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Soul Of The Age Soul Of The Age (2009)

by Jonathan Bate(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1588367819 (ISBN13: 9781588367815)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: Mostly-fascinating collection of essays, thoughts, theories and placing-you-there Elizabethan history that attempts to understand nothing less than the very mind of Shakespeare, as a man of his time, and--as Ben Jonson famously wrote--as a man "not of an age, but for all time." Besides a couple of chapters about the politics and religion of his time that I found a bit too dry, the book succeeds at doing so. It is at its best when it sticks to the literary and theatrical stuff: his plays, his theatres and the people he knew. If anyone doubts the existence of a non-university man who got a woman eight years his elder pregnant, married her, and left them behind to find his glory and future in the theatres of London, England, let them read this, and they will doubt no more.... moreThis book brings Shakespeare to life like few things I have read. Michael Wood's book and a couple of others are just as good, in different ways. And they all delve into the man and his time using their own conceits. The conceit of this one is to break the book down into sections that correspond to Shakespeare's famous "Seven Stages of Man" speech from As You Like It. (This is the one that begins with the even-more-famous line, "All the world's a stage.") And so Bate chronicles the life of and mind of Shakespeare by breaking his life up into the seven parts that we all supposedly share. I got the feeling that Bate had much of the book written already, via separate speeches and chapters, and tied them all together with the conceit of the seven stages, but whatever. It doesn't matter, because it works.The narrative is at its best when it brings us pell-mell into Elizabethan England. We see it as Shakespeare may have, and we witness things, and become aware of city-wide and nation-wide news that he would have been aware of. We meet the Burbages, and Heminges, and Condell, and the theatre and publishing climates of the time. We see him as one of the many in these realms, and as one in the businesses he was in. He is placed firmly in his time, and yet the book works well also when it shows him to be a chronicler of his time. Shakespeare is renowned as being perhaps not just the best writer of our times, but also as the best mirror to his own time, without blocking the visage with his own image. He is within his world, and yet surprisingly intellectually and philosophically detached from it, so he can show it to us, and paint a picture of our human nature, and yet not include his own views and preferences in it--all at the same time.In short, we know what Hamlet thinks--but we never know what Shakespeare thinks. Of course, no writer is his character, and no character is its author. We know all of one, and very little about the internalization of the other.But Bate's book gets us closer to it than perhaps anything I've read before. The best compliment I'd give to this book is that it shows you something different about Shakespeare and his England, even if you thought you'd read it all before, like I have. If you enjoy that kind of literary history, and a biography of him (a little) and of his time, and of his place in his time (a lot of that), then you'll enjoy this.
review 2: I was really liking this book, reveling in yet another sensible author who doesn't fall for the whole Shakespearean controversy nonsense. He had lots of really great detail about Shakespeare's life and how it informs his works etc. Then he's talking about Hamlet and Polonius' speech to Laertes, and his analysis of the speech is simply that it is full of old saws and cliched advice. And that the end of the speech, "To thine own self be true/And it must follow, as the night the day/Thou canst not then be false to any man," was just as cliched and trivial as the rest of the speech. That really bothered me. Okay, yeah, Polonius is annoying, the whole scene where he tells the king and queen that Hamlet is mad for the love of Ophelia is really funny and full of nonsense. But his speech to his son is one of the few real heartfelt things Polonius says. His advice, taken piece by piece, is actually quite sound, if a bit stuffily pronounced. And that last gem is absolutely golden and absolutely true. And yes, I'm probably a bit biased, since I took those three lines as my basic philosophy of life years ago. But really, stepping back and looking at them objectively, there is nothing cliched or trivial in those last three lines. They are succinct and they cut to the heart of how we should relate to our fellow beings. So, long essay short, I will be going back to it at some point, skipping past his ideas about Polonius, but it was a bit of a let down after all the goodness that came before! less

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