Writer
His publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995), The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000), and a novel based indirectly on the life of William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love. His biography of John Clare (2003) won the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), as well as being short listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the South Bank Show Award. In America it won the NAMI Book Award. The Genius of Shakespeare was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as "the best modern book on Shakespeare". It was reissued with a new afterword in 2008. Bate also edited Clare's Selected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004), and, with Eric Rasmussen, Shakespeare's Complete Works for the Royal Shakespeare Company, published in April 2007 as part of the Random House Modern Library. This was the first edition since that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to use the First Folio as primary copy text for all the plays. Each play is also published in an individual volume, with additional materials, including interviews with leading stage directors.
Bate's intellectual and contextual biography Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London, 2008 and in USA as Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, Random House, 2009) was runner-up for the PEN American Center's PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography of the year. In 2010 he published English Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) and in 2011, as editor, The Public Value of the Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic).
Bate is also a frequent writer and presenter of documentary features for BBC Radio 4. His subjects have included The Elizabethan Discovery of England, Faking the Classics and The Poetry of History, in which poems about great events are compared to historical accounts. He wrote the script for Simon Callow's one-man show Shakespeare: the Man from Stratford (later renamed Being Shakespeare) for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival.
In 2012 he served as consultant curator for the British Museum round reading room exhibition for the Cultural Olympiad, Shakespeare: Staging the World, co-writing the catalogue with curator Dora Thornton.
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Famous quotes containing the word writer:
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)