Shakespeare

Title: Shakespeare

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: William Collins, 2016 (First published 2007)

ISBN: 9780007197903

Pages: 200

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) is the greatest English playwright and one of the finest poets of all time. From humble beginnings in a provincial town, he migrated to London at a young age and strived hard to become an acknowledged author, actor, director and manager in a troupe of actors that thrilled the late-Elizabethan society. He died at the age of 52, and his fame didn’t percolate to the large populace till nearly a century after his death. But thereafter, there was no looking back as far as his renown was concerned. This book is one among a series titled ‘Eminent Lives’ first published by John Atlas and written by Bill Bryson, who is the favourite of millions of readers on account of his witty remarks and presentation through which he introduces profound ideas in a way appealing to all. However, if we examine the book in a critical light, it is not as funny and absorbing as Bryson’s other books such as ‘Down Under’ and ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, reviewed earlier in this blog.

Bryson brings out some wonderful facts about England’s greatest playwright. There is a ‘wealth of text on him, but the poverty of context in them’ is startling. The Library of Congress holds some 7000 works on Shakespeare. At the same time, the British Library contains 16000 titles on the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon out of which 4000 are relatively new, as books, monographs and other studies. The scholarship is so vast and hairsplitting that we now know that Shakespeare had written 884647 words, 118406 lines, 138198 commas, 26794 colons and 15785 question marks and so on.

This book is interesting in the extreme, more for its mirror on the society of England in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, rather than the actual biography of the great poet cum dramatist. In fact, it presupposes that the readers are quite aware of the life of Shakespeare so that it describes only the background facts, which introduced unexpected twists and turns in his life. Epidemics and mass deaths were prevalent. It was an age in which it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents. Population of the country was actually less than what it was three centuries ago, due to plague and other diseases. A nasty outbreak of plague was witnessed in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford in 1564, the year of his birth, which killed 200 people in the town. Bryson wryly comments that Shakespeare’s greatest achievement was not writing Hamlet or the Sonnets, but just surviving his first year of life. Plague swept every ten years or so, in different counties. People who could relocate to other places left the city behind in such cases. This is one reason why there are such a large number of royal palaces just outside London. For nearly every year out of the two-and-a-half centuries, deaths outnumbered births in that city. What kept the population at a stable figure was the influx of provincials and Protestant refugees from Europe. Life expectancy was a dismal 35 years, so that the city was an overwhelmingly youthful place. Egalitarianism was yet to be fashionable. There were Sumptuary laws that specified what one could wear and linked it to the income he earned and his position in society. Such was the case with food. A cardinal was permitted nine dishes at a meal while most ordinary people were allowed only two courses. Eating meat during Lent was a criminal offense attracting a term in prison. The Church was given the privilege to grant exemption during this period. This made many churches and priests immensely rich by selling such indulgences at great profit to them.

If what one wants from this book is the plain biography of Shakespeare, he is in for disappointment. Similar is the information about the period 1585 – 1592, when he left Stratford-upon-Avon and his family, and established himself as an actor and playwright in London. Bryson also is not able to cast light into this dark period. This was a time when English drama excelled under the splendid talent of many outstanding authors like Kyd, Greene and Watson, all of whom died at an early age. Christopher Marlowe, who was dead at 29, was an able rival of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had also died at that age, we’d have considered Marlowe the greater writer, but he possessed little gift for comedy and none for creating strong female roles. George Bernard Shaw had remarked that ‘Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first’. Bryson lists many examples where the poet has ‘borrowed almost mechanically’. In some cases, only the theme is admitted from a classic like what Kalidasa, who borrowed the tale of Sakuntala from the Mahabharata. What is noteworthy is that they embellished the plain story into a masterpiece of creativity. The book asserts that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and excellence in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.

Bryson devotes a considerable space in the book for a discussion on the scholarship on Shakespeare and his works – both pro- and anti-. Real Shakespearean scholarship starts with Edward Malone – not much was known about the poet, but Malone found the details of his family and made a grand effort to find the order in which the plays were actually written. At the same time, there was a very strong movement that sought to deny Shakespeare the credit of writing the wonderful plays and poems. Some 5000 books or monographs are written with this objective in mind. The author ridicules the anti-Shakespeare movement as all of it involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatement of facts. James Wilmot was the first to come out with such an argument and then came Delia Bacon, who first claimed that Francis Bacon, her namesake, was the real author. Bacon made a trip to England in 1852 – 1857 for research on the topic and produced a huge, unreadable book. She returned to the U.S. thereafter but became insane. Till her death, she strongly believed that she was the Holy Ghost! Besides Francis Bacon, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe and the 17^th Earl of Oxford and about fifty other persons are credited with writing poems and plays under the pseudonym of Shakespeare. Bryson convincingly attacks the fallacy of these claims.

At the outset, the author confesses that this book is not what he thinks of William Shakespeare, but what he had heard about Shakespeare from the people who have spent lifetimes studying and thinking about the great man. Accordingly, this work is a great attempt to see how much of Shakespeare we can know from the record. He came about in an era when English was still struggling to gain respectability from the stranglehold of Latin. The Bodleian Library in Oxford had only 36 books in English out of the 6000 books it possessed in 1605. Even the first text book on English language that came out in 1568 was in Latin. The book presents a bibliography, but curiously, no Index.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star