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Epicurus.com - Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $14.57
Your Save: $ 5.38 ( 27% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Eminent Lives
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.33
EAN: 9780060740221
ISBN: 0060740221
Label: Eminent Lives
Manufacturer: Eminent Lives
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2007-11-01
Publisher: Eminent Lives
Release Date: 2007-10-23
Studio: Eminent Lives
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Editorial Reviews:
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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. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed. Bryson 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 a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: makes you appreciate Shakespeare more, even if you don't think that's possible.
Comment: Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare has the perfect subtitle. Not just because it is so fitting for Shakespeare, but--as Bryson shows--it is a necessity when looking at the greatest genius of all humanity. Bryson cuts through the speculation and goes to what we actually know about Shakespeare the man, which is next to nothing. And yet, Bryson writes a wonderful book filled with his compellingly trademark style that engages and engrosses the reader. He focuses on the world of Shakespeare and what little we know about him, and also how wonderful he was and how lucky we are to have had him. Sure, most of the information isn't really new, but that's not the point. It, like with Shakespeare himself, is how it is done. This is going on the treasured spot on my bookshelf right next to Bryson's Mother Tongue. Grade: A+
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bryson never fails to entertain
Comment: Shakespeare:The World as Stage (eminent Lives) by Bill Bryson
I have always found Bill Bryson"s books filled with just the right kind of humor and information. I was surprsed to see this title. This has to be the best bio on Shakespeare I've ever read and I have read alot of them. As Bryson points out, there isn't alot to tell. Somehow he manages to give you just about everything known about the man but conveys it in ways that are just plain funny. But don't think Bryson hasn't done his homework. This must have been quite an endeavor. If you like to learn about Shakespeare, you'll love this book. Long Live Bill Bryson!! gail maizel
Customer Rating:
Summary: Crafted, concise, and fun to read
Comment: Bill Bryson's concise biography of Shakespeare is brilliantly written, humorously insightful, and entirely delightful. The prose is a well-crafted and playful presentation of the dozen odd facts known about Shakespeare and many of the suppositions, inferences, and wild speculations about the man and his work. This Shakespeare primer can be easily understood by any high-school level reader and no prior knowledge about Shakespeare is required--Bryson even helpfully informs the reader that "William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably" (p. 196) the author of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, a fact that is apparently not self-evident.
Bryson has written several books including the prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book under review is provided as a volume in the "Eminent Lives" series of concise biographies by varying authors and as such conforms to an imposed restriction on length. With a candid honesty that permeates his offering, Bryson notes that the world didn't really need another Shakespeare biography but that the "Eminent Lives" series did. Bryson is straightforward in admitting that no groundbreaking research is presented, but rather the biography gathers the known facts, the supposed facts, and much pithy innuendo into a single engaging and accessible overview. Bryson's strength, then, lies not so much in his Shakespearean expertise but rather in his obvious ability to turn a phrase.
As expected, the book presents facts about Shakespeare's life, work, and environment. The book reads much as one would expect and holds no surprise of construction, methodology, or presentation. The book is divided into chapters that establish what is known and what is generally supposed about several periods in Shakespeare's life and his environment. The book mentions most plays, several long poems, and a few sonnets; it does not present substantive literary criticism on any of the works but does briefly examine some issues of attribution. Bryson makes some attempt to place Shakespeare's materials into a general chronological order but does not tackle the thornier issues. The book's somewhat unbalanced biography is similar to all Shakespearean biography insofar as virtually nothing is actually known about the man whereas very much has been inferred. Bryson carefully notes fine distinctions between the two. For example, Shakespeare's death is presented mostly as an interpretation of his will, as that document has been discovered and can be analyzed objectively. The final chapter of the book examines the occasional academic notion that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's material, and reviews some of the leading alternative theories and their attendant problems.
While nothing in the biography is new or even particularly innovative, it is nevertheless an invigorating review of extant data. Bryson brings a fresh and exciting voice to material that elsewhere often is stale in presentation. A mix of bedrock facts, such as Shakespeare's date of birth--"By tradition it is agreed to be April 23, Saint George's Day" (p. 24) in 1564--stand alongside humorous observations: "The Droeshout engraving [of Shakespeare]...is an arrestingly--we might almost say magnificently-mediocre piece of work" (p. 4). Bryson throws compellingly banal facts into the mix, too--"Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks" (p. 19). What emerges is a lovingly rendered biography of an obviously favorite subject. Those familiar with Shakespeare's life and times will find the information recast in an enjoyable way, while those unfamiliar with the topic will find the information intelligible and quite accessible. One of the book's particular strengths is the development of a sense of time and place surrounding Shakespeare as an individual. For example, Shakespeare's multi-year absence from the stage is explained by the closure of all London theaters due to plague.
Bryson's book includes nine named and enumerated chapters and a selected bibliography. It runs to 199 pages and has only a handful of footnotes. Bryson attributes several items within the book and occasionally textually refers to his sources to establish academic authority on some point. In summary, Bryson is an endlessly entertaining writer and Shakespeare - The World as Stage is an outstanding read for anyone who enjoys Shakespearean theater, good writing, or both.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Something for everyone
Comment: I really enjoyed this quick read. I knew virtually nothing about Shakespeare; never having read much of his work, nor any explanation of his existence. I learned a good bit, stayed entertained and walked away with a much better appreciation of Shakespeare's impact on the world.
I still can't watch Laurence Olivier's Hamlet however.....
Customer Rating:
Summary: As much as most people will ever want to know
Comment: When I visited Ashland, Oregon's Shakespeare Festival the buyer in their large, authoritative bookstore suggested this as a good basic biography of William Shakespeare. I've concluded it was a good recommendation for several reasons.
It is a relatively brief 224 pages because Bryson makes the case that extremely few documented facts are known about Shakespeare's life. It seems that essentially nothing is known about Shakespeare's relationships with his immediate family members or known theatrical colleagues, and there are blocks of years during which nothing can be said with certainty about even where he lived much less what he was doing. Bryson makes the case that other - more scholarly? - biographies of The Bard which purport to provide greater detail are, of necessity, essentially speculative if not fictitious. He also explains that most of the visual images we have of Shakespeare and his world - portraits, busts, drawings of The Globe theater, etc., - are demonstratably, or at least arguably, inaccurate if for no other reason than they are non-contemporaneous.
Besides telling us about as much as can be documented about Shakespeare's life Bryson provides an interesting overview of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater world which was an important social and financial phenomenon that brought people of all classes together in intimate surroundings on a daily basis. In a period of less than 150 years - the Puritans shut down the theaters in 1642 - more than 12,000 new words entered the English language of which 2,035 are attributed to - or at have their first recorded by - William Shakespeare. And we learn that the bulk of Shakespeare's work might have been lost forever if his fellow thespians had not collected his plays into what we know as The First Folio within a few years of his death.
Bryson devotes a useful chapter to summarizing the cult that has grown up - dating from the early 1800s - around the effort to demonstrate that Shakespeare's work was actually written by someone else; there are multiple suspects. Most of this "scholarship" is far more speculative than even the most speculative Shakespearean biographies, and Bryson makes the case that the not-Shakespeare faux exposes are clearly absurd; more than one of the candidates died before several of Shakespeare's plays were written. The argument against these theories that exhibits the most common sense is that absolutely nobody alive when the plays were produced questioned that Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon wrote them and, in fact, numerous well known contemporaries praised The Bard.
Bryson's style is fast moving and the material is well organized, but fans of Bryson's trademark sarcastic humor won't find any of it here. There is a five-page bibliography.
Highly recommended.
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