William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English
language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his
biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged
around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill
Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man
himself.
Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's
most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an
American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that
her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's
plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson
records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike
room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of
First Folios is housed.
Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent
and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin
air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have
common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's-the
beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and
a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.