Shakespeare
The World as Stage
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Bill Bryson’s bestselling and brilliantly witty biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship—updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death
William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself in this captivating historical biography. His Shakespeare is like no one else’s—the beneficiary of Bryson’s genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.
Bryson’s quest to uncover the real Shakespeare delivers a lively and accessible look at the man and his world:
A Tour of Elizabethan England: Journey back to a time of plague, plotting, and brilliant creativity, exploring the world that shaped the famous playwright.Shakespearean Scholarship Debunked: With his trademark skepticism, Bryson navigates the eccentric theories and wild suppositions that have long obscured the truth about the Bard.The Man Behind the Plays: Sifting through the scant facts, this engaging account moves beyond the million words of text to reveal a surprisingly human and relatable figure.Accessible Literary History: Forget dry academic analysis. This is a story-driven exploration, perfect for anyone who wants to understand the life behind the literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself. In the absence of much documentation about his life, we have the plays and poetry he wrote. In this addition to the Eminent Lives series, bestselling author Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered. Bryson's curiosity serves him well, as he delves into subjects as diverse as the reliability of the extant images of Shakespeare, a brief history of the theater in England and the continuing debates about whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really wrote Shakespeare's works. Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive as Bryson puts it, "he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron forever there and not there."
