Jonathan Bate's Blog, page 5

Very Short English Literature

Fitting that my Very Short Introduction to English Literature is published on the day that Michael Gove tells the Tory party conference that we need a return to the canon -- to Pope, Dryden, Keats and Shelley. I argue in the book that "repertoire" is a better term than "canon", but I'm hoping for lively debate on the subject.

Meanwhile, I have blogged for the publisher, OUP, on the subject of the book, so I won't do so here, but will merely provide a link.

One Man and his Dog

One more photo from The Man from Stratford in action. Simon Callow shares his stage with just one other creature ...

Shakespeare on TV

The Telegraph asked me to write a Comment about the news that the BBC plans to show 6 Shakespeare plays, including one live performance, as part of the Shakespeare Festival that will be the centre of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. I've always had my doubts about Shakespeare on TV - preferring it on radio in lots of ways - and I don't have good memories of the 1970s BBC versions. The National Theatre broadcast-to-cinema experiment has been fantastic, but the point I make in the Comment is that a ...

The Man From

This blog has been silent through a hectic summer, much of it spent following The Man from Stratford around the country. So here are some pix of The Man in action.

Henry IV Parts 1 & 2

The line of thinking that I was beginning to sketch out in my last blog entry has now been developed at greater length for a piece published in today's Guardian: Shakespeare's Best History Plays.

Shakespeare and the Privatized Military

Shakespeare has a long history of refreshing the parts of life that other writers have difficulty in reaching. One of the more surprising lecture invitations I have received was to talk to a conference of the "family offices" of "high net worth individuals." Hard as I found it to imagine what it would be like to be so rich that you needed advisers to help you keep your family in order, I went along and it proved a fascinating occasion. The brief was to explore how Shakespeare dealt with the p...

Amazon Reviews, Uxoriousness and Sock Puppetry

One of the pleasures of being married to another writer is the discovery that two people can do the same sort of thing—researching, writing, publishing—in such different ways. I can only write at the last minute before a deadline, whereas Paula gets herself organized way in advance. I get very insecure about published reviews but ignore readers' reviews on Amazon, whereas Paula refuses to read her reviews in the press but pays a lot of attention to what she calls "real readers' reviews" on Am...

In our Time: Hazlitt

The In Our Time discussion of Hazlitt should be on the iplayer for a while. I'd have liked it if we'd had more time to talk about his portrait painting and the continuity with his writing - perhaps his best book is The Spirit of the Age, which is a series of pen-portraits of the great minds of his time, a writerly equivalent of portraiture.

Leader with a Temper

Some things don't change. Leaders do not like being told bad news and can lose their temper with the messenger. Shakespeare, inevitably, catches this impeccably:

MESSENGER Madam, he's married to Octavia.
CLEOPATRA The most infectious pestilence upon thee!
Strikes him down
MESSENGER Good madam, patience.
CLEOPATRA What say you?
Strikes him
Hence, horrible villain, or I'll spurn thine eyes
Like balls before me! I'll unhair thy head!
She hauls him up and down
Thou shalt be whipped with w...

On Delivering

Probably the most satisfying moment for an author - more than seeing the work set in print when the proof comes or even when receiving the first copy - is that of delivery. Hitting the send button. Especially as the final stages of writing - cutting to length, removing repetition, checking references - are so laborious. Ecstasy therefore this morning as my English Literature: A Very Short Introduction wings its way through the ether to Oxford University Press.

Early research for the book was d...