Shakespearean scholarship is so incredibly vast, so teeming with conjecture, theory and endless conspiracy that it can be difficult at times to find a straight answer to simple questions. Even many good editions of Shakespeare’s plays and especially the so called biographies often assume knowledge on the reader’s part which isn’t there, and more frequently neglect to source their own assertions. For the curious reader this is frustration incarnate. How is this known? Where does this fact come from? - one asks, vexed at infinite surmise.
What Bryson does in this book is deconstruct the myth of Shakespeare and take it back to the basics of what is, and how it is, known. Frequent references to Shakespeare’s contemporaries - their recollections of , and comments on, his life – along with expoundings on the little, yet significant public records in which Shakespeare fleetingly appears make this an account of the bard grounded in hard fact.
Equally important however is the book’s awareness of what is not known or readily knowable, and Bryson’s scepticism is as always refreshing - not necessarily about Shakespeare himself but about the pretenders who mythologize on Shakespearean authorship.
Chapters and Structure
Bryson takes us through Shakespeare’s life fairly chronologically, beginning with The Early Years: 1564-85, then on to the Lost Years: 1585-92 – giving a broad but thorough picture of the London scene at the time. The next chapter - In London - gives a candid account of the Elizabethan theatre business and how and by which devices we perceive it today. This is followed by a pleasingly digressive chapter: The Plays, in which Shakespeare’s use of a burgeoning modern English is introduced.
The book continues in an historical vein until the self explanatory chapter – Death, but finishes with a humorous and cynical section on the ever increasingly lunatic authorship conspiracy.
The Book's Merits
What is best about this book however is its sincere acknowledgment of Shakespeare’s flaws. It is easy to aggrandise Shakespeare - to see him in a god-like literary status, enthroned among muses atop a pile of lesser poets. But what is more difficult to confront, and what is addressed in this book, is the touching and relatable humanity of a corporeal man scribbling with ink and parchment - ‘a more sober assessment shows that he was pretty human’.
Bryson alerts us to Shakespeare's ‘anatopisms – that is, getting one’s geography wrong – particularly with regard to Italy, where so many of his plays were set’, and to his blundering anachronisms: ‘He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to Caesar’s Rome fourteen hundred years before the first mechanical tick was heard there’ so much so that Bryson quips: ‘A certain messy exuberance marks much of what he did’.
But far from being patronizing or derogatory – as would be foolish where Shakespeare is concerned- this is simply an honest observation on the ways of Shakespeare ‘the man’. Indeed Bryson agrees wholeheartedly with John Dryden who retorts–‘Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d”
This is an excellent book for anyone becoming interested in Shakespeare for the first time and for more advanced students who just want to cut through the mire and read something unashamedly and refreshingly honest.
References: Bill Bryson, Shakespeare -The World as a Stage (Harper Press; London, 2007)
