Monday, September 7, 2009

Shakespeare - The World as Stage, By Bill Bryson



My Labor Day goal was to complete some of the 18 half-finished books on my side table, lest they tumble onto and injure me. One successfully put away was "Shakespeare - The World as Stage" by Bill Bryson, which if written by almost anyone else could have been brutally boring. But no one does humor like the British, and Bryson does it very well indeed.

How and why so many books could have been written about a man about whom we know almost nothing is a bit of a mystery, but then Shakespeare is hardly any man. A lot of Bryson's book is a look at just that issue - a lot about a little. What recorded history tells us about Shakespeare could be written on the inside of a matchbook, but academic analysis is endless.