nOne man in his time plays many parts, nHis acts being seven ages. nIn this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of todays most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bards own immortal list of a mans seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeares life and connects them to his world and work as never before. n nHere is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifths St. Crispins Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth Is passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew. n nEqual parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeares experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.n