Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson

(Book Review )

This book has been making the rounds at my office lately. A co-worker passed it on to me with the words: “This is the best book I’ve read in years. Possibly, the best book I’ve ever read.”

That, you'll agree, is high praise indeed. I can’t go quite that far in my own recommendation. But I will say it was a very readable, and very enjoyable, little book.

Even before a co-worker pressed this book on me, it has been on my list of “books-to-get-around-to-reading-eventually.”
I like Bill Bryson (see my reviews of other Bryson books, The Mother Tongue, The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods, Down Under, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.)
And, as a graduate of a couple Shakespeare courses in university, I have some interest in Shakespeare (although I'm far from an expert).
I didn’t know anything about his life, but I was moderately curious about it and more than willing to be guided through by a talented writer like Bryson.

Since I don’t know anything about the life of Shakespeare, I can’t really vouch for the accuracy of this book. I’ll leave that to other reviewers. What I can say is that this book is fun to read. It’s got the warm conversational tone you would expect from Bryson, plus the usual Bryson humour, but it is also packed full of interesting little tidbits of information about Shakespeare and the times he lives in.

The central conceit (or joke) of the book is that we know so little of Shakespeare’s life that it’s almost impossible to make a book out of it, but let’s try anyway. Bryson lays this out in the first chapter.

To answer the obvious question, this book was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, as because this series does. [This book is part of the Harper Collins Series of Biographies "Eminent Lives" (W).] This idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.
Which is one reason, of course, it’s so slender.

You wouldn’t think this would make much of a premise for a book, but Bryson pulls it off.

Bryson lays out the bare facts we know about Shakespeare, and then explains why we know what we know, and why it is that we don’t know much else.
In doing so, he frequently pokes fun of eccentric Shakespeare scholars, who have often spent years and gone to great lengths to search through thousands of 16th century documents just to establish the little that we do know about Shakespeare.
On the other hand, Bryson also makes fun of other Shakespeare biographers who fill in the historical gaps by sometimes making wild inferences about Shakespeare’s life based on questionable assumptions.

And along the way, Bryson drops in the few little facts we know about Shakespeare, and also talks a bit about the life and times Shakespeare lived in.

In doing so, Bryson is easily able to stretch out the facts into a very readable 195 pages.

What else is there really to say about this book?

...well, I guess if I were pressed, I could come up with a few notes and nitpicks.

* The section on Shakespeare’s vocabulary and his contributions to the English language is essentially a repeat of information Bryson has already included in his previous work The Mother Tongue. So if you’ve already read The Mother Tongue, it’s slightly tiresome to have to read this same information twice. However this makes up only a small section of the book, (only 6 pages, 108-114) so it’s forgivable.

* There were a few points in this book that left me mildly confused, and there are a few points I would have liked to learn more about.
Maybe it’s just me as a history buff, but I would have enjoyed more discussion about the politics and ideologies behind Shakespeare’s history plays. I’ve heard before that many of Shakespeare’s history plays were designed to reinforce the claims to the throne of Elizabeth I and James I respectively, but I don’t know as much about this as I would like. Bryson mentions in passing that Macbeth makes reference to the gunpowder plot, but he doesn’t give the actual line. I would have liked to read the actual lines.
Also I would have liked some clearer idea of how much we know of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. For example on page 194, Bryson mentions in passing that Ben Johnson kept private notebooks. How much can we know about Ben Johnson’s life through his private notebooks? How common a practice was this in the 17th century?

And there are various other questions that are still lingering in my mind after reading this book.

But on the whole, considering how easy this book is to read and how slender it is, you get a good education on Shakespeare for very little effort. You can't beat that.

Link of the Day
Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t Co-Opted Human Rights”

Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)