Bate takes fresh look at the Bard

Published on Friday 28 August 2009 17:12

WHAT can you say about the world's best-ever writer when he left behind so few details about his life that biographers are always doomed to find him elusive? And what can you say about him that's still fresh when you've already written one of those doomed biographies yourself?

That was the dilemma the pre-eminent Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate faced when he first contemplated writing another book about him. But Ben Jonson's description of Shakespeare as "the soul of the age" seemed to offer a way in. If Shakespeare really did encapsulate his era, perhaps telling the story of how it shaped his mind would be more rewarding than yet another trudge around the few authenticated documents the Bard left behind.

Bate probably knows more than anyone alive about Shakespeare. Often this can be the kiss of death to the general reader – not here. Instead, he takes a fact about Shakespeare's life – the books he would have read at school, for example – and then atomises how they might have affected the cast of his mind – how, for example, the comic insults used in his Latin primer at school found later echoes in the flyting between Falstaff and Prince Hal.

Some of the links between the times and the work are evident enough – the "British" plays, such as Macbeth, replacing the English history ones once a Scottish king sat on the throne for example – but Bate teased out less obvious theses (such as just how much Shakespeare's life was affected by the plague) with lan.

In passing, Bate mentioned two facts that make the Bard still more pointedly relevant to us today. First, that his father's glove-making business was the "victim of an Elizabethan credit crunch".

Second – an assertion I've never heard before – that (thanks to his equity in his theatre company), Shakespeare was the first writer ever to make a living from his writing. Can this really be true?

If Shakespeare's Roman plays owe a lot to his reading of Plutarch, historian Saul David's debut novel, Zulu Hart, clearly owes much to the spirit of George McDonald Fraser – who first sparked his interest in Victorian history.

In an enjoyable discussion about historical fiction with Allan Massie, David revealed how frustrating it was to ditch facts, no matter how fascinating, that just had no place in the plot.

Information overload, both writers agreed, is the curse of the historical novel. In any case, said Massie, all that research isn't always necessary.

Once he got a letter from a woman who complimented him on the way he'd captured the sights, sounds and smells of Buenos Aires to perfection in his novel Sins of the Father. "I had to tell her," he said, "that I'd never been near the place."