Book description
How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly
poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's
plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one
dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned?
Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions,
private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads
us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often
violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking. Written
by one of the world's leading experts, it combines almost everything
there is to know about the man and his work in one sensational
narrative, and brings us closer than ever to understanding what
being Shakespeare was actually like.
Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature
at the University of Warwick, chief editor of
The RSC Shakespeare:
Complete Works
and the author of many books, including most recently
John Clare: A Biography
, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait
Black Prize for Biography. A Fellow of the British Academy, he was
awarded a CBE in 2006.
