Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson

Such a satisfying read.  Finally.  Of course, considering the content, this one's pretty par for the course: it's hard to mess up Shakespeare for me.  (The only one who's ever done that is a certain undergrad professor of mine - who will remain unnamed, although that's probably an unnecessary courtesy.  She said once, literally, "Shakespeare was a pretty good writer for his time," as we read through his masterpiece Hamlet.)  This book is comparatively well-informed and -researched, with a substantial bibliography (many works of which I already own.  Yes!)

Shakespeare is a delightful, engaging, and succinct overview of the main points of one William Shakespeare's life.  Bryson discusses and probes various theories to the overwhelming silence of Shakespeare's life outside his plays and poetry, and gives the reader clear understanding of what we may believe to be true, without tremendous assumption (which, unfortunately, Shakespeare scholars and aficionados are wont to do.) 

In regards to his schooling, for instance, Bryson puts it this way:

Shakespeare's genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering -- things that aren't taught in school.  He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays -- unlike, say, those of Ben Jonson, where learning hangs like bunting on every word.  Nothing we find in Shakespeare betrays any acquaintance with Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, or others who influenced Johnson and were second nature to Francis Bacon.  That is a good thing -- a very good thing indeed -- for he would almost certainly have been less Shakespeare and more a showoff had he been better read.  As John Dryden put it in 1668: "Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd."

And so, we love him for his humanity.

Bryson also addresses the various theories as to who Shakespeare "really" was (e.g. Marlowe, Bacon, de Vere.)  He sheds light on the origins of these theories - briefly, thank God - and concludes thusly:

In short it is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare.  But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so.  These people must have been incredibly gifted -- to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward.  The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later.  Now that is genius!

Haha.  Oh, Bill Bryson.  Thank you for charming me once again.