Feb 11, 2019
William Shakespeare started out
the son of a glove maker in a small town in England, and went on to
become the greatest playwright the world has ever seen. How does
one person accomplish so much? What did it take, exactly, for
Shakespeare to become a genius? Was he born with particular gifts
and talents no one else has seen or heard of again in the last 400
years? Or has our love of Shakespeare inflated his reputation
beyond what it deserves?
One
man who has argued in the public arena specifically for
Shakespeare, the man, is our guest this week, Sir Andrew Jonathan
Bate. Knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and
higher education, Jonathan
Bate is also a British academic, biographer, critic, and scholar.
He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism, and Ecocriticism as the
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford,
Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, Gresham Professor of
Rhetoric, and Honorary Fellow of Creativity at Warwick Business
School. His most recent book
is the subject of our interview today, and that is titled
The Genius of
Shakespeare. In his
book, Sir Jonathan examines the life of William Shakespeare, the
man from Stratford, to outline how one man becomes a genius. We are
delighted to have Sir Jonathan here with us today to discuss some
of the answers he discovered in writing his book.