Tuesday – an invitation arrives from Stratford-upon-Avon Town Council. Would I like to attend the conferment of the freedom of the town upon Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh during this year’s Shakespeare birthday celebrations, when they will also unveil the restored statue of the Bard donated by the great 18th-century actor David Garrick, the first person to receive that honour? I think it has to be a yes: I’ll be there to launch my new book, which is a memoir about my life with Shakespeare, as teacher, scholar and theatre-lover. But it’s also about how the words of Shakespeare, and those of other great authors, can, like the words of the Bible and the saints, bring comfort at the most difficult times in our lives. I wonder whether I’ll get a chance to congratulate Branagh and Dench on Belfast, with its heartwarming portrayal of resilience during the Troubles.
Wednesday – resilience in the face of war is on everyone’s minds just now, as we pray for the people of Ukraine, and especially for their remarkable president. A fellow writer tweets: “I love the way all my female friends are swooning over President Zelensky, first for being brave and decent, and secondly for being the Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear.” The problem with mad dictators such as Hitler and Putin is that they have no sense of humour. A warped sense of history, too: I take the trouble to learn a little about the 1,000-year history of Kyiv, which was the largest and most powerful state in Europe when Moscow was still a village. Its glories began when Vladimir the Great converted Rus’ to Byzantine Christianity. I wonder whether the Russian Orthodox Church will have the guts to excommunicate Vlad the Invader.
Thursday – final day of grading this semester’s papers. As opposed to “marking this term’s essays”. Now in my third year at Arizona State University, I’m getting used to the vocabulary differences from Oxford. People still raise an eyebrow when they hear that I forsook the dreaming spires for the harsh sunlit beauty of the Sonoran Desert. I explain that it was push and pull. The push was that eight years was time enough as the head of a college: the role used to be a cushy number for retired diplomats, but now it is non-stop committee chairing, crisis management and globetrotting fundraising. My length of tenure outlasted that of most of my peers, but at the cost of writer’s block.
The move to Arizona has released me into the completion of four books. But there was also the pull: the attraction of the world’s first “School of Sustainability”, with the remit of exploring the contribution that the arts and humanities can make to the multiple environmental crises of our time. The course I’ve been teaching is called “Society and Sustainability”, in which we listen to a huge diversity of voices, including such pioneers of green thinking as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. When I ask the student which of our texts most surprised and inspired them, the majority answer is the Laudato Si’ encyclical of Pope Francis. “We had no idea that religion could be so important to our thinking about sustainability,” they say.
Sunday – the historian AJP Taylor said that he sustained his life as a writer by always having one book at his publisher, one on his typewriter and one in his head. As my memoir Mad About Shakespeare hits the press, my next one is moving from my head to my computer. I’ve been planning a big book about the relationship between humankind and the earth, culture and nature. It was all too vast and amorphous until I hit upon a unifying theme. My previous work – on Wordsworth and the Lake District, for example – had tended to set city and country into opposition. But the key to sustainability is working in harmony with nature.
Suddenly it struck me: the place where culture and nature have always met, both throughout history and in imagination, is the garden. So I’m embarking on a global history of the garden – actual gardens around the world, but also images of the garden in art and literature. And it begins, of course, in the Garden of Eden. Then it proceeds to the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs and how that shaped glorious medieval images of Our Lady among the lilies in a walled garden. And today, an invitation to speak to the friends of the Phoenix Art Museum in a country club looking out on Camelback Mountain has given me the opportunity to try out some of the material. The location is perfect: a suburb called Paradise Valley.
Jonathan Bate’s Mad About Shakespeare: From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room, is published by William Collins
This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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