Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

Read: 6 July 2009

I'm a big fan of The Bard. It all started when I saw Mel Gibson as Hamlet. How ironic is that?

Anyway, the time I saw Mel Gibson's Hamlet, I was also into my "classic mode," which meant that I read a lot of classics at the time. For fun and of my own choice, not because I was required to. So, it was no big leap for me to decide to read Hamlet, for leisure. And although now I feel that Gibson overacted as Hamlet, I was initially drawn in by the beauty of Hamlet's death scene and the highly oedipal interpretation of the Closet scene.

From Hamlet, I jumped to Romeo and Juliet (which I did not like as much, and still don't, romance notwithstanding). Then to Taming of the Shrew--this time, thanks to the Moonlighting version (does anyone else still remember that series? By Jove, I loved Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd in it!).

By then, I had graduated from college and started teaching. I decided to teach Midsummer Night's Dream to the juniors and Hamlet, my all-time personal favorite, to the seniors. In the course of my teaching career, I have also taught Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth. In grad school, I took two Shakespeare courses because I could: one on his Comedies and Histories, the other on his Tragedies. Periodically, lines of Shakespeare relevant to what I'm going through at the moment pop into my head. I think it's safe to say that I love the guy.

His language is and, I believe, will always be a struggle for most readers now, but I maintain that the more you read him, the easier he becomes to read. That, at least, has been my experience. By the fourth or fifth play, reading Shakespeare seems like reading an ordinary novel. Language aside, though, his stories and, most especially, his characters are fantastic. In fact, given that most of his plays aren't original ideas, I'd say what draws people to Shakespeare is the characters that he's fleshed out with his language. Such round and complex creations, never really fitting into a neat classification of good guy or bad guy. If you've read Hamlet or Macbeth or Merchant of Venice or any of his other plays, you'll find that it's not as black and white to categorize the main characters.

Anyway, this is turning out to be an homage to Shakespeare instead of an actual review. Let me redirect myself...

This year, I also discovered another male author that I loved--Bill Bryson. So, when I found out that Bryson wrote the Shakespeare biography for Harper Collins' Eminent Lives series, I really set out to find the book. Which I did. And mighty glad for that.

I might uncharacteristically find Shakespeare's language readable, but believe me, I can hardly get through some Shakespeare biographies and essays about him written by contemporary people. I get bogged down by the academese. That's not the kind of reading I do for fun.

So, thank God for Bryson, who writes a very readable, highly entertaining book about Shakespeare's life and times. Bryson isn't a Shakespeare scholar, and I believe that works to his advantage. Though others might criticize him and his book for having no original research (something which is essential among scholars, Shakespeare or otherwise), at least Bryson aggregates available research and churns up something interesting and accessible for the general populace.

Also, Bryson knows how to make use of fascinating tidbits or factoids as gambits for the Shakespeare uninitiate, or even the Shakespeare hobbyist. For instance, he starts with the idea that we don't really know much about Shakespeare--not his birth date, not even what he really looked like. He also touches on the controversies surrounding Shakespeare's life--his marriage, his sexuality, his authorship--providing enough source material to give one a pretty good picture, but never boring his reader with the dozens of primary or secondary sources that might pepper an academic essay.

A Shakespeare biography will also have to include a background into Elizabethan times and theater, which Bryson does entertainingly. A factoid I was pleased to learn through this book is the origin of the term "box office." I won't reveal it, though, so as not to deny you of the pleasure of finding out if and when you read this book. Or Google the term. Whichever comes first.:-)

Perhaps one thing I could've asked for in Bryson's biography though was more information into the background of the plays. There was an extensive discussion on his sonnets (also touched upon when Shakespeare's possible homosexuality is explored), but not much on the plays. Yes, my two grad courses did give me some background on the plays, but you can imagine the presentation there wasn't as interesting as Bryson's prose. I wanted to see what he could do with them and what interesting tidbits he could dig up.

Of course, perhaps the thing that resonated most with me is that Bryson wrote with the voice of one who, amidst all the questions and controversies surrounding Shakespeare, loved and respected the guy. And, to a Shakespeare fan like me, that's hands-down endearing. While I was reading the book, I felt like Bryson could be someone I could gush to about the credibility of the First Folio, about whether Shakespeare meant to insult his wife in his will, about how Shakespeare wrote his plays because he needed to, for the money (and look what stature the man has now--a lesson in there somewhere). As you might gather from the length of this post, I need someone to gush to about that. Just because I love Shakespeare.

However, even if you're just mildly interested in Shakespeare or even not at all, I suggest that you pick this book up. It demystifies the Bard and brings him down to human level, in easy language, so much so that I believe Bryson succeeds in what a lot of teachers and Shakespearean scholars have tried so hard to achieve--make other people truly appreciate Shakespeare.

My love's more richer than my tongue.

King Lear, Act I, Scene I

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