by Jonathan Bate / Both an editor and a scholar of Shakespeare, Bate (Univ. of Warwick, UK) has written a brilliant biography of Shakespeare, a treatment that stands out among lives of the Bard. That Shakepeare's life continues to inspire myriad biographies, despite the few known facts about it, remains a paradox. Bate succeeds not only by writing lucidly about these facts but also by depicting Shakespeare from the outside in. In sum, he has written a book that alters understanding of how to write biography. Carefully sifting and analyzing facts about Shakespeare's society and information from Shakespeare's work, Bates is able to approach something like the man himself. The author devotes a section to each of the seven ages of man, as named in As You Like It, and in so doing shadows Shakespeare from infancy to oblivion. So, for example, in the first chapter, "Stratford 1564," Bate contextualizes what little is known of Shakespeare's infancy (from textual allusions) with what was going on in early modern England at the time of Shakespeare's birth. One wishes only that Bate had supplemented his precise, useful notes with a bibliography. --Choice.
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