Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14143 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself. In the absence of much documentation about his life, we have the plays and poetry he wrote. In this addition to the Eminent Lives series, bestselling author Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook—for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married—to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered. Bryson's curiosity serves him well, as he delves into subjects as diverse as the reliability of the extant images of Shakespeare, a brief history of the theater in England and the continuing debates about whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really wrote Shakespeare's works. Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive—as Bryson puts it, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron—forever there and not there. (Nov.)
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About the Author

Bill Bryson's bestselling books include A Walk in the Woods, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, and The Mother Tongue. He received the Aventis Prize for A Short History of Nearly Everything. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he now lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and children.

From AudioFile
Little is known about Shakespeares life, and in this brief biography Bryson makes no attempt to expand on the known details, as other authors have. Starting by presenting the paucity of facts, he goes on to sketch the life of the worlds greatest playwright, from Stratford to London and back again. He also discusses the theories suggesting that Shakespeares works were written by someone else, dismissing them as ludicrous. While Brysons prose sparkles with Bard-worthy wit, his reading is lackluster, and this reviewer wonders why he doesnt entrust his audiobooks to more experienced narrators. This is an interesting, though brief, book about the Bard, and it deserves better. K.M. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Crafted, concise, and fun to read
Bill Bryson's concise biography of Shakespeare is brilliantly written, humorously insightful, and entirely delightful. The prose is a well-crafted and playful presentation of the dozen odd facts known about Shakespeare and many of the suppositions, inferences, and wild speculations about the man and his work. This Shakespeare primer can be easily understood by any high-school level reader and no prior knowledge about Shakespeare is required--Bryson even helpfully informs the reader that "William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably" (p. 196) the author of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, a fact that is apparently not self-evident.

Bryson has written several books including the prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book under review is provided as a volume in the "Eminent Lives" series of concise biographies by varying authors and as such conforms to an imposed restriction on length. With a candid honesty that permeates his offering, Bryson notes that the world didn't really need another Shakespeare biography but that the "Eminent Lives" series did. Bryson is straightforward in admitting that no groundbreaking research is presented, but rather the biography gathers the known facts, the supposed facts, and much pithy innuendo into a single engaging and accessible overview. Bryson's strength, then, lies not so much in his Shakespearean expertise but rather in his obvious ability to turn a phrase.

As expected, the book presents facts about Shakespeare's life, work, and environment. The book reads much as one would expect and holds no surprise of construction, methodology, or presentation. The book is divided into chapters that establish what is known and what is generally supposed about several periods in Shakespeare's life and his environment. The book mentions most plays, several long poems, and a few sonnets; it does not present substantive literary criticism on any of the works but does briefly examine some issues of attribution. Bryson makes some attempt to place Shakespeare's materials into a general chronological order but does not tackle the thornier issues. The book's somewhat unbalanced biography is similar to all Shakespearean biography insofar as virtually nothing is actually known about the man whereas very much has been inferred. Bryson carefully notes fine distinctions between the two. For example, Shakespeare's death is presented mostly as an interpretation of his will, as that document has been discovered and can be analyzed objectively. The final chapter of the book examines the occasional academic notion that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's material, and reviews some of the leading alternative theories and their attendant problems.

While nothing in the biography is new or even particularly innovative, it is nevertheless an invigorating review of extant data. Bryson brings a fresh and exciting voice to material that elsewhere often is stale in presentation. A mix of bedrock facts, such as Shakespeare's date of birth--"By tradition it is agreed to be April 23, Saint George's Day" (p. 24) in 1564--stand alongside humorous observations: "The Droeshout engraving [of Shakespeare]...is an arrestingly--we might almost say magnificently-mediocre piece of work" (p. 4). Bryson throws compellingly banal facts into the mix, too--"Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks" (p. 19). What emerges is a lovingly rendered biography of an obviously favorite subject. Those familiar with Shakespeare's life and times will find the information recast in an enjoyable way, while those unfamiliar with the topic will find the information intelligible and quite accessible. One of the book's particular strengths is the development of a sense of time and place surrounding Shakespeare as an individual. For example, Shakespeare's multi-year absence from the stage is explained by the closure of all London theaters due to plague.

Bryson's book includes nine named and enumerated chapters and a selected bibliography. It runs to 199 pages and has only a handful of footnotes. Bryson attributes several items within the book and occasionally textually refers to his sources to establish academic authority on some point. In summary, Bryson is an endlessly entertaining writer and Shakespeare - The World as Stage is an outstanding read for anyone who enjoys Shakespearean theater, good writing, or both.

Something for everyone
I really enjoyed this quick read. I knew virtually nothing about Shakespeare; never having read much of his work, nor any explanation of his existence. I learned a good bit, stayed entertained and walked away with a much better appreciation of Shakespeare's impact on the world.

I still can't watch Laurence Olivier's Hamlet however.....

As much as most people will ever want to know
When I visited Ashland, Oregon's Shakespeare Festival the buyer in their large, authoritative bookstore suggested this as a good basic biography of William Shakespeare. I've concluded it was a good recommendation for several reasons.

It is a relatively brief 224 pages because Bryson makes the case that extremely few documented facts are known about Shakespeare's life. It seems that essentially nothing is known about Shakespeare's relationships with his immediate family members or known theatrical colleagues, and there are blocks of years during which nothing can be said with certainty about even where he lived much less what he was doing. Bryson makes the case that other - more scholarly? - biographies of The Bard which purport to provide greater detail are, of necessity, essentially speculative if not fictitious. He also explains that most of the visual images we have of Shakespeare and his world - portraits, busts, drawings of The Globe theater, etc., - are demonstratably, or at least arguably, inaccurate if for no other reason than they are non-contemporaneous.

Besides telling us about as much as can be documented about Shakespeare's life Bryson provides an interesting overview of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater world which was an important social and financial phenomenon that brought people of all classes together in intimate surroundings on a daily basis. In a period of less than 150 years - the Puritans shut down the theaters in 1642 - more than 12,000 new words entered the English language of which 2,035 are attributed to - or at have their first recorded by - William Shakespeare. And we learn that the bulk of Shakespeare's work might have been lost forever if his fellow thespians had not collected his plays into what we know as The First Folio within a few years of his death.

Bryson devotes a useful chapter to summarizing the cult that has grown up - dating from the early 1800s - around the effort to demonstrate that Shakespeare's work was actually written by someone else; there are multiple suspects. Most of this "scholarship" is far more speculative than even the most speculative Shakespearean biographies, and Bryson makes the case that the not-Shakespeare faux exposes are clearly absurd; more than one of the candidates died before several of Shakespeare's plays were written. The argument against these theories that exhibits the most common sense is that absolutely nobody alive when the plays were produced questioned that Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon wrote them and, in fact, numerous well known contemporaries praised The Bard.

Bryson's style is fast moving and the material is well organized, but fans of Bryson's trademark sarcastic humor won't find any of it here. There is a five-page bibliography.

Highly recommended.