Jonathan Bate

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Kent, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Occupations
  • Academic
  • historian
  • literary critic
  • biographer
  • broadcaster
Known for
Early Modern Britain, Romanticism, Ecocriticism, Biography

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate,

knighted
in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.

Early life

Bate was born on 26 June 1958, in Kent, and was educated at

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
.

Academic and theatrical career

He was a Fellow of

Liverpool University, before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, where he was subsequently Honorary Fellow of Creativity in Warwick Business School.[3]

In 2011, he was appointed Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.[4] During his tenure, he led a fundraising campaign to re-endow the college on the occasion of its tercentenary and oversaw the construction of the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. Bate has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library. He sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.[5]

He was a Governor and for nine years a board member of the

"unauthorised" biography.[7]

In 2010, The Man from Stratford, his one-man play for

Trafalgar Studios, Whitehall, under the title Being Shakespeare. In April 2012, Callow took the show to New York City (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Chicago. In 2014, it was revived in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre
.

Writer

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 biography of

South Bank Show Award. In America it won the NAMI Book Award. Bate also edited Clare's Selected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004). These works have been credited reviving popular and critical interest in Clare's poetry.[10]

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 House Modern 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

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

Edinburgh Festival.[13]

In 2012 he served as consultant curator for the

Cultural Olympiad, Shakespeare: Staging the World, co-writing the catalogue with curator Dora Thornton.[14]

His 2015 biography, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, published globally by

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]

Honours

In the 2006

Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to higher education". He was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literary scholarship and higher education, the citation describing him as "a true Renaissance man".[17][18]

He was elected

Honorary Fellow of his undergraduate college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge
.

Bibliography

Books

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.

Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004),

‘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.

‘Much throwing about of brains’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 132.9 (September 2009), pp. 2617–2620, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awp205

‘Books do Furnish a Mind: the Art and Science of Bibliotherapy’, with Andrew Schuman, The Lancet, 20 Feb 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00337-8

‘“The infirmity of his age”: Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary’, The Lancet, 23 April 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30269-0

‘The Anatomy of Melancholy Revisited’, The Lancet, 6 May 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31152-2

‘The worst is not, so long as we can say “This is the worst”’, The Lancet, 14 April 2020, https://doi.org./10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30811-4

‘Cherchez la femme: Keats and Mrs Jones’, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 2021, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/issues/february-19-2021/

‘John Keats in the season of mists’, The Lancet, 22 February 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00449-9

References

  1. ^ "Professor's expertise in Shakespeare leads to top faculty honor" ASU News, 22 February 2024
  2. ^ Bate, Jonathan (11 March 2019). "Message from The Provost". Worcester College, Oxford. Retrieved 14 September 2019.
  3. ^ [1] Archived 18 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ a b "Bate, Professor Sir Jonathan". Faculty Members. Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 15 January 2015. Retrieved 15 January 2015.
  5. ^ "Princeton University Press, European Advisory Board". Press.princeton.edu. 7 July 2011. Archived from the original on 8 June 2011. Retrieved 28 August 2013.
  6. ^ Jonathan Bate, "How the actions of the Ted Hughes estate will change my biography", The Guardian, 2 April 2014.
  7. ^ "Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, by Jonathan Bate" Archived 23 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine, HarperCollins publishers.
  8. ^ DeMott, Nick (25 August 2018). "A Brief History of Ecocriticism:". Medium. Retrieved 18 October 2023.
  9. ^ Brockbank, William (29 April 2021). "The Ecocritics". Anthroposphere. Retrieved 18 October 2023.
  10. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 18 October 2023.
  11. ^ "RSC Shakespeare Complete Works Collector's Edition | Palgrave Macmillan". Palgrave.com. 22 June 2007. Retrieved 28 August 2013.
  12. ^ Rosenbaum, Ron (12 June 2008). "Are Those Shakespeare's "Balls"?". Slate. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  13. ^ Dickson, Andrew (29 February 2012). "Bard labour: Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow tackle Shakespeare the man". The Guardian. London. p. G2–16. Retrieved 28 August 2013.
  14. ^ "Shakespeare: staging the world" (Press release). British Museum. April 2012. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
  15. ^ "People". Hawthornden Foundation. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  16. ^ "Biography". jonathanbate.com. University of Oxford. Retrieved 15 January 2015.
  17. ^ "No. 61092". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2014. p. N2.
  18. ^ "2015 New Year Honours List" (PDF). Government of the United Kingdom. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 January 2015. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  19. JSTOR 517771
    .
  20. JSTOR 2902334
    .
  21. ^ Motion, Andrew (17 October 2003). "Review of John Clare by Jonathan Clare". The Guardian. (See John Clare.)
  22. ^ Maxwell, Glyn (21 December 2015). "Review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate". The New York Times.
  23. ^ Cooke, Rachel (14 April 2020). "Review of Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate". The Guardian.

External links

Academic offices
Preceded by Provost of Worcester College, Oxford
2011–2019 		Succeeded by
Kate Tunstall (interim)
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