Product Description

Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? What makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? And how has Shakespeare come to be such a powerful symbol of genius?

The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life – and afterlife – of the greatest English poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars, deftly shows how the legend of Shakespeare’s genius was created and sustained, and how it has become a truly global phenomenon.

‘The best book about Shakespeare for a generation’

Philip Howard, The Times

‘As brilliant an account of the Bard’s iconic universality as you could hope to find’

Michael Billington, Guardian

‘Absolutely dazzling – illuminates the whole man and the influence he has in our lives’

Simon Callow, Sunday Express

‘Occupies the territory of biography, literary criticism, theatrical and social history, and a journey across its landscape is one of constant delight and illumination’

Sir Richard Eyre, Financial Times, Books of the Year

‘The theme of this wonderfully written, diverse book is diversity itself, and the range of the essays serves only to confirm the disparate nature of Shakespeare’s achievement’

Peter Ackroyd, The Times

‘The liveliest and most intelligent general book on Shakespeare I have read for a long time’

John Gross, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95639 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is the editor of the highly acclaimed RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works (Macmillan) and the author of many books, including John Clare: A Biography (Picador). He was made CBE in the Queen’s 80th birthday honours, for his services to literature and higher education.

Customer Reviews

The genius of Bate!
Jonathan Bate's THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE takes issue with cultural conservatives and with politically correct radicals to explain how a dramatist of humble orgins became the best known author in history. In what is described as "a new kind of biography", Bate offers a two-part history of Shakespeare's talent and reputation. Instead of the usual life story or play-by-play account, Bate begins part one by discussing the anecdotes that were told about Shakespeare during his life, looking at how his contemporaries saw him. Then he moves on to dissect the sonnets showing the various ways they have been used to provide a biographical key to their author's life. Wielding Occam's razor, Bate attacks the tendency of the "life and works" approach to over-interpret the poems to illuminate the dark corners of the life.

Bate's willingness to admit that much will never be known is refreshing. His suggestion about the Dark Lady's identity is delightfully mischievous: she could have been the wife of John Florio, Italian secretary to the Earl of Southampton. Given the sources, this is as credible as most other interpretations, even though Bate is attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel's sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that would not have persuaded Othello. More daring is Bate's solution to the conclusion of "Master W H", the unknown "begetter" of the sonnets. This, he argues, is just a printer's error for "W S" (William Shakespeare).

When addressing the authorship question, Bate uses knockabout tactics to demolish alternative candidates - from Francis Bacon to sundry lords - but he does so in a more profound question: why should anyone doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays? As so often, the answer concerns class. Cultural conservatives could not bear the idea that a mere grammer-school boy and butcher's son was as talented as university-trained wits.

In part two, Bate deals with the gradual growth of Shakespeare's reputation after his death. Since the Bard's plays broke the rules of classical decorum, his eighteenth-century admirers were forced to "invent" a new category of "native genius" to account for his talent. Shakespeare's apparent weakness, his lack of a university education, turned out to be his greatest strength. Aided by sundry Romantics, Britain's national poet was defined a "natural" genius.

Other emerging nations also adopted Shakespeare as a cultural icon, but usually in opposition to the classical culture of oppressive rulers. In Germany, for example, the Bard was reinvented as a symbol of anti-Gallic, pro-Teutonic identity. As a large part of Shakespeare's rise to universal deification was his ability to inspire other artists, Bate considers the reworking of his plays by artists such as Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi and Henry Fuseli.

Although everyone knows that Shakespeare has been used for conservative propaganda, Bate is at his best when he reminds us that the Bard was once also the people's playwright. The use of Shakespeare by Quakers, Chartists and other nonconformists as a counter-tradition - "one nurtured in the dissenting academies in which those excluded from the old universities found an educational community" - powerfully suggests that Shakespeare's genius was rooted in the ability to represent so many different aspects of life that all social groups could find cofirmation of their world-view in his books.

Bate goes further. Rather than being a reactionary Dead White European Male, Shakespeare was also an inspiration to black writers such as George Lamming and Aime Cesaire, who used THE TEMPEST as a critique of colonialism and as "the voice of the recovered black identity". Examples such as these seem to prove Bate's assertion, following Jorge Luis Borges, that Shakespeare can be "everything and nothing".

Perhaps the most polemical passages are those in which Bate revisits the arguments between the conservative "vigilantes", who use the Bard to police educational standards, and the politically correct "new iconoclasts", who use him for their own ideological ends by arguing that Shakespeare was less a genius than a product of historical forces. At its most extreme, this view denies that his works have any meaning: it is we who give meaning to them.

Between the stubborn assertiveness of the conservatives and the absurd reductionism of the radicals, Bate occupies a middle ground - Shakespeare, he insists, became an icon of genius because he was a better playwright than his contempories. His reputation has become universal because his plays really do contain a rich store of images, ambiguities and the juxtaposition of different viewpoints convincingly imagined.

Bate ends his book by arguing that Shakespeare's dramatic techniques - he toned down, for example, the stark motivations of characters he found in his sources - have only been fully appreciated in the twentieth-century. After modern science and philosophy propagated new ideas about relativism, uncertainty and the coexistence of opposites, the way was open for William Empson to lead the appreciation of ambiguity in Shakespeare's work.

THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE is aimed squarely at the general reader. Cultural materialists are sure to be exasperated as conservatives and other Shakespeare specialists may cringe at the boldness of his assertions and the ambition of his scope. Like many popular accounts, this well written book excites and provokes while risking accusations of over simplication. It is manifestly counter-productive, for example, to conclude an engagingly fervent book about the unique irreplaceability of Shakespeare's genius with the claim that had history been a little different Lope de Vega would have done just as well.

Despite such quibbles, Bate succeeds in conveying a powerful image of practical genius. Instead of bardolotry, we get a vivid portrait of a man who "invented the profession of dramatist", a quick-witted outsider who broke all the rules, a creative collaborator who gloried in playing games with what was possible on stage. Not only does THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE say a great deal about the making of a literary reputation, it is also a fascinating account of how plays are lifeless unless they are performed.

Enticing and thought-provoking
The scholarship pervades this book. In the bargain, the thesis of this work is expounded in a style which engages and takes control. It is polemical in parts, but does try to balance the clearly and forcefully expressed ideas with a consideration of competing themes. Having said that, the occasional political bias does come through - but in the context of this book and its discussion of cultural influence and expression, that is no bad thing. The bonus was that the average reader will learn a great deal. What more could one ask for? A well written book, which instils novel ideas, challenges existing prejudices and educates.

Definitive Book on the Bard
This is the book to get if you want a concise and readable account of why Shakespeare is the World's greatest ever writer. Jonathan Bate is a master when it comes to uncovering the 'genius of the man.' brilliant, riveting and thought provoking. A must for Shakespeare addicts!