Shakespeare (DIVULGACIÓN nº 347)

by Bill Bryson, Andres Ehrenhaus (Translator)

"Bill Bryson, célebre en todo el mundo por su Una breve historia de casi todo, aborda ahora un enigma mayúsculo: la personalidad de William Shakespeare. De Hamlet, Otelo, el rey Lear y Macbeth conocemos mucho, pero del ser humano que los concibió apenas sabemos nada. Armado de un sano sentido común y de su admirado don comunicativo, Bryson examina datos, suposiciones y mitos para trazar una semblanza lo más precisa posible del dramaturgo y poeta de Stratford upon Avon. El resultado es una fascinante indagación en la vida (hasta donde alcanza la certidumbre) y el tiempo de Shakespeare. Bryson evoca la Inglaterra isabelina, con el azote de la peste, su expansionismo imperialista, la emergente capital londinense y los usos y costumbres del mundo teatral. Y en este marco histórico, que depara sorpresas notables y proporciona un marco muy enriquecedor para el lector actual de Shakespeare, surge la figura del poeta. Bryson no omite ninguno de los aspectos más controvertidos acerca de él:

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Shakespeare, Audiobook, Historical, Biography Memoir

187 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Bill Bryson is a bestselling American-British author known for his witty and accessible nonfiction books spanning travel, science, and language. He rose to prominence with Notes from a Small Island (1995), an affectionate portrait of Britain, and solidified his global reputation with A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), a popular science book that won the Aventis and Descartes Prizes. Raised in Iowa, Bryson lived most of his adult life in the UK, working as a journalist before turning to writing full-time. His other notable works include A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and The Mother Tongue. Bryson served as Chancellor of Durham University (2005–2011) and received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including an honorary OBE and election as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society. Though he announced his retirement from writing in 2020, he remains one of the most beloved voices in contemporary nonfiction, with over 16 million books sold worldwide.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I chose a gift for the biography department, I was drawn to this little pocket lost in the middle of other historical bios. I knew the author for his humorous side and was intrigued by the gender gap, so I bought it myself.
This book is supposed to be "antibiographical" because one knows practically nothing about Shakespeare. It was the case with most authors identified in England in the 16th century, who left no trace of themselves. Apart from his plays, there are only signatures at the bottom of acts of baptism, marriage, birth, and minutes during a neighborhood suit brought by his father. He made three portraits of himself. But all that is very little. This book tells us to great lengths that there is nothing to affirm about the man Shakespeare was, on his emotional side, about his sexuality. Many biographers, however, have speculated, and things are very different.
He seems to have been a handsome man, his mind keen and sweet. He had a busy schedule as an actor in London, so one can imagine, without being mistaken, that he was a very active man. It is believed that he retired to his native village to write his plays. When his stage plays were successful, he led a comfortable life.
Bryson imagines Shakespeare in the hard times of the 16th century. The usages, customs, and historical context are fascinating to discover. It was another world that made me think of science fiction. The diseases were multiple: the plague, syphilis, & etc. In the 16th century, England experienced the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 while she was pregnant. A whole period remained obscure (between 1585 and 1592); it is the lost years, where the biographers resorted to conjecture to identify its course. Some say he traveled to Italy. Others say he was a traveling comedian.
I have appreciated the passages described by the Elizabethan theatres and edifices, which differed from other theatres. There are no traces left, apart from one or two rough drafts of drawings. It's fascinating. The theatrical activity was enormous at the time, which involved competition between the different rooms. For example, Shakespeare wrote comedies while writing plays.
We also talk about his great rival, C. Marlowe. In 1598, Shakespeare joined the troops of the Chamberlain, whom he would never leave. They later became actors of the king. It specified that Shakespeare drew his ideas elsewhere for most of his plays while sublimating them in the text. But all the authors did that at that time. Dream of a Summer Night, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Tempest are three pieces of his own. I was fascinated to learn that Shakespeare created new words for his time, such as "excellent, vast, lonely, frugal, etc."

I strongly advise this small book. It is exciting, instructive, and fun, which is excellent for the biography genre.

[Always Pouting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really not a fan of Shakespeare but reading this book really did help explain his popularity, at least in my mind. Everything we know about him seems to be questionable and when you don't know anything conclusive about someone, that leaves a lot up to discussion. Also I never really appreciated how he changed the way English is spoken, probably because I don't know enough about the history of spoken English. I enjoyed the book though, I learnt a lot I didn't know before and I think the author did a good job going over the information we have about Shakespeare as well as the popular theories involving him, especially all the things about who actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Also I really appreciated that he acknowledged that Shakespeare doesn't make any sense some times because for some reason everyone seems resistant to agreeing when I mention it, but come on some times the writing is incoherent.

[Labijose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un personaje tan famoso e ilustre como desconocido. De Shakespeare no se sabe prácticamente nada. Por no saber, ni se sabe en qué orden escribió su extensa obra. Nada sobre sus pensamientos ni reflexiones personales. Nada sobre sus apetencias sexuales. Nada sobre su relación personal con su familia. NADA. Y, sin embargo, a lo largo de la historia, ingente cantidad de personalidades han dedicado su vida a desentrañar al (posiblemente) mejor dramaturgo de todos los tiempos. Y no hablemos de diseccionar su obra línea por línea.

Mi entrañable Bryson no viene aquí a descubrir la pólvora con esta breve y concisa obra. Simple y llanamente expone lo poco que se sabe, dando referencias. De lo que no se sabe o se especula, el autor nos explica porqué no hay que creerse prácticamente nada. Y donde lo borda (y donde me lo he pasado mejor), es en las descripciones que hace de la época. Especialmente del Londres que vio nacer al Globe y sus teatros comtemporáneos. De cómo se (mal)vivía. De las recurrentes epidemias de peste que tuvieron que padecer, con la consiguiente reducción de población. Y, sin embargo, ricos y pobres tenían algo en común. Algo que disfrutaban, aunque muchos ni comprendieran: asistir al gran espectáculo del teatro.

Otra curiosidad que Bryson explica muy bien es la enorme contribución que Shakespeare hizo al idioma inglés, añadiendo palabras (¡más de 1700!) y expresiones nunca usadas hasta entonces. Su prolijidad en ese campo es algo realmente asombroso. No en vano, al inglés se le sigue denominando “la lengua de Shakespeare”, y con mucha razón.

En definitiva, una obra simple, de apenas 200 páginas, que nos ayudará a comprender un poco al genio y figura que fue este monstruo de las letras, y, sobre todo, la época que le tocó vivir. Pero poco, porque Shakespeare seguirá siendo un misterio. Y, probablemente, sea mejor así.

4 🌞🌞🌞🌞

[Cecily · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very strange and frustrating book:

• It reads like a lighthearted text book for teenagers/high school - except that it has no index (a cardinal sin for any non-fiction book).
• It is about a wordsmith, but the first chapter focuses on what he may have looked like.
• Its mission and content is to tell us about Shakespeare, yet it tells us in exhaustive and repetitive detail that almost nothing is or can be known about the man ("a wealth of text but poverty of context").

Irrelevant Facts

There are pages of disjointed facts about life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Some of them are staggeringly banal ("At the top of the social heap was the monarch") and others are weirdly specific (e.g. the laws about hat wearing).

Absence of Facts

All the way through, Bryson alternates between cagtaloguing all the unknowns of Shakespeare's life and trying to describe it; consequently, his text is heavily sprinkled with "probably" and other, even weaker caveats. It makes it all seem rather pointless and distracts from the few interesting insights he does have. He describes his subject as "ever elusive", despite stressing the fact that we know far more about Shakespeare than almost anyone else who lived at that time. Equally contradictory is the claim that "More than for any other writer, Shakespeare's words stand separate from his life" - but surely we can't know that because, as Bryson keeps saying, we know so little about his life!

Bryson identifies three options for researchers in the absence of hard facts: "pick minutely over legal documents... to speculate... or to persuade themselves they know more than they actually do". It's not clear which option Bryson took. As he says, "A devoted reader can find support for nearly any position he or she wishes in Shakespeare".

Vocabulary: Words and Phrases

The only really interesting points were that estimates of Shakespeare's vocabulary are usually huge overestimates because they include each variant of word form and spelling: take, takes, tak'n, taken etc. It's not the size, but what he did with it that mattered; his true skill was as a phrasemaker, demonstrated by the fact that 10% of the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are from his works.

Related to that, Shakespeare is credited with coining huge numbers of words, but in truth, it’s often just that his texts are the oldest authentic documents to use them; we don’t know if he actually coined them, or they were common parlance down his way (as Blackadder said to Dr Johnson in my favourite episode: Ink and Incapability - but the link isn't to that line).


Fortunately this was a quick, easy read. I only read it at the behest of my father-in-law: I am not a big Bryson fan, rarely read biographies and am not a huge history enthusiast either. Reading it has not changed those preferences.

[Kalliope · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you wanted to know more about William Shakespeare, his life, his writings, his times…etc, you would have to embark in the reading of an endless amount of written material that would fill trucks and trucks. Alternatively, you could choose a more expedite path. If instead of rummaging through tons of printed paper one could find a capsule of uncorrupted and distilled Shakespeare, would you not pick this?

And this is what Bill Bryson offers us with his book, Shakespeare The World as Stage.

Why another biography on WS? Bryson himself says that the world does not need yet another biography but the series Eminent Lives by Harper-Collins did.

And we are glad they did. They define this biography series according to Strachey’s stated objective of: “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant”.

Bryson has then set himself to follow Strachey’s (and Harper-Collins) recommendation. He has strived “to see how much of WS we can know, really know, from the record”. In an almost investigative style and in a clear and dispassionate fashion, he presents to us in an orderly chronology the evidence that he has extracted. He also presents samples of the musings and multiple conjectures that have sprouted generously. But then, without much ado, dismisses them in a very elegant, and sometimes funny, way.

So, his conclusion is that as so very little is known his book can be only 196 pages long.

In reality there is some sugar and other flavors added to the capsule, for we can also taste quite a bit of extraneous material, such as Shakespeare’s times and places. We get to hear about urban development and palaces in London, about the state of its hygiene and health, about life expectancy and children death-rate, about the set-up of schools and academic curricula, about the making of books and theatrical practices, and about the functioning of the legal system, etc.

For a better assimilation of the capsule, Bryson needs to correct our modern expectations, and remind us that to know so little about a sixteenth century craftsman is nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the material from the sixteenth century has been lost. What is most miraculous about surviving in Shakespeare is that, given the frightful odds, he withstood childhood and got to be an adult. Bryson insists on the very exceptional situation that so much of his works have survived, and this is thanks to the initiative of two of WS’s friends and colleagues, Henry Condell and John Heminges, who decided to publish the First Folio posthumously.

The parts I enjoyed most were the discussion on the various remaining First Folios, and particularly the last chapter, the one on the Claimants. All success stories invite detractors. These come across as really foolish.

We should be glad that Harper-Collins chose Bryson, whose writing style, so very limpid and fluid and clear, is entirely suitable for the making of this capsule.

But of course, the capsule has not entirely satisfied my appetite. My curiosity has now been awoken and it will continue to sniff around the World and Stage of William Shakespeare.

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, witty, highly readable biography of the Bard by one of the our best beloved writers. Bryson doesn't go incredibly in-depth with this work but I applaud him on that. A lot of biographies can be bogged down by completely unnecessary information which causes the page number to rise to the thousands. This 200-page biog contains about as much information as we casual readers need on Shakespeare. I would definitely include it on a list as one of my most enjoyable biographies in recent memory.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

We thrill at these plays now. But what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt … Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this.



London Bridge, around the time of Shakespeare’s death.


a short biography

The book is in the Eminent Lives series by HarperCollins. These are “brief” biographies, roughly one half of an average biography, and considerably less than the doorstop biographies often written today. The World as Stage comes in at 199 pages, so not a long read. This is not a disadvantage (for me) at all; and particularly for a biography of Shakespeare, a man about whom, Bryson never tires of reminding us, the provable facts concerning his life are not numerous. Hundreds of speculations and theories have been proposed to explain the mysteries and fill in the unknowns; the evidence for most of these is little more than a fervent desire by the proposers that they be true.

an enjoyable read

Bill Bryson (not a historian, of course) is a very entertaining writer. His first big hit in the U.S. was A Walk in the Woods. But both before and after that came a wide, eclectic series of non-fiction works. He was born in the U.S., has lived most of his adult life in Britain, and has a dedicated fan base of readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book is quite packed with delightful facts (or near-facts) about Shakespeare and the England/London of his day. The size of London, the way it nestled inside the city walls, people packed in there like sardines; the diseases that swept the city (and England) every few years, particularly the Plague; the fact that the first theaters were made to locate outside the city walls, in a horrible “suburbs” filled with tanning houses, brothels, graveyards, and other dreadful establishments and waste areas that must have presented theater-goers with a number of sensory (olfactory) challenges.

Bryson presents a great number of interesting comparisons between the Shakespeare we know, and his fellow playwrights of the era: John Fletcher, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Decker, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur and others. He informed me (I knew it not) that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a writer, and appeared frequently in the plays he wrote – which, by the way, were not his property. In those days a play had to be registered before it could be performed, and it could only be registered to an acting company. After that, the company owned the play, and it could only be performed by them.

This sort of interesting stuff comprises the bulk of the book, and caused me to underline quite frequently.

but

There are a couple of bad points about the book which occasioned my rating. The penultimate chapter, titled Shakespeare’s Death, is a hodge-podge of stuff thrown together that varied considerably in interest, from my point of view: his will; the later deaths of his family; the subsequent popularity of theater in London (until shut down by the puritans in 1642); many pages devoted to the first publication of the folio edition of his works, and on and on with that folio topic; etc. What I found interesting in all this could have been done in half the thirty pages devoted to it, so seemingly (to me) a lot of padding.

But this is a personal peeve, which certainly wouldn’t be shared by all. Far worse (and perhaps a consequence of Bryson coming up against the stops for the publisher’s “short” requirement) was the fact that, for a non-fiction work, the format of the book is dreadful. There is no index. There is no Table of Contents. The headings at the top of the pages are identical, from first page to last - Bill Bryson on the left page, SHAKESPEARE on the right. Well that sure is useful, isn’t it, just in case you forget what book you’re reading, and don’t care to look at the cover.

In other words, there’s really no way of finding anything in the book. How many chapters are there? What was that one called? And where the hell was it? Well, mount an expedition.

But don't let that put you off. A very worthwhile book.

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[Maricarmen Estrada M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to learn a little more about Shakespeare's life prior to reading Hamnet and watching the movie, and this totally worked for me (not sure about Hamnet, I just started it and is going well, and the movie will be after that, so... ). I already love Bill Bryson's writing and I truly enjoyed learning the few details and a little more of what is known about this prolific and emblematic English writer.

I am writing this review a few days after I finished the book and I must say that this book has stayed with me. It's like seeing all Shakespearian details in many things I come along elsewhere with different eyes. Brilliant!

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the outset - if you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life and times of William Shakespeare, you are going to be disappointed. Bill Bryson simply doesn't write like that. Those of you who are familiar with his oeuvre would know that he is a "love-him-or-hate-him" author: people either love his snarky humour, or hate it with passion. And there are merits to both viewpoints.

I am not a big fan of Bryson's travelogues - too sarcastic for my taste, and I don't like his humour which sometimes borders on insult - but as a collector of historical trivia, he is unparalleled in my opinion. He writes history concentrating entirely on its amusing sidelines, with a perspective which is delightfully skewed. He does it for America in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States; for the domestic life in At Home; for the English language in The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Here, he does it for the Great Bard, the father of the English language as we know it - William Shakespeare.

In his typical style, Bryson starts off by saying that we do not know what the hell Shakespeare looked like; and apart from a few dry facts and statistics, we knew absolutely nothing about the man.

We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.

For the rest, he is the literary equivalent of an electron - forever there and not there.

This is typical Bryson hyperbole, however - once we go through this slender volume we understand we do know a lot about Shakespeare: as much we can expect to know about a person who lived five centuries ago. We must remember that his iconic status came into being much later. At the time of his life, Shakespeare was just a phenomenally successful playwright.

The book traces the bard's life quite faithfully, from his birth in Stanford in 1564, through his journey up the ladder as a playwright to be reckoned with, the pinnacle of fame he reached at the turn of the Seventeenth Century, up to his death as a gentleman of some means. It also discusses his legacy of plays as well as those conspiracy theories which maintain that all Shakespeare's plays were written by someone else.

But if it were just that, this tome would have been most boring. But no: true to form, Bryson floods us with trivia about Elizabethan England (and about Queen Elizabeth herself); disease-ridden London and her penurious population who still found time to go to plays, in spite of a fourteen-hour workday; the playhouses which also hosted inhuman sports such as animal baiting; persistent Protestant-Catholic skirmishes; the idiosyncrasies of King James who succeeded Elizabeth; and (of course!) the utterly cooky conspiracy theories of the people who insist that the bard never wrote his plays. Along with this, we come to know that Shakespeare probably plagiarised passages verbatim (in fact, it was a common practice among writers those days) and that we don't actually know how he spelled his name. In fact, it is a trivia-fest - the ideal book to be enjoyed over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.

But it does give references to a number of books which may be referred to by those interested in seriously studying the life and works of Shakespeare and the world he inhabited. So this book may be considered a primer on the Immortal Bard.

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really short, but really enjoyable!

It's not a surprise that this is short. First off, it belongs as part of a series of concise biographies. Secondly, there isn't much known about Shakespeare, so biographies of him should be short. Why go on and on about something if there's nothing to go on about?!

The larger of them tend to devote many pages to dissecting the plays. Bryson does not. That was a little bit disappointing...but only a little. I've spent enough time dissecting them. I'd rather just work on enjoying these days, not analyzing them.

I'm glad Bryson touched on the authorship question. "Did Shakespeare write all this stuff?" I entertained the notion when I encountered it back in school, but having looked at the evidence and given it a good think, I've come to the conclusion that it is a ludicrous question. Bryson agrees and lays out why.

Is this a scholarly work? No. But have you seen some of what passes for such? I'm okay with this. It seems like sound logic deduced from absorbing sound work on the topic. After all (and for example) one of the leading proponents of the anti-Shakespeare movement was a woman who wanted to claim all of the plays for her cousin Sir Francis Bacon. She was biased and, as it turns out, crazy. Her book on the subject was widely dismissed at the time of publication as ridiculous, but the idea lingered, took shape and went on to have a long second life in quarters that rely on scanty evidence or none at all. And yet they persist. It all seems absurd.

Anywhoodle. Looking for a basic bio on Shakespeare? Here it is!

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, authenticated
as a true likeness by Ben Johnson.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I worked as a secretary on a tabloid newspaper, many years ago, journalists writing stories based only only a few facts would say they were 'cooking with gas'. This is a cheerful and entertaining read where Bryson is doing just that - so little is known about Shakespeare's life. Yet I think he does a great job. He talks about Tudor England - and the general experiences of playwrights, actors and audiences during this period. We are able to get an excellent flavour of the theatre scene in late 16th century, early 17th century London. Bryson also talks about the research and scholarship attached to Shakespeare's works - some of it an ever-expanding celebration of extraordinary minutiae. (This cheers me up. There are apparently people in this world a whole lot crazier than me.)

This is a quick and entertaining read that will give anyone pleasure. I end with some extracts from the book that I particularly enjoyed....

The First Folio



What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two. This is thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be over-emphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare's works, for the usual condition of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive.... Of the approximate three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare's birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, 80 per cent are known only by title....

The madness of (some) scholars

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tells us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used ten times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times....

Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it. Another scholar, Charlton Hinman, managed to identify individual compositors who worked on the typesetting of Shakespeare's plays, by comparing preferences of spelling.

The Library of Congress in Washington contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare - twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day....and the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly the most exhaustive of bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works - books, monographs, other studies - every year.

An aside.....the madness of sugar in Tudor England

People of all classes loved their foods sweet. Many dishes were coated with sticky sweet glazes, and even wine was sometimes given a generous charge of sugar, as were fish, eggs and meats of every type. Such was the popularity of sugar that people's teeth often turned black, and those who failed to attain the condition naturally sometimes blackened their teeth artificially to show that they had had their share of sugar, too.

The Box Office

General admission for groundlings - those who stood in the open around the stage - was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that - all this at a time when a day's wage was one shilling (12 pence) or less. The money was dropped in a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping - the box office.

Men playing female roles

While we often know a good deal about performers in male roles from Shakespeare's day, we know almost nothing about the conduct of the female parts.... We don't even know much about them in general terms, including how old they were...

This disdain for female actors was a northern European tradition. In Spain, France and Italy, women were played by women - a fact that astonished British travellers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life.

The golden age of theatre

The golden age of theatre lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime, but what a wonderously prolific and successful period it was. Between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theatres by the Puritans seventy-five years later, London's playhouses are thought to have attracted fifty million paying customers, something like ten times the entire country's population in Shakespeare's day.

To prosper, a theatre in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day - about 1 per cent of the city's population - two hundred or so times a year, and to do so repeatedly against stiff competition. To keep customers coming back, it was necessary to change the plays constantly. Most companies performed at least five different plays in a week....and used such spare time as they could to learn and rehearse new ones.

Shakespeare was an actor, as well as playwright

Shakespeare appears to have remained an actor throughout his professional life (unlike Ben Johnson who quit as soon as he could afford to).... It can't have been easy...but it would doubtless have allowed him (assuming he wished it) much greater control than had he simply surrendered a script to others, as most playrights did. According to tradition Shakespeare specialized in good but fairly undemanding roles in his own plays. The ghost in Hamlet is the part to which he is most often linked.

Shakespeare's vocabulary (more scholarly madness)

Much has been written about the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary. Spevack in his magnificent and hefty concordance - the most scrupulous, not to say obsessive, assessment of Shakespearean idiom ever undertaken - counts 29,066 different words...but that rather generously includes inflected forms and contractions. If instead you treat all the variant forms of a word - for example, take, takes, taketh, taking, tak'n taken, tak'st, tak't took tooke took'st tookst as a single word (or lexeme, to use the scholarly term)......his vocabulary falls back to about twenty thousand, not a terribly impressive number. The average person today, it is thought, knows probably fifty thousand words. That isn't because people today are more articulate or imaginatively expressive, but simple because we have at our disposal thousand of common words - television, sandwich, seatbelt, Chardonnay, cinematographer - that Shakespeare couldn't know because they didn't yet exist.

Anyway, and obviously, it wasn't so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them - and no one has ever done more.

Shakespeare created many new words

He coined - or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of - 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour's Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them..... In plays written during his most productive and inventive period - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one ever two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences six hundred words that, according to all other evidence,they had never heard before.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others... Where would be be without them?

The Globe Theatre


Today's Globe Theatre, photographed by Ed O'Keeffe.

The Globe stood a hundred feet or so in from the river, and a little west of London Bridge. (The replica Globe Theatre built in 1997 is not on the original site...but merely near it.)

The members of Shakespeare's company owned the Globe among them.....The Globe is sometimes referred to as 'a theatre built by actors for actors', and there is of course a good deal in that. (It) had a distinction in that it was designed exclusively for theatrical productions, and took no earnings from other entertainments.

The Globe itself didn't last long. It burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years the were. No theatre - perhaps no human enterprise - has seen more glory in only a decade or so as the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another plays of unrivalled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure,Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra......

We thrill at these plays now. But what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard? Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet's soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favoured places than this.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This audiobook was a perfect companion for a long road trip. Bill Bryson, who has now written books on everything from the history of the universe to the origins of our domesticity to America in the 1920s and, perhaps most endearingly, stories of his various travels around the world, here turns his attention to William Shakespeare.

In this relatively slim volume (it's less than 200 pages), Bryson researched what few facts are known about Shakespeare and synthesized them into chapters on his childhood, his "lost years" (1585-1592), his time in London, his plays, his fame, his death and, finally, the strange claims that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him.

Like most Americans, I was first introduced to Shakespeare in high school, when we read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and a few of his sonnets. I've read more of his plays since then, but until now I have never read a biography of the man himself. After reading Bryson's book, I feel like I know as much as any modern person can know, simply because so few facts have survived. One Shakespeare scholar told Bryson that "every Shakespeare biography is 5 percent fact and 95 percent conjecture."

Even the few surviving portraits that are purportedly of Shakespeare cannot be verified. "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. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures."

I liked reading the details of Shakespeare's life, but I think my favorite chapter was the last one on Claimants. Bryson thinks he has identified the person that started what he calls the anti-Shakespeare sentiment, an American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon became convinced that Francis Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, and in 1852 she traveled to England to try to prove that Shakespeare was a fraud. Of course, there is no evidence of this, nor of any other claimants writing Shakespeare's works, but some researchers continue to come up with theories. Bryson picks apart the claims and shows what little merit there is to them.

"The one thing all the competing theories have in common is the conviction that William Shakespeare was in some way unsatisfactory as an author of brilliant plays. This is really 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. In any case, it would hardly be a unique achievement for someone brought up modestly to excel later in life. Shakespeare lacked a university education, to be sure, but then so did Ben Jonson -- a far more intellectual playwright -- and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud ... 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."

I would heartily recommend this book to fans of English literature and history. It has Bryson's trademark dry wit and humorous phrasings, so Bryson fans should also be satisfied. The audio CD I had also included an interview with the author, which was delightful, as expected.

On a more alarming note, I'm nearly out of Bryson books to read. Now that will be the winter of my discontent.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is somewhat of a departure for Bill Bryson – ‘Shakespeare’ being a biography of sorts and Bryson being overwhelmingly and ostensibly a popular travel writer. Although the central premise here is that, as Bryson freely acknowledges indeed almost relishes, is that what we do know about the life of William Shakespeare is surprisingly very, very little.

What Bryson does do here is provide us with (as his regular readers would expect) a very witty, insightful, but unsentimental portrait of Shakespeare and his burgeoning and everlasting literary genius.

With ‘Shakespeare’ what Bryson has successfully managed (presumably consciously) to avoid is the ground covered by the overwhelming majority of other books written Shakespeare the man – ordinarily being either academic/quasi-academic tomes and as such impenetrable to all but Shakespeare/literary scholars, or highly speculative popular writings based on the various conspiracy theories and myths that now surround the life, works and legend of William Shakespeare.

Here Bryson as usual entertains us with, amongst other things, various tales of those who have seemingly dedicated years of their lives attempting to get to the heart of and establish some hitherto unknown truths about Shakespeare and his works. As well as being utterly frank about what we do (or more to the point) do not know about William Shakespeare.

As a reader of Bryson's books and somewhat of a Shakespeare obsessive (it took me around 30 years to see theatre productions of all 37 of his plays – many several times) I had high hopes for this book and wasn’t disappointed.

Above all, what Bryson has given us here is a celebration and a very good one, of the staggering and awe inspiring literary genius that was and always will be William Shakespeare.

[Theresa Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography of William Shakespeare is mostly about how much we don’t know about him. I found it interesting how people of the time didn’t care about spelling things consistently, including their own name. I’ve worked as an editor for years, and the notion of spelling words haphazardly is completely contrary to everything I’ve ever been taught.

This has more detail than I really needed. I had no idea how unhinged some people can be in trying to find facts about Shakespeare as well as how obsessed some people are trying to prove Shakespeare didn’t write the plays that we read and see performed today. Part of the reason some folks don’t believe he could have written what is ascribed to him is that he didn’t have the kind of formal education other of his contemporaries did. “Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school.”

There is some humor in this as Bryson’s work is known for—mostly the jokes come at the expense of the Puritans who hated joy and were forever trying to shut playhouses down. There is also a lot of talk about how frequent plagues shuttered the theaters and devastated the population, something to keep in mind since all of us, in the last year and a half, were a bit shocked how a pandemic meant closing much of the world to attempt to avoid overwhelming hospitals and trying to keep the rates of severe illness and death down. It was a new thing for people who live today, but a completely common occurrence back then.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a big fan of either audio books or Shakespeare, but I needed a short something to listen to recently. So on a trip to the library I chose this one because:

1. Bill Bryson wrote it
2. Bill Bryson read it
3. It was only 5.5 hrs long

So I listened to this one and was pleasantly entertained and learned a lot of very interesting things presented in an amusing way. One of the things I learned is that Bill Bryson has a very British accent after having lived in England for many years, despite the fact that he was born and raised in Iowa.

Not a bad way to spend a few hours, but still not a fan of audio books.

[W · Rating 3 out of 5]

It really isn't a biography,as Shakespeare the man,remains shrouded in mystery.It certainly came as a surprise to me,that practically nothing is known about the man.

It wasn't until a hundred years after Shakespeare's death,that any attempt at writing his biography was made.

Bryson mostly therefore, talks about the era in which Shakespeare lived,the background of his work,and the myths and conspiracy theories surrounding him.

One theory is that Shakespeare's plays weren't particularly original,and that he may have taken the main ideas of his plays from other sources.

Another theory even claimed that his plays were not the work of one man alone. As is his specialty,Bryson digs up some entertaining stuff. I ended the book wanting to know more,and it was a bit frustrating.

But an entertaining little book,nevertheless.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This man was so good as disguising his feeling that we can’t ever be sure that he had any.

In many ways Shakespeare is the perfect subject for a Bryson book. Shakespeare scholars have included some colorful and eccentric characters—such as Delia Bacon and J. Thomas Looney—which is one of Bryson’s specialties. Shakespeare is also sufficiently mysterious, most of his life being buried in the oblivion of history—an important thing for Bryson, who is attracted to gaps in our knowledge. Two more of Bryson’s fixations come into play: his interest in the history of the English language, and in daily life of bygone days.

The book is refreshing for Bryson’s deflating humor. More than any other author, Shakespeare attracts untold myths, legends, theories, and pure idolatry; but Bryson’s approach is cool and investigative. He is constantly reminding the reader of the limits of the available evidence. What thus emerges is a portrait of Shakespeare’s times, a bare outline of his life, and refutations of unfounded notions. You might say the book is limited to this investigative track. Bryson is no literary critic and does not attempt any serious appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. But this is just as well since so many great works of criticism already exist elsewhere. Bryson does what he’s good at, and that’s good enough for me.

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, that was a quick and easy read, very pleasant too thank you Mr Bryson. After reading this book I have learned loads about Shakespeare - NOT! Having being forced to study him for A-Level English and worship at the alter of Shakespeare like a good student I was also suprised how little is known about him. My best memory of learning about Shakespeare was being asked to write an essay on the use of natural symbolism in "A Winters Tale". Being a slightly cocky and beligerent teenager I turned in an essay entitled "Why Shakespeare is literatures greatest plagiarist", obviously this was not well received but having read this book I think some of my points were pretty salient.

This book essentially poses more questions rather than answers; Was Shakespeare gay? Did he really wear an earring? Are any of the paintings of him actually, you know, him? How should we really spell his name? Where was he a lot of the time? What's up with only leaving your missus a second rate bed?

I suppose the answer nowadays is, who really cares apart from some very obsessed academics? The main thing is to appreciate the legacy we were left and to use the words he created to the fullest!

[Laure · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great entertaining listen! I listened to it on my way to work and doing the dishes this week.
I did not get bored one minute - full of interesting facts about Shakespeare's life and his times. Entertaining, erudite and fun. Now, that's a combo hard to beat.

[Kevin Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Bryson’s short biography, Shakespeare: The World as Stage, is an excellent addition to the already vast corpus of literature about the life and times of William Shakespeare. If you’ve already had some contact with Shakespearean scholarship, I’d recommend checking out something a little meatier, such as Stephen Greenblatt’s terrific biographical study of Shakespeare, Will in the World (or, for that matter, any of the other myriad books on Shakespeare by the likes of such literary luminaries as Bloom, Shapiro, and many others). Either way, though, Bryson’s Shakespeare is a quick and engaging read, regardless of your familiarity with the subject.

If you haven’t encountered any of the innumerable dissections, dissertations, postulations, monographs, opinions, theorems, theses, hypotheses, studies, surveys, sketches, and reckless speculations, all bounded, not in a nutshell, but within the vast infinitude of past Shakespearean scholarship (or the seemingly endless torrent of new scholarly works currently being dreamed up, written, and eagerly published), then Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage is the perfect place to start. It’s a brief but efficient introduction to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, that fascinating but tumultuous era into which Shakespeare was born, lived, and worked—written with Bryson’s trademark blend of humor, wit, contagious curiosity and irrepressible exuberance that defines all of his work.

It’s a short book, written for an ongoing and widely- read biographical series that focuses on “great lives,” or, somewhat less grandly, on persons of historical interest or import. The brevity of the book, though, turns out not to be so much a hindrance as a rather helpful restriction. As Bryson rightly points out early in the book, William Shakespeare’s historical footprint—excepting his published works of course, which are quite an exceptional exception to make—is practically nonexistent. And the depressingly few facts we do know (with something approaching certainty) wouldn’t fill a single page—much less a book. So the prescribed brevity of Bryson’s biography actually ends up doing him a favor. Unlike most Shakespeare scholars (a slightly snobbish cohort to which Bryson, happily, does not belong), he doesn’t have to fill pages with empty inferences and shoddy speculation. Tellingly, though, even with all his succinctness and pith, Bryson’s brief biographical sketch still necessitates the inclusion of a fairly large amount of educated guesswork, speculative musings, and other fillers.

If one were truly to stick only to the known facts about William Shakespeare, one wouldn’t end up with a book, but a paragraph. Luckily for readers, then, that the mysteries of Shakespeare’s life, and the unending speculations over them, are a large part of the fun.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

At school I was required to study two of the Bard’s plays: the one known as The Scottish Play and Twelfth Night. I found the former a real struggle and way too grim but rather enjoyed the humour in the latter. But I’ve never returned to Shakespeare’s work, in truth I just find the language rather impenetrable, just too much like hard work to battle through. But I am somewhat curious about the man considered perhaps the finest writer of them all and I’ve long admired Bryson’s ability to tell a story, so why not give this exploration a go.

The first thing I noted is that not much is actually known about the man, not much at all. A good deal of what has been written or spoken about him by others is essentially based on supposition or is even pure guesswork. Therefore the story of his life here is very slim pickings indeed. There’s then quite a lot about his work: the order it was written (also not really known), how it was staged (cheaply and with very few frills) and some context on the London he lived in and other writers who might be considered his rivals.

At this point, perhaps half way through or maybe a little less, I started to feel about this book as I did about the play you’re not supposed to name - i.e. it was failing to pique my interest sufficiently to motivate me carry on ploughing through it. I gave up. It’s not that it’s a bad book or that I feel that it won’t suit others – I really think it will for those that have a real interest in the man or his work - it’s just that it wasn’t working for me.

I’ve upped my standard one star award for books I fail to finish as I’m blaming myself here for picking a book that really wasn’t suited to me.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

No matter where on the planet you're from, it seems that there is at least one figure from the early Renaissance period (1400-1600 AD) who's had a huge and profound impact on your society's culture ever since: here in the English-speaking world, for example, that would be playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and in fact it's guessed that a huge majority of all new novels and movies coming out in English these days are based or inspired in one way or another on something from "The Bard"s old works. But that's the ultimate irony about Shakespeare; that although he is one of the only Elizabethan playwrights in history to have almost all his works preserved and reproduced over the ages (a main factor behind him being as influential as he now is), hardly any facts about the man himself exist, and in fact apart from his creative writing you would scarcely even know he was a physical human who actually once lived. Over the centuries, then, it has led to wild speculation about Shakespeare's life on the part of thousands, and an entire wing of academic study about the man so in the center of all Western artistic thought.

So for those like me who hardly know anything about the subject, Bill Bryson's new book Shakespeare: The World as Stage is going to be a godsend; it is a tight, funny 200-page overview of what exactly we factually know about the man and what we don't, peppered with a lot of anecdotes about the various crackpots over the years who have gotten obsessed with the question. And in fact this is the entire reason for the book to exist in the first place, is to give a short and tidy overview of a famous person's life; it is in fact the latest installment of James Atlas' "Eminent Lives" series, where for years he's been asking intriguing writers in other fields to pen short accessible works about various famous thinkers in history. For example, for those who didn't know, Bryson himself is mostly known in the publishing world for extremely sharp, funny and bitter travelogues; and here he puts that style to good use, taking us from one interesting historical and academic site to the next, as he with us unravels the mystery of this playwright we know so little about.

In fact, that's about the only big drawback to this book as well, if you want to look at it that way; that a 200-page manuscript simply isn't enough to fully get into the mysteries behind Shakespeare and his work, and that the main enjoyment Bryson's book contains is with all the astounding trivia-style facts he rattles off throughout. (Did you know that there are only fourteen words in existence actually written in Shakespeare's hand? That of 3,000 plays written in the Elizabethan Era, we only have printed copies of 200 of them, with nearly 40 of them being from Shakespeare himself? That his collected work contains 884,647 words, 15,785 question marks, and 10 instances of the term "dunghill?") As far as I'm concerned, though, that's what's to like about this book, not dislike; it's no scholarly treatise by any means, but Bryson's Shakespeare is definitely a pleasant little unintimidating ladder into the endless underground cavern which is Shakespearean study. And given that other titles in this series deal with such other fascinating characters from history as Thomas Jefferson, Muhammad, and Machiavelli, I'm also looking forward to reading more.

Out of 10: 9.2

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This overview of Shakespeare’s life improved greatly as the pages increased. At first, it honestly felt like Mr. Bryson was begrudgingly completing a college research paper and, becoming exasperated by the lack of factual information, instead presented a (very interesting) history of Elizabethan London! The emphasis right from the beginning was how little we actually know about the life of William Shakespeare. It was fascinating to learn that most of what has been presented to us as biography is in fact, conjecture. Mr. Bryson, in typically wry, readable, and exciting form, instead provided a history of the main players in London during Shakespeare’s life then placed the known puzzle pieces into the solid history. The final chapter was ultimately my favorite as it addressed the many theories about alternative authors of Shakespeare’s works, then debunked them one by one. Overall, this lovely, brief analysis of the life of Shakespeare was a nice supplement to some of the more weighty, academic biographies out there.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent introductory overview.

Bryson is especially effective in making explicit how little we really know about Shakespeare and how much 'knowledge' is supposition or even 'what feels right' according to whichever individual is writing about the bard at the time. There's also a worthwhile amount of historical context about the theatre, contemporary writers and playwrights, monarchs, and social preoccupations.

I would readily recommend this to a newbie wanting to get a sense of Shakespeare's world.

[Vanja Šušnjar Čanković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bil Brajson i ja nismo kliknuli na prvu, pa ni na drugu knjigu. Ovo je moj treći susret sa njim, ali isključivo zbog teme. Naime, odlučila sam da mu dam šansu budući da sam pisala jedan stručni rad u okviru kojeg sam i sprovela jedno skromno empirijsko istraživanje o relevantnosti Šekspirovih drama za savremenu pozorišnu umjetnost i ovom prilikom želim da zahvalim svima vama koji ste popunili anketu i dali vaš doprinos ovom istraživanju. E sad, što se tiče samog Brajsona, mislim da će naše druženje ovdje završiti osim eventualno ako ne napiše recimo biografiju Selindžera ili Fantea ili nešto slično. :) Ima nešto u njegovom načinu pisanja što mi se ne sviđa, nisam sigurna šta, možda neka prevelika samouvjerenost i izvjesna nadobudnost koje provejavaju sa svake stranice. Svejedno, ovdje je bilo mnogo prijatnih iznenađenje gdje je djelimično i uspio da suspregne svoje stavove i da i mnogo kvalitetnih objektivnih zapažanja o Šekspirovom stvaralaštvu. Ipak, ovdje dominira ozbiljan istraživački rad koji je Brajson sproveo ispisujući tako jednu nepretencioznu, istinitu i nadahnutu biografiju najvećeg engleskog dramskog pisca svih vremena. S druge strane, Brajson ne piše suvoparnim dokumentarističkim, akademskim i naučnim jezikom nego zadržava svoj šmekerski izraz i svoj specifičan humor koji, možda, nekima neće odgovarati. Djelo je prožeto i mnogim zanimljivostima i anegdotama iz Šekspirovog vremena koje, sigurna sam, mnogi od nas, uključujući i nas koji smo izučavali Šekspira, najvjerovatnije, nismo imali priliku čuti kao dio nekog opšteg znanja i kulture i time ovo djelo ima svoj značaj. Sve u svemu, pitko i kvalitetno.

Slijede dva kratka paragrafa iz ove knjige koja su mi bila posebno upečatljiva i interesantna:
"Duvan koji se u Londonu pojavio godinu dana posle Šekspirovog rođenja, isprva je predstavljao luksuz, ali je uskoro postao tako rasprostranjen da je u gradu krajem veka već bilo ništa manje nego sedam hiljada duvandžija. Korišten je ne samo iz zadovoljstva, već i kao lek za raznovrsne boljke, ubrajajući tu i venerične bolesti, migrenu, pa čak i neprijatan zadah, i smatrao se tako dobrom preventivom protiv kuge da su čak i decu podsticali da ga koriste. Izvesno vreme učenicima u Itonu pretila je kazna batinama ukoliko se ustanovi da zanemaruju duvan."

"Slatka hrana je bila omiljena u svim slojevima društva. Mnoga jela bila su prelivana slatkim lepljivim sirupima, pa se čak i vino ponekad izdašno zaslađivalo, kao i riba, jaja i sve vrste mesa. Šećer je bio tako omiljen da su ljudima često crneli zubi, a oni kojima se to nije dogodilo prirodnim putem, ponekad bi veštački pocrnjivali zube da pokažu kako i oni jedu dosta šećera."

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nyilván ha valaki írt egy könyvet "majdnem mindenről", és utána szükségét érzi, hogy külön Shakespeare-ről is írjon egyet, akkor Shakespeare nem tartozik a "majdnem mindenbe". Hát kösz, Shakespeare nevében.



Közben meg persze igazából arról van szó, hogy Brysont nem az érdekli, mit tudunk Shakespeare-ről (arról már úgyis kismilliom-egy oldalt összeírtak), hanem hogy miért csak ennyit. Amire az egyik válasz természetesen az, hogy mert a csávó retek régen élt. A másik meg az, hogy amikor élt, nem gondolt arra, hogy 500 év múlva irodalomtörténészek fognak ölre menni a "Ki volt Shakespeare?" kérdésen. Hat fennmaradt aláírása van (közülük három - a végrendeletét díszítő - nem is biztosan az övé), és ezeken kétszer nem tudta ugyanúgy leírni a saját nevét - komolyan, mintha trollkodni akart volna a kutatókkal. Közben meg nyilván csak lazán fogta fel a helyesírást, mint akkoriban mindenki - inkább ajánlásnak, mint szabályrendszernek tekintette, pont ahogy a kortárs facebook-kommenterek egy része.

Feltételezhetően a darabjaival kapcsolatban is ritkán jutott eszébe, hogy az örökkévalóságot célozza meg velük. A színpadi művek akkortájt amúgy is "játékok" voltak, a szórakoztatóipar részei, mint manapság a Marvel-mozik vagy a Barátok közt. Azért lettek megírva, hogy a népet becsábítsák a "színház" nevű üzleti vállalkozásba, és ott megkönnyeztessék vagy megnevettessék. A korszak kulturális tömegcikkei voltak, és jó pár száz évig eszébe sem jutott senkinek, hogy a "magaskultúra" Olimposzára kéne őket átköltöztetni.

A pláne az egészben az, hogy Shakespeare így is ekkora májer tudott lenni - kis túlzással a kisujjából rázta ki az angol nyelvet. Hangsúlyozni kell, hogy akkoriban kábé csak a latint tartották alkalmasnak arra, hogy értelmes gondolatokat fejezzünk ki általa, hősünk azonban (akár tudott róla, akár nem) mindent megtett azért, hogy ezt az előítéletet lebontsa. Új szavak és kifejezések ezreit vezette be, megmutatta, milyen hajlékony tud lenni az angol nyelv, milyen gazdag érzelmeket és gondolatokat tud megragadni... Ha az elitnek írt volna, mindez csak szűk körben fejtett volna ki hatást - óriási szerencsének kell tartanunk, hogy a tömegkultúrát választotta a kibontakozás terepének. Simán lehet, ha Shakespeare nem lett volna, Oxfordban még most is holt nyelveken író költőket próbálnának a professzorok valami holt nyelven a hallgatók fejébe verni. (Persze az is simán lehet, hogy nem.)

Ami meg Brysont illeti: ez az ingoványos talaj, a félinformációk és nettó kitalációk világa szemlátomást nagyon fekszik neki. Lubickol az Erzsébet- és Jakab-kor hiányos tényanyagában, mert itt kényelmes tere marad arra, hogy finoman ironikus humorát kiélje. Mondhatnánk, ugyanúgy megújítja a tudományos ismeretterjesztés nyelvét, mint ahogy Shakespeare újította meg az angol nyelvet. De nem mondjuk - ennek megállapítását meghagyjuk a 2500-as esztendő irodalomtörténészeinek. Hátha ők meg majd azon vesznek össze, ki volt Bryson.

[Karina Padureanu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viata lui Shakespeare este aproape un mister, se cunosc extrem de putine lucruri despre ea, desi s-au facut multe cercetari, din pacate putine sunt sansele sa se mai descopere ceva esential.
Insa Bryson ne transporta in acele timpuri si ne putem imagina cam cum a trait.
Ce frumos ar fi sa afle cumva Shakespeare cat de celebru a devenit peste secole ! Desi a avut perioada lui infloritoare in care a fost apreciat, nu avea cum sa realizeze ce impact va avea opera sa asupra literaturii, asupra oamenilor.

Nu am stiut ca el a introdus "o avalansa de cuvinte si sensuri noi" in limba engleza, este impresionant sa contribui la formarea unei limbi ! Ni se par acum firesti cuvintele formate prin adaugarea lui "un", insa el le-a "inventat" pe multe dintre ele...cata imaginatie, cand nimeni nu se gandise pana atunci (exemplu - unmask - a demasca).

"Acum piesele acestea ne fac sa vibram. Dar cum ar fi fost oare pe vremea aia, cand erau nou-noute, cand toate trimiterile lor erau de actualitate si mergeau drept la tinta, iar toate cuvintele nemaiauzite pana atunci?
Inchipuiti-va cum trebuie sa fi fost sa te uiti la "Machbeth" fara sa stii cum se termina, sa faci parte dintr-un public amutit dupa ce a ascultat pentru prima data solilocviul lui Hamlet, sa-l vezi pe Shakespeare rostind versurile scrise chiar de el. Nu cred sa fi existat on istorie prea multe locuri mai privilegiate decat acesta."

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am struggling to recall why exactly I wanted to read this. Many people speak highly of Bryson. But why would I want to read a wry Midwesterner on Shakespeare? I still can’t answer that. This is middlebrow secondary work, not any sort of textual analysis. The entire book addresses the dearth actually known about the Bard. If there is a hero it is the duo who gave us the first Folio.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Bryson is an old friend. His approach to history makes the standard tome all the more flat and dull by comparison – Bryson knows his stuff well enough to not only present it to an audience but to play with it, to have fun with it, to make it fun. He genuinely loves his subjects, and it is infectious. He's like the teacher you always hoped to get – the brilliant, funny, cool one who (to use a real example) sat cross-legged on the table at the front of the room and told the most amazing stories and made you sorry when the class was over, rather than the one who turned the lights off and showed irrelevant slides to a group of uninterested and often napping art students at the deadly time of 3:00 in the afternoon.

With The World as Stage, Bryson has succumbed to the lure of adding to the groaning shelves of Shakespeare biography, with the excuse (if he needs one) that herein will lie only what is known beyond doubt. Shakespeare biography is, he tells us, 90% conjecture, and about 5% fact; here he tries to gather together "just the facts" (I said that, he didn't), and talk about where they originated and about the conjecture they've sparked and the probabilities therein.

For example, he begins with the visual image of Shakespeare as we know it. He efficiently dissects the three images most closely associated with him, the three on which all others are based: the Chandos portrait (which may not be Shakespeare); the engraving which appeared as the frontispiece of the First Folio (which is bloody awful); and the bust that is part of his memorial (many of the details of which have been obliterated). Did he look like any or all of these? Maybe. What, exactly, did he look like? We don't really know.

When was he born, and where? We're not sure.

How did he do in school? We don't even know that he went – though it's probable.

How was his marriage to Anne Hathaway? We have no idea – we don't even know that "Anne" was her name; her father's will refers to her as Agnes. I never knew that.

And so forth. Data is so very scarce for many reasons. It's been four hundred years; records have deteriorated or gone up in flames; what records there are can be next to impossible to locate and once located to read and/or decipher. Shakespeare's name was spelled dozens of different ways, including by himself, and never "Shakespeare". Even with all that, a researcher just can't expect so very many mentions of Shakespeare in the public record: unless he was getting married, baptizing a child, or involved in an arrest or lawsuit (or dying), there simply would be no official documentation. If for no other reason, I would treasure this book for two things: first was the story of the husband and wife team of Charles and Hulda Wallace who, driven in the early 1900's by the husband's obsession with Shakespeare, spent 18 hour days poring over the public record from Will's lifetime and made some discoveries (and then he lost his mind and went paranoiac and into oil). I know it marks me out as a bit freaky, but I'll admit it anyway: I would give a lot to be able to go and spend 18 hours a day studying cramped and often faded and illegible 16th century documents looking for mentions of Shakespeare. Sounds like a dream job. Seriously. The second gift Bryson gives me in this is the concept that if there really was a Love's Labours Won, there were probably enough copies made that it could still be found one day. (Way to reduce a Shakespeare geek to tears, Bryson.) (Sadly, in the interview which serves as Chapter 10, he contradicts that. But hope springs, and all that.)

I call myself a Shakespeare geek, and probably shouldn't; for me it refers to my deep affection and fascination for the man and his work – thirst for knowledge, not necessarily possession of knowledge. I know more than the average bear, but not enough to truly qualify me as a geek. For example, I had no idea that Will's brother Edmund was an actor (and died at only 27 in the same year as their mother, both of unknown causes). I also didn't know Walt Whitman was a rabid anti-Stratfordian (which Bryson doesn't mention, but which I discovered in related reading.) I do know enough not to trust any single source – not even Bill Bryson …

Bill Bryson reads his own words in this audiobook edition, and I enjoy his voice, lightly deep, young and humorous and pleasant. He reads naturally and easily, with healthy pauses where they're needed and not where they are not. And it's fun to listen to the British influence on his accent (he was born in Des Moines, lived there from 1977 to 1995, moved back to the US, then returned to England in '03, where he remains). It's not wholly a British accent, but there is British in it; I feel like Sherlock Holmes tracing his travels through his enunciation, except that I'm going about it backwards.

Much as I enjoy Bryson's reading, though, I'm not sure audio is the best format for this, for me. For a book like this I need to be able to flip back and see what year the will was found, and remind myself of names of the Folger Library archivists Bryson talked to, and how many Shakespeare-related publications he mentioned were there, and so on. It's a lot harder to do this with audio, even the comparatively flexible medium of a digital file on my iPod. Also, I suspect there are illustrations in the tangible editions; there usually is an insert in exactly this sort of book.

If for no other reason, I owe Bill Bryson for a wonderful quote which I am adopting. I may have it tattooed somewhere. Written in a letter to a friend upon having written a preface to Delia Bacon's dense and nutty anti-Stratfordian book (without having read it): "This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as I live." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne. (In L.M. Montgomery, the only people who share my last name are nasty cows. In The World as Stage, the city of my birth is the home and gravesite of Delia Bacon. *sigh*) I kind of want to go lay Hawthorne's quote, in illuminated calligraphy and elaborately framed, on her grave. (I just might.)

Bryson devotes a chapter – a funny, sardonic, bubble-popping chapter – to what is often called the Authorship Question. To wit: that actor guy who couldn't even spell his own name couldn't have written the finest works in the English language. Bryson happily takes that concept apart, and then takes its component pieces apart. I'm a Stratfordian, and … honestly, as a rock-solid Stratfordian, I'll admit, I have a sneaking affection for the Oxfordian theory of authorship. It's fun. It's balderdash, but it is fun. Not, however as much fun as the Marlovian theory – who doesn't love the idea of someone faking his death so as to become a better spy, as well as to go off and write the finest plays and poetry the English language has ever produced? I would love to play with that story … But the Kit-Marlowe-didn't-die-at-Deptford story is mostly wishful thinking for me, because I have an unaccountable fondness for the man.

But when all is said and done, I can only marvel at the insistence of so many otherwise intelligent people that Shakespeare could not have had the education or breadth of experience to write his plays. First of all – no one knows that. Bill Bryson takes great pains to enumerate all the things we do not know about William Shakespeare. (And even at that we know more about him than about 99% of his contemporaries.) Second of all … A large plank in the platform of many of the Theorists is that the author of the plays has to have been a lawyer because of the extent to which the law is referenced in the plays, and/or has to have traveled extensively because of the non-English settings of so many plays … et cetera. I can only conclude that the people who hold those beliefs have never written fiction. I know next to nothing about cars, but if I decided to create a character like Mercedes Thompson I could crack a book or talk to a mechanic (or use the internet), and present a reasonable simulation of expertise. I am not now nor ever have been a forensic analyst, but I can talk (within very strict limits) about petechial hemorrhaging and lividity and epithelial cells and loops and whorls and so on without making a total fool of myself, because of exposure to stories about forensic analysts. If I needed more artistic verisimilitude for an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, I could – again – crack a book or talk to a CSI (or wander the internet). If I want to set a book in Katmandu, I don't have to go there; it's a wonderful thing to be able to do so, but - - it's called "research".

Oddly, it's an defense I haven't seen used in what I've read about the Authorship Question. It just seems so obvious…

Shakespeare was not writing in a vacuum, all alone and armed only with his own direct experience. If fiction was written under those rules, science fiction, fantasy, most mystery, and a large percentage of non-subgenre novels would be impossible. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes a wonderful account of calling up a local vintner to ask what the wire gadget is called that anchors the cork in a champagne bottle. As she points out, most people are delighted to talk about their vocations. All those reference to the law? Shakespeare went out and observed, and read, and talked to lawyers. All those Italian settings? Shakespeare went out and read, and talked to sailors and other travelers (and either did not pay close attention or got bad information, as his geography is way off in several cases). Every single one of the objections that "Shakespeare couldn't have known that" can be knocked down with two simple sentences: "We don't know what he knew", and "If he didn't know, he asked". It's just all so foolish.

What's rather alarming, reading about the theories, is reading in turn about this new movie that came out right around the time I listened to this, "Anonymous". (Which, not to be obtuse about it, is rather an idiotic name, isn't it, if the theory is that in order to disseminate his work Edward DeVere made use of some guy named Shakespeare as a front for the plays? They're not by "Anonymous", after all.) It was part of the Oxfordian cabal's arsenal – and the worrying bit was that they spread high school and college study guides as far and wide as they could. Not, from what I understand, insisting that DeVere was actually the author, but raising the question suggestively. "Make your own decision," they seem to say, "was it Sir Edward DeVere 17th Earl of Oxford … or was it that guy Wilm Shaksper whose father made gloves?"

In the end, for me the Authorship Question has the kind of interest of one of those alternate histories: what if the South had won the Civil War, or if Hitler had won WWII? Or (not that I've seen this one, yet) what if the moon really was made of green cheese? The South didn't and Hitler didn't, and the moon isn't, and while what-if's are entertaining, they're not otherwise productive. And, in the end, did the world desperately need one more book about Shakespeare? Well, no. But am I for one happier because Bill Bryson wrote one? Yeah. I am.

And for heaven's sake, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like Bryson - he has a wonderfully dry sense of humour and at times can have me in stitches laughing. His travel books have delighted me for years and his books on English usage have also been very amusing and fun.

I've never bothered reading much about Shakespeare's life - I have always thought I should, but never seemed to get around to it.

This is a very short biography and no wonder there are so many people out there prepared to put forward so many alternative names for exactly who wrote the plays. If you ever wanted to read about conspiracy theories - this book could easily have been called Shakespeare, the theories.

The riches this man brought to our language are staggering, not just in terms of his plays, but the number of words he brought into the language and the seemingly endless quotable quotes that are now virtually cliches.

This was a quick and easy read and quite a fun read. I don't know if it will improve my understanding of Shakespeare's plays or poetry, but a good read all the same.