Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives) - Hardcover

Bryson, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007197896 ISBN 13: 9780007197897

Publisher: HarperPress, 2007

Synopsis

In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson’s biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright.

Shakespeare’s life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard – from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died.

Following his international bestsellers ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ and ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’, Bill Bryson has written a short biography of William Shakespeare for the Eminent Lives series – which seeks to pair great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Bryson's many books include, most recently ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’ as well as ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything‘, ‘I'm a Stranger Here Myself’, ‘A walk in the Woods’, ‘Neither Here Nor There’, ‘Made in America’, and ‘Notes from a Small Island’. He edited ‘The Best American Travel Writing 2000’. Born in Des Moines, he now lives in Norfolk with his wife and four children.

From the Back Cover

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 ― she spent months in silence at Bacon’s home, ‘absorbing atmospheres’ that bolstered her theory. With shades of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunker-like basement 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 a home at the tips of our tongues. His Shakespeare is like no-one else’s ― the beneficiary of Bryson’s genial nature, his engaging scepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivalled in our time.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0007197896
• ISBN 13: 9780007197897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208