LITERARY CRITICISM: Danielle Clarkereviews Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William ShakespeareBy Jonathan Bate, Viking, 500pp, £25
THE NOTION THAT Shakespeare's works, not his life, represent his true claim to literary immortality has been a part of the Shakespeare myth from the very beginning. His monument in Stratford states "all that he hath writ/ Leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit", the printer of the First Folio in 1623 advises "Reader, looke/ Not on his Picture, but his Booke" and Shakespeare himself invests heavily in the notion of his work's transcendent capabilities, "do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,/ My love shall in my verse ever live young" (Sonnet 19).
Jonathan Bate's arresting new book takes this principle to its logical conclusion, attempting to write not a biography of Shakespeare, but in effect a biography of the work. This is fertile but dangerous territory, and many a critic has foundered on its treacherous quicksands. If the work is transcendent, original, and enduring (which must be the premise of such an undertaking) then how can the author's life really be of great import? This is all the more pertinent, when, as Bate freely admits, virtually all the evidence relating to Shakespeare's life can be written down in a paragraph, and the remaining threads and patches amount to little more than fuel for speculation. Reading the life from the works is equally misleading, especially when the works themselves are so heavily invested in notions of disguise, identity, performance and deception.
Soul of the Age follows a long line of inventive solutions to the Shakespeare biography "problem", but Bate succeeds by dint of the range of his scholarship and his magisterial style. Reading Soul of the Age is like being in the company of a truly excellent teacher, full of riffs and ideas, of things to follow up, suggestive links and connections, and the occasional dead-end or strained comparison that doesn't quite hit home.
Structured on Jacques's famous "seven ages of man" speech from As You Like It, which, as Bate points out, is not original to Shakespeare, the book explores loosely-related topics based on each of the seven ages. So the section on the soldier serves as a springboard for Bate to link Elizabeth's famous Armada speech to the history plays, to explore the subtle interconnections between Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex rebellion in 1600, to look at the "clash of civilizations" in Othello and to place the settings of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest in the context of imperial conflict in the Mediterranean. Some of the "ages" creak a little under the weight of material they are asked to support. In some cases, the links between topics are rather tenuous and the structure is merely a nice conceit on which to hang what is a series of thoughtful essays on various aspects of Shakespeare's work and the context in which it was written.
Bate never really makes the case for the "work as biography", and one rather feels that the "biography" angle is one that has been imposed upon him by the marketing department (the American edition is subtitled "A biography of the mind of William Shakespeare"). Time and again, Bate drops in a sentence about the life, only to conclude that nothing can be concluded.
His resistance to inferring the life from the works means that when he ventures onto the ground of the sonnets, he does a volte-face, arguing that whilst the "Dark Lady" sonnets sexualise the beloved, the "young man" sonnets merely idealise, driving an uncharacteristic wedge between lived experience and imaginative word-mongering.
Whilst keen to demonstrate how Shakespeare breaks all the rules of Elizabethan sonneteering, Bate seems strangely reluctant to deal with their homoeroticism, and this leads him to suggest, bizarrely, that the dedication to "WH" is a misprint, and that the printer intended to dedicate the text to Shakespeare himself. The attempt to wrest insights into law, love, war and so on into the biographical straitjacket is unnecessary, because this is a veritable cornucopia of a book, full of teasing insights, such as the fact that there are very few babies in Shakespeare, or that the evidence of the plays suggests Shakespeare "would gut a book for its nourishment, then cast it aside".
Bate's chosen topics often reflect his own earlier interests: he writes exceptionally well on Shakespeare's rootedness in a now vanished rural England, and details his intimate knowledge of its plants, animals and birds (Bate is the author of a biography of the poet John Clare). He is captivating on Shakespeare's use of Ovid, the Bible and Montaigne. Soul of the Age fleshes out the educational and intellectual sources of Shakespeare's extraordinary linguistic and stylistic inventiveness with wit and deftness of touch - quotation from primary sources is full and generous, and Bate assumes his reader to be serious and engaged. In this respect it is a pity the referencing is relatively scanty, and the interested reader is not given some guidance on further reading.
There is little here that is actually new in terms of evidence, but Bate's quixotic intelligence quite frequently perceives a new or lost connection, and he is disarmingly self-conscious about the limitations of his role, noting that "bookish scholars . . . have a subliminal desire to make [Shakespeare] more like themselves than he really was". Sometimes discussions are slightly bloated and overly detailed (on the Essex rebellion, for example); at others, potentially tantalising nuggets are introduced and then abandoned, yet the book in general is both analytical and original, and repeatedly opens up familiar texts in new and surprising ways, sending the reader scurrying back to consult a long forgotten passage or a neglected play. Shakespeare lives while "we have wits to read, and praise to give", and Bate's engaging study helps us to do both.
• Danielle Clarke is professor of English renaissance language and literature in the school of English, drama and film at University College Dublin