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Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives) | 
| Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  51 reviews
Sales Rank: 143
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 000719790X
EAN: 9780007197903
ASIN: 000719790X
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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| Customer Reviews: Read 46 more reviews...
Fascinating and accessible approach to Shakespeare November 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 October 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 September 26, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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!
 Much Ado About Nothing September 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Although his name is oft bandied about as a must read this is the first time I've ever had the chance. Bryson that is not Shakespeare! This serves as a nice intro to Shakespeare the man with a "just the facts ma'am" approach. And as he admits, this slim volume is a testament to the fact that what we can take as absolute fact about Shakespeare is very little at all.
For a giant in literary terms Shakespeare has left very few footprints. However as Bryson points out this isn't as odd as it might sound, one can't reasonably expect records dating 400 years ago to either be in a sturdy condition or to be legible or even to have survived numerous calamities over the years from natural fires to German bombing campaigns. The fact that the actual early copies of manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays account for about 15 % of all surviving plays from the late Elizabethan / early Jacobean period is pretty remarkable in and of itself.
The author obviously allows room to discuss the speculation of other scholars or this would be a very very slim volume indeed, but he clearly demarcates between what is established fact and what is theory. From his early years we get the speculation of his education and whether he was a secret Catholic, to the sparse years in London before becoming an established writer taking in such romantic fancies that he sailed with Drake.
The one thing Bryson holds no stock in at all is the theory that Shakespeare is not the author of the plays and though he dutifully covers all the potential others he is quite clear on the lack of any tangible evidence that anyone other than William of Stratford wrote the plays
The Perfect Layman's Biography of Shakespeare September 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Well, I suppose the big beardy Anglophile yank had to do it sooner or later.
As Bryson himself says in his introduction, the world doesn't really need another book on Shakespeare. From the incredibly specific and obscure to the uselessly vague and general, from the trivially lightweight to the inaccessibly somber, the Bard of Stratford is the subject of literally dozens of new books of facts, biography, analysis, opinion, theory and conjecture, every damn year.
For all that, this was a worthwhile book to have written, which is more or less all we'd expect of Bryson, who is a clear, clever and witty writer who rarely fails to please.
Bryson has chosen biography as his goal. The book is written in more or less chronological order, with chapters covering distinct periods in Will's life. Bryson starts by characterising the period, analysing the (usually scant) evidence available, then raising and scrutinising the various popular interpretations about what is known. He detours occasionally into anecdotal discussion about his researches or funny or impressive stories about other people's attempts at research, which all over helps it from getting too dry and to remain a very Bryson book.
Throughout he's diligent about the distinction between evidence and interpretation. The problem is, we actually have pretty slender information about Shakespeare's life: a veritable wealth of data by the standards of Elizabethans in general, but still very little from which to derive any reliable idea of the facts of his life. Inevitably, this means foraying into conjecture from time to time; a practice at which Shakespearean academe excels, but a dangerous one. Bryson gives an example of the famous deer-poaching incident, a romantic guess made in the eighteenth century that was repeated as solid fact in Shakespeare scholarship for more than a hundred years after. Bryson, by contrast, while happy to include reasonable and useful guesses as to how to interpret what is known, is very careful to let you know what's fact - and where it's from - and what's conjecture and how it was arrived at.
If you're seriously into your Shakespeare scholarship, this book probably doesn't have anything new to tell you (although Bryson's research is up to date, and he has access to facts I didn't have at Uni), but if you're only likely to buy one Shakespeare biography in your life, this isn't a bad one to choose.
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