Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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urn:lcp:shakespeareworld00bill:lcpdf:116331f0-b740-4840-9c9f-3e51bc2a6d08 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier shakespeareworld00bill Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4mk98m3k Invoice 11 Isbn 9780061673696 It's not a surprise that this is short. First off, it belongs as part of a series of concise biographies. Secondly, there isn't much known about Shakespeare, so biographies of him should be short. Why go on and on about something if there's nothing to go on about?! a b c "Writer Bill Bryson remembers his Iowa roots". Ames Tribune. Gannett Co. 28 October 2013 . Retrieved 31 January 2020. 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.

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that all together he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.” The short answer to this is not much. We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. “His sexuality,” Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.” In the work he cites scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Frank Kermode, Edmond Malone, Samuel Schoenbaum, Caroline Spurgeon and Charles William Wallace. 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 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 …

a b "Bill Bryson visits his utopia". The Independent. 7 May 2002. Archived from the original on 9 September 2010. At school I was required to study two of the Bard’s plays: the one known as The Scottish Play and Twelfth Night. I found the former a real struggle and way too grim but rather enjoyed the humour in the latter. But I’ve never returned to Shakespeare’s work, in truth I just find the language rather impenetrable, just too much like hard work to battle through. But I am somewhat curious about the man considered perhaps the finest writer of them all and I’ve long admired Bryson’s ability to tell a story, so why not give this exploration a go.

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. What did Shakespeare look like? We don't know. There are three portraits that are "the best". But two of them were done after his death and the other (the only one done during his lifetime) may be of someone else entirely. We don't even know how to spell his name, though it appears that neither did he. "Shakespeare" was the standard spelling of the time, but in the six surviving signatures we have from his own hand, he didn't spell it the same way twice. So, was he Willm Shakp, William Shakspēr, Wm Shakspē, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere, or William Shakspeare? It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work - every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career - is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few could argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.” The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. But if it were just that, this tome would have been most boring. But no: true to form, Bryson floods us with trivia about Elizabethan England (and about Queen Elizabeth herself); disease-ridden London and her penurious population who still found time to go to plays, in spite of a fourteen-hour workday; the playhouses which also hosted inhuman sports such as animal baiting; persistent Protestant-Catholic skirmishes; the idiosyncrasies of King James who succeeded Elizabeth; and (of course!) the utterly cooky conspiracy theories of the people who insist that the bard never wrote his plays. Along with this, we come to know that Shakespeare probably plagiarised passages verbatim (in fact, it was a common practice among writers those days) and that we don't actually know how he spelled his name. In fact, it is a trivia-fest - the ideal book to be enjoyed over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratfrod was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.” We also talk about his great rival, C. Marlowe. In 1598: Shakespeare joined the troop of the Chamberlain, whom he would never leave. They were actors of the king later. It specified that Shakespeare sought his ideas elsewhere for most of his plays while sublimating the text. But all the authors did that at that time. Dream of a Summer Night, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Tempest are three pieces only of his own. I was fascinated to learn that Shakespeare created new words for his time as "excellent, vast, lonely, frugal, ..." What Bryson does do here is provide us with (as his regular readers would expect) a very witty, insightful, but unsentimental portrait of Shakespeare and his burgeoning and everlasting literary genius. In May 2007, he became the president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. [36] [37] His first focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane, and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007. [21] In 2011, Bryson won the Golden Eagle Award from the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild. [38]

Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9784 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-06-04 20:52:58 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1127308 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two. This is thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be over-emphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare's works, for the usual condition of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive.... Of the approximate three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare's birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, 80 per cent are known only by title.... The riches this man brought to our language are staggering, not just in terms of his plays, but the number of words he brought into the language and the seemingly endless quotable quotes that are now virtually cliches. 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.The Library of Congress in Washington contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare - twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day....and the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly the most exhaustive of bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works - books, monographs, other studies - every year. Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different—often very different—ways of shaping particular letters.” In November 2006, Bryson interviewed then British prime minister Tony Blair on the state of science and education. [25]