IN THIS ILLUMINATING, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard's own list of a man's seven ages in As You Like It—infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and oblivion-Bate deduces the crucial events of Shake-speare's life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history. Soul of the Age is more than a new recounting of Shakespeare's experi-ences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.