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Lunatic, lover, poet: this is the definitive biography of John Clare. Clare was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth or Shelley, and a life that was possibly the most extraordinary, and certainly the most moving, of them all. The 'poet's poet', he has a place in the national pantheon - and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, unveiled in 1989. From rural Northamptonshire to literary London, from first love to delusions, depression and incarceration, Clare was haunted by ghosts from the past. In this, the first major biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate explores both the man and his madness, his work and his writing - poems, letters, even part of an autobiography - all of which show a mind plagued by demons and doubts, constantly questioning issues of identity, memory and, above all, loss.

Jonathan Bate weaves an exhilarating tapestry of the Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues that shaped and informed Shakespeare's mind. In the midst of this extraordinary, colourful and often violent world, he traces Shakespeare's various incarnations: precocious grammar-school boy, thoughtful young lover, canny businessman, social climber, caring father. Gradually, Shakespeare emerges in a portrait that is vivid, nuanced and completely fresh: a man who was both timelessly talented and, in the words of his friend and rival Ben Jonson, the very soul of the Elizabethan age.