Jonathan Bate: the influences on Shakespeare

I’ve been reading Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Before this one, I had read two other biographies of Shakespeare: Bill Bryson mostly focuses on what’s fact, what’s myth, and what’s conjecture, and Anthony Burgess writes it from the perspective of a novelist, imagining the man Shakespeare could have been like. Jonathan Bate’s book, as suggested by the title, focuses on the mind: What was Shakespeare (most likely) taught in grammar school? What did he read? Who most influenced him? 

For example:

“The composition of Latin epistles was intended to make the boys skilled in rhetoric, the persuasive use of words for the purposes of argument. Rhetoric meant learning how to order your speeches: exordium, narration, arguments in favor, arguments against, refutation, exemplification, testimony, conclusion. It meant honing your metaphors and developing elaborate figures of verbal symmetry—syllepsis, antimetabole, zeugma, threefold amplificatio (otherwise known as tricolon).” (Ch.5) 

This is how he learnt to see different points of view and argued for different sides. 

“One of the most popular texts in the Elizabethan classroom was the Heroides, Ovid's verse epistles written from the point of view of women in mythology who are deserted by their lovers—Ariadne on Naxos, Dido after the departure of Aeneas from Carthage, and so on. A frequent exercise was to imitate them—“write a letter in the style of X or from the point of view of someone who has suffered Y”—and in this sense they, like the letters of Cicero and Erasmus, would have helped the student Shakespeare to take his first steps in the art of dramatic impersonation. John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe, the two dramatists who most influenced him when he began writing plays himself, both made extensive use of the Heroides as models for the art of a character's self-examination at moments of emotional crisis. The art, that is to say, of soliloquy.” (Ch.7) 

Those who think the real Shakespeare couldn’t have been a glover’s son who went to grammar school don’t seem to realise that grammar school did equip Shakespeare with many skills needed for becoming a playwright. The rest was reading, observation, and genius.

In chapter 7, Bate writes about the translation movement, and the importance of Thomas North (who translated Plutarch) and John Florio (who translated Montaigne): 

“But since gentlemen readers—and even relatively humble aspiring gentlemen such as Shakespeare—could comfortably read Latin texts in the original, why was such a high proportion of the literary canon of the ancient Romans translated into the vernacular in the Elizabethan period?” (ibid.) 

That’s an interesting question. 

“To judge from the authorial prefaces to these and the many other works from the classics undertaken in the 1560s and 1570s, the translation movement formed a concerted effort to demonstrate that the English tongue was dignified enough to express the wisdom of the ancients.” (ibid.) 

The translation movement, he says, was motivated by “nationalism and the ideology of aggressive Protestantism”, but: 

“... as so often with literary publication, the law of unintended consequences came into force: though the translation movement was by and large aimed at the courtly elite and dedicated to Protestant nationalism, it provided literate middle-ranking figures such as Shakespeare with a wealth of material that could be pressed into the service of other intentions— such as the composition of entertaining, thought-provoking plays.” (ibid.) 

Bate then writes about what Shakespeare may have learnt from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. I’m not going to copy anything here, so you should get the book and read it yourself. 

The most important influence on Shakespeare seems to be Ovid.

“Scholars have calculated that about 90 percent of Shakespeare's allusions to classical mythology refer to stories included in that epic compendium of tales.” (ibid.) 

This is followed by a fascinating passage in the book where Jonathan Bate demonstrates that Shakespeare knew Metamorphoses in both the original Latin and Arthur Golding’s translation. 

“Like Ovid, Shakespeare is interested in the mingled yarn of our human fabric. Both are writers who probe our humanity with great rigor, but ultimately do so in a spirit of sympathy for our frailties and indulgences, rather than stern judgment upon our faults. […] 

Though Prospero's speech valuably demonstrates Shakespeare's continuing interest in the minutiae of Ovid's language even to the end of his career, it is exceptional in the detail of its borrowing. Shakespeare's more habitual use of the Metamorphoses was less specific. He would refer to the stories there as parallels, or paradigms, for the emotional turmoil of the characters in his plays. Where Ovid told of bodily metamorphoses wrought by extremes of passion, Shakespeare translated these into psychological transformations and vivid metaphors. In particular, he found in Ovid a great store of examples of female feeling—something that was notably lacking in many of his other models, such as the plays of Marlowe and the history books of Plutarch and Holinshed. What mattered to him most was Ovid's storytelling, and for that the Latin text was not necessary—in rereading Ovid for pleasure after he left school, Shakespeare seems mostly to have relied on Golding's English version.” (ibid.) 

Bate does make me want to read Ovid. He also wrote a book called How the Classics Made Shakespeare, though I’m not going to read it anytime soon as I haven’t read any classical literature. 

One of the arguments of anti-Stratfordians is that there’s no evidence that Shakespeare owned books (but as Bill Bryson points out, there’s also no evidence that he wore pants). James Shapiro also argues in Contested Will that a) Shakespeare’s list of books would not have been mentioned in his will and the full list of things he owned no longer survives; and b) there were many ways Shakespeare would have got access to books without necessarily buying them, especially when he’s a playwright. 

Jonathan Bate makes the same point: 

“As he borrowed words and stories, so he may have borrowed rather than bought some of his books.” (Ch.9) 

Considering that Shakespeare was a playwright and needed material, and also knew publishers, translators, courtiers (he had patrons), and other playwrights, borrowing books or getting them at a discount seems an easy task. The authorship conspiracies all boil down to snobbery and ignorance.  

“Books were usually kept in a chest, which would have been heavy to transport. Shakespeare traveled light. He moved between temporary lodgings in London, where he never had a permanent home. He was said to have traveled back to Stratford at least once a year. It is hard to imagine his book chest being carted along with him. He had a restless imagination, not a Jonsonian predilection for mental hoarding. He would gut a book for its nourishment, then cast it aside. Once he finished his cycle of English history plays, he put away his Holinshed for a number of years. The old play scripts that he recycled in his early work probably went back into company stock. Once he had turned Arthur Brooke's labored narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet into an anything-but-labored play, he would have had no reason ever to pick it up again.” (ibid.) 

Bate then speculates which books Shakespeare must have owned (Golding’s translation of Metamorphoses and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives were surely among them), but it’s very possible that, as he says, Shakespeare “would gut a book for its nourishment, then cast it aside”. I can certainly relate to the idea of Shakespeare not owning many books, as I myself love literature but don’t own that many books (reading and book buying, as you can probably see from Book Twitter, are two separate hobbies). 

I’m very much enjoying Soul of the Age. It’s fascinating to learn about the literary works that inspired Shakespeare and the works that may have shaped him as a writer. Jonathan Bate also makes me love Shakespeare even more.