Krishna
This is another one of our favourite authors whose books we routinely review. See Made in America and The Mother Tongue for just two examples. This book is about the Bard on Avon, as the title clearly indicates.
Bill Bryson has done the near impossible. With very little reference material – and there is very little known about the man – he has managed to write a book (admittedly slim) about the life of the man which is as complete as it possibly could be but also found time to demolish the ‘Shakespeare is not really Shakespeare’ theorists. More of the last point later.
The first known portrait, in fact one of the only three from which all others were made, belonged to Richard Plantaganet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville. He was the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and managed to lose a vast inheritance he came into in just nine years and fled. His creditors tried to assess his house and one treasure in his house was this painting. People were upset about the balding man in the portrait, refusing to believe that the man with ‘wanton’ air and ‘lubricious’ lips not to mention his skin colour which was ‘too dark to be that of a Christian Englishman’ could be the great playwright. Could that be some other man, perhaps an Italian or a Jew?
Anyway, Shakespeare’s birth was at a time when diseases were widespread and England’s population was shrinking every year. High infant mortality did not help either. Later he married Anne Hathaway who was eight years older than he.
Bill Bryson is a treasure trove of interesting facts and this book is no exception. He talks about Queen Elizabeth (the first of course) who was a contemporary and how she was reviled by Catholics for moving back to Protestanism after Mary Queen of Scots bringing back Catholicism as the official religion. Her life was in constant danger and she was practically a prisoner in the name of safety. Fun stuff to read.
Since eating meat during Lent was a hanging offense, helpfully ‘most varieties of light meat including veal, chicken and all other poultry were categorized as fish’. William Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare was said to be illiterate. Unlikely says Bill Bryson. He was an alderman and so was influential as well.
Bryson does not have any reason to even allude that Shakespeare may not have written all the plays we know today in his name. (See our reviews of The Contested Will for an example of the controversy. You will discover that he tackles it at the end, in a separate chapter. He is skeptical.)
The plays those days had a penny as a ticket (and a penny more for sitting privileges and yet another penny more if you needed a cushion to sit on). The money was collected in a box and taken to the back for safekeeping, hence the ‘box office’.
Shakespeare seems to have ‘borrowed’ most of his plots and sometimes titles and dialogs from earlier works. (Copyright was not a concept then). He always improved it though, imbibing it with his unique mark, making them memorable and elevating the original tales from humdrum.
Dialogs? Both Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra have passages lifted entirely from earlier works, which were themselves translations from still earlier works.
Shakespeare introduced a number of words that were not known into his plays and most of them came into common usage thereafter (thinks like unmask, critical, horrid, critical etc. Lots more)
Not to mention phrases like ‘one fell swoop’, ‘vanish into thin air’ and a lot more that he introduced that is now considered commonplace.
As always, the book about anything from Bill Bryson contains a lot of tangential trivia. When Elizabeth I passed away, the throne went to James I (who ruled Scotland until then). He was odd with crooked gait, the disconcerting habit of always playing with his codpiece, nibbling young men while listening to his ministers, etc. (Nibbling?) He also had eight kids from his Queen Anne.
The Catholics tried to murder James through gunpowder bomb placed under Westminster, to turn back the tide; to their fury, England was by this time almost entirely Protestant. Guy Fawkes was waiting for the signal to blast the entire royalty to smithereens but the news was leaked and Guy was arrested. (Annually Guy Fawkes effigy has been burned ever since)
The oddity of Shakespeare’s will that leaves ‘his second best bed’ to his wife Anne Hathaway and the controversy and research triggered by it are interestingly told.
Though the book is as fascinating as (almost) anything Bill has written, one is struck by how little we know about Shakespeare as a person after reading this work. To be fair, Bill announces this fully and clearly right at the beginning of the book and the information within this book is excellently researched. But you still are left puzzled about much of Shakespeare’s life. If his plays were not preserved in a folio by a man who knew him and that too years after his death, we would not even have the plays today! Go figure.
The other interesting thing is that most of the sonnets were addressed to a man but bear very endearing, even infatuated tone, suggesting a homoerotic outlook. That is not to say that Shakespeare had gay tendencies because, as a poet, he may have given voice to a female (though nowhere is there such a suggestion). Curious.
As I said earlier, Bill tackles the theories that ‘prove’ the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays to another (deliberately anonymous) person and demolishes them with his usual scholarship. Provides convincing arguments to the contrary.
Given that the paucity of information about Shakespeare is not really the fault of the author, I would give it a 8/10
— Krishna