Shakespeare

Synopsis: This short biography of William Shakespeare by world famous writer Bill Bryson brims with the author's inimitable wit and intelligence. 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.

Review: The world probably doesn't need another biography of Shakespeare, as Bill would be the first to acknowledge, especially as the main impression is always that we don't know much about him and there isn't much information available (we don't even know what he really looks like as the few images that we have of him are unreliable) but Bill sifts through the facts and tries to seperate them from the fiction with such wit and humour that, like all of his books, it's a pleasure to read. It's only a short book, but I like that, too often books about Shakespeare are filled with conjecture and guesswork, they ramble on for ages and then you realise that it's mostly supposition on the part of the author. It's quite astonishing really that someone who left such a legacy of written work behind him has left hardly any evidence as to who he actually was, but I guess that that mostly relates to the the times in which he lived and in fact I believe that we know more about him than any other dramatist of that time.

'The Droeshout engraving, as it is known (after it's artist Martin Droeshout), is an arrestingly - we might almost say magnificently - mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is curiously mispositioned. the hair is longer on one side of the subject's head than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon. Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened - nothing like the gallant and confident figure that speaks to us from the plays. Despite it's many shortcomings, the engraving comes with a poetic endorsement from Ben Jonson who says of it in his memorial to Shakespeare in the First Folio.'

"O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face, the Print would then surpasse
All that was ever writ in brasse."

'It has been suggested, with some plausibility, that Jonson may not actually have seen the Droeshout engraving before penning these generous lines. What is certain is that the Droeshout portrait was not done from life. Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time of the First Folio.'

People are still arguing over whether or not he wrote the plays that are attributed to him, Bill does cover a few of these conspiracy theories but it's clear that he believes fairly strongly that they are all nonsense and indeed, most of them have a whiff of desperation about them (although Sir Derek Jacobi is among the doubters and indeed he signed a 'declaration of reasonable doubt' on the subject.) You won't learn much because there isn't much to learn but it's just as informative as other Shakespeare biographies and it has the added bonus of Bill's trademark humour.