Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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The Globe itself didn't last long. It burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years the were. No theatre - perhaps no human enterprise - has seen more glory in only a decade or so as the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another plays of unrivalled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure,Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra......

He worked as a journalist, first for the Bournemouth Evening Echo, eventually becoming chief copy editor of the business section of The Times and deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent. Közben meg persze igazából arról van szó, hogy Brysont nem az érdekli, mit tudunk Shakespeare-ről (arról már úgyis kismilliom-egy oldalt összeírtak), hanem hogy miért csak ennyit. Amire az egyik válasz természetesen az, hogy mert a csávó retek régen élt. A másik meg az, hogy amikor élt, nem gondolt arra, hogy 500 év múlva irodalomtörténészek fognak ölre menni a "Ki volt Shakespeare?" kérdésen. Hat fennmaradt aláírása van (közülük három - a végrendeletét díszítő - nem is biztosan az övé), és ezeken kétszer nem tudta ugyanúgy leírni a saját nevét - komolyan, mintha trollkodni akart volna a kutatókkal. Közben meg nyilván csak lazán fogta fel a helyesírást, mint akkoriban mindenki - inkább ajánlásnak, mint szabályrendszernek tekintette, pont ahogy a kortárs facebook-kommenterek egy része. He’s obviously an important guy – I use his words and allusions all day long, but he’s also so important that studies and books about Shakespeare tend to be a bit intense…and a bit dense.And so forth. Data is so very scarce for many reasons. It's been four hundred years; records have deteriorated or gone up in flames; what records there are can be next to impossible to locate and once located to read and/or decipher. Shakespeare's name was spelled dozens of different ways, including by himself, and never "Shakespeare". Even with all that, a researcher just can't expect so very many mentions of Shakespeare in the public record: unless he was getting married, baptizing a child, or involved in an arrest or lawsuit (or dying), there simply would be no official documentation. If for no other reason, I would treasure this book for two things: first was the story of the husband and wife team of Charles and Hulda Wallace who, driven in the early 1900's by the husband's obsession with Shakespeare, spent 18 hour days poring over the public record from Will's lifetime and made some discoveries (and then he lost his mind and went paranoiac and into oil). I know it marks me out as a bit freaky, but I'll admit it anyway: I would give a lot to be able to go and spend 18 hours a day studying cramped and often faded and illegible 16th century documents looking for mentions of Shakespeare. Sounds like a dream job. Seriously. The second gift Bryson gives me in this is the concept that if there really was a Love's Labours Won, there were probably enough copies made that it could still be found one day. (Way to reduce a Shakespeare geek to tears, Bryson.) (Sadly, in the interview which serves as Chapter 10, he contradicts that. But hope springs, and all that.) It's not a surprise that this is short. First off, it belongs as part of a series of concise biographies. Secondly, there isn't much known about Shakespeare, so biographies of him should be short. Why go on and on about something if there's nothing to go on about?! A pláne az egészben az, hogy Shakespeare így is ekkora májer tudott lenni - kis túlzással a kisujjából rázta ki az angol nyelvet. Hangsúlyozni kell, hogy akkoriban kábé csak a latint tartották alkalmasnak arra, hogy értelmes gondolatokat fejezzünk ki általa, hősünk azonban (akár tudott róla, akár nem) mindent megtett azért, hogy ezt az előítéletet lebontsa. Új szavak és kifejezések ezreit vezette be, megmutatta, milyen hajlékony tud lenni az angol nyelv, milyen gazdag érzelmeket és gondolatokat tud megragadni... Ha az elitnek írt volna, mindez csak szűk körben fejtett volna ki hatást - óriási szerencsének kell tartanunk, hogy a tömegkultúrát választotta a kibontakozás terepének. Simán lehet, ha Shakespeare nem lett volna, Oxfordban még most is holt nyelveken író költőket próbálnának a professzorok valami holt nyelven a hallgatók fejébe verni. (Persze az is simán lehet, hogy nem.) Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) The only really interesting points were that estimates of Shakespeare's vocabulary are usually huge overestimates because they include each variant of word form and spelling: take, takes, tak'n, taken etc. It's not the size, but what he did with it that mattered; his true skill was as a phrasemaker, demonstrated by the fact that 10% of the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are from his works.

This book is supposed to be "antibiographical" because one knows practically nothing about Shakespeare. This work was the case with most of the identified authors of the 16th century in England, who left no trace of them either. Apart from his plays, there are only signatures at the bottom of acts of baptism, marriage, birth, and minutes during a neighborhood suit brought by his father. He made three portraits of him. But all that is very little. This book tells us to great lengths that there is nothing to affirm about the man Shakespeare was, on his emotional side, about his sexuality. Many biographers have, however, speculated, and things are very different. The ship that took the Puritan leader John Winthrop to New England carried him, ten thousand gallons of beer, and not much else.)” Nancy Dalva wrote in the New York Observer: "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. Wodehouse, a soupçon of Sir Osbert Lancaster and a cup of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One can be firm of purpose and blithe at the same time, it turns out; one can write a seriously entertaining book." [3] One theory is that Shakespeare's plays weren't particularly original,and that he may have taken the main ideas of his plays from other sources. Bryson was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Bill Bryson Sr., a sports journalist who worked for 50 years at the Des Moines Register, and Agnes Mary (née McGuire), the home furnishings editor at the same newspaper. [8] [9] His mother was of Irish descent. [10] He had an older brother, Michael (1942–2012), and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth. In 2006, Bryson published The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a humorous account of his childhood years in Des Moines. [9] In 2006 Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day." [11]What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two. This is thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be over-emphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare's works, for the usual condition of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive.... Of the approximate three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare's birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, 80 per cent are known only by title.... Honorary degrees 21st - 25th June". st-andrews.ac.uk. University of St Andrews. 20 June 2005. Archived from the original on 18 August 2016 . Retrieved 11 September 2016. Another theory even claimed that his plays were not the work of one man alone. As is his specialty,Bryson digs up some entertaining stuff. I ended the book wanting to know more,and it was a bit frustrating. He coined - or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of - 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour's Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them..... In plays written during his most productive and inventive period - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one ever two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences six hundred words that, according to all other evidence,they had never heard before. In this book he time-travels. An American expat born in Des Moines, Iowa, a Briton by choice, Bill Bryson is an intentional and perpetual tourist, and it’s a great pleasure to accompany him on his foray into the 16th century.

In 2005, Bryson was appointed chancellor of Durham University, [23] succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov. [31] He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. a b "Bill Bryson breaks retirement to record Christmas audiobook". The Guardian. 27 September 2022 . Retrieved 13 December 2022. a b c "Writer Bill Bryson remembers his Iowa roots". Ames Tribune. Gannett Co. 28 October 2013 . Retrieved 31 January 2020.Is this a scholarly work? No. But have you seen some of what passes for such? I'm okay with this. It seems like sound logic deduced from absorbing sound work on the topic. After all (and for example) one of the leading proponents of the anti-Shakespeare movement was a woman who wanted to claim all of the plays for her cousin Sir Francis Bacon. She was biased and, as it turns out, crazy. Her book on the subject was widely dismissed at the time of publication as ridiculous, but the idea lingered, took shape and went on to have a long second life in quarters that rely on scanty evidence or none at all. And yet they persist. It all seems absurd. What did Shakespeare look like? We don't know. There Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn’t, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum. Hawthorne under questioning admitted that he hadn’t actually read it. “This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as [I] live,” he vowed in a letter to a friend.”

Author Bill Bryson Takes Agent to Court". Courthouse News Service. Pasadena, California. 4 December 2012. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013 . Retrieved 31 January 2020. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link) Mr. Bryson goes off at times on amusing tangents, makes pointed parenthetical remarks and is otherwise completely charming and conversational, like a good host. The pleasure of his company cannot, to borrow a phase from him, “be emphasized too strenuously.”

Mr Bill Bryson OBE HonFRS Honorary Fellow". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 5 October 2015. biographical text reproduced here was originally published by the Royal Society under a creative commons license It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare’s plays are full of ocean metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles,” “an ocean of salt tears,” “wild sea of my conscience”) and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.” Reading 'Shakespeare The World As Stage', however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task. For a better assimilation of the capsule, Bryson needs to correct our modern expectations, and remind us that to know so little about a sixteenth century craftsman is nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the material from the sixteenth century has been lost. What is most miraculous about surviving in Shakespeare is that, given the frightful odds, he withstood childhood and got to be an adult. Bryson insists on the very exceptional situation that so much of his works have survived, and this is thanks to the initiative of two of WS’s friends and colleagues, Henry Condell and John Heminges, who decided to publish the First Folio posthumously. Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.”