Shakespeare

September 3, 2007
Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself. In the absence of much documentation about his life, we have the plays and poetry he wrote. In this addition to the Eminent Lives series, bestselling author Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
) does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook—for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married—to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered. Bryson's curiosity serves him well, as he delves into subjects as diverse as the reliability of the extant images of Shakespeare, a brief history of the theater in England and the continuing debates about whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really wrote Shakespeare's works. Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive—as Bryson puts it, “he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron—forever there and not there.”

October 15, 2007
Humorous travel writer Bryson doesnt seem the obvious choice for a Shakespeare biography, but he does the job quite wonderfully by sticking to the facts about Shakespeares life. Those are very few, so most Shakespeare biographers proceed more or less imaginatively. Not Bryson. He instead brings amused but understanding skepticism to what his forebears have posited about each period of Shakespeares life and constructs a plausible continuity from their most persuasive ideas and what other sources reveal about Shakespeares milieu. As he proceeds, he doesnt so much shatter illusions as reveal how creative biography and historiography must be at 400 years remove from their subjects physical existence. The records just dont exist to make them less conjectural. It even turns out that todays restored Globe Theatre doesnt and cant reproduce Shakespeares Globe. But if Shakespeare is hard to document, there is at least one other of his contemporaries who is impossible to tracewhoever wrote his plays instead of himand Bryson splendidly concludes a splendid book by demolishing the claims for Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)