- Bryson, Bill.
Shakespeare.
London: Harper Perennial, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-00-719790-3.
-
This small, thin (200 page) book contains just about every
fact known for certain about the life of William Shakespeare,
which isn't very much. In fact, if the book restricted itself
only to those facts, and excluded descriptions of Elizabethan
and Jacobean England, Shakespeare's contemporaries, actors and
theatres of the time, and the many speculations about Shakespeare
and the deliciously eccentric characters who sometimes promoted
them, it would probably be a quarter of its present length.
For a figure whose preeminence in English literature is rarely
questioned today, and whose work shaped the English language
itself—2035 English words appear for the first time
in the works of Shakespeare, of which about 800 continue in
common use today, including critical,
frugal, horrid, vast,
excellent, lonely,
leapfrog, and zany
(pp. 112–113)—very little is known apart
from the content of his surviving work. We know the dates
of his birth, marriage, and death, something of his parents, siblings,
wife, and children, but nothing of his early life, education,
travel, reading, or any of the other potential sources of the
extraordinary knowledge and insight into the human psyche which
informs his work. Between the years 1585 and 1592 he drops
entirely from sight: no confirmed historical record has
been found, then suddenly he pops up in London, at the peak
of his powers, writing, producing, and performing in plays
and quickly gaining recognition as one of the preeminent
dramatists of his time. We don't even know (although there is no
shortage of speculation) which plays were his early works and
which were later: there is no documentary evidence for the
dates of the plays nor the order in which they were written,
apart from a few contemporary references which allow placing
a play as no later than the mention of it. We don't even know
how he spelt or pronounced his name: of six extant signatures
believed to be in his hand, no two spell his name the same
way, and none uses the “Shakespeare” spelling
in use today.
Shakespeare's plays brought him fame and a substantial fortune
during his life, but plays were regarded as ephemeral things
at the time, and were the property of the theatrical company
which commissioned them, not the author, so no authoritative
editions of the plays were published during his life. Had
it not been for the efforts of his colleagues John Heminges
and Henry Condell, who published the “First Folio”
edition of his collected works seven years after his death, it
is probable that the eighteen plays which first appeared in
print in that edition would have been lost to history, with
subsequent generations deeming Shakespeare, based upon surviving
quarto editions of uneven (and sometimes laughable) quality of
a few plays, one of a number of Elizabethan playwrights but
not the towering singular figure he is now considered to be.
(One wonders if there were others of Shakespeare's stature
who were not as lucky in the dedication of their friends,
of whose work we shall never know.) Nobody really knows
how many copies of the First Folio were printed, but guesses
run between 750 and 1000. Around 300 copies in various states
of completeness have survived to the present, and around
eighty copies are in a single room at the
Folger Shakespeare Library
in Washington, D.C., about two blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Now maybe decades of computer disasters have made me obsessively
preoccupied with backup and geographical redundancy, but that just makes
me shudder. Is there anybody there who wonders whether this is
really a good idea? After all, the last time I was a few
blocks from the U.S. Capitol, I spotted an
ACME MISSILE BOMB
right in plain sight!
A final chapter is devoted to theories that someone other
than the scantily documented William Shakespeare wrote the
works attributed to him. The author points out the
historical inconsistencies and implausibilities of most
frequently proffered claimants, and has a good deal of fun
with some of the odder of the theorists, including the
exquisitely named J. Thomas Looney, Sherwood E. Silliman,
and George M. Battey.
Bill Bryson fans who have come to cherish his lighthearted
tone and quirky digressions on curious details and
personalities from such works as
A Short History of Nearly Everything
(November 2007) will not be disappointed. If one leaves
the book not knowing a great deal about Shakespeare, because
so little is actually known, it is with a rich sense of
having been immersed in the England of his time and the
golden age of theatre to which he so mightily contributed.
A U.S. edition is available, but
at this writing only in hardcover.
July 2008 