Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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It's a wonder Will's works survived at all. If not for the dedicated efforts of John Heminges and Henry Condell in compiling the First Folio, eighteen of Shakespeare's plays would probably have been lost to us. Imagine our world without Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and a dozen others. It's our good fortune that Heminges and Condell weren't procrastinators. Both men were dead by 1630, only seven years after the First Folio was published.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others... Where would be be without them? In other words, there’s really no way of finding anything in the book. How many chapters are there? What was that one called? And where the hell was it? Well, mount an expedition. At first glance, Bill Bryson seems an odd choice to write this addition to the Eminent Lives series. The author of ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’ isn’t, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Reading ‘Shakespeare The World As Stage’, however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task. The man who gave us ‘The Mother Tongue’ and ‘A Walk in the Woods’ approaches Shakespeare with the same freedom of spirit and curiosity that made those books such reader favorites. A refreshing take on an elusive literary master. Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson – eBook Details To start – I never really knew much about Shakespeare. I knew the basics. And I realized starting the book that I’ve never actually read one of his plays all the way through, though I have seen a couple performed.Bill Bryson (not a historian, of course) is a very entertaining writer. His first big hit in the U.S. was A Walk in the Woods. But both before and after that came a wide, eclectic series of non-fiction works. He was born in the U.S., has lived most of his adult life in Britain, and has a dedicated fan base of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. I call myself a Shakespeare geek, and probably shouldn't; for me it refers to my deep affection and fascination for the man and his work – thirst for knowledge, not necessarily possession of knowledge. I know more than the average bear, but not enough to truly qualify me as a geek. For example, I had no idea that Will's brother Edmund was an actor (and died at only 27 in the same year as their mother, both of unknown causes). I also didn't know Walt Whitman was a rabid anti-Stratfordian (which Bryson doesn't mention, but which I discovered in related reading.) I do know enough not to trust any single source – not even Bill Bryson … Adapted, in 2009, as an illustrated children's edition titled "A Really Short History of Nearly Everything"

The Globe itself didn't last long. It burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years the were. No theatre - perhaps no human enterprise - has seen more glory in only a decade or so as the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another plays of unrivalled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure,Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra...... In the end, for me the Authorship Question has the kind of interest of one of those alternate histories: what if the South had won the Civil War, or if Hitler had won WWII? Or (not that I've seen this one, yet) what if the moon really was made of green cheese? The South didn't and Hitler didn't, and the moon isn't, and while what-if's are entertaining, they're not otherwise productive. And, in the end, did the world desperately need one more book about Shakespeare? Well, no. But am I for one happier because Bill Bryson wrote one? Yeah. I am. In reality there is some sugar and other flavors added to the capsule, for we can also taste quite a bit of extraneous material, such as Shakespeare’s times and places. We get to hear about urban development and palaces in London, about the state of its hygiene and health, about life expectancy and children death-rate, about the set-up of schools and academic curricula, about the making of books and theatrical practices, and about the functioning of the legal system, etc. a b "Bill Bryson breaks retirement to record Christmas audiobook". The Guardian. 27 September 2022 . Retrieved 13 December 2022. So most of his biography comes down to context. In lieu of what we know about the man himself, we can study the world he inhabited. For instance, we know that upon crossing London Bridge, he may have seen the impaled head of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators displayed on a spike. He probably drank ale for breakfast and may have developed a taste for potatoes, only recently imported to his homeland from South America. He may have enjoyed leisurely games of skittles on a bowling green on a Sunday afternoon.Kilen, Mike (1 September 2015). "The real life of Bill Bryson's 'Stephen Katz' ". The Des Moines Register; USA Today. Even the few surviving portraits that are purportedly of Shakespeare cannot be verified. "The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures."

Although able to apply for British citizenship, Bryson said in 2010 that he had declined a citizenship test, declaring himself "too cowardly" to take it. [19] However, in 2014, he said that he was preparing to take it [20] and in the prologue to his 2015 book The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island he describes doing so, in Eastleigh. His citizenship ceremony took place in Winchester and he now holds dual citizenship. [15] Writings [ edit ]This sort of interesting stuff comprises the bulk of the book, and caused me to underline quite frequently. Bill Bryson stepping down as Chancellor". Durham University. 20 September 2010 . Retrieved 4 July 2011. Közben meg persze igazából arról van szó, hogy Brysont nem az érdekli, mit tudunk Shakespeare-ről (arról már úgyis kismilliom-egy oldalt összeírtak), hanem hogy miért csak ennyit. Amire az egyik válasz természetesen az, hogy mert a csávó retek régen élt. A másik meg az, hogy amikor élt, nem gondolt arra, hogy 500 év múlva irodalomtörténészek fognak ölre menni a "Ki volt Shakespeare?" kérdésen. Hat fennmaradt aláírása van (közülük három - a végrendeletét díszítő - nem is biztosan az övé), és ezeken kétszer nem tudta ugyanúgy leírni a saját nevét - komolyan, mintha trollkodni akart volna a kutatókkal. Közben meg nyilván csak lazán fogta fel a helyesírást, mint akkoriban mindenki - inkább ajánlásnak, mint szabályrendszernek tekintette, pont ahogy a kortárs facebook-kommenterek egy része. Bill Bryson is an old friend. His approach to history makes the standard tome all the more flat and dull by comparison – Bryson knows his stuff well enough to not only present it to an audience but to play with it, to have fun with it, to make it fun. He genuinely loves his subjects, and it is infectious. He's like the teacher you always hoped to get – the brilliant, funny, cool one who (to use a real example) sat cross-legged on the table at the front of the room and told the most amazing stories and made you sorry when the class was over, rather than the one who turned the lights off and showed irrelevant slides to a group of uninterested and often napping art students at the deadly time of 3:00 in the afternoon.