"Shakespeare", Bill Bryson
Well, I suppose the big beardy Anglophile yank had to do it sooner or later.
As Bryson himself says in his introduction, the world doesn't really need another book on Shakespeare. From the incredibly specific and obscure to the uselessly vague and general, from the trivially lightweight to the inaccessibly somber, the Bard of Stratford is the subject of literally dozens of new books of facts, biography, analysis, opinion, theory and conjecture, every damn year.
For all that, this was a worthwhile book to have written, which is more or less all we'd expect of Bryson, who is a clear, clever and witty writer who rarely fails to please.
Bryson has chosen biography as his goal. The book is written in more or less chronological order, with chapters covering distinct periods in Will's life. Bryson starts by characterising the period, analysing the (usually scant) evidence available, then raising and scrutinising the various popular interpretations about what is known. He detours occasionally into anecdotal discussion about his researches or funny or impressive stories about other people's attempts at research, which all over helps it from getting too dry and to remain a very Bryson book.
Throughout he's diligent about the distinction between evidence and interpretation. The problem is, we actually have pretty slender information about Shakespeare's life: a veritable wealth of data by the standards of Elizabethans in general, but still very little from which to derive any reliable idea of the facts of his life. Inevitably, this means foraying into conjecture from time to time; a practice at which Shakespearean academe excels, but a dangerous one. Bryson gives an example of the famous deer-poaching incident, a romantic guess made in the eighteenth century that was repeated as solid fact in Shakespeare scholarship for more than a hundred years after. Bryson, by contrast, while happy to include reasonable and useful guesses as to how to interpret what is known, is very careful to let you know what's fact - and where it's from - and what's conjecture and how it was arrived at.
If you're seriously into your Shakespeare scholarship, this book probably doesn't have anything new to tell you (although Bryson's research is up to date, and he has access to facts I didn't have at Uni), but if you're only likely to buy one Shakespeare biography in your life, this isn't a bad one to choose.
If you're reading these, you may wonder why all my reviews have been positive. The thing is, I'm most interested in talking books I enjoyed. But if I can think of a book that didn't impress me in an interesting way, I'll put something up.