27 Facts About Jonathan Bate

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate was born on 26 June 1958 and is a British academic, biographer, literary critic, broadcaster, and scholar, known for his work on Shakespeare, Romanticism, and ecocriticism.

Jonathan Bate is currently Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities and Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, where he served as Provost from 2011 to 2019.

Jonathan Bate has authored major biographies of the poets John Clare, Ted Hughes, and William Wordsworth, as well as influential works on Shakespeare.

Jonathan Bate has written and presented extensively for BBC radio, and wrote the one-man play Being Shakespeare for actor Simon Callow.

Jonathan Bate is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature.

Jonathan Bate was educated at Sevenoaks School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, completing a PhD on Shakespeare and the Romantic imagination.

In 2011, Jonathan Bate was elected Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.

Jonathan Bate has held visiting posts at Yale University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Huntington Library and Folger Shakespeare Library, and served on the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Jonathan Bate has written for the stage in other ways; for example, he served as textual consultant for the Royal Shakespeare Company and was co-curator of the British Museum's 2012 exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World, for which he co-wrote the catalogue.

In 2019 Jonathan Bate published How the Classics Made Shakespeare, examining the influence of Greek and Roman literature on Shakespeare; and in 2020 Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, a biography of William Wordsworth released for the poet's 250th birthday.

In 2021, Bate published Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald, an unusual dual-biography comparing the Romantic poet and the Jazz Age novelist.

Jonathan Bate's Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life garnered widespread attention for its subject and the controversies surrounding its publication.

Jonathan Bate is widely recognised for his work as a scholarly editor of Shakespeare and Romantic literature.

Jonathan Bate has edited several canonical texts, combining close textual scholarship with an accessible critical style.

Each play was issued in a separate volume, with Jonathan Bate contributing introductions and commissioning interviews with stage directors and actors.

Jonathan Bate edited English Romantic Poetry for the Everyman's Library series, balancing canonical figures with lesser-known poets and emphasizing nature and politics in the Romantic canon.

Jonathan Bate is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, known for presenting literary documentaries and participating in discussions.

Jonathan Bate has been a panellist on Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time over a dozen times, often as the lead contributor on episodes about Shakespeare and the Romantic poets.

Jonathan Bate has written and presented several radio series for BBC Radio 4, notable for their blend of scholarship and accessible storytelling.

Jonathan Bate's programmes include The Elizabethan Discovery of England, Faking the Classics, and The Poetry of History.

In 2020, Jonathan Bate presented In Wordsworth's Footsteps, a three-part Radio 4 series marking Wordsworth's 250th birthday in which he traveled through the poet's Lake District haunts.

On television, Jonathan Bate has contributed to cultural and historical documentaries.

The documentary shows Jonathan Bate guiding viewers through the Folio's contents and its narrow escape from obscurity.

Jonathan Bate is married to the author and biographer Paula Byrne, whom he met during his years at Liverpool University.

In interviews, Jonathan Bate has spoken of his passion for sustainability and the natural environment, interests which overlap with his literary focus on Romantic poetry and ecology.

Jonathan Bate was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004.

Jonathan Bate has served as Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation since 2022.