There’s also musings on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, his genius for creating new words and phrases, and his overall impact on the english language. )īryson takes the collected facts about Shakespeare’s life - which is indeed, not very much - and intersperses them with historical datum of the time, what it was like to live in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, the lives of the monarchs themselves, what we think the theaters looked like, and what living in London was like at the plague-ridden turn of the 17th century. (Though we do know he existed Bill seems personally offended that anyone would suggest otherwise. Who was William Shakespeare? What did he wear? Who did he love? Was he lighthearted or gloomy? Who were his favorite writers? What was his family like? Did he have a happy childhood? Was he a good actor? Did he anticipate immortality? Did he spell his name S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-A-R-E? Was he as stingy as the scant court records show? Why, in his will, did he bequeath his wife his second best bed? Did he even exist ?ĭespite there being millions of pages of analysis written on the man, and an unending tide of new articles every year, Bill Bryson’s point is that as far as actual facts go, we know next to nothing about the man outside of his written work.
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