Facts Only But fast and Fun | Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)

Combining fact and humour | Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) | Bill Bryson

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	• Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) Bill Bryson Eminent Lives, 2007 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Who was Shakespeare?

This is a brief, but very enjoyable and elegant read by someone who obviously loves this subject and its environment.

Bill Bryson gives this question of Shakespeare's identity a pretty good shot. There is apparently no definitive answer as to whether he was simply himself, someone else under a pseudo name, or several people under the same pseudo name. Even his portrait that we know him by is questionable. We do get interesting little glimpses of the times and the life of the person who purported to be Shakespeare. We also get glimpses of the stir that Shakespeare created with his work. How could one person, a country person at that, be so sophisticated and knowledgeable about so many important things? His work is so revered that it is studied for authentication purposes almost like biblical manuscripts. Shakespeare, in a word, seems to have created his own weather.

Sometimes the things that surround something or someone are as exciting as the thing itself

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Facts Only But fast and Fun

Several reviewers have taken this book to task for what it is not. It is not a scholarly book and was not intended to be. It is part of the "Eminent Lives" series. The publishers tout the series as consisting of "succinct" essay-like books intended to be "short biographies for an age short on time." No book in the series (that I have seen) has any significant scholarly apparatus. They allow well-known writers to relate the basic facts of an "eminent" person's life and give their take on the person to the extent they think appropriate. They are like the serious essays you can find in magazines like the "New Yorker" but longer. This book fits the series's pattern.

The book relates all that is actually known about Shakespeare, points out the many things that are not known and touches on the major problem areas, including the authorship controversy. Like Jack Webb on the old "Dragnet" TV show, Bryson pretty much keeps to "just the facts" but does note many of the areas of speculation in which Shakespeare students routinely indulge. He does all this in a smooth and flowing prose and with energy and wit.

The book has no index, no scholarly footnotes and only a minimal bibliography of a few secondary sources. There is evidently little or no documentary research, although Bryson obviously read what books he should and interviewed a number of knowledgeable people for the book. He takes no position on any of the controversies except the question of authorship, on which he is a firm Stratfordian. The book is strictly about Shakespeare's life, however, and makes almost no effort to discuss the poems and plays as works of literature. Couldn't do that and keep it short.

This is an excellent book for someone who wants to begin to learn about Shakespeare's life and (to some extent) his times. And it is a fun fast read for those who want a handy and short summary of what is known and what some of the problems are.

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Combining fact and humour

When Bill Bryson is going to tackle a subject like William Shakespeare, you know that it is going to informative and very funny, an excellent combination. In his usual wry style Bill Bryson tries to unravel fact and fiction about Shakespeare's life, time and works. Because of the scarcity of facts, people have over the ages made up whole stories based on no evidence whatsoever. Also, there was (and is) a strong movement that Shakespeare's plays were not written be Shakespeare, because they consider him too much of a country yokel to write about the sophisticated topics covered in his plays. Bill bryson describes the times in which Shakespeare was alive, including the way in which theaters and plays were run, and makes a convincing case for not over-fantasizing, but also a realistic believe that Shakespeare has actually existed. A very readible book that combines fact and humor in a very pleasant way.

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Bill Bryson's Shakespeare

This book meets the standards that all of his books meet: It is interesting and concise and would probably be liked by Shakespeare lovers as well as novices. It delves into the period in which Shakespeare lived, and Bryson is careful to only include information which can be specifically documented. It is truly worth reading.

There's small choice in rotten apples

Bill Bryson is more or less superman in today's literary world. He transcends subjects in a single bound and the globe in another. He's a talented critic, writer and humourist. It's a good job, to use modern vernacular, that he's the daddy because, with this one, he's taken on the mother of all literary subjects.

He's done so wisely. He's not attempted to become an original researcher and posit new theories about the man's identity or his plays and other works. He has essentially evaluated and sumamrised the existing state of Shakepearian debate and study, providing his own critique of what is compelling and credible. Thankfully, Bryson was born without a 'boredom gene' and the book reaches any audience, reading so easily. The man does not do dull.

Typically, Bryson's prose is litered with diverting and revealing anecdoes, we get a potted physical history of the theatre alongside the exposition of the central figure. Bryson is expert at demonstrating the lack of hard information about Shakespeaare (I spelled that incorrectly, but then, so did the Bard...) and the vulnerability about the claims and surmises made about his life and character. That will no doubt ruffle feathers. I found it interesting to learn that Shakespeare had thieved so many of his stories from others. As also did I find the battle for written English over Latin. The fact there were lost plays is new to me too. So to non-Shakespeare scholars this offers a lot.

To those who are scholars I am not sure it will be depthy enough to satisfy but they are not the prime audience I'd suppose. Bryson's great economy of expression, wit and clarity mean he is less self-indulgent in this book than perhaps any other of his that I have read (which is all but one, that being the African diaries). Although always near the surface, his trademark wit is less in evidence, reserved for a full scale assault on those who feel Shakespeare was somebody else. That business is clearly a cottage industry and I know Bryson has trodden on somebody else's cucumbers here by reason of the ridicule he heaps on the alternate theories.

It is a short book. There could have been more. But how much more was truly needed? And at whatever point should he have stopped on an almost inexhaustible subject populated by many including purists and pedants? Nevertheless one gets the impression he made a judgement about the length that possibly excluded a little more hard work examining various omissions from the life of the Bard and those who knew or worked with him.

Bryson's book has one central curiosity. It is really the oppositite of a biography - more a book about what we don't know than what we do - and that is refreshing in itself. I think he's done a first rate job here given how well aired the subject is.

And for his next trick...?

Incidentally, the title I gave to this is a quote from one of the Bard's plays and seems to convey Bryson's attitude to much of the literature he discovered!

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William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's?the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

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