Note: This title is one in a series of brief biographies from Atlas Books/Harper Collins titled Eminent Lives. Notes the publisher: "The key to the Eminent Lives series is the pairing of author and subject: distinguished writers on figures central to world culture."
"Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession,” writes Bill Bryson near the beginning of this slim volume. "The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous." So why yet another biography of The Bard? "The idea is a simple one," notes Bryson, "to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record."
The answer, apparently, is not a lot. Shakespeare, according to Bryson, "is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron—forever there and not there."
We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.
Indeed, what the public record reveals about Shakespeare fits comfortably within the confines of a paragraph. Bryson has taken these meager mentions and passing references and created an engaging, highly readable biographical essay.
Written chronologically and divided into nine chapters, the book covers Shakespeare’s early life, the lost years, his time in London, and his death.
One of the more fascinating chapters is titled "Plays." Here Bryson offers insights into Shakespeare’s success. It was not, he writes, "without its shortcuts. Shakespeare didn’t scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names, and titles—whatever suited his purpose." Bryson further notes, however, ". . . this was a charge that could be laid against nearly all writers of the day. To Elizabethan playwrights plots and characters were common property."
Shakespeare’s vocabulary, writes Bryson, "showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs, and natural history (he mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms, both large numbers), but in other respects Shakespeare’s knowledge was not all that distinguished." He often got his geography wrong. And anachronisms, notes Bryson, "likewise abound in his plays. He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to Caesar’s Rome 1,400 years before the first mechanical tick was heard there." Shakespeare’s genius, contends Bryson, "had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school." Bryson further writes:
It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language.
Shakespeare was a phrasemaker par excellence. "If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide," writes Bryson, "then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception."
In a final chapter, titled "Claimants," Bryson discusses the controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s work. Could his plays, "so brim with expertise—on law, medicine, statesmanship, court life, military affairs, the bounding main, antiquity, life abroad"—been written by "a single lightly educated provincial?" Bryson examines and then dismisses these claims:
. . . 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.
Shakespeare: The World as Stage is a supremely satisfying read. Bryson, in his characteristically wise and witty fashion, brings to life for readers the greatest writer the Western world has known.
Highly recommended.
Reviewed by the teachers at Education Oasis
©2008 Education Oasis http://www.educationoasis.com
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