Search results for ""author jonathan bate""

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES ‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’ John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence. Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.

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A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 ‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times ‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday Times A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment, and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution, had a love affair and an illegitimate child, before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called ‘the hiding places of my power’. W. H. Auden once wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. He was wrong. Wordsworth’s poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.

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Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol Ann Duffy, and a series of striking examples of how literary texts change as they are transmitted from writer to reader. The narrative embraces not only the major literary movements such as Romanticism and Modernism, together with the most influential authors including Chaucer, Donne, Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens and Woolf, but also little-known stories such as the identity of the first English woman poet to be honoured with a collected edition of her works. Written with the flair and passion for which Jonathan Bate has become renowned, this book is the perfect Very Short Introduction for all readers and students of the incomparable literary heritage of these islands. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 'Highly engaging ... Go now, read this book' THE TIMES

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‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLEN From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives. ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing your mind? Shakespeare’s world is never too far different from our own ‘permeated with the same tragedies, the same existential questions and domestic worries. In this extraordinary book, Jonathan Bate brings then and now together. He investigates moments of his own life – losses and challenges – and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time or any crisis. Along the way we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Johnson, John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times. This is a personal story about loss, the black dog of depression, unexpected journeys and the very human things that echo through time, resonating with us all at one point or another.

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From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare's imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book that combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became.

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The most important critical work for decades' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times In the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the environment and why poetry matters in the new millennium. In fascinating detail, Bate explains how words like 'culture' and 'environment' have evolved since the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Romantics to the present day. 'Bate presents his case with an emotional conviction which is almost impossible to resist' The Times 'Anyone familiar with Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare will know how winningly he marries erudition to liveliness' John Coldstream, Daily Telegraph 'I came away from the book deeply grateful for its impassioned song' Adam Thorpe, Sunday Telegraph

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE ‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times ‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.

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With an introduction by Simon CallowJudgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius.Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, and charting how his legacy has grown over the centuries, this extraordinary book asks how Shakespeare has come to be such a powerful symbol of genius.Written with lively passion and wit, The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life - and afterlife - of our greatest poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has shown how the legend of Shakespeare's genius was created and sustained, and how the man himself became a truly global phenomenon.'The best modern book on Shakespeare' Sir Peter Hall

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‘What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ Seamus Heaney John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley – and a life to match. The ‘poet’s poet’, he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, unveiled in 1989. Here at last is Clare’s full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer – cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons – and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare’s ringing voice – quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous – emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.

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From the common playgoers to the royal patrons, this book explores Britain from the perspective of Shakespeare’s audience – revealing how the significant issues of the day were explored at the playhouse through objects and quotations from Shakespeare’s plays.

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From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book of extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became.Revealing in new depth the influence of Cicero and Horace on Shakespeare and finding new links between him and classical traditions, ranging from myths and magic to monuments and politics, Bate offers striking new readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. At the heart of the book is an argument that Shakespeare’s supreme valuation of the force of imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism.Rounded off with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare became our modern classic and has ended up playing much the same role for us as the Greek and Roman classics did for him, How the Classics Made Shakespeare combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and scholarship, demonstrating why Jonathan Bate is one of our most eminent and readable literary critics.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare’s magnificent tragedy of love, jealousy and explosive racial politics. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Othello in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors and an actor – Trevor Nunn, Michael Attenborough and Antony Sher – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare’s magical late play. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Cymbeline in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors – Dominic Cooke and Emma Rice – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry. Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory – remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. ‘Stressed Unstressed’ harvests an array of poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts. Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, ‘Stressed Unstressed’ invites you to read a poem and join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems – to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's ambiguous, bittersweet fairy tale. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of All’s Well that Ends Well in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with important directors Gregory Doran, Stephen Fried and the actor Guy Henry – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare’s most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Measure for Measure in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with a leading director and two actors – Trevor Nunn, Roger Allam and Josette Simon – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's journey into the Forest of Arden. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of As You Like It in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with important Shakespearean directors (Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd) and a Shakespearean actor (Naomi Frederick) – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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Authoritative, surprising, evocative and original, Shakespeare: staging the world offers a completely new approach to one of the most exceptional creative imaginations in history. While matters of religion, trade and war were being contested, the role of the playwright developed to inform, persuade and provoke debate on the concerns of the day. This richly illustrated book presents an extraordinary collection of objects from the British Museum's unrivalled collection, as well as key pieces from Britain and elsewhere. Simon Forman's diary of 1611 gives a vivid account of attending a contemporary performance of A Winter's Tale; a dagger fished from the Thames gives new resonance to the gang violence of Romeo and Juliet; while Guy Fawkes's lantern illustrates the Catholic counterculture revealed through the failed Gunpowder Plot, which was later to prove the inspiration for Macbeth. Shakespeare: staging the world is a fascinating view of the early modern world through the eyes of Shakespeare, his players and audiences. "A fascinating account of Shakespeare's cosmopolitan world, illustrated with breathtaking images that bring to life the rich material culture that shaped Shakespeare's writings and his age. This is a superb volume, one that will have pride of place on my bookshelf." -Professor James Shapiro, author of 1599 and Contested Wil

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare’s great drama of ambition, desire and guilt. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Macbeth in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors – Rupert Goold, Gregory Doran and Trevor Nunn – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's epic retelling of the Wars of the Roses. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Henry VI in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors and a designer - Edward Hal and Michael Boyd, and Tom Piper – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's anarchic comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Comedy of Errors in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors – Paul Hunter, Nancy Meckler and Tim Supple – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's exuberant early comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with acclaimed directors David Thacker and Edward Hall – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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This fresh edition of Shakespeare's much-loved Sonnets, developed by and for the Royal Shakespeare Company, features a Foreword by the actor/director, Fiona Shaw. Its easily accessible layout and elegant design make it the ideal gift for any special occasion.

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From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's bittersweet comedy of courtship and ethnic tension. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Merchant of Venice in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors and two actors – Darko Tresjnak, David Thacker, Anthony Sher and Henry Goodman – providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare’s career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended – as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare’s works for the twenty-first century.

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Developed in partnership with The Royal Shakespeare Company, this is the first edition for over a hundred years of the fascinatingly varied body of plays that has become known as ‘The Shakespeare Apocrypha’. As a companion to their award-winning The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, renowned scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, supported by a dynamic team of co-editors, now provide a fascinating insight into ten plays in which Shakespeare may have had a hand. A magisterial essay by Will Sharpe provides a comprehensive account of the Authorship and Attribution of each play. Combining outstanding textual scholarship with elegant writing and design, this unique collection allows us to revisit the question of what is Shakespearean. It is an indispensable book for students, teachers, performers, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

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This volume assembles a selection from the many papers delivered at the Sixth World Shakespeare Congress. Four plenary lectures are printed, including that of Jane Smiley on the creation of A Thousand Acres, her award-winning novel derived with King Lear. Twenty-two papers by well-known scholars also offer a wide range of responses to Shakespeare's art and international assessment of his presence in the world at the end of the twentieth century.

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