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Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.33
EAN: 9780060740221
ISBN: 0060740221
Label: Eminent Lives
Manufacturer: Eminent Lives
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: November 01, 2007
Publisher: Eminent Lives
Release Date: October 23, 2007
Studio: Eminent Lives
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Editorial Review: 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A summary of his life and a defense of his authorship via Bryson
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Wit, Logic, and Love for the Bard
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - How little we can know
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 ... Read More
Rating: - There's small choice in rotten apples
Bill Bryson is more or less superman in today's literary world. He transcends subjects in a single bound and the globe in another. He's a talented critic, writer and humourist. It's a good job, to use modern vernacular, that he's the daddy because, with this one, he's taken on the mother of all literary subjects.
He's done so wisely. He's not attempted to become an original researcher and posit new theories about the man's identity or his plays and other works. He has essentially evaluated ... Read More
Rating: - Who was Shakespeare?
This is a brief, but very enjoyable and elegant read by someone who obviously loves this subject and its environment.
Bill Bryson gives this question of Shakespeare's identity a pretty good shot. There is apparently no definitive answer as to whether he was simply himself, someone else under a pseudo name, or several people under the same pseudo name. Even his portrait that we know him by is questionable. We do get interesting little glimpses of the times and the life of the person who purported ... Read More
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