Jonathan Bate has been described by the New York Review of Books as “one of the great modern Shakespeare scholars” and by The Spectator as “our leading Shakespeare scholar”.
He writes about his lifelong passion for Shakespeare in his memoir Mad about Shakespeare, of which Ian McKellen wrote “Many of us are mad about Shakespeare, whether as audience, actor or scholar. Jonathan Bate represents us all in his enlightening, moving report of his own personal ‘madness’. Reading it is an education.”
Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, praised The Genius of Shakespeare as “the best modern book on Shakespeare”. It was originally published to wide acclaim in 1997 (Picador/OUP USA); the 10th anniversary edition (2008) had a new Afterword and the Picador Classic edition (2016) included a further afterword and an introduction by Simon Callow.
Jonathan’s intellectual biography Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (Penguin UK/Random House USA, 2009) was runner-up for the PEN America Biography Award and was reviewed in the TLS as “the most eloquent evocation of Shakespeare one is ever likely to encounter”. It was a “Best Book of the Year” in the Washington Post and Library Journal.
Jonathan delivered the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures on the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute of London University and developed them into How the Classics made Shakespeare (Princeton University Press, 2019). The Wall Street Journal reviewer thought it was “exquisite”, while The Spectator found it “amazingly erudite” and the Washington Post called it “eminently readable, proffering illuminating facts and observations on every page”.
From 2003 to 2012 he was on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom he edited, jointly with Eric Rasmussen, The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works (Macmillan UK, Random House Modern Library USA, 2007, paperback 2008), which won the Falstaff Award for best Shakespeare book of 2007 and a British Book Design Award. It remains the market-leading edition in the UK. Texts of individual plays, with longer introductions, stage histories and director interviews, have been published in paperback in 34 volumes, the series completed in April 2012.
A companion volume of Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others, being the so-called “apocryphal plays”, was published by Macmillan in 2013. It also won the Falstaff Award. A second edition of the Complete Works, with an additional introduction, inclusion of The Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover’s Complaint, and staging notes on 100 RSC productions, was published in April 2022, to mark the beginning of the 400th year of the First Folio, which provides the copy text for 36 plays.
Jonathan co-authored, with Dora Thornton, Shakespeare: Staging the World (British Museum & OUP USA, 2012), published to coincide with their exhibition of the same title, which was the British Museum’s contribution to the London 2012 Olympic Cultural Festival. Selected highlights are illustrated in a smaller book, Shakespeare’s Britain.
His online course Shakespeare and his World had over 60,000 followers: it included 63 short films, ranging across eight of the plays, which are available here.
