"Like fruit hanging on a branch, my soul / Till the tree dies!" At the end of Shakespeare's legendary play Cymbeline, the misunderstanding between the Roman young Posemos and the British princess Imochen is clarified, and the lovers embrace each other, and the remorseful Posemos sighs. Shakespeare can be said to be a "soul-filled" writer, and references to the soul can be seen everywhere in the play. Reading Shakespeare is like plucking the fullest fruit from the orchard of ideas, and in its juice there is a whole body of genetic information about the intellectual history of early modern Britain.
The specific life of Shakespeare is full of gaps and controversies, which is a challenge that biographers must face, but if we don't even know exactly whether a biographer is really lame (see sonnet 37), it is possible for the biographer to gain a freedom not to get lost in the jungle of life facts, which often leads to a more imaginative and innovative form of biographical writing. As an important British scholar, critic and biographer, Jonathan Bate's "Shakespeare: The Soul of the Times" (2008, Chinese Edition 2023) is not so much a biography of Shakespeare, but a clue to Shakespeare's text and life as a clue to connect the ideological map of an era, and to write history by biographical method, which is the legacy that Plutarch left to Shakespeare and handed from Shakespeare to Bate. The charm of this biography is that it is a biography of the ideas of an era, and at the same time has the specificity of the text.
Bate follows Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson, in his description of Shakespeare: "The soul of the age. This description is first and foremost specific. It differs from Bate's previous book The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), which emphasized Shakespeare's transcendent universality, and it focuses more on how Shakespeare's works are the fruit of his own zeitgeist and how they can be placed in the world picture of his time. Somewhat similar to another biography published shortly before it, Stephen Greenbrandt's Secular Will (2004, Chinese edition 2007), they both focus on the interaction between Shakespeare and a given historical period, and are based on a large amount of research and historical support, but Greenbrandt's focus on Shakespeare's "world" (the original English name of "The Secular Will" literally means "Will in the world") refers more to the worldly in which Shakespeare successfully navigated it. Material and political realities, Bate is more concerned with a set of intellectual traditions that Shakespeare inherits, expresses and dialogues with—that is, the word "soul" in the title.
Bate is equally committed to reconstructing the era in which this soul operates and its changing history, but he is particularly concerned with the geopolitical landscape in which Shakespeare operates. The world is the map of England and Wales at Elizabeth's feet in the famous Didgley portrait, and the rivalry between Christianity and Islam beyond the territory of "unstable France, southern Europe under Roman Catholic rule, the Mediterranean under Ottoman power" and the coastal regions. Such a map of the world, which gradually became clearer, brought new interpretations to texts such as Othello, The Tempest, and even Shakespeare's contemporary, Marlowe's The Jews of Malta. At the same time, Bate depicts Shakespeare's historical vision of "two worlds" at the same time: his deft maneuver between the country and the city, the folk and the court, the literary world and secular success, the establishment of Protestant authority and the execution of Charles I, the flourishing of religious "miracle plays" and "mystery plays" and secular theaters, the classical cosmic order of Ptolemy and the universal acceptance of Copernicus, and the transition from Tudor to Stuart. Bette sketches out the opportunity and vitality of this transition between the old and the new: Shakespeare and Galileo were both born in 1564, the year of the death of "Michelangelo, the pinnacle of the Italian Renaissance, and John Calvin, the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva", and this collision of old and new gives Shakespeare's plays endless vitality. From Edmund in King Lear, to Richard in Richard III, Allen in Titus Andronicus, the illegitimate son in King John, and Iago in Othello, these Machiavellians who represent the "New Philosophy" both disgusted and attracted Shakespeare, who had been educated in grammar school since childhood, and perhaps precisely because Shakespeare was a "new man in the old world".
Bate invites us to return to the specific geography and space of that era, and to imagine the reality of Shakespeare's life. Based on Jacques's famous monologue of "Life is Like a Stage" in "All Are Happy", the book divides the seven stages of Shakespeare's life, in each of which the theatre plays a central role. Life is like a stage, and it is precisely the fact that the troupe dominated Shakespeare's life and major social relations for most of the time, and the spatial politics of the theater condensed the forces of plague, competition, court support, and political supervision in specific time and space. At the beginning of his work, the theater was forced to close due to the plague and the riots that John Nash's "Isle of Dogs" might cause, and later in his career, the plague at the beginning of the reign of James I closed the theater. But both of these lengthy hiatuses led to an important shift in Shakespeare's identity, and the closure of the latter theatre indirectly led to Shakespeare's transition from comedy to the writing of late, complex tragedies and legends. His troupe and theatre were inseparable from the court: the Queen's love of theatre contributed to his rise to prominence, and after his rise to fame, troupes often performed at the court, but the demagogic nature of the secular theatre as a public space rivaled the church brought political risks and restrictions. But Shakespeare's creative vitality does not come primarily from the court: it is the product of the city rather than the royal family or the study. His repertoire competes with that of the Tong Ling Theatre Company, and his lines contain not only Roman proverbs, but also street wisdom in taverns. He was inspired not only by Ovid and Seneca, but also by the freshest ideas of his time—Marlowe's new plays, Florio's translation of Montaigne, Machiavelli's philosophy, and famous contemporaries such as the Hamlet Hales v. Petty controversy over the rights of the suicidal. From this point of view, these plays not only show Shakespeare's extraordinary ability as an artist, but also reflect the soul of an entire era, and can even be said to be the product of collective creation in the broadest sense.
On the one hand, Shakespeare: The Soul of the Age has a distinct sense of contemporary issues, or, in Bate's words, it delights in "illuminating the present with history." The book deals with controversial facts, such as the "second best bed for the wife", the identity of black beauties and young men in the sonnets, and even the question of sexuality, but beyond the superficial factual discussion, Bate uses these issues as an introduction to some more general and contemporary propositions, raising questions about Shakespeare's relationship with law and authority. It is more concerned with why Shakespeare was not implicated in the political turmoil of the Essex Rebellion, even though the Earl's cronies had just watched Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe Theatre, and Hayward, the political historian who also wrote about Richard II, had been thrown into the Tower of London three years earlier. What kind of realpolitik reminder was intended to be given to James I, and how was this reminder a thought product of the post-Spanish fleet era? It seems that there is always a thought—and even a soul's curiosity—that carries the book on its way, and that would be a pleasure for a reader with similar curiosities.
Perhaps because of the relative scarcity of true biographical facts, Shakespeare: The Soul of the Times adopts a freer form of writing that focuses on the issues of intellectual history. It does not follow a strict order from swaddling to grave, but rather focuses on specific plays in terms of questions, such as the chapter "Schoolchildren" that focuses on the late play The Tempest, which examines Shakespeare's Latin proficiency, the number of books in his collection, and even the struggle between Stoicism and New Humanism and Epicurean thought. This motif is further elaborated in Bate's recent work, How the Ancient Classics Shaped Shakespeare (2019), and this question-based approach not only constitutes a formal innovation in biographical writing, but is also reminiscent of recent works about Shakespeare in a similar form, such as This Is Shakespeare (by Emma Smith), which looks at Shakespeare's plays and focuses on a central question. The chapter on "Lao Suo" uses King Lear's discussion of illegitimate children and natural law to be read in tandem with Agnes Heller's The Age of Disconnection (translated by Wu Yarong, published by Huaxia Publishing House in 2020). In addition, despite the looseness of the prose, the flexibility of the style, and the first-class narrative, Bate's documentary research and argumentation are not ambiguous at all. A simple example: The Tale of Winter, with its less than 3,000 words, has a clear research question (Shakespeare's adaptation of the legend inverts the two countries of Sicily and Bohemia), and combines detailed documentation and textual analysis with historical facts of geopolitical and religious conflicts.