Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

I've finally finished Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. I started the book sometime back in March and expected it to take about a week, maybe more. But no, that was not to be. The book is divided into the ages of Jacques' speech from As You Like It and after making it through the intro and the Infant, I was drained. There is so much dry, Elizabethan history to make it through that I needed a break. And so I've been reading an age in this book and then switching to a different book, repeat, repeat until Soul of the Age is done.

Here's the thing; the book isn't bad. I'd like to think if it was just awful I wouldn't have put myself through it. It was dry at points (a lot of points) and it was academic and difficult but not bad. Do I want to go back and do it again? No, but I'm happy I finished it.

At the end of the book Bate says his "aim throughout this book has been to explore Shakespeare's wit in the full sixteenth-century sense of the word" (407) which I suppose he did and although it would take someone smarter than me to realize that from the start. I didn't realize that was the goal or purpose of the book until I made it to page 407 and he told me. Bate provides lots of examples of Shakespeare's contemporaries praising him for his wit above all else and that at that time wit "referred to the mind as the seat of consciousness and thought" (406) so this complement is of the highest esteem. The one thing that I didn't feel like I ever got is a "biography of the mind of William Shakespeare" as promised in the sub-title of the book. The book never really felt like a biography and instead it was like a series of loosely connected essays looking at specific aspects of Shakespeare's plays and how they fit into the historical context of 16th century England.

I'm having trouble thinking of more to say. I think I'm a little burned out from reading this and at this point I've said what I can. I wouldn't recommend this for the casual Shakespeare reader, and the more you already know about Latin, Elizabethan England, Senecan tragedy and the likes the better you'll be. If you're a big Shakespeare nerd as well as an academic nerd and you feel like challenging yourself, go for it. I know this was over my head at many points but I'm still glad I finished it and hopefully I learned something new that will come to me once my head stops spinning.

If you're curious about my other posts about this book, you can find them here:
All the world's a stage
A sonnet is the crystallization of the emotion of a moment

Title quote from page 375, taken from Jacques' speech

Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Random House, 2009

Do you give up on books?

Remember how I said I was having trouble getting through Bate's Soul of the Age so my solution was to read an age, read a different book, come back for another age, repeat until I finished? And I even said in my last post about the book how things were looking up and getting more interesting? At least I'm consistent in my failing to keep up with promises to myself, because I've already failed. This is why I stay away from challenges.

I finished up the Lover age, read Christopher Moore's You Suck, and then I was all prepared to pick up Soul of the Age again. (This is going to seem like I'm just rambling, but I promise you, it does come back to books.)  Since I now work from home and live in the suburbs without a car, I spend a lot of my time hanging around the apartment and Saturday was so beautiful, I decided I needed to get out. Boyfriend had to work and they didn't have anyone to take pictures of the game, so I volunteered my services to be the photographer for the women's lacrosse game. I do this sometimes if they don't have someone else, and they let me because I work for free and have my own equipment. It's actually probably good they don't rely on me, since when we got to the university I realized the memory card was in my other camera. I could have gone back and gotten it, but they were fine without pictures, and I'm lazy. Instead I hung around campus for awhile and just watched the game. And by watched the game I mean I randomly looked up from my book to see why there was cheering.

This is the point I wanted to get to: I brought You Suck and my Kindle with me. Had I actually remembered my memory card, I would have had a lot less reading time, and therefore wouldn't have finished You Suck and wouldn't have needed another book. But that's not how things went, and I finished You Suck and needed something else. So I bought an ecopy and started reading Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, which I've wanted for awhile but was originally waiting for it to come out in paperback. Thank you Kindle, for allowing me to purchase things I'm too impatient to wait for.

I do plan on making it back to Soul of the Age but it seems like it's going to take longer and longer to complete that one. So I have a couple questions:
Do you ever stop a book in the middle? What makes you stop?
Do you have any books you stuck with and in the end you were happy you kept with it?
Do you have a book you finished despite your better judgement and regretted it?

A sonnet is a crystallization of the emotion of a moment

I'm still making my way through Jonathan Bate's very dry Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare.  I said in my other post about this book that I was going to read an age in this book, read  a different, interesting book, come back to tackle another Shakespearean age*, etc. I hate stopping a book in the middle and besides, this was a gift from Boyfriend, so I'm going to be able to say I tried. I spared you a post after reading the Schoolboy, which is, I'm sure, super interesting if you're familiar with Latin.  Especially Latin puns.

The Lover has started off on a stronger foot than Infant and Schoolboy.  It begins with a story about Elizabethan condoms as invented by Gabrielle Falloppio, he of the fallopian tubes. Really, it's this line that got me: "Known colloquially as an overcoat, the device was eight inches long and tied at the base with a pink ribbon to make it more acceptable to women" (149).  Oh Fallopius, always thinking of the ladies.  This section is helped along by the fact that I'm extraordinarily immature.  And thus to we segue into Shakespeare's home life, marriage and 3 kids before the age of 21, and his depiction of love and lust in his plays and sonnets.

Perhaps because the topic itself is more based in human emotion than a recitation of the Latin and Greek history Shakespeare would have received, I've been more drawn into this age. Or perhaps the references are clearer to me. The entire book thus far seems to require the reader to already be familiar with not only Shakespeare's life and works but also others plays, poems and general life of this time. I am not well-versed enough to follow some of the references and allusions used in the first to ages but apparently I've taken enough Shakespeare and 16th Century Lit classes that the Lover made sense to me.

Bate blends Shakespeare's history, general history of the time and Shakespeare's work to put together a biography. He's not looking at Shakespeare's work as autobiographical, but simply to find parallels between the Elizabethan age and the plays and sonnets.

The Lover is split up into three parts: we start, as I mentioned before, discussing what is known about Shakespeare's own married life. Bate looks at statistics from the time to see the average age of a first marriage, the stigma, or indeed lack of, surrounding pregnant brides and the actual court records and marriage license of a William Shaxpere and Anna Whateley.

Next up comes the Bawdy Courts which were essentially the Real Housewives of Elizabethan England. A woman's reputation was the most valuable thing she had and these courts gave her the chance to defend herself when called things like "maggoty whore," "tinker's trull," "common as a barber's chair" (168) and other names that are even more fun. Bate connects the Bawdy Courts with the court scenes in his plays.

Lastly there is The Perplexities of Love, which examines the sonnets, their historical Petrarchan position and use in the royal courts. This section contains a lot less name calling and syphilis remedies but I liked this section the best. It looks at how other poets of the time used sonnets, especially the blason, and how Shakespeare turned the traditions on their head ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" Sonnet 130).

I'm still going to take a break and move onto a different book after each age. I liked this one but I've been hurt by the previous two. But I'll keep coming back to this until it's finished. I'm not sure it that's tenacity or just plain stubbornness.

*The book is divided up in the ages from Jacques' "All the world's a stage" speech from As You Like It. In case you're unfamiliar, it is Infant, Schoolboy, Lover, Solider, Justice, Pantaloon, Oblivion.

Title quote from page 187

Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Random House, 2009.

Book Archives!

I've finished another age (schoolboy) in Bate's Soul of the Age and in continuing with my plan of reading a new book in between each age, I've moved onto Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I've read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies twice now, so I figure it's about time I read the original. Plus it fits into my goal of reading more lit that is by non-American writers from a time earlier than the 1970s! Still not winning the non-white author game, but it's a baby step.

In the meantime, I wanted to let people know I have a page that lists out all of the books I've reviewed/written about/etc as well as links to those books.  There's a page called Book Archives! (yes, it is exciting enough to need the exclamation point) right over on the left side of the page, under the follow list.

Ideally I'd like to add images to the page, but I've been having a wee-bit of trouble getting the formatting to not look like I tried to set up the page while drunk. So it's a work in progress. 

Does anyone else keep an archive of your past books?  If so, how do you do it? What do you find works best and keeps things neat?

Update: I bet it would also make things easier if I included a link to the Archives right here, so here you go: Book Archives!

All the world's a stage

I'm a bit of a Shakespeare fan. I've taken a number of Shakespeare classes in high school and college, I go to see the plays when I can and I've managed to accrue a decent library of books about the man and his work. I've even blogged about Shakespeare related works a couple times* and I'm about to add another book to that list: Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate.

What can this biography tell me about Shakespeare's life that the others (Will in the World by Greenblatt, The World as Stage by Bryson, Reduced Shakespeare by Reed and Tichnor) leave out?  Probably nothing. Shakespeare didn't leave a lot to go on so most biographies are about 10 pages of fact and then a lot of speculation. That (obviously) doesn't stop me from reading them! Bate decides to explore the seven ages as described by Jacques in As You Like It to explain the soul and mind of Shakespeare. The biography will not necessarily go in chronological order, so the "schoolboy" age includes both Shakespeare's time at King Edward's Grammar School but also jumps to a discussion about Prospero from The Tempest.  Bate explains "Because of the power of memory and imagination -- two of Shakespeare's greatest gifts -- the mind does not obey the same rule of time as the entropic human body" (xviii).

Bate does acknowledge that you can't read the plays or sonnets as autobiography but that clues hidden within the text can help shine light on the man. When he does this, connects the plays to parts of Shakespeare's history, the text comes to life. I want to keep reading, to find out more. However, this type of analysis requires a lot of research, and unfortunately it appears Bate wanted to make sure you knew just how much research he did because he often goes off on tangents that are so marginally connected to Shakespeare you could skip that and not be missing anything about the man. I like the connection between Shakespeare's son-in-law, the doctor John Hall, and the change  in tone Shakespeare takes towards doctors, from the comedic to dignified, in his plays. What I don't like or particularly need are examples of Hall's recipes for enemas. The problem is there are a lot of moments like this, and I find myself checking how many pages are left or staring out into space instead of, you know, reading. So here's what I'm thinking:

I'm going to continue to read this book. However, I'm going to read other things in between because this is just not sucking me in. My plan is to read one stage of life, read a different book, come back and read another stage of life, then a different book and so on and so forth. If suddenly Soul of the Age changes direction and really grabs hold of my attention, I'll keep reading it. So far that hasn't happened, but I'm not giving up!

As it stands I've finished stage one: Infant. When Bate talked about Shakespeare, it was good. When his writing wandered from the topic, my mind wandered from the book. I hope the other stages are more interesting, but I'll find out after I read something else.

Title quote is from As You Like It

Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Random House, 2009.

*If you want some more Shakespeare related posts I've done
Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged - I think you showed a lot of heart, a lot of courage, a lot of -- as Shakespeare would say -- "chutzpah"
Othello - The Law of Transitives and...Othello?
My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare - [Maybe] I'll find the meaning of life in a sonnet
Fool - We're all Fate's bastards
Favorite Shakespeare Quotes