Who was Shakespeare? How did plague turn him from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did his plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And yet why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned?
Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Jonathan Bate leads us on an exhilarating tour of the intellectual and cultural world that shaped and informed Shakespeare’s thinking. Each of the Seven Ages of Man – infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old man and, finally, second childhood – provides a theme. Each theme brings us closer to understanding what being Shakespeare was actually like. Age by age, Bate shows that while Shakespeare was timelessly talented, he was also, in the words of his friend and rival Ben Jonson, the very soul of the Elizabethan age.