A review by chrissych
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

4.0

A fascinating little read that explores more the unknowability of Shakespeare than the life of the man himself. Bryson writes concisely and manages to cut through much ineffectual (and often spurious) debate regarding claims of the playwright's identity, history, works, and status, without falling to the temptation of proposing spurious claims of his own. Some readers have taken offense to the fact that he shoots down theories without providing his own, but this is exactly his point: given the extremely limited, though still substantial in comparison to other playwrights of the age, evidence regarding Shakespeare's personal and professional lives, it is IMPOSSIBLE to really know much at all.

The book reads as an entertaining, insightful jab at the battle between critical scientific thought and historical romanticization, a concise but compelling overview of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and a sobering reminder that history, once lost, can not be rebuilt out of nothing.