Mad About Shakespeare, Life Lessons From The Bard
by Jonathan Bate
publ: William Collins 2022
Review by Andrew Hilton
The Shakespeare books keep coming, and this is the latest by one of our leading Shakespeare scholars, author of Soul of the Age, The Genius of Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Ovid, among a long and varied list of critical and biographical works, as well as some works of fiction.
But this new book, subtitled ‘Life Lessons from the Bard’, is a highly personal account of an (almost) lifelong passion, of those who inspired him – he was extraordinarily well taught, in both English and Classics, at Sevenoaks School – his many other literary interests and enthusiasms, and the way great writing has weaved itself into his life, reflecting and so often expressing his own experience, in which, as Dr Johnson said of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘joy and sorrow are mingled’.
The great Doctor is an early enthusiasm. ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it’ Bate quotes as a criterion for literary judgement that he has carried with him throughout his life. That ‘endure’ is telling, for Johnson is only the first in the book’s list of writers who suffered from the ‘black dog’ of depression, or some form of mental illness. John Clare, Mary Lamb (who in an episode of madness stabbed her mother to death before, years later, contributing to ‘Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare’) follow, then in their turn Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Woolf is returned to repeatedly; how far Bate’s fellow feeling with her extends we can only speculate, though he tells painfully of his mother’s severely disabling depression during his own teenage years. However, his prolific output as a scholar and his productive association with the professional theatre (for a time he was a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he co-edited the RSC’s Complete Works, and wrote the dramatic piece, Being Shakespeare, for Simon Callow) are testimony to an enormous energy, to a life well spent – and with much more, I trust, to come.
The last chapter, the particularly moving ‘Voyage to Illyria’, relates to events I will not reveal here, but leave them to hit the next reader as hard as they hit me. Here Bate attains to an almost Shakespearean narrative intensity, concluding it more – you may be relieved to hear – in the manner of a comedy or late romance than in the shattering tragedies of Shakespeare’s middle years.
As a bonus, for any Shakespearian who – like me – wearies of the persistent claims that the true author of the plays was really Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, or a number of other nonsense contenders, Bate provides a pithy and forensic debunking, almost worth committing to heart!
Very highly recommended.
Andrew Hilton is the author of ‘Shakespeare on the Factory Floor’ (Nick Hern Books 2022)
