Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214 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

Fascinating and accessible approach to Shakespeare
I really enjoyed this book. It was a quick and easy read, admittedly, but it does not bill itself as a Shakepeare textbook or biography and would be a different animal if it was. If you take it at face value, it's a fun read, helped along by Bryson's amusing style.

Read this even if you are bored by Shakespeare
Bought it as a background book to a historical novel on Shakespeare. I knew so little about the man.It is one of the best books I read all year. Bryson explains with great clarity how scholars are forced to deduce so much with very little hard evidence. Even the basic facts that 'every school-child knows' are really conjectures. No contemporary manuscript of his plays exists. His birthday (23 April) is based upon assumptions drawn from his baptism. Even his picture may not be him. Bryson then dances his way through the host of theories, myths and scholastic analysis over the past five hundred years like a wiry court jester. It helped me make sense of it all and even become quite excited. I finally understood the significance of the different folios/quartos - and even more amazingly, I cared. For the first time in 30 odd years I had the urge to re-read Shakespeare's plays and I even thought about buying an audio-tape of Macbeth. I didn't but my hand hesitantly stretched out towards the shelf before I put it down again.

Makes the most of what little there is to know
A neat little book exploring what little we know about Shakespeare's life. Bryson hasn't had the easiest of tasks, trying to work a coherent life out of such scant information and vague references to Shakespeare during his lifetime, and all in all he's done well.

It starts a little dry, and the small details get a bit overwhelming - but then, there is little emotive material to work with so detail is there is to offer. Where Bryson excels is in fleshing out these patchy details with other interesting information about the theatrical conventions of the time, life in Stratford and London, and other literary types who surrounded Shakespeare. In doing so he turns this into a much more interesting biography than it would otherwise have been. The last chapter, relating to the various theories that Shakespeare didn't write the plays and sonnets attributed to him, is where Bryson's wit and sharp humour really come into their own as he batters them down one by one, and the book thus ends on a vibrant note which made me laugh aloud and left a lasting smile!