoolboyChapter 5 Stratford Grammar 71Chapter 6 After Palingenius 93Chapter 7 Continuing Education: The Art of Translation 100Chapter 8 The School of Prospero 116Chapter 9 Shakespeare's small Library 131Third Age LoverChapter 10 The Married Man 149Chapter 11 Before the Bawdy Court 162Chapter 12 The Perplexities of Love 186Fourth Age SoldierChapter 13 The Famous Victory of Queen Elizabeth 223Chapter 14 Essex Man? A Political Tragedy in Five Acts 233Chapter 15 The Clash of Civilizations 268Chapter 16 Shakespeare and Jacobean Geopolitics 282Fifth Age JusticeChapter 17 At Clement's Inn 293Chapter 18 After Machiavelli 307Chapter 19 The King's Man 319Sixth Age PantaloonChapter 20 The Myth of Shakespeare's Retirement 331Chapter 21 The Principal Comedians 343Chapter 22 The Foolosopher 360Seventh Age OblivionChapter 23 The Readiness is All 375Chapter 24 Shakespeare the Epicurean 389Chapter 25 Exit and Reentrance 403Acknowledgments 425Notes 427Index 457
