Throw Your Skinny Book Down, Son!

Bill Bryson, Shakespeare, 2007
I started reading this book on the 12th of August after returning from a brilliant staging of Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. I wanted to keep some of the feeling and ambiance of the theatre with me, so what could be better than a biography on the great English bard? This is a very slim volume - the reason being that Bryson wants to look at exactly what we know about Shakespeare through hard-earned facts. It turns out there's very little we know about the man. Nevertheless, he conjures Elizabethan and Jacobean England immaculately while fitting in the evidence for Shakespeare's existence and genius. He shares some amusing and bizarre facts about the period (people were considered to be rich and noble if they had teeth blackened from too much sugar eating, for example) while at the same time aiming a crossbow at all previous scholars that have extrapolated on the man without a shred of evidence. Part bitchy, part brilliant - never boring. If anything, I have not been satiated by this biography and now wish to learn more (I've just ordered a biography on King James I from the local library.)