5/22/2023 0 Comments Shakespeare by Bill Bryson![]() ![]() Enjoy his plays, but don't bother with the playwright himself. In this elegant, updated, illustrated edition, the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of one of the world's greatest poets are evoked through a series of full-color paintings, drawings, portraits, documents and photographs. The only entertaining chapter, I thought, was the last one (again, mostly filler) that discusses all the anti-Shakespeare "scholarship" that seems to have less evidence than there is for who Shakespeare was. Bill Bryson's Shakespeare pairs one of history's most celebrated writers with one of the most popular writers in the English language today. If you already know something about the Bard, you probably know all this book has to tell you. He stretches points and repeatedly notes what we DON'T know as much as what we do know, and takes tangents about the era whenever he can legitimately create a link to Shakespeare. ![]() Like an English student struggling to hit his word count, whenever Bryson can fill lines by naming titles, he names them all. There is not much to the book, and Bryson clearly had to stretch what he did have to make his page count. Which is one reason, of course, it's so slender." (pg 21)Īnd that is the crux of it. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson Available on: Audio Download Audio CD Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases that even today have common currency. ![]() Bill Bryson pokes fun at his own book, noting "this book was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare as because this series does. ![]()
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