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Shakespeare
By Bill Bryson
Harper Press £14 99
200 pages
Dateline: 18th September, 2007
Bill Bryson should be congratulated on at least one achievement in
this incredibly competitive and crowded area. Uniquely, his new biography
of William Shakespeare is on sale in Tesco and he should therefore reach
a wider audience than almost any previous writer on this elusive subject.
It might be as well that this book is going to end up on the gift lists
of many people who know little or nothing about the Bard, since, not
necessarily through any great fault of the author, it does not reveal
too much of import that is not already in the public domain.
This book is part of an Eminent Lives series that aims to offer
"brief biographies by distinguished authors on the canonical figures",
thus ambitiously attempting to emulate Plutarch, Vasari, Dr Johnson
and Lytton Strachey. Whether Bill Bryson is quite in that league might
be questionable, but Shakespeare certainly competes with the best of
those currently in the series, such as Muhammad, Beethoven and Caravaggio.
It is an unfortunate fact that almost nothing concrete is known about
the life of William Shakespeare, or for that matter many of the members
of his family, particularly his wife about whom Germaine Greer has just
written a lengthy tome that will be reviewed here in the next few weeks.
This makes the job of a biographer nigh on impossible and coming up
with anything novel is a major achievement.
Bill Bryson has clearly researched his subject assiduously, with a
bibliography stretching to over three pages. This means that if nothing
else, he presents a concise summation of both known and assumed facts.
He is also a diligent and honest man who makes clear what he believes
to be fact, speculation or invention. As he humorously he points out,
this differentiates him from several of his predecessors who had a habit
of turning guesswork into certainty.
Over seven of the nine chapters, he looks at the minimal information
available about the playwright and then, like pretty much every other
seeker after the essence of the Bard, fills in the gaps with social
history from Elizabethan and Jacobean times. He also tries to draw biographical
information from the plays but unlike some others, is prepared to admit
that this is probably going to take us further from, rather than closer
to, knowledge about the life of England's greatest playwright.
The areas in which Bryson shines are those where he is a specialist,
particularly as a lexicographer. It may not be remembered now that he
is seen as a travel writer and polymath, but his first two books of
significance were about the English and American languages and if there
is any original thought in this book, it is in the area of words.
We get many statistics about Shakespeare's use of words but also practical
commentary on the writing. Bryson also has good contacts and writes
fascinatingly about the fifty or so first folios collected at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
He is also excellent when rubbishing clearly ludicrous claims as to
the external authorship of the 37, 38 or however many plays it is that
Shakespeare actually wrote. In the final chapter entitled Claimants,
we get the real Bill Bryson at his best. He is a sceptic of the first
order and his sense of fun emerges as he lampoons many of the theorists
in this field and happily points out that some of the proposed writers
of the plays were dead, others had no talent and the remainder too little
time.
This book may add relatively little to the knowledge about William
Shakespeare, already derived over several hundred years. However, it
tells us a fair amount about Bill Bryson, should amuse its readers and,
on the basis that many are starting from a zero position, will leave
them considerably the wiser.
Philip Fisher
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