A provocative portrait of Shakespeare

Were Homer more proximate to us in time, perhaps we’d worry the details of his daily life as furiously as we do William Shakespeare’s.

Perhaps -- but probably not.

Homer, after all, wrote in Greek and, though Robert Fagles’ and Richmond Lattimore’s translations are everything a contemporary reader could want, their language is not the poet’s. Fascinating though they are, Homer’s gods and heroes move through our consciousness as though beyond a scrim woven of more than physical distance; the greatest of them inhabit our reader’s consciousness as idealized points of reference rather than relevance.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, is -- Chaucer and the Beowulf poet notwithstanding -- the very foundation of our canon. His language and rhythms, like those of the King James Bible, defined our first collective notions of eloquence. More important, his characters and poet subjects speak to us still as full-blooded individuals, complex, contradictory, heroic, flawed, grasping, foolish and wise, filled with longings we experience still. We see ourselves in them; each generation finds some compelling image of itself in the mirror of the Bard’s vast oeuvre.

Jonathan Bate, now professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Warwick, is one of our foremost, most erudite Shakespeare scholars. His 1997 book, “The Genius of Shakespeare,” makes an elegant case for its title. His new book -- “Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare” -- explores the context and influences out of which that singular talent arose.

The title, of course, is taken from the incantatory elegy with which Ben Jonson introduced the First Folio in 1613:

Soul of the age!

The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!

My Shakespeare, rise . . .

Bate, a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company and co-editor of its magisterial 2007 edition of the complete works, brings to this new task not only a formidable command of scholarship on Elizabethan England but also the eye of a close, keen reader of the works that are, after all, the point of it all.

Essentially, “Soul of the Age” is a series of linked essays divided into concise chapters. Unless you’re one of those fortunate souls with a memory of the whole Shakespearean corpus, the best way to read this book is alongside the RSC compendium, because there’s a good deal of pleasure to be had by tracking Bate’s frequent -- and always apt -- quotations back to their textual context.

The author’s structural conceit is to arrange his essays according to the “seven ages of man” set forth in the melancholy Jaques’ speech in “As You Like It.” Thus the sections: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon (the decrepit old man in the traditional commedia dell’arte) and oblivion.

This architecture frees Bate from the constraints of chronology, and he uses that liberty to great effect, ranging across the various social forces -- including disease and sexuality -- and political and intellectual influences that surrounded Shakespeare. There’s fascinating speculation here, for example, on which books might have been part of the library he plundered for stories and themes. Bate is a sober interpreter, but he’s not afraid to suggest plausible novelty when the evidence seems to support it.

Thus, he speculates that during the so-called lost years early in Shakespeare’s life, he was in fact enmeshed in legal cases that were a feature of the extremely litigious Elizabethan age. His name appears twice in a lawsuit over family property during the late 1580s, and he may have been present in 1588, when it was filed before the Queen’s Bench in Westminster by the Shakespeares’ lawyer, John Harborne. As Bate points out, Harborne read law at Clement’s Inn: The character Justice Shallow in “Henry IV, Part 1” twice mentions studying there. (Shakespeare appears to have borrowed the names of characters from people who figured in other litigation.)

Bate is unimpressed and perhaps too quickly dismissive of recent scholarship arguing that Shakespeare -- or, at least, his father -- were recusants, which is to say, secret Catholics.

He’s daring, however, in his strong suggestion that the famous mystery surrounding “Mr. W.H.,” described in the publisher’s preface to the Sonnets as “onlie begetter” of the poems, is simply the result of a misprint. A careless printer, Bate proposes, simply made W.S. (William Shakespeare) W.H. -- and launched a thousand fancies.

Similarly, Bate pirouettes off diary notes by John Ward, vicar of Stratford, who wrote that “in his elder days [Shakespeare] lived at Stratford and supplied the stage with 2 plays every year.” Bate suggests that the Bard, who had invested well in country properties, removed himself to Stratford for various reasons -- including health -- but continued sending completed plays to the London theaters without “being involved in actually putting them on.”

Shakespeareans will find other such nuggets to turn over and argue about, but Bate is at his best when he applies his critical faculties to the plays’ characters themselves. He finds, for example, a summary of Shakespeare’s own complicated outlook and politics in his creation of the humorously detached but emotionally enmeshed Enobarbus in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

“Shakespeare was a realist as well as a romantic, a skilled politician as well as a supreme poet,” he writes. “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.”

In a fascinating discussion of Shakespeare as lover and prudent family man, Bate notes that “[o]f all Shakespeare’s married couples, the pair who seem most intimate, whom the audience senses are as in love as man and wife as they were when first they wooed, are the Macbeths. That is a fact that may give pause for thought.”

So does a great deal of this wise, wide-ranging book, which is further evidence for another of the claims Jonson made in his elegy: “He was not of an age, but for all time.”

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