2014 Book 35: Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Book 35: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson, isbn: 9780739495100, harper, 199 pages, $13.99
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): At first glance, Bill Bryson seems an odd choice to write this addition to the Eminent Lives series. The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Reading 'Shakespeare The World As Stage', however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task. The man who gave us 'The Mother Tongue' and 'A Walk in the Woods' approaches Shakespeare with the same freedom of spirit and curiosity that made those books such reader favorites. A refreshing take on an elusive literary master.
My Rating: Four stars out of five
My Thoughts: Bryson's take on the life of William Shakespeare is a breezy read that manages to get the few details we know for sure about the Bard's life across without a great deal of authorial wish-fulfillment or extrapolation. At just short of 200 pages, this is probably the shortest Shakespeare biography ever published, precisely because the author doesn't pretend to know things that are essentially unknowable unless some hidden trove of personal papers of Shakespeare's are discovered (which seems to be growing less likely as each decade passes). I found the book a fun read -- Bryson's accessible, snarky-but-sincere voice is in full evidence even though he's not writing about his own personal experiences the way he does in his travelogues and memoirs -- that gave me a decent sense of what we really know versus what we've only guessed at. Bryson also addresses, at the very end of the book, the various controversies about whether William Shakespeare the man was simply a stand-in for someone else as the author of the works, and uses what we do know (including modern linguistics analysis) to refute the more common theories (including Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon).
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): At first glance, Bill Bryson seems an odd choice to write this addition to the Eminent Lives series. The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Reading 'Shakespeare The World As Stage', however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task. The man who gave us 'The Mother Tongue' and 'A Walk in the Woods' approaches Shakespeare with the same freedom of spirit and curiosity that made those books such reader favorites. A refreshing take on an elusive literary master.
My Rating: Four stars out of five
My Thoughts: Bryson's take on the life of William Shakespeare is a breezy read that manages to get the few details we know for sure about the Bard's life across without a great deal of authorial wish-fulfillment or extrapolation. At just short of 200 pages, this is probably the shortest Shakespeare biography ever published, precisely because the author doesn't pretend to know things that are essentially unknowable unless some hidden trove of personal papers of Shakespeare's are discovered (which seems to be growing less likely as each decade passes). I found the book a fun read -- Bryson's accessible, snarky-but-sincere voice is in full evidence even though he's not writing about his own personal experiences the way he does in his travelogues and memoirs -- that gave me a decent sense of what we really know versus what we've only guessed at. Bryson also addresses, at the very end of the book, the various controversies about whether William Shakespeare the man was simply a stand-in for someone else as the author of the works, and uses what we do know (including modern linguistics analysis) to refute the more common theories (including Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon).