I have before me an engraving of a bald, mild-mannered man who looks faintly like Alan Ayckbourn (who, incidentally, is the second most popular playwright in the world). The engraving is alleged to be of William Shakespeare, but it's probably no more truthful a likeness than the postcard I have of Jesus that makes him look like David Beckham. What we know of Shakespeare's life is little more than we know of Jesus's, which is why, like communicants in a church or spiritualists round a ouija board, we try to summon him to us - as if to know him more fully as a man were to understand his genius as a writer. Biographies appear with astonishing frequency, writer after writer tirelessly examining the same known knowns and the same known unknowns, all obliged to rely on what should be called the speculative tense - "Shakespeare might have stood in this room . . . " - or the coy historical present: "He sits at his oak table, sharpening his quill . . . " They should all be subtitled "Climbing Mount Conjecture".
Frustrated by the paucity of evidence, two recent books on Shakespeare have uncovered more of him by oblique and original methods. In The Lodger, Charles Nicholl, like a cold-case detective, revealed a detailed social and physical context from which it's possible to infer Shakespeare's presence in his London digs. And by fleshing out the year in which England was threatened with a Spanish invasion, the Earl of Essex mounted a rebellion and Shakespeare wrote, among other plays, Hamlet, James Shapiro's 1599 showed us the outline of the playwright as though he'd passed through an ice-mist, leaving a man-shaped hole behind him. But still we don't know who he was. Bill Bryson, the author of a recent (very likeable) condensed biography, put it perfectly: Shakespeare, he said, is the "literary equivalent of an electron - forever there and not there."
Jonathan Bate's previous biography of Shakespeare - The Genius of Shakespeare - embraced anecdote, history and analysis to explore the exact nature of Shakespeare's originality and offered a critical commentary on a huge spectrum of influence and scholarship. In the process he proved the truth of Robert Graves's epigram: "The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good - in spite of all the people who say he's very good." He also argued convincingly, among other intriguing speculations, that the death of Marlowe was the making of Shakespeare. Bate probably knows as much as any single person can know about Shakespeare, having studied, lectured and written extensively about him, as well as being the editor of a recently published Collected Works. So to write another biography within a decade might seem like an expedient and disingenuous recycling of surplus research. Soul of the Age, however, is surprising, fresh and anything but le pot rechauffé
Bate was provoked to write his new biography by Simon Callow's request for a one-man show about Shakespeare in his "cultural moment", but its inspiration is drawn from Ben Jonson's description of Shakespeare as "Soul of the Age". Its intention is to create an "intellectual biography . . . gathering what we can from his plays and his poems", but its ambition is larger than that. To investigate Shakespeare's "cultural DNA", Bate oscillates between two established parameters: the social, cultural, and physical conditions that Shakespeare inhabited, and the work that he produced in those conditions. He extracts the composite parts of the soul and atomises them, and, in bouncing between the two reflective surfaces of the work and the life, creates a sort of hologram of Shakespeare.
Bate escapes a neatly chronological approach by taking his structure from Jacques's "seven ages of man" speech in As You Like It. "All the world's a stage" serves as an ideal template to follow the contours of Shakespeare's career. Unlike many academics, Bate recognises that the stage was indeed his world and that whatever he learnt inside and outside that world was filtered and distilled into his work. The seven ages - infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, lawyer, pantaloon and "second childishness" - give him the opportunity to forage and stray over a continent of subject matter, while always being tethered to a narrative scheme.
Soul of the Age illuminates the world Shakespeare was born into: its religion, its illnesses, its wealth and its poverty, the natural world and the social order. Bate demonstrates that Shakespeare's work is veined with the Latin grammar that was the basis of his schooling and that he gathered the habit of translation from his education - Ovid's shadow fell over the comedies, and Plutarch's Parallel Lives spawned the Roman plays. He argues, always through reference to the plays, that Shakespeare had to have been a voracious reader and muses on the books he must have borrowed or bought - Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Holinshed, the Bible in the Geneva translation - the books that fed his work, sometimes as inspiration or verbal echo, often as paraphrase. "A man should ever . . . be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things, look he then have nothing to do but with himself," says Montaigne (in a contemporary translation). Or, as Hamlet puts it, "The readiness is all". There's an engaging inclusiveness in Bate's method, a feel for the smells and sights of London, the road to Stratford, the places he worked, the people he met. By comparing Shakespeare with his contemporaries, he gives a sense of the singularity of his character: canny and conservative.
He was an outsider, growing up beyond the metropolitan, courtly world but passionately engaged with it. "The Lover" initiates a tour of the subjects of teenage sex, marriage, venereal disease and contraception, along with a discourse on the bisexuality of the court of James I and the writing of Twelfth Night, "a drama of love's perplexity". In "The Soldier" the rebellion of Essex is treated as a five-act "political tragedy" in which the real events resound and collide with the theatrical fiction of Richard II and Henry IV. The discursiveness is exhilarating, and nowhere more so than in the chapter "Justice", where Bate ranges from examining the lives of petty officials, the administration of the law throughout the country and the endless litigation of the new middle class, to Falstaff's line "We have heard the chimes at midnight", of which he asks: which chimes were they? And, by deft footwork, answers the question and more besides.
The questions of Shakespeare's "lost years" and his "retirement" are also answered, at least to my satisfaction: the plague and giving up acting. If there is a gap anywhere in Bate's universe it is that, except for saying "as far as we know he did not experience soldiering at first hand", he fails to deal with what seems to me an obsessional interest in military life. Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet's father (a celebrated soldier, so tough and combative that once, in a negotiation for peace, he "smote the sledded Polack on the ice"), Lear ("I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion / I would have made them skip"), Henry IV, Henry V, Benedick and more are all professional soldiers, all defined by the hunger to fill the vacuum left by battle and by war as the defining male action. Room for another volume, I hope.
Shakespeare's beliefs are as elusive as his character: they are the sum of his writing. In a reflection on Antony and Cleopatra, Bate concludes: "Shakespeare was a realist as well as a romantic, a skilled politician as well as a supreme poet. He was equally capable of imagining Antony's dramatic trajectory as a rise and as a fall. He was perpetually both inside and outside the action, both an emotionally involved participant in the world he created and a wryly detached commentator on it. So he invented a new character, the only major player in the story who is absent from the historical source . . . Enobarbus might just be the closest Shakespeare came to a portrait of his own mind." It's typically brilliant perception.
All books about Shakespeare tell us as much about their author as they do of their subject. What this book tells us about Bate is that he has the gift of a true teacher - able at once to educate and to entertain. He has the skill, grace and wit that his subject deserves, even if, for all his virtues, he is not entirely immune from academic verbiage - "the fact . . . not always perceived by other biographers. . . .", "most biographies prefer to ignore", etc. And though he quotes Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent", he doesn't always observe it. I'm not qualified to say how much of the research and conclusions are original or could be discovered by ascending the mountain of biographies or through a ferociously diligent reading of the plays and their footnotes. What I do know is that after reading Soul of the Age I felt closer to the soul of Shakespeare.
Richard Eyre's books include Utopia and Other Places (Bloomsbury).
