Jonathan Bate

Bate's Soul of the Age tells the story of the great dramatist while deducing the crucial events of Shakespeare's life, connecting those events to his world and work as never before, and revealing how this unsurpassed artist came to be.

The playhouse and the role of playwright were relatively new phenomena during Shakespeare's time, yet his audience spanned from royalty to the common man. This work shows what these audiences were finding out about the world through the eyes of the playwright. It uses Shakespeare's characters and locations as a way of showing how all the world was a stage, full of dramatic encounters between cultures and nationalities. Shylock is our way into early...

The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme "poets' poet" John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest laboring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography. Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work: his birth in poverty, his...

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...

Believed to have been written in 1599, William Shakespeare's "Henry V" forms the final installment of a tetralogy of plays, which includes "Richard II", "Henry IV, Part I", and "Henry IV, Part II". The play focuses on the events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War. Henry, who is introduced in the earlier plays as a wild and undisciplined youth, has now come of age and ascended to the thrown following the death of his...

"Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this classic play about gender, desire, and sexual love. This volume also includes more than a hundred pages of exclusive features: An original Introduction to "All's Well That Ends Well"; Incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work; Commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors,...

Although one of his lesser known plays, Shakespeare's considerable abilities as a playwright are readily apparent in "Troilus and Cressida." This historical and tragic 'problem play', thought to be inspired by Chaucer, Homer, and some of Shakespeare's history-recording contemporaries, is initially a tale of a man and woman in love during the Trojan War. When Cressida is given to the Greeks in exchange for a prisoner of war, Troilus is determined to...

The tragic drama of an old king's foolishness is accompanied by a scene-by-scene analysis, commentary on past and current productions, and an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career.

Themes: Adapted Classics, Low Level Classics, William Shakespeare, Fiction, Tween, Teen, Young Adult, Hi-Lo, Hi-Lo Books, Hi-Lo Solutions, High-Low Books, Hi-Low Books, ELL, EL, ESL, Struggling Learner, Struggling Reader, Special Education, SPED, Newcomers, Reading, Learning, Education, Educational, Educational Books. Timeless Shakespeare-designed for the struggling reader and adapted to retain the integrity of the original play. These classic plays...

"All's Well That Ends Well Without the Potholes" provides an updated version of Shakespeare's comedy All's Well That Ends Well. It makes the play more accessible by modernizing the outdated vocabulary and grammar, and by revising the more difficult passages, while retaining almost all of the poetic content. The series "Shakespeare Without the Potholes" is intended to provide updated versions of all of the 37 generally recognized plays of William Shakespeare....