While many, many writers have penned works on Shakespeare (roughly 200,000 works if I recall correctly from the book), many seem to resort to some “artistic license” in describing facts since much of what we know about him is conjecture or just false. The relative short length of this book, he tells us, is due mainly to the fact that there’s little that’s really “known” about Shakespeare, especially his early life, though we do have an impressive amount of his works nowadays due the efforts of two of his colleagues at the time to put together a portfolio of his works, what modern Shakespeare academics refer to as the First Folio.īryson does an impressive job of explaining the evidentiary support for and against the various of theories about Shakespeare’s life and works and the conclusions that have been drawn, without making the book feel bogged down in minutiae.

His biography of Shakespeare was an enjoyable, informative and subtlety well-crafted read. Bryson seems to have a consistently good reputation, and now I can see why. I’ve been meaning to read something of Bryson’s for a long time and thought this might make a good introduction, especially since I did a lengthy project on Shakespeare back in middle school and have continuously heard contradicting “facts” about him since then. By Jennifer Marie Lin on Dec 22nd, 2014 (Last Updated Jul 3rd, 2019)īill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage is a short and well-researched biography on the famous Bard, with some background on Elizabethan England thrown in for good measure.

Bill bryson the world as stage