Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)

Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) Review

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is a succinct but entertaining short biography of the Bard of Avon. It's author is Bill Bryson who has published such best sellers as "A Walk in the Woods" and "A Short History of Nearly Everything". The native of Iowa who has lived for many years in Norfolk, England is a fan of the English language and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). This book is one of the short biographies on famous folks published by Atlas Books in their James Atlas edited series "Eminent Lives."
Among the things we learn in this book are:
1. We have very little evidence to go on in constructing a life of Shakespeare. We have only 14 lines in his own handwriting; his will and a court document.
2. We know nothing about how loving or miserable was his life with his wife Anne Hutchinson or his relationships with his two daughters or sons. He willed his wife his second best bed!
3. The years of 1585-92 when Shakespeare was earning his spurs in playwriting and acting in London are completely blank.
4. Shakespeare wrote his greatest plays during the reign of King James I who became king in 1603 following the death of Elizabeth I.
5. Life in Shakespeare's day was short and often brutal. Plagues swept away large numbers of citizens; bear baiting and other cruel sports were popular and the English population was at a low due to disease.
6. No one has proven that Will Shakespeare did not write the plays. He probably had a good elementary education in Stratford, knew Latin and Greek and was generally well educated for the day.
7. It is doubtful if such people as Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe wrote the plays. Bryson provides various reasons for his doubts anyone but Shakespeare wrote the 38 plays
8. There are over 2,000 word coinages first used in Shakesperean drama. He was an excellent wordsmith and poet.
9. Shakespeare is the greatest author in English writing such masterpieces as Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeon and Juliet, Measure for Measure, the history plays and such comedies as A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It.
10. Shakespeare retired from the stage in 1613 dying in Stratford. He was not rich.
10. We have no proof as to what were Shakespeare's religious beliefs.
Bill Bryson has done a good job on this informative little book. It could be used with profit in high school classes involved in a unit on Shakespeare.
The book provides good material on life in the sixteenth century

Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) Overview

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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