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Sir Jonathan Bate | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1958-06-26)26 June 1958 (age 66) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupations |
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| Known for | Shakespeare,Romanticism,Ecocriticism |
| Spouse | Paula Byrne |
| Awards | Hawthornden Prize,James Tait Black Prize |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Sevenoaks School |
| Alma mater | St Catharine's College, Cambridge Harvard University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Trinity Hall, Cambridge University of Liverpool University of Warwick Worcester College, Oxford Arizona State University |
| Main interests | Shakespeare,Early Modern Britain,Romanticism,Ecocriticism,Biography |
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate (born 26 June 1958), is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes inShakespeare,Romanticism andecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of 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 atArizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow atWorcester College, Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature.[1] Bate wasProvost of Worcester College from 2011 to 2019.[2] From 2017 to 2019 he wasGresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He wasknighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
He was a Fellow ofTrinity Hall, Cambridge, and then, from 1991 to 2003, King Alfred Professor of English Literature atLiverpool University, before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at theUniversity of Warwick, where he was subsequently Honorary Fellow of Creativity inWarwick Business School.[3]
In 2011, he was appointed Provost ofWorcester 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 SultanNazrin Shah Centre, which was shortlisted for theStirling Prize. Bate has held visiting professorships at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles,Yale University, theFolger Shakespeare Library, and theHuntington Library. He sits on the European Advisory Board of thePrinceton University Press.[5]
He was a Governor and for nine years a board member of theRoyal Shakespeare Company. From 2007 to 2011 sat on the Council of theArts and Humanities Research Council. In 2010 he was commissioned byFaber and Faber to write a literary life ofTed Hughes. This was cancelled when the Estate of Ted Hughes withdrew co-operation.[6] The book was subsequently recommissioned by HarperCollins as an"unauthorised" biography.[7]
In 2010,The Man from Stratford, his one-man play forSimon Callow, a commission of theAmbassador Theatre Group, toured the UK prior to an opening on theEdinburgh Fringe. It also played inTrieste. In June 2011 and March 2012 it was revived at theTrafalgar Studios, Whitehall, under the titleBeing 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 theHarold Pinter Theatre.
His earlier publications includeShakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986),Shakespearean Constitutions (1989),Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), the Arden edition ofTitus Andronicus (1995, revised and updated with extended introduction, 2018),The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), two influential works ofecocriticism,Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) andThe 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 ofWilliam Hazlitt,The Cure for Love.
His biography ofJohn Clare (2003) won theHawthornden Prize and theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), as well as being short listed for theSamuel Johnson Prize, theRoyal Society of LiteratureHeinemann Award and theSouth Bank Show Award. In America it won the NAMI Book Award. Bate also edited Clare'sSelected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004). These works have been credited with reviving popular and critical interest in Clare's poetry.[10]
His book,The Genius of Shakespeare was praised bySir Peter Hall, founder of theRSC, 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'sComplete Works for theRoyal Shakespeare Company, published in April 2007 as part of theRandom HouseModern Library. This was the first edition since that ofNicholas Rowe in 1709 to use theFirst 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 removingA 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 titleCollaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others. It is the first Shakespeare collection to includeThe 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 biographySoul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London, 2008, and in the United States asSoul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, Random House, 2009) was runner-up for thePEN American Center's PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography of the year. In 2010 he publishedEnglish 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 monographHow the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), developed from the inauguralE. H. Gombrich Lectures at theWarburg Institute, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019 and a new biography ofWilliam Wordsworth was published on the occasion of the poet's 250th anniversary in April 2020. It won the Lakeland Book Awards prize for literature.
Bate is also a frequent writer and presenter of documentary features forBBC Radio 4. His subjects have includedThe Elizabethan Discovery of England,Faking the Classics,The Poetry of History (in which poems about great events are compared to historical accounts), andIn Wordsworth's Footsteps (broadcast for the 250th anniversary ofWilliam Wordsworth). He wrote the script forSimon Callow's one-man showShakespeare: the Man from Stratford (later renamedBeing Shakespeare) for the 2010Edinburgh Festival.[13]
In 2012 he served as consultant curator for theBritish Museum round reading room exhibition for theCultural Olympiad,Shakespeare: Staging the World, co-writing the catalogue with curatorDora Thornton.[14]
His 2015 biography,Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, published globally byHarperCollins, was shortlisted for theSamuel 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, toecocriticism, to the revived reputations of Shakespeare'sTitus Andronicus and of the poetJohn 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 journalExpositions:https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2211/1990.
He is currently the Chair of the board of trustees for the Hawthornden Foundation.[15]
He is married to the author and biographerPaula Byrne. They have three children.[16]
In the 2006Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to higher education". He wasknighted in the2015 New Year Honours for services to literary scholarship and higher education, the citation describing him as "a true Renaissance man".[17][18]
He was electedFellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1999 andFellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2004.[4] He is anHonorary Fellow of his undergraduate college,St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
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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
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by | Provost ofWorcester College, Oxford 2011–2019 | Succeeded by Kate Tunstall (interim) |
