Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by
Jonathan Bate
Jonathan
Bate is one of the great Shakespeare scholar/editors of the late 20th-early
21st century. He belongs in the company of such early 20th century
greats as E. K. Chambers, J. D. Wilson and Alfred Harbage;
capable of speculation, but with an unerring centrifugal instinct to fact
and truth. Bate's
The Genius of Shakespeare is a groundbreaking
summation of the perception of Shakespeare's works, his Arden Third Series
edition of Titus Andronicus is the best I know, and his (and
Rasmussen's) masterful RSC
Complete Works is, well, masterful.
With a buildup like that, it would be hard to say his latest,
Soul of the
Age, is anything but a very good book, and indeed it is. That is not
to say great. Great books on Shakespeare are extremely rare, but very
good from this scholar is nearly as good as it gets. The only caution
I would suggest is that it is not a beginner's book. Considerable
familiarity with the works of the period and the various controversies over
Shakespearean biographical details would be helpful to the reader.
Following the close arguments in several of the set pieces throughout the
book would be quite challenging without at least a basic understanding of
16th and 17th century British history and literature.
This book purports to answer the dual questions, "What was it like
being Shakespeare? and, What are the most telling ways in which
Shakespeare's works embody—or rather ensoul—the
world-picture of his age?" It does so by using Jacques' Seven Ages
speech from As You Like It as a substrate on which to build expanding
notions of Shakespeare's consciousness and historical notions of the
significantly intersecting
Elizabethan and Jacobean "moments." Bate's goal is nothing less than
to create an "intellectual biography of the man in the mind-set into which
he was born and out of which his works were created." At first blush
the Seven Ages devices would seem a poor fit, but in practice it works
well. Not each "age" is intimately connected with Shakespeare, as we
will discuss below, and Bate often shows the Shakespearean moment to
transcend the "age." The approach is not nearly as chronological as
the structure might suggest, and the material not neatly, demonstrably
internal to the mind of Shakespeare. It is, however, nonetheless
fascinating.
Infancy.
The infancy section, for example, has almost
nothing to do with infancy. It ranges widely to encompass Galileo,
Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, the Reformation, Elizabeth and Simon Forman,
the plague, the legal year, the importance of maps in Elizabeth's reign,
Florio's World of Words, Leonard (both of them) and Thomas Digges, the Copernican universe,
Horace's distinction between negotium and otium, with their obvious
parallels to Shakespeare's business and country lives, and so on. The
broad brush strokes that prepare the canvas are followed by the detailed
strokes that paint the life of the theatre beginning in the 1580s leading to
Shakespeare's eventual emergence some time near the end of that decade.
A fascinating section deals with English "chorography"—"or the geographical
and historical description of a particular region." Bate cites William Lambarde's Perambulation in this respect, and not for the last time
do we meet Lambarde in the course of the book.
Of course Bate does not neglect biographical
certainty where it can be obtained, such as the many Warwickshire allusions
in the works that make them certainly the work of the boy who grew up in
Stratford; but neither does he overdo this obviously well worn material.
His is a fresher, more detailed, more intriguing approach. He notes,
for example, mention in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew of
Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, and then reveals that there
actually was a Hacket family living there in 1591. So it goes. A
grand synthesis of overarching trends of the age combined with intimate
details of the mental life of our playwright from his known history.
The Schoolboy.
The second age is that of the schoolboy, and
while this is the section that has the greatest correspondence with
biographically known probabilities, it also broadens to embrace Renaissance
humanism's theories of education and government, and moves from there to one of
the book's several long set-pieces: an analysis of The Tempest.
Finally it
ends in a fascinating discussion of the books likely to have been owned by
Shakespeare, one of the best sections of the book.
Among many other specialties, Bate is an
Ovid specialist of sorts, and has contributed a great introductory essay,
"Shakespeare's Ovid," to Nims' definitive modern edition of Golding's
1567 translation of
The Metamorphoses. We get much of Ovid along with a
description of Shakespeare's education in the King's New School in
Stratford: "...it is demonstrable from his work that of all the
writers on the syllabus Ovid was the one who appealed to him most strongly,
and whom he sought out—albeit mostly in English translation—after he left
school." And again, "Scholars have calculated that about 90 percent of
Shakespeare's allusions to classical mythology refer to stories included in
that epic compendium of tales."
Bate also notes the often overlooked fact
that Shakespeare's first acting experience probably occurred in his grammar
school: "...there is no reason to suppose that a pageant of the
deserted Ariadne, probably based on the poem written in her voice in Ovid's
Heroides, might not have been staged in Stratford in an earlier year,
with one of Shakespeare's schoolfellows in the title role. Or even
Shakespeare himself." In addition to acting, Shakespeare would have
been exposed—exposed is probably too tame a word—to Latin to English,
English to Latin translation. "Shakespeare's provincial grammar school
education gave him sufficient Latin to base his Rape of Lucrece on a
story in Ovid's Fasti that was not translated into English in his
lifetime."
From Ovid we are also treated to an analysis
of the influence of Seneca on the English tragedy and the importance of
Jasper Heywood's translations. After Ovid, however, no more important
source for Shakespeare's works exceeded that of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and Bate duly considers his influence on Julius Caesar,
Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.
The Lover.
The lover's age must embrace Shakespeare's
marriage and his self-revelations, if any, in the Sonnets. With regard
to his marriage, Bate brings forth the remarkable fact, which I cannot
remember to have seen stated elsewhere, that among Shakespeare's
contemporaries (based on examination of Stratford parish records for
1570-1630) "only three were in their teens when they married" (which may be
a bit deceiving because the age of all men at marriage cannot be determined
based on the parish records, but never mind that). Even more
remarkably, there is "only one identifiable teenage Stratford husband in the
whole sixty-year period whose bride was pregnant on the day of their
marriage: the glover's son, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare." In
other words, the shotgun wedding supposition seems to be myth, at least
based on social norms, and a teenage boy-older pregnant woman "was a very
unusual combination." In his marriage, as in all else, Shakespeare
seems to have been
unique. Bate suggests sexual precocity as a possible explanation for
Shakespeare finding himself the father of three before age twenty.
Certainly his virtuosity with the language of sex in his works suggests an
abiding concern, if not obsession.
While noting the tendency of
biographers to flights of fancy regarding Shakespeare's sex life, and
possible venereal diseases, Bate's discussion is restrained and fair minded.
Shakespeare clearly imagined himself to have been the victim of marital
infidelity, but the operative word is imagined, as Bate points out.
There is no way to know the reality of his sex life based on his language in
the plays or the poetry. The perennial conundrum is the bequest of the
second best bed in the will, and it remains a conundrum. More
perplexing is absence of mention of the Blackfriars gatehouse, purchased in 1613, or
Shakespeare's shares in the Globe, but here again, so much has been
swallowed by silence, and Bate is too cautious a scholar to fantasize.
After a thoroughgoing discussion of the sonnets, Bate tentatively
identifies—though hardly insists upon—the rival poet as John Davies of
Hereford, spinning a unique interpretation of Mr. W. H. being flattered by
Davies' famous penmanship. Bate admits the possibly fanciful nature of
this guess, but it is indeed charming.
The Soldier
Since there is no evidence Shakespeare was ever a soldier (despite some
strained theorists) this section is largely concerned with things militaire:
Elizabeth as warrior and her great "Tilbury" speech (which Bate says may
have been inauthentic, after expanding on it for several pages!); the Armada
year; the history plays with their multiple battles and warrior-poets; and
more. This section is home to the book's longest set-piece, where Bate
attempts to prove that Shakespeare's Richard II was a source for John
Hayward's controversial The First Part of the Life and Reign of King
Henry IV, dedicated to the unfortunate Lord Essex whose head suffered
much for it. Bate calls it "A Political Tragedy in Five Acts," and it
is a tightly spun, intricate argument which carries us far afield from
Shakespeare biography, if not of the catchall "age". As noted above,
this book is not one for beginners, and particularly this section. The
uninitiated will find it heavy sledding. It may be worth noting that
Bate rests his argument on verbal imagery "unlikely to be coincidence," in
the manner of authorial attribution in the fifties and sixties, but
ultimately it is hard to see that it much matters. This is a
specialist's section.
The long argument about Richard II, Haywood and the Essex rising of
1601 is followed by an apparent afterthought on "Moorish" culture, and an
after-after thought on Jacobean geopolitics which feel like remnants too good to
waste but apropos of nothing in particular.
The Justice
This sections concerns itself primarily with tracing Shakespeare's possible
legal "training" (or "knowledge," as displayed in the plays). It has him
as his fathers early representative at Clement's Inn during the "lost years,"
and is as good a guess as any. Shakespeare's unusually deep knowledge of
legal terminology have led many to posit just such a connection, and suppose him
to have been at least for a time "some sort of noverint or apprentice lawyer."
One is apt to credit these arguments, even though they are based on the same
sorts of fantasies that argue other matter, simply because Shakespeare so
commonly adopts the neutral anonymity of a lawyer. The suppositions about
law expand to politics, and Bate concludes that "Shakespeare's political beliefs
are as elusive as his religion, his sexuality, and just about everything else
about him that matters." It is the biographer's common lament.
The Pantaloon
The pantaloon is a stock character in the commedia dell'arte: the lean and
slippered authority who thwarts the will of the young lovers, the laughable
older man now the butt of jests by his lively children. Whether this fits
Shakespeare in any significant way is dubious, but Bate sticks with the Seven
Ages metaphor faithfully. This section does contain the best brief summary
of "the contours of Shakespeare's career," that I have read, and this
section alone, from pages 333-342, are worth the price of the book. Bate
makes much, and deservedly so, of the fact that Shakespeare cannot be shown to
have acted after 1603, when he is listed as an actor in Jonson's Sejanus,
coupled with the "shame" sonnets which linguistic analysis seems to date from
this same period: "The inference must be that he stopped acting around the
time of the 1603-4 plague outbreak. Perhaps the sense of shame that he
alludes to in sonnets 110-112, written around this time, had something to do
with his decision." Of course, this is hardly proved, but the temptation
to some sort of certainty is so great that even as careful a scholar as Bate
gives it rather more weight than it can bear. In any event, the curative
sentiments of the book that explode the "myth" of Shakespeare's retirement after
around 1611 are welcome, if the mystery remains.
As with all biographers starting with Rowe, Shakespeare's biography always
becomes the occasion for literary criticism. If it were not so, the
biographies would be slim indeed. Never mind, because this section deals
with King Lear in a delightful chapter titled "The Foolosopher" that does
not need the excuse of biographical relevance.
Oblivion
This final "age" is interesting because it labels Shakespeare an
"epicurean": "Add to Stoicism an acknowledgment of the needs of the
body and the raw materiality of things, then what do you get? The
answer is a powerful philosophy that had a largely bad press in the
Renaissance, but that might actually have been the closest Shakespeare came
to belief." These are rather startling words, but Bate goes far in
supporting them. After an extended discussion of Shakespeare's love
for certain of his characters, Bate says "Enobarbus might just be the
closest Shakespeare came to a portrait of his own mind." Enobarbus,
Bate notes, "embodies the pliable self." This biography, if more
brittle in several of its arguments than pliable, is still a very good one,
remarkable for careful analysis and possessing a charm in the way it
teases weighty meaning out of airy events. If it is at times
ponderous, it redeems itself more often in winning clarity. It is MUST
reading for Shakespeareans.