Professor Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. His publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford UP, 1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (Oxford UP, 1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford UP, 1993), the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995), The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador, 1997), two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991) and The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2000) and a novel about William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love (Picador, 1998).  His biography of John Clare (Picador, 2003) won Britain’s two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.  He has also edited Clare’s Selected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004) and written a new introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of Andrew Marvell’s Complete Poetry (2005).

He is on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom he edited The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he is on the Council of the AHRC, broadcasts regularly for the BBC, writes for the Guardian, TLS and Sunday Telegraph, has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours for his services to literary study and higher education.

He is currently working on an AHRC group investigating the public impact of the humanities.

 Related Sessions

Thursday 16 October 2008, 7.00pm Weston Room, King's College's Maughan Library, Chancery Lane. WC2A 1LR
Researching the arts - why bother?


 Publications

Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (Viking Penguin UK, October 2008; Random House USA, spring 2009).


 Festival Buzz

"A rare opportunity to debate first hand with those involved in the great issues of our time."
Chris Rapley, director, Science Museum