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'This season's best-selling volume.' Independent. 'Pleasant quirky details...make for enjoyable interludes...admirable.' Sunday Telegraph 'A brilliantly funny and gently insightful travel guide to 16th century England. Bryson is great at picking out of the morass of Elizabethan fact the small details that illuminate and amuse!he also uncovers from the world that surrounded the theatre some fascinating examples of Elizabethan eccentricity!As an abbreviated tour around the world of Shakespeare, this could hardly be bettered.' Sunday Times 'less a biography than a delightful account of Shakespeare's elusiveness -- and the extraordinary lengths people have gone to remedy it!the pairing of Bryson with Shakespeare is a happy one.' TLS 'Bill Bryson jogs along in his own ineffable way, good--humoured, undoctrinaire, nodding respectfully at experts but confidently following his own inclinations!he is shrewd on telling detail.' The Times 'Bill Bryson has always been able to spot a market; and there ought to be a market for his latest book!an accessible, sensible Life of Shakespeare!surely a fine gift for someone encountering Shakespeare for the first time!Bryson is shrewd!and as funny as you'd expect...he sets down all the important bits of evidence, and assesses them in a measured scholarly way. He's good value too.' Daily Telegraph 'Measured, sensible and, at times, as wryly humorous as you'd expect.' Times 'Bryson uses an inimitably light touch and squeezes a vast subject down to manageable proportions!he is a warm and funny guide through the whole complicated morass of Shakespearean scholarship.' Financial Times 'Bill Bryson offers us a brisk summary of all the things we'd like to know, but don't!enough to be absorbed in an entertaining evening.' Daily Mail 'Fascinating!Bryson is the master of digression. Without the asides and witty observations about Shakespearean scholarship, there wouldn't be a book. And that would be a pity.' The Guardian 'Bill Bryson's short biography of Shakespeare is a delight!fresh, concise and!sharply illuminting!Bryson is brilliant at picking out just a few telltale details to paint a bigger picture!a gem of a book, likely to be useful to both beginners and to seasoned Shakespeareans alike.' Mail on Sunday 'A joy from first to last!this is an accessible, exhilarating biography that's shot through with Bryson's trademark humour and irreverence!tremendous.' Time Out Praise for 'A Short History of Nearly Everything': 'A modern classic.' The New York Times 'It represents a wonderful education, and all schools would be better places if it were the core science reader on the curriculum.' Times Literary Supplement Praise for 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid': 'Outlandishly and improbably entertaining!inevitably [I] would be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter.' New York Times 'Always witty and sometimes hilarious!wonderfully funny and touching.' Literary Review
Sunday Times
'...brilliantly funny...As an abbreviated tour around the world of Shakespeare, this could hardly be bettered.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
140 of 144 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shakespeare explained,
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This review is from: Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives) (Hardcover)
This is a very entertaining and informative account of the life and works of William Shakespere. Although the book is short, there is much fascinating information packed into it. I found it particularly fascinating to read 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. Many myths about Shakespeare are cheeerfuly debunked by Mr Bryson, like the one about his work as an author never being mentioned in his lifetime, and the one about less being known about him than other contemporary dramatists (apparently more is known about Shakespeare than any of the others). The final chapter, in which Mr Bryson cheerfuly disposes of the fantasies of those who claim that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, is particularly entertaining.
The only complaint I have about this book is that I wish it had been longer, since Bill Bryson writes about his subject so entertainingly. However, Mr Bryson has evidentl taken to heart Shakespeare's own aphorism "brevity is the soul of wit."
98 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
De-bunking the Bard's de-bunkers,
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This review is from: Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives) (Hardcover)
This is an easily readable and short life of Shakespeare written for a series called "Eminent Lives" and strangely coming after books on George Balanchine and George Crick!! In it Bill Bryson, in his inimitable witty style, tells us how little is known of WS's life but then goes on to examine what others have conjectured about it, pouring scorn on so many of the theories. I have read several attempts at Shakespeare biographies but still learned something from this [especially on the Bard's neologisms] but my favourite was the final debunking of the attempts to say the plays were written by someone else. Bryson does this so amusingly [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?!] that I was actually laughing as I read it. For example, on the claims for Marlowe to have been the real Shakespeare, Bryson writes "He was the right age ..., had the requisite talent and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work."
So, Bryson has produced just what his publishers wanted, a brief biography that anyone can read and learn from, which appears both learned and well researched on the one hand, but also enjoyable and amusing on the other.
51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good read which does what it says on the tin,
By
This review is from: Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives) (Hardcover)
This book is well worth buying and is an interesting and enjoyable read. Bill Bryson is always worth reading, his common sense and down to earth style are always entertaining. What better subject could he have than our greatest writer ? So the book is onto a winner and delivers. I found it an easy and diverting read on holiday. I learned things I didn't know, about Shakespeare's "missing periods", about his relationship with Anne, about the extent to which he was a Jacobean as much as an Elizabethan writer. I particularly liked the debunking of those who claim that Shakespeare didn't write "Shakespeare".
So why only three stars? Well, the book comes across exactly as what it is, a commission. "Bill, could you write us a brief book about Shakespeare?" As such it firstly it feels a bit cobbled together, a bit rushed off. Secondly it is rather lacking in depth. Thirdly it rather lacks structure jumping erractically between the specifics of Shakespeare's life and the generalities of the world around him. I am probably being over critical, in that the book does exactly what it says on the tin and is well worth a read. I just feel that if the drive to write the book had come from Bill Bryson rather than being a commission, the end result would have been a deeper more satisfying work. So in summary, recommended as a good light read, just don't expect too much.
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