Speculation is not quite his only resource. He finds clues in the very silences of the biographical record. Why did Shakespeare not follow the fashion and write a comedy about city life? His abstinence encourages Bate to explore the thought of Shakespeare as a provincial outsider, uncomfortable in the capital, who from early in James I's reign may have spent little time there. There is a more conspicuous silence. One reason we know a fair amount about other playwrights of the time is that their writings got them into trouble with the authorities, whose invest-igations left biographical details on record. Shakespeare never got into trouble. Bate notes how, after the accession of King James, the playwright adapted his language to meet the king's political preferences, among them the wish to unite his Scottish and English crowns. Englishness, the virtue celebrated in Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays, yielded the palm to Britishness. In Elizabeth's reign, we might add, Shakespeare had been free to tease the "weasel Scot", but under her successor, when Jonson and other playwrights were im-prisoned for mocking the Scottish accents of the royal entourage, he avoided such provoc-ation.
What, if anything, does his prudence dis-close about the opinions of a writer in whom at one point Bate perceives a "conservative" and "traditional" streak, but at another an impulse to "take the commonplaces of the time and stand them on their head"? Whatever political preferences he may or may not have had, Bate sees, he had none of the didacticism that was standard in Renaissance writers. Rather than "imposing views" he juxtaposed "opposing" ones, though Bate's inference that the playwright favoured "serious debate" among the public, as a stimulus to "free thought", may be a speculation too far.
To John Milton a generation after him, Shakespeare was a child of nature, "warble his native wood-notes wild". Bate dissents. He was "a magnificently artificial writer", who, though no friend to bookishness, brought thought and learning and literary self-consciousness to his art. Bate is at his most assured on the subject where the evidence is most tangible: Shakespeare's immersion in and reworking of his sources, poetic and historical. To his credit, and the book's advantage, he also salutes his transcendence of them, in the flight of plays and poems that leave their biographical origins on the runway.
