Soul of the Age, By Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate sets out to write "an intellectual biography" of Shakespeare; or, as he puts it, to explore "Shakespeare's wit in the full 16th-century sense of the word". He loosely structures Soul of the Age around "the seven ages of man" speech by the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It. Nothing wrong with that: it has the merit of following Shakespeare's own potted view of the curve of human life. But Bate, to be true to his disdain for subjective expression in literature, ought to acknowledge that these lines, though written by Shakespeare, are spoken by a jaded cynic whose name means "privy".

Perhaps Jakes's cradle-to-the-grave survey is intended to be just hot air, a parody of material existence without the consolations of philosophy and faith? That said, the speech provides a legitimate enough spine for the book, if only Bate had stuck to it. Instead, he darts in and out of chronology. This gamble with narrative could only be justified if he created radical new contexts for his discussions of the plays and poems. This is hardly the case.

Bate announces that "Gathering what we can from his plays and poems: that is how we will write a biography that is true to him". The truth will follow, nothing less. To this end, he instructs us, we need subtly to "triangulate" the life, work and world, and search for "traces of cultural DNA", or else run the gauntlet of the "immense perils" of literalism. To firm up this rebranded New Criticism, Bate approvingly cites an Oxford academic; never mind that Goethe, Wordsworth and Keats might take a different view.

A mere 47 pages later, however, Bate is shifting his ground. "We must always be wary", he warns again, "of attempts to map Shakespeare's life on to his work. But writers cannot avoid drawing on their experience". Some "but"! Bate now finds himself arguing that Shakespeare's portrayal of doctors after King Lear was inspired by the arrival of Dr John Hall, who in 1607 married Susanna Shakespeare. Later, Bate concedes further points of intersection between Shakespeare's life and art in Macbeth. The Porter's speech directly alludes to the real-life trial and execution in 1606 of Father Henry Garnett. Much the same applies to the use of Gower in Pericles, to the cross-gender twins in Twelfth Night, and to much else – including Shakespeare's reference to his friend and publisher Richard Field in Cymbeline.

An early chapter is given over entirely to The Tempest, one of three discrete discussions of Shakespeare's last solo play. According to Bate, it "asks a central humanist question: what do we have to learn from books?" The play features here only because of its links with books, just when Bate is trying to extrapolate Shakespeare's surmised library from his education at the Stratford grammar school. His pages on Shakespeare's schooling are generally well done, though quite dense. Bate the professor gets stuck into Shakespeare's sources while elsewhere warning his readers against recreating Shakespeare in their own image. His Shakespeare belongs to the world of intellectual literary history. For Bate, Shakespeare's plays are tame, Anglican creatures. Characteristically, he sees a fairy-tale Ovid everywhere in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Shakespeare here owes far more to Apuleius' brilliantly kinky The Golden Ass, as Frank Kermode showed long ago.

Bate's discussion of the Sonnets is convoluted and not helped by a last-ditch appeal for validation to "computer-assisted stylometric analysis". As reliable, one wonders, as the tests that gave us the now-discredited funeral elegy for William Peter, a poem that ought never to have made it within a mile of the Shakespeare canon?

To Bate, the closest dramatic analogue to the Sonnets' story of "the male bond broken by rivalry over a woman" are three plays barely connected to the poems. The obvious one, The Merchant of Venice, is mentioned earlier, when Bate writes, in the context of Shakespeare's courting of Anne Hathaway, that "I have an instinctive sense that the wooer whom Shakespeare most resembles is Bassanio... clever but cold, an adventurer". Shakespeare might give him little thanks for this – even though Bate soon withdraws the slur.

Why then say it? Bate generally writes with clarity and precision in spite of occasional solecisms. The best pages are when he follows his literary and historical instincts, as in his thought-provoking discussion of the Earl of Essex's doomed bid for power; or when he traces "the hiding-places" of Shakespeare's power back to Montaigne. He concludes that Shakespeare was above all "a contrarian", ever ready to subvert the commonplaces of his time. At last, here is Bate, unhampered by scholasticism, making readers engage again with their favourite poet-dramatist.

René Weis is professor of English at UCL and author of 'Shakespeare Revealed' (Murray)

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