Jonathan Bate: The best of a Bard job

Forget, for the moment, the question "How well do we know Shakespeare the author?" A new one has hacked its way to the head of the queue: "How well do we even know Shakespeare the text?" The familiar corpus is now revealed as a Frankenstein's monster, though with beautiful skin: the texts we have are spliced, blended from the Folio and the Quarto versions of his work. We knew that what we studied, saw performed, laughed, wept and yawned over, amounted to a compromise. What we didn't know was how such a compromise could be anything other than honourable. What's wrong with giving us the best bits? Jonathan Bate differs. His new version of Shakespeare's work, written for the RSC with performance in mind, is based on the First Folio, the version assembled by Shakespeare's editors, friends and collaborators and intended for the Playhouse.

Bate has written a great deal on Shakespeare, to wonderful effect: The Genius of Shakespeare is the most expansive, clear, and imaginative critique of the bard in existence. He has also acted and directed Shakespeare. Maybe such training should be mandatory for all nascent Shakespearean critics.

Bate talks in great, whooshing waves, and in repose, his gentle face can take on an intimidating intensity. It's a scholar's look, but I'm not really unnerved: we've struck up a bond. We've both played Macbeth. Bate came off worse - Macduff drew blood from him on stage. The last Shakespeare play he acted in was Henry IV, Part II.

"Jan Ravens, the famous impressionist, was Mistress Quickly. Stephen Fry was the Lord Chief Justice. That was the last thing I did. There was stage fright, but also I realised that I was too interested in the whole play to do one part, so then I started directing. I directed a bunch of shows, including a terrible production of Two Noble Kinsmen [How do you do a good one? I wonder]. I think Stephen Fry in one of his novels alludes to my execrable production..."

Does he still have thespian yearnings? "Well I do, I did Edinburgh Fringe and all that stuff and, as everyone says, it was a great generation of actors at Cambridge. And it was very much: 'Will I become a theatre director or will I become an academic?' I think really it was an act of sheer cowardice that took me down the academic road, because I thought, if you were fairly good and worked hard, you could make it as an academic, whereas being a theatre director... It was so much more a matter of luck."

The self-deprecation is at once charming and distressing. For he has achieved a great deal: King Alfred professor of English Literature at Liverpool University by the age of 32, now professor at the University of Warwick, the author or editor of 17 books, including an award-winning biography of John Clare, this champion of Shakespeare and the Romantic tradition can afford a bit of self-congratulation. But he seems grateful for the way his vocations have now elided.

"What's been nice in recent years is that I've sort of come full circle, because of going on to the board of the RSC. When I took this ludicrously big project on, it was obvious from a fairly early stage that I'd need to have a lot of help - unlike anything else I've done before, where I've always written my books on my own. So the sense of organising but also sort of inspiring a team: that was something new. But that's of course how the First Folio was produced."

His search for Shakespeare brought him, as such quests do, some unlikely allies: "My original plan was to edit all the plays myself and just have my associate editors [help] with the commentary. I started like that but then realised that it was too big. So then they [the publishers] told me to put together an advisory board, and I was in a bar in New Orleans, and there was this guy called Eric Rasmussen, who is a textual scholar and who annually, for the journal Shakespeare Survey, writes these fearsome reviews of scholarly and editorial work where, if you misplace a comma, he will eviscerate you and humiliate you, and I thought: 'I can't have this man reviewing me: I must have him on the advisory board!' So he sits in this bar and he asks, 'How much involvement are you looking for?' and I said, 'Well, as much as possible really. I know you're busy with other projects.' And he sipped his beer and said, 'Sure, I'll do the text for you.'"

It turns out that the revolutionary decision to treat the Folio as the only authoritative text was informed less by considerations of high aesthetics than by pragmatism, which is satisfyingly faithful to the spirit of Shakespeare the man. "Generally, the editor will agonise over every, every decision in choosing which is the better reading, and in a way my idea was to cut that Gordian knot and just say 'If the Folio is not obviously a printer's error then we can stick with the Folio' and that made it a lot quicker."

I've read his introduction, I know all the arguments, but something prompts me to the reflection that while the approach of Nicholas Rowe, the 18th-century dramatist who first conflated the two texts may have been unscholarly, it was nonetheless artistically sound: we all want our beloved to look their best. "I know exactly what you mean. There are lots and lots of examples where you can apply your aesthetic judgement and find that in some cases the Folio is better, in some cases the Quarto is better. I do have genuine regrets with some lines, but the principle meant that we got a line that is as you say probably slightly less good than in the Quarto. The problem is, if you apply your model of wanting your lover to look their best, then you're simply doing what the 18th-century editors did and making the choice on aesthetic grounds, which you've no right to do."

But now Bate softens his stance: "In plays where it really does count, Hamlet and King Lear, we put the Quarto bits at the back, and certainly if I was a director I'm not sure that I'd be the Folio purist that I am as an editor..."

But isn't this edition now the RSC's standard text? "It's the RSC base text, but directors will always make their own choices, and there's going to be no sense of a three-line whip. Directors have always taken liberties with the text and I don't think there's any desire [on the part of the RSC] to stop that process. If I have another regret about Folio rather than Quarto, it's that because of the parliamentary Act against swearing on the stage, there are some places in the Folio text where those lovely 'Sbloods!' and 'Swounds' have been taken out, so it's a slightly cleaned-up Shakespeare." But there's good news: "In compensation for that, we've put in some really dirty footnotes, so it balances out... Eloise Summershaw [a co-editor] discovered that Shakespeare had a hundred different words for vagina."

Much speculation has surrounded Shakespeare's so-called "missing years". Bate holds that there's no real mystery here. "There are no 'missing years', he was looking after his father." Again, it's hard to quarrel with this. For all his well-attested lack of uxoriousness - the "second best bed" for his wife says it all - Shakespeare clearly possessed a good deal of paternal feeling, so it seems only right to grant him his share of filial feeling. Then Bate observes, "If there is a period somewhere in the 1580s where we don't quite know where Shakespeare is, I've just got this hunch that there's a Welsh connection."

My ears prick up. No-one studying the corpus, play by play, can fail to be struck by the ubiquity, and plausibility, of Shakespeare's Welshmen. "So if the old story, which goes back to a very early source, about Shakespeare spending some time as a schoolmaster in the country is true, then maybe, for a time, when his family was in hard times, he got a job as a teacher in Shrewsbury." It's an exciting thought, though it's also true that Shakespeare could have picked up all that Welshness in his own manor: many of his neighbours were Welshmen.

Weaving through our conversation is that strange pseudo-debate called "the Authorship question". Jonathan Bate has done perhaps more than anyone to show that babbling mountebank the door. We both cackle over the failure of the "heretics" to explain Shakespeare's extraordinarily close knowledge of the Stratford countryside and, indeed, of Stratford characters. Some would maintain that the authorship question isn't really worth the candle. Bate disagrees.

"When taxi-drivers ask me what I do and I answer, too many ask, 'But did he write the plays?' I even get it from students!" Just as with the Folio, the truth matters. Then there's that famous example to confound those who would maintain that Shakespeare had too little learning to write the plays: "Hello! Jonson was way more learned and he didn't go to university! But then Jonson is bitterly envious of the effortlessness of Shakespeare's art: 'Would he had blotted a thousand' ..."

He makes the point that in editing the Folio he was effectively editing an edit: the Folio writers knew of the Quartos, and consulted them. But the Quartos represent a different stage in the play's evolution, and, once again, you can't graft the sprout of a sapling onto the bough of a tree. "This was, as it were, the penny-dropping moment."

In defying the orthodoxy of Stratford, the heretics are also asking us to reject what every sane person has always understood about how writers write, namely that great art is usually sustained and complemented by great practical acumen: "One, he was a very good businessman as well as a great writer; two, his conception of what writing is about has nothing to do with coded autobiography; of course there are little moments, such as in The Winter's Tale: Leontes is seeking some kind of reconciliation with his daughter - much as Shakespeare was."

Bate is rightly keen to stress Shakespeare's practicality in other respects too: "I don't see Shakespeare as a control freak when it came to the scripts. He's the re-write man, the pen-sharpener. In attacking him Robert Greene became the first anti-Stratfordian!"

Shakespeare's refusal to judge his characters ties into Bates' own creative writing. In 1998 he wrote a novel entitled The Cure for Love: "For me the most exciting thing about writing a novel was that sense of a moral obligation to give each major character a chance, a voice, a space, and not to commit myself to one character or another: Shakespeare just is the ultimate example of that. I began my novel in the first person, but I discovered in the process that that wasn't right, because the central character desperately needed an interlocutor to bring him back down to earth, to prick his bubble so to speak."

There is, as Jonathan Bate points out, much still to learn about Shakespeare, about the man, his work, and the opportunities he offers in performance. They are all inter-related: the actor needs the scholar as vitally as the warrior needs the swordsmith. So, Shakespeare could have played the ghost of Hamlet's father, but he could also have played Christopher Sly, the poor peasant in The Taming of the Shrew who is woken from a Stratford dream to the reality of London success. Meeting Jonathan Bate reminds you of how the thin notes laboriously uncovered in the library burst out as a symphony in the playhouse.

The 'RSC Shakespeare Complete Works' is published by Macmillan at £30. To order a copy for £27 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897