Jonathan Bate's Blog

There is a neat Sheryl Crow song about a hippie chick that begins “She was born in November 1963 / The day that” – and you think she is going to sing “Kennedy died”, but it actually goes “Aldous Huxley died.” It was, as a matter of fact, the same day. Huxley finds his place in a rock song of the Nineties because he was one of the godfathers of the psychedelic experimentation of the Sixties. Indeed, the very word “psychedelic” was coined in correspondence between him and a psychiatrist called...

Over the past thirty years, I have reviewed dozens of biographies and works of literary criticism. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to rewrite some of them as blog posts, stripping them of references to the books reviewed and seeing if they work as capsule introductions to the authors in question. Here is my first such attempt, on George Orwell.

GEORGE ORWELL embodied the English qualities of independent thought, clarity of expression and intolerance of cant. As an observer o...

… “on Fortinbras”, says Hamlet. A victory for the strong-arm man. I happen to be teaching Hamlet this week, a play very interested in succession and election. Also, though, a play in which people lie a lot. One thing that strikes me about the current election is the huge discrepancy between nearly all the opinion polls and the result. Exactly as in the 2015 Conservative victory in the UK, 2016 Brexit and 2016 Trump. It’s not my field of expertise, but this further debacle for the polling industr...

Now that my biography of Wordsworth is at press – coming out in early April in the UK and late April in USA – I’m reflecting on what I put in and what I left out. Most of what I left out was the second half of his life and thus pretty well all his later work. I’m intrigued and slightly amused that this means that for a second time around I find myself at odds with the flow of mainstream Wordsworth/Romanticism studies. That is to say, back in the late 1980s all the “new historicists” were beratin...

En route to the Hay Festival to talk about How the Classics made Shakespeare, I flick through the book and reflect on what I left out that I meant to put in, but never got around to, because delivery was late and I just had to get it done and move onto the next thing – all writers know that feeling. One of the points I made in the book is that when we talk about Shakespeare and the classics we immediately think of the Roman plays based on Plutarch, together with Titus Andronicus, but that in fac...

Last night in the chapel of Worcester College Oxford we held our annual service of Remembrance. This is a tradition in which I read out the Roll of Honour, the names of the members of the College who fell in the two world wars, and then the Last Post is sounded and we keep two minutes’ silence. It was especially moving this year, being the exact centenary of the signature of the Armistice at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The ever-excellent choir began with Douglas ...

My review of volume one of Sylvia Plath’s letters will be in The Times on Saturday. I decided to say very little about her relationship with Ted Hughes, mainly because she doesn’t meet him for the first eleven hundred pages of the book, but also because I wanted to give a flavour of the full range of her voices, and not focus on the love letters that were extracted in the Daily Telegraph last Saturday.

But I have inevitably been asked whether this new volume contains material that I would have w...

I promise that this blog will not develop into a forum for refutation of the “anti-Stratfordians” but, as with my post earlier today about early pilgrims to Shakespeare’s Stratford monument between 1618 and the early 1630s, I must correct a false aspersion cast at last night’s lively How To: Academy Authorship Debate. Someone said “Ted Hughes didn’t believe the man from Stratford wrote the plays – funny that you didn’t mention that in your biography of him.” Well, unless I missed something in th...

A jolly evening at the How To: Academy debating the identity of Shakespeare with my dear friend Alexander Waugh. I don’t think I’m ever going to change the mind of someone whose argument appears to rest on the proposition that Ben Jonson faked Heminge’ and Condell’s dedictory epistle and address to the reader in the First Folio, in which they clearly ascribe the plays to their fellow-actor – and who, for good measure, suggests that the bequest of mourning rings to Hemmings, Condell and Burbage i...

A very interesting article in today’s Guardian about poetry and plagiarism. When T. S. Eliot famously said that immature poets imitate but mature poets steal, he did not mean “Find someone else’s poem online, change a handful of words and pass it off as your own, trading not only on their words but even on their chosen crafted form.” But what did he mean? One way in which I start a discussion of this question with students is to suggest to them that when one says “I love you” one is at some leve...