Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) | 
|  | | | Title: | Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) | | Author: | Bill Bryson | | Publisher: | Eminent Lives | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 01 November, 2007 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0060740221 / 9780060740221 | | List Price: | $19.95 | | You Save: | $6.38 | | Amazon Price: | $13.57 | |
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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:
• How Little We Can Know 20 August, 2008
With this book, the ever succinct Bill Bryson exposes how little we know and can know about one of the world's most recognized figures. The writer left only a few bland papers, wills and court fillings. His time left some engravings, some diaries. Of course, there are the plays themselves and the sonnets, mined for biography by many. Much of what is commonly believed is conjecture or invention from a sense of "had to be" that only started long after his death with each generation adding, not examining prior imaginings. Our need to know a man of such influence and the absence of first hand accounts forced their creation and promoted their endurance.
That great bald head. Every one of the three - and there are only three - portrayals of him are open to question. Was this or that lord his patron or do we just repeat the opinions of biographers writing long after his death? Ever look over the new globe theatre in London, the "reproduction" of Shakespeare's original? One, just one, image of a theatre like it survives. Not it, of one just like it and so you looked around what? And Bryson even finds space for the line of strangely named enthusiasts who believed someone else wrote Shakespeare, that a man from backwater Stratford had no business exploring humanity.
This small book shows once again that the most interesting of history is the making of history itself, exposing her process, that showing how little we can know is the greatest gift of the truly inquisitive.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A38RAHEKGHKM6S
• If There Be Nothing New * 31 August, 2008
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
- Reviewed by customer ID: AKR4DH6WLF6GG
• A Summary Of His Life And A Defense Of His Authorship Via Bryson 27 August, 2008
Bryson is the perfect choice for this addition to the "Eminent Lives" series, as he takes what little is known about Shakespeare's life and distills it into an easily digestible biography. Conceding that little is known about Shakespeare, Bryson succeeds in capturing the writer and bringing his life into the best focus possible. Filling in the few details he can, Bryson proceeds to create an idea of Shakespeare that forms as solid a portrait as we are ever likely to get. While that alone is praiseworthy, the real outstanding achievement in this work is Bryson's dissection of the "Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" myths with a case by case demolition of each one of those silly attempts by others to find the "real" Shakespeare. All the pretenders are examined and thoroughly debunked and that alone makes this book must reading.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3DXVYD2TQHWGD
• Wit, Logic, And Love For The Bard 27 August, 2008
In Shakespeare: The World as Stage, Bill Bryson tackles the enigma that is Shakespeare by majoring on only those facts that are definitely known about him. Much time is spent exploring the world of Shakespeare's day to reach an understanding of the kind of man he was in relation to his era and his people. Bryson makes the case that a surprising quantity of details survive for this man in an age when such things were rarely codified. Bryson also explores Shakespeare's family, his role as actor, the rumors surrounding him, and answers the claims that he was not who history says he is. His wit and logic as he debunks the many baseless theories and projections about other Shakespeares is truly worth the read. Grade: A.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3II2CGKQG19GT
• As Much As Most People Will Ever Want To Know 31 August, 2008
When I visited Ashland, Oregon's Shakespeare Festival the buyer in their large, authoritative bookstore suggested this as a good basic biography of William Shakespeare. I've concluded it was a good recommendation for several reasons.
It is a relatively brief 224 pages because Bryson makes the case that extremely few documented facts are known about Shakespeare's life. It seems that essentially nothing is known about Shakespeare's relationships with his immediate family members or known theatrical colleagues, and there are blocks of years during which nothing can be said with certainty about even where he lived much less what he was doing. Bryson makes the case that other - more scholarly? - biographies of The Bard which purport to provide greater detail are, of necessity, essentially speculative if not fictitious. He also explains that most of the visual images we have of Shakespeare and his world - portraits, busts, drawings of The Globe theater, etc., - are demonstratably, or at least arguably, inaccurate if for no other reason than they are non-contemporaneous.
Besides telling us about as much as can be documented about Shakespeare's life Bryson provides an interesting overview of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater world which was an important social and financial phenomenon that brought people of all classes together in intimate surroundings on a daily basis. In a period of less than 150 years - the Puritans shut down the theaters in 1642 - more than 12,000 new words entered the English language of which 2,035 are attributed to - or at have their first recorded by - William Shakespeare. And we learn that the bulk of Shakespeare's work might have been lost forever if his fellow thespians had not collected his plays into what we know as The First Folio within a few years of his death.
Bryson devotes a useful chapter to summarizing the cult that has grown up - dating from the early 1800s - around the effort to demonstrate that Shakespeare's work was actually written by someone else; there are multiple suspects. Most of this "scholarship" is far more speculative than even the most speculative Shakespearean biographies, and Bryson makes the case that the not-Shakespeare faux exposes are clearly absurd; more than one of the candidates died before several of Shakespeare's plays were written. The argument against these theories that exhibits the most common sense is that absolutely nobody alive when the plays were produced questioned that Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon wrote them and, in fact, numerous well known contemporaries praised The Bard.
Bryson's style is fast moving and the material is well organized, but fans of Bryson's trademark sarcastic humor won't find any of it here. There is a five-page bibliography.
Highly recommended.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2MFUK442KQAPQ
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