Shakespeare: The World As Stage

There are few more engaging companions on a non-fiction journey than Bill Bryson. I have gone with him happily on trips around Australia, explorations of the history of the English language and the domestic home, and many others. So it was a canny move by the publishers of this Eminent Lives series to hire Bryson to deal with what must surely be their most problematic subject: William Shakespeare.

The problem is that although Shakespeare left behind the richest body of work in the English language, he left us almost zero information about his personal life. Not even his birth date is certain. This hasn't prevented a tidal wave of speculation about his loves, career, even his identity; as Bryson points out, it's not that the world needs another book about Shakespeare -- it's that this series does.

If anyone is skilled at spinning an interesting tale out of a bare handful of recorded (and contested) facts, it's Bill Bryson. And Shakespeare: The World as Stage tells us a lot of very engaging stuff about the Elizabethan theatre, publishing, London, class and religion in Shakespeare's time. But -- and this is not Bryson's fault -- it tells us next to nothing about the man himself. It is truly amazing that so much mystery still surrounds this most luminous of literary figures. Was he gay? Why did he leave his wife their 'second-best bed'? ( I suspect a coded message...) What was he up to in the 'lost years'? We don't even know for sure what plays were written when, or even in what order.

I'm still glad I read it, though, because it succinctly filled in some useful background to the events of  Antonia Forest's The Players and the Rebels. Which reminds me, I still need to get The Player's Boy! I feel a Christmas present coming on...

At Home

 I love obscure facts, and I love houses, and I love Bill Bryson. So the combination of all three in Bryson's At Home has proved perfectly irrestistible.

This delightfully corpulent book is sub-titled "A Short History of Private Life," and in it, Bill Bryson rambles through his English country house and along the way, wanders through the history of domestic comfort -- so far he's covered (among many other topics) the story of electricity, the telephone, landscape gardening, mice, sperm whales, tea and servants. There is a fascinating fact or anecdote on every page (often many more than one...) and the chuckle value is high, as is the "wow, I never knew that" factor.

Did you know that lobsters used to be so common round the coasts of Britain that servants "sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week"? That the aspidistra was uniquely immune to the ill-effects of gas lighting, hence its ubiquity as a Victorian houseplant? That caravans of camels up to seventy miles long carried salt across the Sahara from Timbuktu to the ports of the Mediterranean? That despite widespread panic over rabies-carrying bats in the US, more people die from food poisoning at church picnics every year than from the entire history of human contact with bats?

I gleaned each of these tidbits from opening the pages of At Home at random. So far, Bill and I have reached the study; there's only the garden and the upper floor to go before our tour concludes. I'll be sad when it's over.