For after he tells us what we don’t know about Shakespeare, and some few facts that we do, Mr. Bryson, wasn’t so merry in Shakespeare’s day. Bryson is now himself a kind of über-academic, having been named chancellor of Britain’s Durham University in 2005, and being very active in the preservation of the “rural life” of Merrie England. Bryson’s marvelous and succinct rebuttal of the Christopher Marlowe claim: “He was the right age … had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.” How nicely ironic it is that Mr. The Bard could hardly have a more devoted advocate. Along these lines, the last chapter-“Claimants”-is particularly pleasurable, as the author trounces various theorists of alternative authorship of the plays.

It will be up to academics to re-ravel what Mr.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is aimed at general readers, not Shakespeare scholars, though the latter do make appearances now and then, not always is a flattering light, but always entertainingly. One can be firm of purpose and blithe at the same time, it turns out one can write a seriously entertaining book. Wodehouse, a soupçon of Sir Osbert Lancaster and a cup of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Here’s his very first sentence, about the onetime owner of a Shakespeare likeness now in the National Portrait Gallery: “Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.” Right off, the author’s established his blithe and sunny tone: If a trio of witches were cooking up this book in a cauldron, there’d be a pinch of P.G. Bryson begins by telling us what Shakespeare did (or did not) look like. Like Show White sweeping up for the Seven Dwarfs, he whistles while he works. Bryson is so cheerful as he goes about debunking received wisdom, cockamamie theories, eccentric research and serious but flawed scholarship. On and on go the disclaimers: “We know precious little ….” “We hardly know what he was as a person.” “Ever a shadow in his own biography, he disappears, all but utterly ….” And yet Shakespeare: The World as Stage is not an ongoing discouragement, because Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.” 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. Bryson sets off on a mission: “ see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.” The series in question is Eminent Lives, which describes itself as “brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” (The general editor, James Atlas, is the matchmaker.) Thus, Mr.

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson