In her 2018 book Free Woman, the academic Lara Feigel explored the period when she was considering ending her marriage while studying the life and work of Doris Lessing. This year she produced Look! We Have Come Through!, a fresh reading of D.H. Lawrence against the backdrop of the pandemic.

In my view the most successful example is Reading by Moonlight by the novelist and former academic Brenda Walker, in which she recounts her therapeutic reading practice whilst undergoing treatment for breast cancer. "In a serious illness," Walker reflects, "we might reach for a novel to remind ourselves that even when we fear being broken we are still full, still containers for the promise of growth and flight."

And now we have Mad About Shakespeare, by renowned Shakespearian scholar Sir Jonathan Bate. Bate is no stranger to the notion of literature as therapy. In 2016, with his wife the biographer and novelist Paula Byrne, he co-founded The Relit Foundation, a not-for-profit that advocates reading poetry to counter stress.

His narrative is, however, more free-ranging than that of Feigel and Walker, who both reflect on the specific nourishment they sought at particular moments in their lives. While his ostensible focus is mental health, he also touches on bird-watching, doomed love affairs, the death of his father, and the serious illness of his daughter, Ellie, who needed a kidney transplant as a young child.

The origins of his Shakespeare fascination remain a little hazy. The playwright was always in the background as his parents owned the collected works. Unsurprisingly, it was "seeing him done at full throttle by professionals" that "roared [him] into top gear", and his interest crystallised further after the death of his father from a heart attack when Bate was only 21.

As the book progresses, Bate broadens his focus to encompass other writers afflicted by emotional suffering, including John Clare, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. While these digressions are occasionally illuminating, more often they read as attempts by Bate to showcase the breadth of his expertise and intimate knowledge of these writers' lives (his elucidation of the legal tussle over Vita Sackville-West's estate is a case in point).

This tone militates against his larger purpose: having set out to break down barriers between life and literature, he ends up providing a tour of his academic interests that seems lofty and disconnected from lived experience.

The case he makes for literature in times of crisis is also surprisingly weak. Reflecting on his overnight vigil at Ellie's bedside, unsure of whether she would survive, he seems to imply this dark night of the soul could have been smoothed if only the hospital had provided better reading material than Hello magazine.

Despite advocating for literature as a means to illuminate difficult emotions, Bate at times displays an over-simplified view of human experience, particularly when it comes to gender. He partly attributes his mother's decline in mental health to "the coincidence of menopause and my brother leaving home".

Similarly, his waning interest in reading throughout his adolescence is explained away as the influence of testosterone.

This is a missed opportunity to interrogate the gendered dynamics of reading. It is well-known that women read more fiction than men; Ian McEwan has famously suggested that it is female readers who will keep the novel alive as a form.

The best biblio-memoirists manage to combine deeply personal insight with generosity to their readers. Bate unfortunately maintains a whiff of exclusivity that is in keeping with his former life as a well-connected Oxford don. He doesn't refrain from name-dropping; we learn that he was once cornered by (then) Prince Charles in the interval of a performance of Henry V, and that on another occasion he stayed up until three in the morning chatting about the finer points of King Lear with Ian Mckellen.

Readers may or may not want to know that he has also had the fortune of working, conversing, dining or standing in the same room with Simon Russell Beale, Derek Jacobi and Simon Callow.

"We each have one life, one share of action and vision and money", Brenda Walker writes in Reading by Moonlight. "One life to satisfy our vast and human voyaging. With the right books we find out what imaginary strangers have done with their share of this amazing thing, life."

If Bate had brought some of this humility and insight to Mad About Shakespeare it would have been a much stronger book.