Staff Pick: Soul of the Age

Soul of the Age: a biography of the mind of William Shakespeare, By Jonathan Bate

Both an editor and a scholar of Shakespeare, Bate (Univ. of Warwick, UK) has written a brilliant biography of Shakespeare, a treatment that stands out among lives of the Bard. That Shakespeare's life continues to inspire myriad biographies, despite the few known facts about it, remains a paradox. Bate succeeds not only by writing lucidly about these facts but also by depicting Shakespeare from the outside in. Carefully sifting and analyzing facts about Shakespeare's society and information from Shakespeare's work, Bates is able to approach something like the man himself. The author devotes a section to each of the seven ages of man, as named in As You Like It, and in so doing shadows Shakespeare from infancy to oblivion.
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