Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate,CBE,FBA,FRSL (born 26 June 1958),is a British academic,biographer,critic,broadcaster,scholar,and occasional novelist,playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare,Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment in the Department of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Sustainability in the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University,as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford,where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature.[1] Bate was Provost of Worcester College,Oxford,from 2011 to 2019.[2] From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Bate was born on 26 June 1958,in Kent,and was educated at Sevenoaks School during the period when it had state funding as a grammar as opposed to a private ("public") school. He went on to study at St Catharine's College,Cambridge,where he was the first T.R. Henn Scholar and a Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar. He earned a double first in English and returned to the college to complete his PhD on "Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination" and become a Research Fellow,after a year at Harvard University,where he held a Harkness Fellowship.
His earlier publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986),Shakespearean Constitutions (1989),Shakespeare and Ovid (1993),the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995,revised and updated with extended introduction,2018),The Genius of Shakespeare (1997),two influential works of ecocriticism,Romantic Ecology:Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000). Romantic Ecology is specifically credited with having introduced literary ecocriticism to Britain,[8] making him a pioneer of the field.[9] He has also written a novel based indirectly on the life of William Hazlitt,The Cure for Love.
His book,The Genius of Shakespeare was praised by Sir Peter Hall,founder of the RSC,as "the best modern book on Shakespeare".[11] It was reissued with a new afterword in 2008 and again in 2016 as a Picador Classic,with a further afterword and a new introduction by Simon Callow.
With Eric Rasmussen,Bate edited Shakespeare's Complete Works for the Royal Shakespeare Company,published in April 2007 as part of the Random HouseModern Library. This was the first edition since that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to use the First Folio as primary copy text for all the plays. It won the Falstaff Award for best Shakespearean book of the year. The edition faced criticism for removing A Lover's Complaint from the Shakespeare canon.[12] Each play is also published in an individual volume,with additional materials,including interviews with leading stage directors.
A companion volume of the "apocryphal" plays was published in 2013 under the title Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others. It is the first Shakespeare collection to include The Spanish Tragedy,laying out the argument for Shakespeare's authorship of the additional scenes. It also won the Falstaff Award.
Bate's intellectual and contextual biography Soul of the Age:The Life,Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London,2008,and in the United States as Soul of the Age:A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare,Random House,2009) was runner-up for the PEN American Center's PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography of the year. In 2010 he published English Literature:A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) and in 2011,as editor,The Public Value of the Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic),a work sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His monograph How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019),developed from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute,was published by Princeton University Press in 2019 and a new biography of William Wordsworth was published on the occasion of the poet's 250th anniversary in April 2020.
Bate is also a frequent writer and presenter of documentary features for BBC Radio 4. His subjects have included The Elizabethan Discovery of England,Faking the Classics,The Poetry of History (in which poems about great events are compared to historical accounts),and In Wordsworth's Footsteps (broadcast for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth). He wrote the script for Simon Callow's one-man show Shakespeare:the Man from Stratford (later renamed Being Shakespeare) for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival.[13]
His 2015 biography,Ted Hughes:The Unauthorised Life,published globally by HarperCollins,was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and was named by the Biographers' International Organization as the outstanding biography of the year in the category of Arts and Literature.
He is widely regarded as having made a significant contribution to the study of Shakespearean sources,texts and reception,to influence study and the endurance of the classics,to ecocriticism,to the revived reputations of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and of the poet John Clare,as well as to the sustaining of public discourse about the humanities in general and literature in particular. He has surveyed the trajectory of his critical career in an interview with the online scholarly journal Expositions:https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2211/1990.
He is currently the Chair of the board of trustees for the Hawthornden Foundation.[15]
Personal life
He is married to the author and biographer Paula Byrne. They have three children.[16]
John Clare: A Biography. Picador/Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2003.[21]
Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare. Viking. 2008. ISBN978-0-670-91482-1.
English Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2010. ISBN978-0-19-956926-7.
Editor, The Public Value of the Humanities. Bloomsbury. 2011.
Shakespeare: Staging the World. British Museum London/Oxford University Press New York. 2012. ISBN978-0-7141-2824-5. (British Museum exhibition, co-authored with Dora Thornton)
Co-editor, Worcester: Portrait of an Oxford College. Third Millennium. 2014.
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. William Collins London/HarperCollins New York/Fourth Estate Sydney. 2015.[22]
The Shepherd's Hut: Poems. Unbound. 2017. 978-1-7835-2430-3
How the Classics made Shakespeare. Princeton University Press. 2019. ISBN978-0-19-956926-7.
Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World. Yale University Press. 2020. ISBN978-0-3001-6964-5.[23]
Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works & Damned Lives of John Keats & F. Scott Fitzgerald. William Collins UK; Yale University Press USA. 2021. ISBN978-0-300-25657-4
The Poetry of History. BBC Studios. Audiobook. 2021.
Mad About Shakespeare: From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room. William Collins. 2022. ISBN978-0-00-816746-2.
Editions
Charles Lamb: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia. Oxford University Press. 1987.
The Romantics on Shakespeare. Penguin Books. 1992.
The Arden Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. Routledge. 1995. (Revised version, 2018)
John Clare: Selected Poems. Faber and Faber. 2004.
The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. Macmillan/Random House Modern Library. 2007.
The RSC Shakespeare: Individual Works, 34 vols. Macmillan/Random House Modern Library. 2008.
The RSC Shakespeare: Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others. Macmillan. 2013.
Stressed Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind, co-edited with Paula Byrne, Sophie Ratcliffe, Andrew Schuman. William Collins. 2016.
The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works Second Edition. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022.
Articles
Out of the Twilight, New Statesman, 130, no. 4546, (16 July 2001), pp.25–27.
‘Othello and the Other: Turning Turk: The Subtleties of Shakespeare's Treatment of Islam’, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 19 October 2001, pp.14–15.
‘Was Shakespeare an Essex Man?’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009), pp.1–28. The 2008 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture.
‘Shakespeare in the Twilight of Romanticism: Wagner, Swinburne, Pater’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 146 (2010), pp.11–25. The 2009 Shakespeares-Tag Lecture, Weimar.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow is an English actor. Known as a character actor on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades including an Olivier Award and Screen Actors Guild Award as well as nominations for two BAFTA Awards. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to acting by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999.
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self."
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The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. It was considerably revised, with input from Tennyson, about three decades later. Palgrave excluded all poems by poets then still alive.
Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist. In the 1930s he was editor of the influential magazine New Verse, and went on to produce 13 collections of his own poetry, as well as compiling numerous anthologies, among many published works on subjects including art, travel and the countryside. Grigson exhibited in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in 1936, and in 1946 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Grigson's autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950. At various times he was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting. Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM was a British-based Australian poet.
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It was first originated by Joseph Meeker as an idea called "literary ecology" in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972).
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Jonathan B. Keates FRSL is an English writer, biographer, novelist and former chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund.
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John Glenday grew up in Monifieth.
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Eric Rasmussen is an American scholar, academic and author. He is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada.
↑ Wheater, Isabella (February 1999). "Reviewed Work: Shakespeare and Ovid by Jonathan Bate". The Review of English Studies. 50 (197): 84–87. doi:10.1093/res/50.197.84. JSTOR517771.
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