Shakespeare: The World as a Stage
by Bill Bryson
(Harper Press)
Given how little we know about William Shakespeare’s life, an awful lot has been written on the subject. Of course the plays and poems produce a seemingly endless amount of commentary and interpretation and reinterpretation, but the hard facts of his life are few and far between. As Bill Bryson writes: ”Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an ÂÂacademic obsession.”
This slender volume is part of a series of Eminent Lives, described as ”brief biographies by distinguished authors of canonical figures”, in the tradition of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters and Dr Johnson’s equivalent for poets. Bryson admits that ”this book was written not because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, but because this series does. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Which is one reason, of course, it’s so slender.”
Despite the image on the cover of this book, we don’t in fact know for certain what Shakespeare looked like. Of the three portraits said to be of him, two were made after his death and the other is not definitely him at all. Bryson points out that although Shakespeare ”left nearly a million words of text, we have just 14 words in his own hand” — 12 of those being his name, though signed with different spellings each time. (The other two words are on his will: ”by me”.) There are years at a time when there is no mention of Shakespeare in any surviving record; famously, there are the ”lost years” of 1585-1592 — the very years he would have been first making a name for himself as a dramatist in London.
Bryson carefully sifts through what evidence there is and constructs a plausible account of a life on that basis — what we can ”really know”. He gives little credence to the encrustations of speculation that have grown about Shakespeare over the years. He consults various experts, weighs the probabilities and is always frank about what simply cannot be known for certain or at all. The result is that the evidence we do have feels firmer and better examined than before.
As in all Shakespeare biographies, his times play a large role in his story. Bryson is good on Shakespeare’s context, sketching it in succinctly, and informative on his plagiarisms and the uncertain status of his texts as published. Bryson is highly amusing on the contenders for Shakespeare’s crown: all those claimed at one time or another, by various people, crackpot or not, to have been the real author(s) of the plays. There might be scant material record of Shakespeare’s life, but there is zero evidence that any of the other ”claimants” did in fact write these plays and poems by stealth.
What Bryson’s volume lacks is a sustained or detailed engagement with the work. Certainly, that can be got elsewhere, though in such bewildering profusion that a non-scholar might well beg for a volume as slender as Bryson’s to introduce the plays and poems. Good though Bryson is on the facts, it seems a pity that he doesn’t say more about the plays or use them to enrich what we can know. Peter Ackroyd’s 2005 biography dealt with the same thin corpus of documented fact on Shakespeare’s life, but he was able to read the work closely and use it to ask questions about Shakespeare’s attitudes and feelings. This is not to find much biographical succour in the work, but it is legitimate to trace links: for instance, around the time of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet’s death, what does his work say about paternity, children, death and loss?
Despite that gap, however, Bryson’s Shakespeare (which can pretty much be consumed at a sitting) is highly readable, often funny, and makes a useful short introduction to the most famous writer — one who is still ”ever a shadow even in his own ÂÂbiography”.