Knowing dick
about Will

>> Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World
as Stage is an essential look at
the Bard and his times

by Juliet Waters

Before I read Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, I never realized how small Elizabethan England was. With a population of a little under four million, the country that managed to colonize such a huge chunk of the world wasn’t much bigger than Montreal. I also never realized how brutal and weird it was.

Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, both writers more successful than Shakespeare in his time, are on record for killing one man each in their lives. Marlowe himself was killed in a drunken fight. We don’t know about Shakespeare, but that’s only one of the many things we don’t know about him in an age where record keeping was sloppy and often destroyed. And we don’t know what they were fighting about, but there’s a good chance it may have been about some babe with deliberately blackened teeth. Tooth decay back then was a status symbol that meant you had enough money to eat sugar.

Much is made of the high artistic standards of the Renaissance. Little is ever made of how low they could go. “Queen Elizabeth often had visitors from abroad entertained with bearbaiting at Whitehall,” writes Bryson. “In its classic form, a bear was put in a ring, sometimes tethered to a stake, and set upon by mastiffs, but bears were expensive investments, so other animals (such as bulls and horses) were commonly substituted. One variation was to put a chimpanzee on the back of a horse and let the dogs go for both together. The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer. That an audience that could be moved to tears one day by a performance of Doctor Faustus could return the next to the same space and be just as entertained by the frantic deaths of helpless animals may say as much about the age as any single statement could.”

Indeed. But it’s not Bryson’s project to demythologize Shakespearean England. It’s to sift through the mountains of speculative clutter that have grown out of Shakespeare’s life and work, and pare it down to what we really know about him, which turns out to be pretty much dick.

There’s a very good chance that the one portrait we have of Shakespeare isn’t actually him. “Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just 14 words in his own hand, his name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will.” And there’s even reason to doubt the authenticity of those. His contemporaries, notably Jonson, wrote much of what we know about him. But if there is one thing Bryson remains adamantly certain of by the end of this slim but fascinating book, it’s that Shakespeare was definitely the author of his plays. Bryson’s final chapter convincingly debunks the many conspiracy theories. “Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man—whoever he was.”

After the speculations have been examined and discarded, what’s left is a great work of scholarship, not to mention a celebrity biography rare in its discipline. But the real entertainment value of this book is the pairing of Shakespeare, one of the world’s most fertile minds, with Bryson, one of its driest wits. Who better to write about a subject as overwhelming as Shakespeare than the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything?

No one needs another book about Shakespeare. Shakespeare Quarterly logs about 4,000 new works a year. There will, however, never be too many books by Bryson, and if you read only one book about Shakespeare this year, or ever, I’d go with this one.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage by
Bill Bryson, Harper Collins, hc, 200pp, $21.95