The Genius of Shakespeare

Rating:
Summary: CAUTION: DECONSTRUCTION AHEAD
Review: Although Jonathan Bate was right on track in "Shakespeare and Ovid"(1993),he lost his way in trying to defend the Stratford man as the author in his latest book. He devotes almost a third of "The Genius of Shakespeare" to an attack on the evidence for Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, as the true author of the works of Shakespeare. In doing so, however, he makes eight significant errors of fact and 25 gross misinterpretations. For example, he says that no major actor has ever been attracted to anti-Stratfordianism(67), whereas Gielgud, Jacobi, Rylance,York, Chaplin and the director Tyrone Guthrie are all on record as rejecting the Stratford man as the author. And all but Rylance (so far) have voted for Oxford. One more example: He says that contrary to the Oxfordians letters from the Stratford man do survive and then cites the dedications signed William Shakespeare in editions of "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece." (73) These, of course, are not correspondence; and it is well-known that no letters written or received by the Stratford man have ever been found. When Bate becomes better informed about the Shakespeare authorship controversy and takes into account the views of academics ranging from Columbia University (Kristin Linklater) to English professors at Concordia University (site of the 6th annual Edward de Vere Studies Conference next April), he will no doubt see the merit in the evidence for Oxford. Meanwhile, his readers should beware the pot holes, rickety barricades and misguided detours in his ill-fated attempt to steer his readers away from the clearly sign-posted evidentiary route to Oxford's authorship of Shakespeare's works under that pseudonym.

Rating:
Summary: Dear Bill Shax of Moscow
Review: As my husband once said, Beware my lord of jealousy, it is the green-eyed monster.

And I don't think Melvyn actually does those South Bank Show interviews himself: are you as naive a reader of WS as you are of TV?

Rating:
Summary: Bate's Boring Bard
Review: Emilia,

As any fule know, the interviews are the only part of The South Bank Show that Lord Bargg does. So there.

Also, the works of Jonathan Bate do not inspire jealousy but rather loud laughter (or the hopeless devotion of female 'academics').

Let's face it: Bate is just Arthur Quiller-Casting-Couch in combat trousers.

Up the textual revolution! I don't know about you, but I'm off down the pub.

Rating:
Summary: dry as dust
Review: I have to admit that I could only get through two chapters of this book. I tried, and tried, and tried to keep reading this book but it just wasn't possible. The subject matter, or course is fascinating but the way it is written is torturous and painful. It is very dry. Mr. Bate doesn't seem to be telling you a story but rather just throwing research at you.

He opens up with a rather interesting idea about a life of anecdote and a life of allegory. I was thinking that he would start arguing that Shakepeare's life couldn't be told in allegory but had to be told in anecdote. Although, he seems to set it up this way, I wasn't sure what he was trying to argue or prove. I kept reading and reading and began to lose the message and argument he was making. I felt that he didn't have one. I just felt the message was very convoluted and the writing dry.

Most of all when I read good writing I get a sense that the author is talking to ME. I feel like I'm in his office and he is telling me all this great information. However, while reading this book, it felt as though I was eavesdropping on someone's conversation and I missed half of it. I can understand the words and sentences but I feel like I've started listening halfway into the conversation and I'm not sure what they are talking about or trying to argue.

Now I'm not saying the information in the book is incorrect. It is just presented in a way that is hard to understand what he is trying to say.

Dry, boring, with no narrative.

Rating:
Summary: dry as dust
Review: I have to admit that I could only get through two chapters of this book. I tried, and tried, and tried to keep reading this book but it just wasn't possible. The subject matter, or course is fascinating but the way it is written is torturous and painful. It is very dry. Mr. Bate doesn't seem to be telling you a story but rather just throwing research at you.

He opens up with a rather interesting idea about a life of anecdote and a life of allegory. I was thinking that he would start arguing that Shakepeare's life couldn't be told in allegory but had to be told in anecdote. Although, he seems to set it up this way, I wasn't sure what he was trying to argue or prove. I kept reading and reading and began to lose the message and argument he was making. I felt that he didn't have one. I just felt the message was very convoluted and the writing dry.

Most of all when I read good writing I get a sense that the author is talking to ME. I feel like I'm in his office and he is telling me all this great information. However, while reading this book, it felt as though I was eavesdropping on someone's conversation and I missed half of it. I can understand the words and sentences but I feel like I've started listening halfway into the conversation and I'm not sure what they are talking about or trying to argue.

Now I'm not saying the information in the book is incorrect. It is just presented in a way that is hard to understand what he is trying to say.

Dry, boring, with no narrative.

Rating:
Summary: The genius of Bate!
Review: Jonathan Bate's THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE takes issue with cultural conservatives and with politically correct radicals to explain how a dramatist of humble orgins became the best known author in history. In what is described as "a new kind of biography", Bate offers a two-part history of Shakespeare's talent and reputation. Instead of the usual life story or play-by-play account, Bate begins part one by discussing the anecdotes that were told about Shakespeare during his life, looking at how his contemporaries saw him. Then he moves on to dissect the sonnets showing the various ways they have been used to provide a biographical key to their author's life. Wielding Occam's razor, Bate attacks the tendency of the "life and works" approach to over-interpret the poems to illuminate the dark corners of the life.

Bate's willingness to admit that much will never be known is refreshing. His suggestion about the Dark Lady's identity is delightfully mischievous: she could have been the wife of John Florio, Italian secretary to the Earl of Southampton. Given the sources, this is as credible as most other interpretations, even though Bate is attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel's sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that would not have persuaded Othello. More daring is Bate's solution to the conclusion of "Master W H", the unknown "begetter" of the sonnets. This, he argues, is just a printer's error for "W S" (William Shakespeare).

When addressing the authorship question, Bate uses knockabout tactics to demolish alternative candidates - from Francis Bacon to sundry lords - but he does so in a more profound question: why should anyone doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays? As so often, the answer concerns class. Cultural conservatives could not bear the idea that a mere grammer-school boy and butcher's son was as talented as university-trained wits.

In part two, Bate deals with the gradual growth of Shakespeare's reputation after his death. Since the Bard's plays broke the rules of classical decorum, his eighteenth-century admirers were forced to "invent" a new category of "native genius" to account for his talent. Shakespeare's apparent weakness, his lack of a university education, turned out to be his greatest strength. Aided by sundry Romantics, Britain's national poet was defined a "natural" genius.

Other emerging nations also adopted Shakespeare as a cultural icon, but usually in opposition to the classical culture of oppressive rulers. In Germany, for example, the Bard was reinvented as a symbol of anti-Gallic, pro-Teutonic identity. As a large part of Shakespeare's rise to universal deification was his ability to inspire other artists, Bate considers the reworking of his plays by artists such as Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi and Henry Fuseli.

Although everyone knows that Shakespeare has been used for conservative propaganda, Bate is at his best when he reminds us that the Bard was once also the people's playwright. The use of Shakespeare by Quakers, Chartists and other nonconformists as a counter-tradition - "one nurtured in the dissenting academies in which those excluded from the old universities found an educational community" - powerfully suggests that Shakespeare's genius was rooted in the ability to represent so many different aspects of life that all social groups could find cofirmation of their world-view in his books.

Bate goes further. Rather than being a reactionary Dead White European Male, Shakespeare was also an inspiration to black writers such as George Lamming and Aime Cesaire, who used THE TEMPEST as a critique of colonialism and as "the voice of the recovered black identity". Examples such as these seem to prove Bate's assertion, following Jorge Luis Borges, that Shakespeare can be "everything and nothing".

Perhaps the most polemical passages are those in which Bate revisits the arguments between the conservative "vigilantes", who use the Bard to police educational standards, and the politically correct "new iconoclasts", who use him for their own ideological ends by arguing that Shakespeare was less a genius than a product of historical forces. At its most extreme, this view denies that his works have any meaning: it is we who give meaning to them.

Between the stubborn assertiveness of the conservatives and the absurd reductionism of the radicals, Bate occupies a middle ground - Shakespeare, he insists, became an icon of genius because he was a better playwright than his contempories. His reputation has become universal because his plays really do contain a rich store of images, ambiguities and the juxtaposition of different viewpoints convincingly imagined.

Bate ends his book by arguing that Shakespeare's dramatic techniques - he toned down, for example, the stark motivations of characters he found in his sources - have only been fully appreciated in the twentieth-century. After modern science and philosophy propagated new ideas about relativism, uncertainty and the coexistence of opposites, the way was open for William Empson to lead the appreciation of ambiguity in Shakespeare's work.

THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE is aimed squarely at the general reader. Cultural materialists are sure to be exasperated as conservatives and other Shakespeare specialists may cringe at the boldness of his assertions and the ambition of his scope. Like many popular accounts, this well written book excites and provokes while risking accusations of over simplication. It is manifestly counter-productive, for example, to conclude an engagingly fervent book about the unique irreplaceability of Shakespeare's genius with the claim that had history been a little different Lope de Vega would have done just as well.

Despite such quibbles, Bate succeeds in conveying a powerful image of practical genius. Instead of bardolotry, we get a vivid portrait of a man who "invented the profession of dramatist", a quick-witted outsider who broke all the rules, a creative collaborator who gloried in playing games with what was possible on stage. Not only does THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE say a great deal about the making of a literary reputation, it is also a fascinating account of how plays are lifeless unless they are performed.

Rating:
Summary: What We Expect of Him
Review: The title is perhaps misleading. If you read only one book about Shakespeare, perhaps it should not be this one. There are others that give a better introduction to his peculiar appeal. But if you want to know about cultural icons - how they are born, how they mature and die - then you could hardly do better. Shakespeare is, after all, among literary figures the icon of icons (perhaps only Homer can compare). And Bates does a delightful job of sketching just how it all came to be - what we have come to expect of Shakespeare, what sort of dreams and visions we map onto him. And he does it without losing sight of the fact that Shakespeare may indeed deserve all our admiration, even if not always in the form or for the reasons that we suppose.

Rating:
Summary: What We Expect of Him
Review: The title is perhaps misleading. If you read only one book about Shakespeare, perhaps it should not be this one. There are others that give a better introduction to his peculiar appeal. But if you want to know about cultural icons - how they are born, how they mature and die - then you could hardly do better. Shakespeare is, after all, among literary figures the icon of icons (perhaps only Homer can compare). And Bates does a delightful job of sketching just how it all came to be - what we have come to expect of Shakespeare, what sort of dreams and visions we map onto him. And he does it without losing sight of the fact that Shakespeare may indeed deserve all our admiration, even if not always in the form or for the reasons that we suppose.

Rating:
Summary: The Fop Rocks
Review: Way back in 1991 it looked like long hair was the best way to be a genius. Who can forget Jonathan Bate sitting in the corner of the Solarium in Queens' College and talking about Shelley and trees or something? Bate's hair was distinctly floppy and at this stage he was using Panthene's special formula conditioner and shine.

By 1995, however there had been important developments: several distinguished Shakespeare scholars were starting to display territorial hair loss. Indeed some were deliberately conspiring to look like Shakespeare (see Wychfield Almanack, Cambridge 1995). Never one to risk not being called an opportunist, Bate seized the micro-moment and switched to Wella products once and for all (it seemed!) This coincided with some distinctive clipper action at the Tonsurers in Liverpool Lime Street.

By the end of the twentieth century, Bate had confounded all of his critics by publishing a love story and appearing chummy with Lord Bragg on Sunday Night television, after Heartbeat. Who would dare call Jonathan Bate a serious academic again?

No-one much cared if Shakespeare was a genius or not, but if it keeps us all in a job then that's just dandy. Safe to say, however, that if Shakeyspeare was alive today he'd be shunned and sneered at by English academia 'cos let's face it: we wouldn't know a genius if he bit us on the arse.

Jonathan Bate is currently using the new range of advanced Brylcream products, with micro-beads.