![]() All too often, you pick up a new biography and find that speculation advanced in the timid subjunctive in the early going assumes the mantle of unassailable truth a few chapters later.Īs one scholar in the field tells Bryson half in jest: “Every Shakespeare biography is five percent fact and 95 percent speculation.” ![]() What Bryson demonstrates in sifting through the scant known facts and documents of Shakespeare’s life is that there is room for a sane secular voice amid the Babel of scholarly contention and wild conjecture that surrounds him. “This book was written, not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, as because the series does,” Bryson admits with disarming candor.Īnd if the publication of his modest volume fills the annual Shakespeare quota and prevents another deranged academic from printing proof positive that Shakespeare’s plays were written posthumously by Geoffrey Chaucer, then more power to Bryson. ![]() William Shakespeare: The World as Stage is the latest addition to the Penguin Lives series, notable for the sometimes inspired and occasionally weird pairing of subject and author. ![]() In adding to the groaning pile of this year’s Bardlit, Bill Bryson at least offers two qualities William Shakespeare prized and that are in chronically short supply in many books about him - brevity and wit. ![]()
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