Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate, author of the acclaimed Shakespeare biography Soul of the Age, speaks on "The Good Life in Shakespeare" and about the Epicurean tradition, with an emphasis on the plays As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure.

This lecture was delivered in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre on Monday, April 26, 2010. Bate was introduced by Folger Director of Research David Schalkwyk.

Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick, is the author of Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995), and The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). He is on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom he edited, jointly with Eric Rasmussen, The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works (2007). His most recent book is the acclaimed intellectual and contextual biography of Shakespeare, called Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008).

The annual Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture is sponsored by the Folger Institute.

Listen to the lecture.