當代莎士比亞研究經典之作。好評如潮：

'The best book about Shakespeare for a generation' - Philip Howard, "The Times".

'As brilliant an account of the Bard's iconic universality as you could hope to find' - Michael Billington, "Guardian".

'Absolutely dazzling - illuminates the whole man and the influence he has in our lives' - Simon Callow, "Sunday Express".

'Occupies the territory of biography, literary criticism, theatrical and social history, and a journey across its landscape is one of constant delight and illumination' - Sir Richard Eyre, "Financial Times", Books of the Year.

'The theme of this wonderfully written, diverse book is diversity itself, and the range of the essays serves only to confirm the disparate nature of Shakespeare's achievement' - Peter Ackroyd, "The Times".

'The liveliest and most intelligent general book on Shakespeare I have read for a long time' - John Gross, "Sunday Telegraph", Books of the Year.

Jonathan Bate (1958) is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism.當今莎士比亞研究最彪悍的學術領袖之一。

He was educated at Sevenoaks School, the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship. He was formerly a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and then King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of Warwick.

He is a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and sits on the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

His publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995), The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000), and a novel based indirectly on the life of William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love. His definitive biography of John Clare (2003) won the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), as well as being short listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the South Bank Show Award. In America it won the NAMI Book Award. The Genius of Shakespeare was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as "the best modern book on Shakespeare".[1] It was reissued with a new afterword in 2008. Bate also edited Clare's Selected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004), and, with Eric Rasmussen, Shakespeare's Complete Works for the Royal Shakespeare Company, published in April 2007 as part of the Random House Modern Library. This was the first edition since that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to use the First Folio as primary copy text for all the plays.