And so forth. Data is so very scarce for many reasons. It's been four hundred years; records have deteriorated or gone up in flames; what records there are can be next to impossible to locate and once located to read and/or decipher. Shakespeare's name was spelled dozens of different ways, including by himself, and never "Shakespeare". Even with all that, a researcher just can't expect so very many mentions of Shakespeare in the public record: unless he was getting married, baptizing a child, or involved in an arrest or lawsuit (or dying), there simply would be no official documentation. If for no other reason, I would treasure this book for two things: first was the story of the husband and wife team of Charles and Hulda Wallace who, driven in the early 1900's by the husband's obsession with Shakespeare, spent 18 hour days poring over the public record from Will's lifetime and made some discoveries (and then he lost his mind and went paranoiac and into oil). I know it marks me out as a bit freaky, but I'll admit it anyway: I would give a lot to be able to go and spend 18 hours a day studying cramped and often faded and illegible 16th century documents looking for mentions of Shakespeare. Sounds like a dream job. Seriously. The second gift Bryson gives me in this is the concept that if there really was a Love's Labours Won, there were probably enough copies made that it could still be found one day. (Way to reduce a Shakespeare geek to tears, Bryson.) (Sadly, in the interview which serves as Chapter 10, he contradicts that. But hope springs, and all that.) The parts I enjoyed most were the discussion on the various remaining First Folios, and particularly the last chapter, the one on the Claimants. All success stories invite detractors. These come across as really foolish. Bill Bryson stepping down as Chancellor". Durham University. 20 September 2010 . Retrieved 4 July 2011. In 2012, Bryson sued his agent, Jed Mattes Inc., in New York County Supreme Court, claiming it had "failed to perform some of the most fundamental duties of an agent." [27] The case was settled out of court, with part of the settlement being that Bryson may not discuss it.

Közben meg persze igazából arról van szó, hogy Brysont nem az érdekli, mit tudunk Shakespeare-ről (arról már úgyis kismilliom-egy oldalt összeírtak), hanem hogy miért csak ennyit. Amire az egyik válasz természetesen az, hogy mert a csávó retek régen élt. A másik meg az, hogy amikor élt, nem gondolt arra, hogy 500 év múlva irodalomtörténészek fognak ölre menni a "Ki volt Shakespeare?" kérdésen. Hat fennmaradt aláírása van (közülük három - a végrendeletét díszítő - nem is biztosan az övé), és ezeken kétszer nem tudta ugyanúgy leírni a saját nevét - komolyan, mintha trollkodni akart volna a kutatókkal. Közben meg nyilván csak lazán fogta fel a helyesírást, mint akkoriban mindenki - inkább ajánlásnak, mint szabályrendszernek tekintette, pont ahogy a kortárs facebook-kommenterek egy része.Reading 'Shakespeare The World As Stage', however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task.

University of Winchester honours prominent figures at Graduation 2016". Archived from the original on 4 January 2017 . Retrieved 3 January 2017. The only really interesting points were that estimates of Shakespeare's vocabulary are usually huge overestimates because they include each variant of word form and spelling: take, takes, tak'n, taken etc. It's not the size, but what he did with it that mattered; his true skill was as a phrasemaker, demonstrated by the fact that 10% of the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are from his works. So I listened to this one and was pleasantly entertained and learned a lot of very interesting things presented in an amusing way. One of the things I learned is that Bill Bryson has a very British accent after having lived in England for many years, despite the fact that he was born and raised in Iowa. It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare’s plays are full of ocean metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles,” “an ocean of salt tears,” “wild sea of my conscience”) and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.” The Library of Congress in Washington contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare - twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day....and the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly the most exhaustive of bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works - books, monographs, other studies - every year.Bill Bryson is an old friend. His approach to history makes the standard tome all the more flat and dull by comparison – Bryson knows his stuff well enough to not only present it to an audience but to play with it, to have fun with it, to make it fun. He genuinely loves his subjects, and it is infectious. He's like the teacher you always hoped to get – the brilliant, funny, cool one who (to use a real example) sat cross-legged on the table at the front of the room and told the most amazing stories and made you sorry when the class was over, rather than the one who turned the lights off and showed irrelevant slides to a group of uninterested and often napping art students at the deadly time of 3:00 in the afternoon. Don't be put off by my three-star rating. I'm not enough of a snob to think of 3 stars as a "low" rating. It means "I liked it." Nothing more, nothing less. I've always found English history to be rather dry, but I'm glad I read the book. It will add a new layer of subtext to my future reading of Shakespeare's works. Just knowing that audience members were sometimes allowed to sit on the stage during a performance alters my perspective. How distracting that must have been for the actors! Imagine allowing that on Broadway. Bill Bryson". Durham University. Archived from the original on 5 December 2010 . Retrieved 29 July 2010.

At first glance, Bill Bryson seems an odd choice to write this addition to the Eminent Lives series. Author Bill Bryson Takes Agent to Court". Courthouse News Service. Pasadena, California. 4 December 2012. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013 . Retrieved 31 January 2020. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link) The short answer to this is not much. We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. “His sexuality,” Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.”In 2012, he received the Kenneth B. Myer Award, from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience, in Melbourne, Australia. [ citation needed] Bill Bryson receives Honorary Doctorate". University Business. 26 July 2015 . Retrieved 16 July 2018.

How was his marriage to Anne Hathaway? We have no idea – we don't even know that "Anne" was her name; her father's will refers to her as Agnes. I never knew that. Bill Bryson’s biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over 400 years ago, Shakespeare has remained centre stage. His fame stems not only from his plays – performed everywhere from school halls to the world's most illustrious theatres – but also from his enigmatic persona. His face is familiar to all, yet in reality very little is known about the man behind the masterpieces. The Brysons moved around the United Kingdom, living in Virginia Water (Surrey), Purewell (Dorset), Burton (Dorset), Kirkby Malham, and the Old Rectory in Wramplingham, Norfolk (2003–2013). [17] They currently live in rural Hampshire and maintain a small flat in South Kensington, London. [15] From 1995 to 2003 they lived in Hanover, New Hampshire. [18] In reality there is some sugar and other flavors added to the capsule, for we can also taste quite a bit of extraneous material, such as Shakespeare’s times and places. We get to hear about urban development and palaces in London, about the state of its hygiene and health, about life expectancy and children death-rate, about the set-up of schools and academic curricula, about the making of books and theatrical practices, and about the functioning of the legal system, etc. In November 2006, Bryson interviewed then British prime minister Tony Blair on the state of science and education. [25]Even the few surviving portraits that are purportedly of Shakespeare cannot be verified. "The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures." He coined - or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of - 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour's Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them..... In plays written during his most productive and inventive period - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one ever two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences six hundred words that, according to all other evidence,they had never heard before. Mr. Bryson goes off at times on amusing tangents, makes pointed parenthetical remarks and is otherwise completely charming and conversational, like a good host. The pleasure of his company cannot, to borrow a phase from him, “be emphasized too strenuously.”