After some infatuation with epic sagas (that quickly stopped cold with confusing "Gilgamesh") and bitter-tasting, boozy autobiography of Eric Clapton, I found something really delightful completely by accident - there is a little corner on the very top of the ship where I usually sit & write my diary and its near the passenger's library. Where I browsed absentmindedly while I was waiting for my coffe - lo and behold, I spotted Bill Bryson on the shelf. Now, I know Bryson from before and he never failed to amuse me, he is absolutely adorable character though I found hard to recommend him to people because he is difficult to describe - he doesn't write fiction, he is not a historian, he is basically a chatty, witty, eccentric non-fiction writer covering absolutely everything that pops in his head. And more I read from him, the more I love him.
This time around Bryson writes about life of Shakespeare. Since the book was published as a part of series "Eminent lives" my guess is that it was probably written specifically for this list of biographies - this might explain why the book appears only slightly strained and artificial, where other Bryson books flow like some eccentric river - this one has a feeling of commissioned piece. However, even commissioned piece by Bill Bryson is wonderful.
The life of William Shakespeare is anybody's guess - we hardly know anything at all about the man, except few historical details that might as well have been fabricated and embellished with time. As Bryson wittily points out, all those intimidating books written about him are mostly fabrications because nothing can be proven for sure and people mostly imagined and guessed whatever they believed. In fact, we are unbelievably lucky that we have his complete works (printed and published after his death) because majority of other plays - popular and brilliant as they might have been - from this era are lost and forgotten. Not having anything concrete to hold on and decidedly avoiding guesswork, Bryson focuses on what kind of world Shakespeare lived in - here he goes his usual eccentric way and delights in describing living conditions of Tudor's London, food, housing, clothing, diseases, religious wars and so on. Clearly, those were dangerous times and one of the biggest wonders of all is that he actually survived childhood at all - not to mention all the other lethal possibilities afterwards (you could have been arrested and killed if anyone accused you for being an atheist, for example). I gulped the whole book in three days and it only took me so long because I work long hours and have time to read only after midnight - every day I was looking forward to finish the work and return to my book.
The very last chapter was very amusing - Bryson deals with all the assumptions of someone else being the "true" author of Shakespeare works: it is something I was quite fascinated for some time but the way Bryson waves it off actually embarrassed me - he is so sharp, witty and right on the spot that I felt foolish for ever even thinking about it. For example, the very first person who started the snowball rolling was American lady who was mildly demented and ended up in sanatorium convinced she is a Holy Ghost. And others who followed were equally loony. For all the theories that Shakespeare was a uneducated provincial boy who couldn't possibly know all these things, Bryson points that he was a son of a city mayor and had a decent education for that time - when they write "Shakespeare never owned a book" this is absolutely impossible to prove because we know absolutely nothing about his possessions (except what is written in his will - Bryson jokingly points that for all we know, he might had spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the clothing or the books). I just love Bill Bryson.
No comments:
Post a Comment