bedsitter23

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am not necessarily a big fan of the Bard, but I am a big fan of Bryson, so I thought it might be worth checking out.

I like the idea of the Eminent Lives series. The idea is that you already have some idea of the person so you don't need a lot of general details you already know; but you also aren't interested in investing time in a 500plus page biography.

This was pretty fascinating to me. Essentially, we know next to nothing about Shakespeare. The pictures we have of him are unreliable. The same goes for the Globe Theater. Based on recollections years later. It is weird to think about this in a Instagram/Twitter age where we know literally everything about our stars. Still, no one thought to interview Shakespeare's children or any other matter of things to capture him for posterity.

It is a miracle we have what we have. The collections of his works weren't always reliable (not unlike today, where every funny song on YouTube is credited to Weird Al). The references we do have are when Will shows up in legal documents of the day. Instead of making things clearer, what we do have just increases the mystery.

So many of the phrases and quotes we take for granted came from Shakespeare. The book ends with some of the theories have had about The Bard not being The Bard throughout the years. While we know next to nothing about the real Bill Shakespeare, it is still quite clear he existed. It wasn't ghost written by a famous writer of the day. it wasn't a collective. It wasn't Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or any of the suspected men or women over the years.

He clearly did exist. He just wasn't always the Greatest Writer Ever. As one suspects, even Bill had critics.

This made for some interesting reading and I really enjoyed this angle of telling the Bard's story. This made me realize what he contributed to our language, and what a genius he was. It was also an interesting reading of the time in which it was much harder to document things, and how much has likely been due to natural disasters, time and as with Shakespeare, sometimes good intentions.

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