Soul of the Age
Book (italiano):
“One man in his time plays many parts,<br>His acts being seven ages.”<br><br>In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in <i>As You Like It</i>, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.<br><br>Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in <i>The Merchant of Venice </i>won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from <i>Hamlet</i> to <i>Macbeth</i>; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew.<br><br>Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, <b>Soul of the Age</b> is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>
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