Shakespeare: The World as Stage

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 Hom

A Very Eminent Life Book Lover What I like about Bill Bryson, besides his clear and witty writing style, is his curiosity and the fact that his questions are often the ones I would ask too. In this work he has turned his attention to The Bard, and his love for all things English shines through this too brief biography. We ar. "History book for those that get bored with history books" according to Igelfeld. To read Bill Bryson is to like Bill Bryson, but this is not his usual tongue-in-cheek book. For me, this was just the right book because I didn't want to read an overly-intellectualized work where it's so dry it almost spontaneously combusts while you're reading it. Bryson covers all the major . Yes! Shakespeare Really Did Write Shakespeare! Happy Reader Bryson ends Chapter 1 with a simple statement: "The idea [of this book] is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.Which is one reason, of course, [that the book is] so slender."It is amazing how Shakespeare can be a household name 400 years after

. From Publishers Weekly Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself. 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. 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. All rights reserved. In the absence of much documentation about his life, we have the plays an

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.. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. 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