bill bryson shakespeare the world as stage

In this elegant, updated, illustrated edition, the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of one of the world's greatest poets are evoked through a series of full-color paintings, drawings, portraits, documents and photographs.

His Shakespeare is like no one else's–the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivalled in our time.īill Bryson's Shakespeare pairs one of history's most celebrated writers with one of the most popular writers in the English language today. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a basement room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.īryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.īryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts.

Bill bryson shakespeare the world as stage