Book review

England in Shakespeare’s day is given vivid and compelling life in Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare, The World as Stage.”

Against that bristling backdrop, Bryson unmasks all that we don’t know about the bard (which is nearly everything!) and yet is humbled by all that we have of him. At 196 pages, this is a tidy quick read. It is a conversational yet scholarly ride through a time of remarkable richness and risk. Many of his choice observations and statistics are wonderfully understated:

- two-thirds of the infants born in Stratford in the year of Shakespeare’s birth were killed by the plague. “In a sense, William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.”
- ”In nearly every fyearor at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.”
- Life expectancy there was 35 years (so Shakespeare’s audience was young.).
- Shakespeare knew about 20,000 word, you and I know 50,000 (why am I not comforted by this?)
- 12,000 words entered the English language in the 150 years surrounding Shakespeare's life of which he coined 2000!
- Elizabethan sumptuary law, extending to dress code and meal-takings, were based on income.

And through it all, Bryson exposes the legion of wishful, if unfounded, assumptions and guesses which have accrued with the centuries; leaving us with a portrait of genius depicted only by the times and an astonishing body of work (its precarious path from his era to ours a remarkable chapter in itself).

In all, a very accessible book brimming with nuggets, engaging writing, and a near reverence for a gift bequeathed to the ages.