Synopses & Reviews
Review
"[Bryson] does the job quite wonderfully by sticking to the facts about Shakespeare's life....Bryson splendidly concludes a splendid book by demolishing the claims for [Shakespeare's authorship by] Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and all." Booklist
Review
"In 196 engaging pages, Bryson accomplishes quite a bit. He clearly delineates what can be known from the small amount of documentation and what has been made up and blown up from thin air." San Antonio Express-News
Review
"Bryson's unassuming and enjoyable survey is a useful introduction that students and playgoers will find handy. It is the work of a man who clearly loves Shakespeare and is bold enough to hold the conviction...that he actually wrote the immortal texts that bear his name." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Bryson's is an accessible and lighthearted look at the Bard of Avon....Yet his lighthearted erudition makes reading this book a page-turning delight. Shakespeare 'is at once the best known and least known of figures,' and Bill Bryson has entertainingly explored that contradiction." Hartford Courant
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Bill Bryson explores the life and work of Shakespeare as a travelogue of sorts, narrating his quest for the Bard: his conversations with Shakespearean actors, with the curator of Shakespeare's birthplace, with academics who have dedicated their lives to studying the plays and poems, and of course, reporting on his own exploits in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Synopsis
New York Times bestselling author Bryson explores the life and works of Shakespeare in an entertaining and erudite biography. Crafted as a travelogue of sorts, the book includes Bryson's conversations with those who know the Bard best Shakespearean actors and academics.
Synopsis
In this new installment in the critically acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Bryson explores the life and work of Shakespeare in a typically Brysonian fashion. That is to say, he has crafted a travelogue of sorts, narrating his quest for the Bard.
About the Author
Bill Bryson is the New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods, The Lost Continent, The Mother Tongue, Neither Here Nor There, Made in America, Notes from a Small Island, Notes from a Big Country, Down Under, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Shakespeare: The World as Stage, At Home, and A Short History of Nearly Everything, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Aventis Prize for Science Books, and was awarded the Descartes Science Communication Prize. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson now lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and four children.