At the outset - if you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life and times of William Shakespeare, you are going to be disappointed. Bill Bryson simply doesn't write like that. Those of you who are familiar with his oeuvre would know that he is a "love-him-or-hate-him" author: people either love his snarky humour, or hate it with passion. And there are merits to both viewpoints.

Bryson takes to 'Streets of Bournemouth' ". bournemouth.ac.uk. Bournemouth University. Archived from the original on 5 October 2016 . Retrieved 16 July 2018. Bryson imagines Shakespeare in the hard times of the 16th century. The usages and customs and the historical context are fascinating to discover. It was another world that made me think of science fiction. The diseases were multiple: the plague, syphilis, & c. In the 16th century, England experienced the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 while she was pregnant. A whole period remained obscure (between 1585 and 1592); it is the lost years where the biographers lost in conjectures to identify its course. Some say he traveled to Italy. Others say he was a traveling comedian. Another theory even claimed that his plays were not the work of one man alone. As is his specialty,Bryson digs up some entertaining stuff. I ended the book wanting to know more,and it was a bit frustrating. General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that—all this at a time when a day’s wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping—the box office.”I have appreciated the passages described by the Elizabethan theatres, edifices different from other theatres. There are no traces left, apart from one or two rough drafts of drawings. It's fascinating. The theatrical activity was enormous at the time, which involved competition between the different rooms. For example, Shakespeare played comedy while writing plays. The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer.

University of Winchester honours prominent figures at Graduation 2016". Archived from the original on 4 January 2017 . Retrieved 3 January 2017. Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that all together he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.”Bill Bryson receives honorary doctorate". King's College London. 14 November 2012. Bill Bryson OBE: the UK's highest-selling author of non-fiction, acclaimed as a science communicator, historian and man of letters. In 1995, while in the United Kingdom, Bryson authored Notes from a Small Island, an exploration of Britain. In 2003, he authored A Short History of Nearly Everything. In October 2020, he announced that he had retired from writing books. In 2022, he recorded an audiobook for Audible, The Secret History of Christmas. [5] He has sold over 16 million books worldwide. [6] [7] Early life and education [ edit ] What did Shakespeare look like? We don't know. There are three portraits that are "the best". But two of them were done after his death and the other (the only one done during his lifetime) may be of someone else entirely. We don't even know how to spell his name, though it appears that neither did he. "Shakespeare" was the standard spelling of the time, but in the six surviving signatures we have from his own hand, he didn't spell it the same way twice. So, was he Willm Shakp, William Shakspēr, Wm Shakspē, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere, or William Shakspeare?