Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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Bryson succeeds admirably in providing a context for Shakespeare's life and works. He describes what was happening in England throughout The Bard's lifetime, and how those events and attitudes might have shaped his choices and influenced his writing. For instance, the issue of Queen Elizabeth's succession was a national preoccupation for much of Shakespeare's life. It's no surprise, then, that one quarter of his plays deal with questions of royal succession.

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. 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. What did Shakespeare look like? We don't know. ThereBryson has written several books, including the prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything . The book under review is provided as a volume in the “Eminent Lives” series of concise biographies by various authors and, as such, conforms to an imposed restriction on length. With candid honesty that permeates his offering, Bryson notes that the world didn’t really need another Shakespeare biography but that the “Eminent Lives” series did. Bryson is straightforward in admitting that no groundbreaking research is presented, but rather the biography gathers the known facts, the supposed facts, and much pithy innuendo into a single engaging and accessible overview. Bryson’s strength, then, lies not so much in his Shakespearean expertise but rather in his obvious ability to turn a phrase. Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9784 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary_edition To start – I never really knew much about Shakespeare. I knew the basics. And I realized starting the book that I’ve never actually read one of his plays all the way through, though I have seen a couple performed. 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. Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different—often very different—ways of shaping particular letters.”

The short answer to this is not much. We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. “His sexuality,” Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.” 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."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. Mr. Bryson goes off at times on amusing tangents, makes pointed parenthetical remarks and is otherwise completely charming and conversational, like a good host. The pleasure of his company cannot, to borrow a phase from him, “be emphasized too strenuously.” 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.

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

The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Seeing Further – The Story of Science and the Royal Society". The Royal Society. 28 January 2010 . Retrieved 5 December 2022. 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. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratfrod was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.” Wroe, Nicholas (14 March 2015). "Bill Bryson: 'When I came here the UK was poorer but much better looked after' ". The Guardian.a b Crace, John (15 November 2005). "Bill Bryson: The accidental chancellor". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 10 February 2008 . Retrieved 26 April 2010. Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare’s life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier’s “discoveries” had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859.” Adapted, in 2009, as an illustrated children's edition titled "A Really Short History of Nearly Everything"