Bill Bryson - Shakespeare

By Showhost april 2009
This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, not a funny book in the same way as his travel/autobiography books,such as ‘Notes from a Small Island’, and for a while I kept waiting for those really humorous observations to appear. But the book really is about William Shakespeare or about how little we really know about him!
Bill Bryson tells us how little is known of Will Shakespeare's life how a lot of what we read is what others have made up about it, and in his witty style, pours scorn on many of these theories.
For instance, there is conjecture that Shakespeares plays were written by someone else. Bryson points out in his dry, wit: can it be true that of the 5000 books written to prove Shakespeare's plays were written by someone other than Shakespeare, three were by Messers Looney, Silliman and Battey.
I learned things I didn't know, about Shakespeare's "missing periods", about his relationship with Anne, about the huge contribution Shakespeare made to the development of the English language, and the large number of words now in common usage that were originally coined by him.
It is not a very big book as there wasn’t a lot to say about WS as very little was known so
Bryson pads out the book with a depiction of life in Elizabethan England, describing for example food and drink, religion, the theatre, and the city of London and other literary types who surrounded Shakespeare . But, some of the historical stories, such as the Spanish Armada, the Essex rebellion and the gunpowder plot, will already be known to many readers.
So, at the end of the book what do we know – nothing really, we don't know what Will looked like, we don't know much about where he lived, or what he did with his time, apart from write and act.
I gotta say I don’t know why it got all the hype that it did.