Ever since classical antiquity, poets and playwrights have written about famous heroes and anti-heroes, lovers and politicians. But they have also yearned for posthumous fame themselves. How do they achieve it?
This final lecture will show how Shakespeare helped to immortalize the famous figures of ancient Greece and Rome, and how he in turn became famous after his death – as the classics were to Shakespeare, so Shakespeare became a classic. He is our classic.
Professor Bate was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric from 2017-19. He is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Creativity at Warwick Business School.
Professor Bate began his tenure as Gresham Professor of Rhetoric with a series on Shakespeare. The topic for his second lecture series was Wordsworth and the Romantics.
All of Jonathan's Gresham Lectures can be accessed here
