Product Description

This short biography of William Shakespeare by world famous writer Bill Bryson brims with the author's inimitable wit and intelligence. Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard -- from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died. Following his international bestsellers 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' and 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid', Bill Bryson has written a short biography of William Shakespeare for the Eminent Lives series -- which seeks to pair great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view. Key title / Bill Bryson is famed the world over and he has a massive fan base. / He has been a consistent international bestseller with all of his previous books. / 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' has sold just under 1.2 million copies in the UK alone and 'Notes from a Small Island' has sold 800k. / This eminent life pairs two of the most celebrated and loved writers in the English language. / Competition: James Shapiro, Dominic Dromgoole

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179 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

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 and sumamrised the existing state of Shakepearian debate and study, providing his own critique of what is compelling and credible. Thankfully, Bryson was born without a 'boredom gene' and the book reaches any audience, reading so easily. The man does not do dull.

Typically, Bryson's prose is litered with diverting and revealing anecdoes, we get a potted physical history of the theatre alongside the exposition of the central figure. Bryson is expert at demonstrating the lack of hard information about Shakespeaare (I spelled that incorrectly, but then, so did the Bard...) and the vulnerability about the claims and surmises made about his life and character. That will no doubt ruffle feathers. I found it interesting to learn that Shakespeare had thieved so many of his stories from others. As also did I find the battle for written English over Latin. The fact there were lost plays is new to me too. So to non-Shakespeare scholars this offers a lot.

To those who are scholars I am not sure it will be depthy enough to satisfy but they are not the prime audience I'd suppose. Bryson's great economy of expression, wit and clarity mean he is less self-indulgent in this book than perhaps any other of his that I have read (which is all but one, that being the African diaries). Although always near the surface, his trademark wit is less in evidence, reserved for a full scale assault on those who feel Shakespeare was somebody else. That business is clearly a cottage industry and I know Bryson has trodden on somebody else's cucumbers here by reason of the ridicule he heaps on the alternate theories.

It is a short book. There could have been more. But how much more was truly needed? And at whatever point should he have stopped on an almost inexhaustible subject populated by many including purists and pedants? Nevertheless one gets the impression he made a judgement about the length that possibly excluded a little more hard work examining various omissions from the life of the Bard and those who knew or worked with him.

Bryson's book has one central curiosity. It is really the oppositite of a biography - more a book about what we don't know than what we do - and that is refreshing in itself. I think he's done a first rate job here given how well aired the subject is.

And for his next trick...?

Incidentally, the title I gave to this is a quote from one of the Bard's plays and seems to convey Bryson's attitude to much of the literature he discovered!

Informative, entertaining and readable
Any biographer of Shakespeare is faced with a problem: the known facts about Shakespeare's life would only fill one rather short chapter. Some biographers discuss at length various speculations about possible events in his life, but Bill Bryson wisely avoids most of this, briefly dismissing, for example, the story that he was caught poaching.

Instead, Bryson fills the book with a colourful depiction of life in Elizabethan England, describing for example food and drink, religion, the theatre, and the city of London. My only criticism of the book is that some of the historical stories, such as the Spanish Armada, the Essex rebellion and the gunpowder plot, will already be known to many readers.

Bryson has clearly taken his research seriously, and interviewed leading Shakespeare scholars as well as visiting the Folger library where many of the First Folios are kept.

Particularly entertaining is the final chapter where Bryson debunks the various theories (one of them proposed by a Thomas Looney) that the plays were written by someone else.

This is an informative and enjoyable book, and much easier to read than the more substantial Shakespeare biographies.

Enjoyable and informative
This is an easy to enjoy book offering the latest thinking on the world's greatest playwright, written in Bryson's typical witty and brisk style. It can be read over a short period of time - in fact, you find yourself wishing it was longer.
One of the most common phrases in the book is 'nothing is known about...' or 'very little is known about...' Bryson does not include information that is not fully backed up, or if he does, he discounts it. So there are times when you become a little exasperated at the lack of information. But the book is never less than highly entertaining, and full of piquant anecdotes and nuggets of information.