Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate (born 26 June 1958), is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet.
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 the University of Warwick, where he was subsequently Honorary Fellow of Creativity in Warwick Business School.
[4] 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.
[7] 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.
In April 2012, Callow took the show to New York City (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Chicago.
Romantic Ecology is specifically credited with having introduced literary ecocriticism to Britain,[8] making him a pioneer of the field.
[12] Each play is also published in an individual volume, with additional materials, including interviews with leading stage directors.
His monograph How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), developed from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019 and a new biography of William Wordsworth was published on the occasion of the poet's 250th anniversary in April 2020.
He is widely regarded as having made a significant contribution to the study of Shakespearean sources, texts and reception, to influence study and the endurance of the classics, to ecocriticism, to the revived reputations of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and of the poet John Clare, as well as to the sustaining of public discourse about the humanities in general and literature in particular.
He has surveyed the trajectory of his critical career in an interview with the online scholarly journal Expositions: https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2211/1990.
[16] In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to higher education".
He was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literary scholarship and higher education, the citation describing him as "a true Renaissance man".
‘Othello and the Other: Turning Turk: The Subtleties of Shakespeare's Treatment of Islam’, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 19 October 2001, pp. 14–15.