SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE

A nice, funny, absorbing little biography by Bill Bryson, which I listened to on CD while commuting. As in A Short History of Nearly Everything, he focuses on what we know and how we know it, and in the case of Shakespeare, it turns out that what we know isn’t much at all. Bryson very reasonably debunks a lot of accepted Shakespeare “facts” (including a number that I’d learned from my high-school English textbook) as mere assumptions (often wildly inaccurate ones), contextualizes the actual facts that remain, and resoundingly shoots down the ridiculous “authorship question.” As a bonus, the audiobook is read by the author. My favorite part:

Nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit of it—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book,” a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.