Soul of the Age | Jonathan Bate | Review by The Spectator

Every new biographer of Shakespeare walks splat into the same old problem. What to say? Since he can’t tell us anything we don’t know, he must either tell us things we do know or things we don’t need to know.

Jonathan Bate’s ingot-heavy volume announces, in its lackadaisical title, an intention to take all possible routes and to examine not just Shakespeare’s ‘life’ but his ‘world’ and ‘mind’ too. Where Bate offers facts he is sound, but he tends to theorise excessively and he devotes whole chapters to stimulating irrelevances like Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech of 1588 and the Earl of Essex’s botched coup of 1601. Like any sane earthling, Bate is irked by the self-deluding contrarians (‘conspiracy theorists’ he calls them) who believe the plays were written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford and polished up by Lord Lucan, Jeffrey Archer and Elvis.

Without tackling the revisionists head on he uncovers information which makes their views look even barmier than usual. Donning the archivist’s white gloves, he goes leafing through the parish records of Stratford and, hey presto, he finds the names Peto, Bardolph and Fluellen cited in minor disputes involving John Shakespeare in the early 1580s. How natural that the dramatist should have remembered these names when later in life he was casting minor characters in his plays. Bate has also sifted the country justice scenes in Henry IV (ii) and discovered numerous place-names from the Midlands which Bacon, Marlowe, Elvis & Co would have had no reason to be familiar with.