190. SHAKESPEARE: The World as Stage

Bill Bryson 2007

The Book Jacket Blurb:

    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.

What Hooked Me:

There is no better author to make the daunting task of relating William Shakespeare's life so reader-friendly than Bill Bryson. The author's ever enlightening, organized and systematic telling of major known occurrences in Shakespeare's life, the 17th century England (and interesting people) of his days, and his enormous contributions to literature and the English language itself is highly satisfying.

The Quotes:

'Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.'(opening lines)

'So we are in the curious position with William Shakespeare of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren't very good by artists working years after his death and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be someone else altogether. The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.'(7)

'It is because we have so much of Shakespeare's work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things -- as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.'(19)

'Shakespeare's early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed.'(44)

'Shakespeare's genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering -- things that aren't taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays -- unlike, say, those of Ben Johnson, where learning hangs like burning on every word.'(109)

'Anyway, and obviously, it wasn't so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them -- and no one has ever done more. It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work -- every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career -- is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behavior. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.'(110)

'He coined -- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of -- 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career.  Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them.'(113)

'Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would be without them?'(114)

'His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has the quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, to be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion -- and many others so repetitiously irresistible that we have debased them into cliches.'(115)

'After his death William Shakespeare was laid to rest in the chancel of Holy Trinity, a large, lovely church beside Avon. As we might by now expect, his life concludes with a mystery -- indeed, with a small series of them. His gravestone bears no name, but merely a curious piece of doggerel:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare,

To digg the dust encloased heare.

Bleste be the man that spares the stones

And curst be he that moves the bones.'(178)

'There is an extraordinary -- seemingly an insatiable -- urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other that William Shakespeare. The number of published books suggesting -- or more often insisting -- as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.'(181)

'When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that it is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.'(closing lines)

HarperCollins First Edition book
196 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge