Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

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Prof. Jonathan Bate

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Jonathan Bate, BA, MA, PhD (Cambridge), CBE, FBA, FRSL - Professor of Shakespeare & Renaissance Literature

Room H513, Humanities Building. Email: j.bate@warwick.ac.uk

Jonathan Bate is well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster and Shakespeare scholar. He has wide-ranging research interests in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Romanticism, biography and life-writing, ecocriticism, contemporary poetry and theatre history. A Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, as well as an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, he is on the Board of the RSC and the Council of the AHRC, broadcasts regularly for the BBC, writes for the Guardian, Times, TLS and Sunday Telegraph, has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA. In 2006 he was awarded a CBE in the Queen's 80th Birthday Honours for his services to higher education.

NEWS

Jonathan will be talking about Soul of the Age on 28 February at the Bath Literature Festival.

On Tuesday 2 March Jonathan will deliver the T. R. Henn Memorial Lecture at his old college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

The next volumes in the RSC Shakespeare—As You Like It, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night—will be published on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April.

On Monday 26 April Jonathan will deliver the annual Shakespeare birthday lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.

On Tuesday 4 May Jonathan will deliver the Wickham Lecture, entitled 'Ted Hughes and Shakespeare', at Bristol University (Wickham Theatre, Department of Drama)

Jonathan’s theatrical debut, The Man from Stratford, a one-man play for Simon Callow, a commission of the Ambassador Theatre Group, will tour regional theatres in the summer prior to a planned official opening at the Edinburgh International Festival in August.

Jonathan Bate and Seamus Heaney will be delivering the plenary lectures at the international Ted Hughes Conference at Pembroke College, Cambridge, 15-18 September 2010.

Jonathan's new book English Literature: A Very Short Introduction will be published by Oxford University Press in October 2010.

The American paperback edition of Soul of the Age will be published by Random House (New York) on 12 October 2010.

PUBLICATIONS

His publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford UP, 1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (Oxford UP, 1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford UP, 1993), the Arden Shakespeare edition of Titus Andronicus (1995), The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador/OUP USA, 1997/8; 10th anniversary edition with new Afterword, 2008), two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991) and The Song of the Earth (Picador/Harvard UP, 2000), and a novel about William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love (Picador, 1998). His biography of John Clare (Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003) won Britain's two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, as well as the NAMI (New York) Book Award; it was shortlisted for four other awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize. He has also edited Clare's Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2004) and written a new introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of Andrew Marvell's Complete Poetry (2005). Since 2003 he has been on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom he edited, jointly with Eric Rasmussen, The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works (Macmillan UK, Random House Modern Library USA, 2007, paperback 2008), which won the Falstaff Award for best Shakespeare book of 2007 and a British Book Design Award. Texts of individual plays, with longer introductions, stage histories and director interviews, are being published in batches: Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, the two parts of Henry IV, King Lear, Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Sonnets and other Poems, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale are now in print, with As You Like It, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night to come in April 2010.

Soul of the Age

His most recent book is an acclaimed intellectual and contextual biography of Shakespeare, called Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (Viking Penguin UK, 2008; Random House USA, 2009; US title is Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare).

"enthralling, the most eloquent evocation of Shakespeare one is ever likely to encounter" (Times Literary Supplement)“this beauty of a book, rich in insight, immaculate in scholarship, a work that is destined … to become one of the standard sources on its subject” (Washington Post)

An abbreviated version of the chapter on Richard II and the Essex rebellion was delivered as the 2008 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, and can be downloaded as a pdf by following this link.

CURRENT RESEARCH AND TEACHING

Jonathan co-teaches the MA Module Life Writing since 1900: History and Practice, with Jeremy Treglown and Paula Byrne. He also lectures, but does not currently give seminars, on undergraduate courses in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and Romantic and Victorian poetry. He is on research leave from January 2010, but will continue to supervise his PhD students, and always welcomes inquiries from potential research students.

Jonathan is currently working on the following projects:

Ted Hughes: The Inner Life (Faber and Faber UK, Farrar Straus Giroux USA). This is a long term project. It is not an "authorized biography" (Ted Hughes did not want one), but it is being written with the full co-operation of the Ted Hughes Estate.

Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others: an AHRC-funded edition of what used to be called 'The Shakespeare Apocrypha'.

Shakespeare and the Theatre of the World: Jonathan is serving as Consultant Curator for this exhibition in the Round Reading Room that will be the British Museum's contribution to the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

He recently served on an AHRC group investigating the public impact of the humanities and is editing a collection of essays arising from it, provisionally entitled The Public Value of the Humanities. A working draft of his own essay is here.

Author photograph by Eamonn McCabe