Shakespeare: The World as Stage

På English

ISBN:: 978-0-06-074022-1

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 supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's--the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and an unrivaled gift for storytelling.--From publisher description.

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Björn recenserade Shakespeare: The World as Stage av Bill Bryson

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There's not a lot we know about one of the greatest writers of all time. So little, in fact, that people for the last 200 years have been speculating that maybe he didn't even write the works he's credited with.

Bryson dismisses all such claims in one of the funniest chapters of the book - noting that three of the leading "anti-Stratfordians" are named Looney, Silliman, and Battey - and instead focuses on presenting what we do know about Shakespeare, what we can reasonably assume about him, and how we know it. And as always with Bryson, it's all presented in a very light, entertaining but informative tone.

There's a lot of interesting information in here, both about Shakespeare the person (the little we know of him), his career and how his works survived, and the society that formed him. What I would have liked to hear more about is …

There's not a lot we know about one of the greatest writers of all time. So little, in fact, that people for the last 200 years have been speculating that maybe he didn't even write the works he's credited with.

Bryson dismisses all such claims in one of the funniest chapters of the book - noting that three of the leading "anti-Stratfordians" are named Looney, Silliman, and Battey - and instead focuses on presenting what we do know about Shakespeare, what we can reasonably assume about him, and how we know it. And as always with Bryson, it's all presented in a very light, entertaining but informative tone.

There's a lot of interesting information in here, both about Shakespeare the person (the little we know of him), his career and how his works survived, and the society that formed him. What I would have liked to hear more about is the society that he formed; his literature, and the influence it had on the coming 400 years. That's not the book Bryson set out to write, and I guess I'll have to keep looking for one of those. For now, Shakespeare is definitely recommended for those who want to know who ol' Billy Stratford was.