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Loading... Shakespeare (original 2007; edition 2009)by Bill Bryson
Work InformationShakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson (2007)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Though not an academic, Bryson's written a well-researched book designed to illustrate how little we really know about Shakespeare. Nevertheless, through reading it we learn a great deal about the theatre of the time and many of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Bryson has fun de-bunking the various theories about who wrote Shakespeare's oeuvre if it was not the man himself. In fact the whole book is fun: light and easy to read, and yet by the end you feel you've learned a lot ( ) If you’re looking for a concise biography of William Shakespeare then Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as a Stage could fit the bill. With his typical wit and dry sense of humor, Bryson outlines the facts without a lot of conjecture while still managing to cover a lot of ground and outlooks. I listened to the audiobook that Bryson reads himself and does an excellent job (as always!). There are 120 notes and highlights in my ebook version of this work, and quite a number of them are words I especially like or wasn’t sure about. Very apt indeed that a book written about the creator of several hundred English words is written using such a wide range of vocabulary. We learn that we know almost nothing about the person (in case you are a fan of conspiracy theories, hold them tightly to your chest, proceed to the last chapter of this book, and be schooled, along with Looney, Silliman and Battey. You’re welcome.) but we have this amazing body of work, a good portion of it preserved in the First Folio. Imagine if they didn’t put together that collection. No, don’t, the world would be a very different place, with many academics left without a proper addiction (©Shakespeare). To give you an idea about the extent to which he gave us everyday words, think about how we would describe a simple scene like this without Shakespeare’s words: I felt lonely©, lying in my bedroom© motionless©, only a moonbeam© lighting the downstairs© room… Moreover, what would we do without phrases like ‘vanish into thin air’ or ‘flesh and blood’, just to name a couple? Or without the Shakespeare insult generators, thou vain beef-witted mammet? See? As always, I enjoyed Bryson’s wit and style immensely. Every piece of information he provided appeared to be exceptionally exciting (for instance, the origin of the phrase ‘box office’), and his level-headed appreciation of the subject of others’ obsession made it pure joy to read this book. no reviews | add a review
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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 supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He 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 an unrivaled gift for storytelling.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)822.33Literature English & Old English literatures English drama Elizabethan 1558-1625 Shakespeare, William 1564–1616LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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