Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL (born 26 June 1958), is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Early life
Bate was born on 26 June 1958, in Kent, and was educated at Sevenoaks School during the period when it had state funding as a grammar as opposed to a private ("public") school. He went on to study at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was the first T. R. Henn Scholar and a Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar. He earned a double first in English and returned to the college to complete his PhD on "Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination" and become a Research Fellow, after a year at Harvard University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship.
Academic and theatrical career
He was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then, from 1991 to 2003, King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of Warwick, where he was subsequently Honorary Fellow of Creativity in Warwick Business School.
In 2011, he was appointed Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. During his tenure, he led a fundraising campaign to re-endow the college on the occasion of its tercentenary and oversaw the construction of the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. Bate has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library. He sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.
He was a Governor and for nine years a board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. From 2007 to 2011 sat on the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2010 he was commissioned by Faber and Faber to write a literary life of Ted Hughes. This was cancelled when the Estate of Ted Hughes withdrew co-operation. The book was subsequently recommissioned by HarperCollins as an "unauthorised" biography.
In 2010, The Man from Stratford, his one-man play for Simon Callow, a commission of the Ambassador Theatre Group, toured the UK prior to an opening on the Edinburgh Fringe. It also played in Trieste. In June 2011 and March 2012 it was revived at the Trafalgar Studios, Whitehall, under the title Being Shakespeare. In April 2012, Callow took the show to New York City (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Chicago. In 2014, it was revived in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Writer
His earlier publications include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986), Shakespearean Constitutions (1989), Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (1995, revised and updated with extended introduction, 2018), The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), two influential works of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000). Romantic Ecology is specifically credited with having introduced literary ecocriticism to Britain, making him a pioneer of the field. He has also written a novel based indirectly on the life of William Hazlitt, The Cure for Love.
His 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. Bate also edited Clare's Selected Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2004). These works have been credited reviving popular and critical interest in Clare's poetry.
His book, The Genius of Shakespeare was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as "the best modern book on Shakespeare". It was reissued with a new afterword in 2008 and again in 2016 as a Picador Classic, with a further afterword and a new introduction by Simon Callow.