Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'This season's best-selling volume.' Independent 'A brilliantly funny and gently insightful travel guide to 16th century England. Bryson is great at picking out of the morass of Elizabethan fact the small details that illuminate and amuse!he also uncovers from the world that surrounded the theatre some fascinating examples of Elizabethan eccentricity!As an abbreviated tour around the world of Shakespeare, this could hardly be bettered.' Sunday Times 'Bill Bryson has always been able to spot a market; and there ought to be a market for his latest book!an accessible, sensible Life of Shakespeare!surely a fine gift for someone encountering Shakespeare for the first time!Bryson is shrewd!and as funny as you'd expect...he sets down all the important bits of evidence, and assesses them in a measured scholarly way. He's good value too.' Daily Telegraph 'Measured, sensible and, at times, as wryly humorous as you'd expect.' The Times 'Bryson uses an inimitably light touch and squeezes a vast subject down to manageable proportions!he is a warm and funny guide through the whole complicated morass of Shakespearean scholarship.' Financial Times 'Bill Bryson offers us a brisk summary of all the things we'd like to know, but don't!enough to be absorbed in an entertaining evening.' Daily Mail 'Bill Bryson's short biography of Shakespeare is a delight!fresh, concise and!sharply illuminting!Bryson is brilliant at picking out just a few telltale details to paint a bigger picture!a gem of a book, likely to be useful to both beginners and to seasoned Shakespeareans alike.' Mail on Sunday Praise for 'A Short History of Nearly Everything': 'A modern classic.' The New York Times 'It represents a wonderful education, and all schools would be better places if it were the core science reader on the curriculum.' Times Literary Supplement Praise for 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid': 'Outlandishly and improbably entertaining!inevitably [I] would be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter.' New York Times 'Always witty and sometimes hilarious!wonderfully funny and touching.' Literary Review

A telling glance at one of history's most famously unknowable figures.As sometimes happens with expatriates, journalist Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) often turned his attention to his native America during his 20-year residence in England (Made in America, 1995, etc.). Apparently he's now been back home long enough to look the other way in this 12th volume in James Atlas's well-received Eminent Lives series. And who better fits the bill for this assortment of brief biographies than Shakespeare, the literary behemoth who practically defines the Western canon yet boasts a CV that could hardly be slimmer. As the typically wry Bryson observes, "It is because we have so much of Shakespeare's work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know." Bryson is just as happy to point out what we can't. To him, Shakespeare is the "literary equivalent of an electron - forever there and not there." Indeed, he makes so much of the fact that so much has been made from the singularly few known facts of the Bard's life that one might say this thin volume's raison d'etre is to identify the many paradoxes surrounding all things Shakespeare, which Bryson candidly illuminates in several deft turns of phrase. That is as good a tack as any to take in this sort of Cliffs Notes - style overview of the rich afterlife and times of Shakespeare, recognized as great, Bryson claims, for his "positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language" - a point on which even those who don't believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare would agree, and a trait he happens to share with his biographer.Shakespeare redux for the common reader. (Kirkus Reviews)

Time Out
'A joy from first to last...An accessible, exhilarating biography that's shot through with Bryson's trademark humour and irreverence...Tremendous.'

Irish Times
'Bryson's short biography is about as enjoyable as history books get. Bryson brings his trademark wit to a complex subject.'

Customer Reviews

Brief Candle
Bryson on top form in this brief "bio" of the Bard. The book illustrates for the uninitiated (like me) what a dearth of knowledge there actually IS about Shakespeare but still paints a vivid picture of the man and, especially, his times. Entertaining from the off and leaving one thirsting for more.

Not Bryson the humourist
This is the only Bryson I have read which I thought lacking in his characteristic wit. He tells us that little is known about The Bard. He starts with his portraits but the book has no illustrations. He does give us rich historical context for the bard so we do learn a lot about his world and how slowly his historic reputation grew. He debunks the critics who want Baconian or other supposed authorship. One clear prejudice comes through. Bryson dislikes the Puritans. He describes them as a threat to Christian orthodoxy and attributes their fleeing to the American wilderness to their refusal to embrace tolerance rather than to their true motivation, reform of an intolerant Church of England which under the Stuarts wanted to enforce conformity in worship, a folly which gave us not only Pilgrims but civil war.

Not prudish
I am just reading Bryson's "Shakespeare" and came across a remark saying that the swan's language is ""quite clean, indeed almost prudish" (page 111 of the paperback edition). This statement is not true. One should consult a book on Shakespeare's bawdy by Ertic Partridge and it can easily be recognized that Shakespeare was a "dirty" as almost all his contemporaries (e.g. Middleton)in specific situations. Especially people who have left the path of the heavenly order are inclined to speak in ambiguities, one meaning always being really obscene. Just contact the porter scene. Munch of it which is generally called dark becomes quite plausible when you make your imagination flow.