Katherine Duncan-Jones
As You Like Him
Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare
By Jonathan Bate
Viking 512pp £25 order from our bookshop
Jonathan Bate has a true novelist’s gift for scene setting and story telling. He spots interesting details and connections overlooked by previous writers, allowing his lively imagination to play freely around them. This lends freshness and charm to many passages in his latest book, especially its opening sections, such as ‘The Discovery of England’. These also pleased me, I confess, because of occasional similarities to the opening chapter of my own Ungentle Shakespeare (2001). But Bate fashions many delightful and original vignettes of his own, such as a scene in which Lord Burghley sits in his Whitehall office with Saxton’s ‘newly minted’ map of England and Wales hanging on the wall. He also suggests cogently that Shakespeare’s status as ‘a provincial outsider’ contributed to a keen fascination with more extreme outsiders such as Shylock and Othello, and notices Shakespeare’s avoidance of London-based comedy in favour of a single farce located ‘in bourgeois small-town Windsor, a place far more like Stratford’.
Even in the opening sections, however, Bate’s affable fluency can carry him away. Like many readers of Venus and Adonis, he discerns the memories of ‘a country boy’ in the poet’s evocation of ‘poor Wat’, a hunted hare which darts
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw