ShakespeareWilliam 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. |
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... century portraits at the gallery , told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language . “ The collar is of a type that was popular between about ...
... century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.” She considered the painting appraisingly. “It's not a bad painting, but not a terribly good one either,” she went on. “It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd ...
... century paper was of good quality, too,” he went on. “It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well.” To my untrained eye, however, the ink had faded to an il- legible watery faintness, and the script was ...
... century, for reasons unknown, developed a sudden and lasting fixation with deter- mining the details of Shakespeare's life. In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records. Eventually they ...
... century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time ...