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| Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Eminent Lives
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  71 reviews
Sales Rank: 12923
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 0060740221
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.33
EAN: 9780060740221
ASIN: 0060740221
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 66 more reviews...
 In search of someone who "is at once the best known and least known of figures" November 1, 2007
79 out of 93 found this review helpful
Those who have read Bill Bryson's previously published A Short History of Nearly Everything already know that he has an apparently insatiable intellectual curiosity and derives great pleasure from sharing what he has learned. In A Short History, he explains why the human race may be the universe's "supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously." It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Bryson later set out in search of William Shakespeare, someone who "is at once the best known and least known of figures." To me, Bryson's quests for understanding "of nearly anything"become, for both him and his readers, adventures of discovery. That is certainly true of this, his most recent book, and yet....
As Bryson notes, Shakespeare (who never spelled his name the same way twice in the signatures that survive) remains "at once the best known and least known of figures" and that is one of the few conclusions that Bryson draws. What did Shakespeare look like? Almost immediately, Bryson acknowledges that those who wish to know "are in the curious position with William Shakespeare of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren't very good [Bryson explains why] by artists working years after his death and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be of someone else altogether. The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like." This is an example of Bryson at the peak of his game, addressing a basic issue, sharing what is (and isn't) known about it, and then moving on to another...and then another.
As historian George Steevens once observed, all that is known about Shakespeare "is contained within a few scanty facts: that he was born in Stratford-on-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died. That wasn't quite true then, and it is even less so now, but it is not all that far from the truth either." At an almost leisurely pace, Bryson works his way through a wealth of historical material, carefully constructing a frame-of-reference for those "few scanty facts." For example:
"After four hundred years of dedicated hunting, researchers have found about a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family - baptismal records, title deeds, tax certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records - it was a litigious age), and so on. That's a good number as these things go, but deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the business of a person's life, but almost nothing about the emotions of it."
"Nearly everyone agrees that William Shakespeare's career as a playwright began in about 1590, but there is much less agreement on which plays began it. Depending on whose authority you favor, Shakespeare's debut written offering might be any of at least eight works" and "arguments would run far deeper were it not for the existence of a small, plump [700-page] book written by one Francis Meres called Paladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury" and published in 1598. It would be of little (if any) interest were it not for "an immeasurably helpful passage" first noticed by scholars more than 200 years after Shakespeare's death, in 1616. Meres praises Shakespeare as being "most excellent among the English" in both comedy and tragedy and offers the first published mention of his plays by title.
In the last chapter, "Claimants," Bryson responds to an accusation - expressed in more than 5,000 books and many more articles -- that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare. If not Shakespeare, who? Those most often suggested include Francis Bacon, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere), Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby. Bryson calmly rejects each of these nominees, for various reasons, noting that more than 50 candidates have been suggested as possible alternative Shakespeares, and then observes:
"The one thing all of the competing theories have in common is the conviction that William Shakespeare was in some way unsatisfactory as an author of brilliant plays. This really is quite odd. Shakespeare's upbringing, as I hope this book has shown, was not backward or in any way conspicuously deprived. His father was the mayor of a consequential town. Shakespeare lacked a university education [such as it was then in the late-16th century], to be sure, but then so did Ben Jonson - a far more intellectual playwright - and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud."
Bryson concludes this chapter and his book as follows: "When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man - whoever he was."
Earlier, I suggested that Bill Bryson possesses an apparently insatiable intellectual curiosity and derives great pleasure from sharing what he has learned in the various books he has written. His quests for gaining understanding "of nearly anything" become, for both him and his readers, adventures of discovery. That is certainly true of his biography of Shakespeare...or whoever he was.
Much Ado about (virtually) Nothing October 27, 2007
73 out of 80 found this review helpful
A few years ago, as a companion piece to a series of study-guides to the plays of Shakespeare, I wrote a guide called "Shakespeare and His Times".
In it I explained that virtually nothing is really known about the Bard's life and proceeded to delineate that which was, in little more than a paragraph. Bill Bryson makes the same point at the outset of "Shakespeare: The World as Stage", and then, because he is the writer he is, takes close to 200 pages to cover it. One would think that 200 pages covering "nothing" would grow tedious. One would be wrong!!! (three exclamatio points, if you please.) So charmigly does Bryson write; so entertainingly does he explicate WHY nothing is known, and how to best understand that nothing, that the book is an unending source of knowledge and delight. ANY writer can write about SOMETHING. It takes the massive talents of the Thunderbolt Kid to write this well about nothing. He makes "Seinfeld" look loquacious.
The whole idea is that we don't know much about Shakespeare... but Bryson turns that into quite a bit. November 26, 2007
35 out of 36 found this review helpful
A tough assignment; write a book on a topic about which we know almost nothing, the life of William Shakespeare. Better yet, make the book about the fact that we know very little about the life of William Shakespeare. Let that book compete with thousands of others about Shakespeare. Doesn't sound like a recipe for a successful book, but Bryson has truly pulled it off.
Here's how.
First off, Bryson doesn't shy away from the fact that we know very little about Shakespeare, instead, he uses it to his advantage. After laying out the facts we do have about Shakespeare, Bryson turns to a description of the world in which Shakespeare lived to explain why we know so little about the man. He really brings 17th century England to life and paints a picture in which you can imagine Shakespeare operating. It's really well done and ends up being fascinating.
Second, Bryson addresses the speculation that has risen up around Shakespeare's life to fill the void of knowledge that we face. Using the information we do have about Shakespeare and the times in which he lived, he categorizes the various Shakespeare theories into more fanciful and less fanciful piles and explains why they belong there. It makes for really interesting reading.
My familiarity with and interest in Shakespeare are average to below average, and yet I found this book to be fascinating, readable and informative. It's made me more interested in Shakespeare.
Highly recommended even for those who aren't deeply interested in Shakespeare.
A WITTY, INFOMATIVE READ THAT IS FUN TO READ TO BOOT. June 28, 2008
23 out of 34 found this review helpful
I am one of those individuals who enjoy Bryson's work. When I read this author's books, I get the impression that he does not take himself all that serious, much in the same way I take myself. I can relate. This little volume on the individual who is probably and arguably the greatest of all our English writers is no exception. It, as others here have pointed out, is sort of a book about nothing. By that I mean, we know almost absolute nothing of the man, William Shakespeare. We don't even know for sure how he spelled his name due to the fact that he, himself, did not spell it the same all of the time. Bryson has taken nothing and turned out a work, 196 pages of work, of something. Now if you think that is easy, try it some time.
This is not a scholarly dissertation (thank goodness) which tries to pass itself off as the beginning and end of all that was ever written about the life of Shakespeare. It is a short study of just what we do not know about him, which we find, is quite a lot! I picked up absolutely dozens and dozens of facts as to what I did not know, and until I read this book, did not realize I did not know. In addition to this I picked up some wonderful trivia (and some information that was not trivial at all) concerning the era in which Shakespeare wrote, if indeed, he wrote during that era. I had no idea of the words and phrases, which happen to number in the hundreds, which were introduced to the English Language via Shakespeare. As one reviewer has pointed out, this is really not a biography, but rather a history lesson, a lesson of little facts that you would not normally be exposed to. Bryson has done his home work and we have all benefitted from his seemingly endless curiosity.
Now for those folks who are Shakespearian scholars. This probably will not be all that much help to you; of course picking up the book, noting that it has only 196 pages, should pretty well tip you off to that fact pretty quickly. If it doesn't, perhaps you might want to find some other line of work. This is a readable book, an interesting book, written for those of us who have not made the study of Shakespeare a profession or made it an obsession, which ever the case may be. It is not a book that you can use as a substitute for a sleeping pill, as so many hard core books on this subject are. It is for those of us who are curious, and who want to know bits of this and pieces of this and that. I will say though, that by reading this work, I have gained even further appreciation for the work of Shakespeare, which says a lot, as I had already admired him greatly.
I did enjoy the last chapter or so, as it addresses the many theories of the many rather odd individuals who have been obsessed over the years, trying to prove that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, or that someone else wrote his writings. These nut jobs seemed to have started from the beginning. The neat thing about it is, as Bryson so well points out, we know even less of the basis of their theories than we know of Shakespeare. Some of them are pretty funny though and worth taking a look.
Bryson does have a low keyed sense of humor and this fact shines through on ever page of this work. His style is easy on the eye, and in this work, there are no pretentions. It is sort of what you read is what you get. I enjoyed this one front to back and feel much richer for having read it. I did give this one five stars as I truly enjoyed it and felt, for me, it was a very worthwile book. Others may disagree with this, but hey, they can write their own review.
 If there be nothing new * August 31, 2008
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
It's a hard thing to produce a groundbreaking book about Shakespeare, and Bill Bryson makes no claim to it. This small book is part of Harper Collins' Eminent Lives series; their website describes Eminent Lives as "brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures." That said, SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE is an entertaining and informative little package.
Bryson catalogues the few facts known about Shakespeare's personal life and whereabouts, and some of the arcana -- word and line counts, for example, and how many plays were prepared by which typesetters, and all the different ways Shakespeare spelled his surname on legal documents. These facts have a certain WOW factor of their own, but mostly demonstrate the thoroughness with which the available information has been mined by hordes of Shakespeare scholars. Bryson devotes a chapter to theories that someone else wrote the plays, and debunks them. Again there are many facts presented in a wry and entertaining way; Bryson does that very well. A reader knowing little about 16th and early 17th century England would learn some interesting things from this little book, which is probably well crafted for its target audience of "survey readers."
There was less analysis of the plays than I expected; I found this a disappointment and took off a star for it.
The audio presentation finished with an interview of Bryson, in which he stated that he's not present in this book as he is in most of his writing; he kept himself out of it. That's true to the extent that he's not playing for humor, but it's clearly in his style: a bit like interesting vacation photos artfully arranged in an album and not for one second trying to integrate themselves into a video. He achieves what he sets out to do but if you're not crazy about his levity, this book may not appeal to you; I enjoyed it. The author reads this audio version, as he usually does, and his Midwestern/British fusion may not be what you care for. In that case, choose the print version.
* Subject line is from Sonnet LIX:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!
...
Linda Bulger, 2008
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