Where There’s A Will: Bryson on Shakespeare
Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage is a short and, if you are interested in the topic, most interesting read. Part of the Eminent Lives series published by Atlas Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, it is one of a collection of biographies of historically important figures written by top writers. Drawing on Bryson for the task was a great idea; he has a knack for distilling information and presenting it in a lively, often amusing way.
Bryson comes clean almost from the first page: despite all the research, we know very little about Shakespeare. We have scraps for documents, opinions for facts. And we have a lot of conjecture from both bona fide and hack historians, too many with hidden agendas, some of whom have “never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion”.
This, for example, is the complete visual record we possess of the theaters in Shakespeare’s day: “One rough sketch of the interior of a playhouse Shakespeare had no connection with; one doubtful panorama by someone who may never have seen London; and one depiction done years after Shakespeare left the scene showing a theater he never wrote for.”
Notwithstanding all that, Bryson does provide us with a fairly vivid picture of Elizabethan and Jacobean London and hometown Stratford, the pall cast by the Plague, the religious and political tensions, and the widespread, near debilitating poverty that served as a backdrop to Shakespeare’s career. Theater was obviously no panacea, but it was a solace for even the miserable classes.
And Shakespeare was the best, if not the brightest, of those playwrights bringing light into their lives. (Brightest honors arguably fell to contemporary Ben Jonson).
What separates Shakespeare from the other stars in the literary firmament is, to use Bryson’s words, “a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language”.
Shakespeare coined – or at least provided us with the first recorded use of – seemingly countless words. Among the 2,035 words ostensibly first found in Shakespeare are antipathy, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, and zany. Oh yeah…and countless.
His real gift, though, was as a phrasemaker. Among his creations: one fell swoop; vanish into thin air; play fast and loose; be in a pickle; budge an inch; cold comfort; flesh and blood; foul play; tower of strength; blinking idiot; with bated breath; pomp and circumstance; and foregone conclusion. His was a gift that keeps on giving. These phrases are so “repetitiously irresistible” that many have devolved into clichés.
For me, Bryson’s greatest service to Shakespearean scholarship was his undressing of all the conspiracy theories surrounding the authorship issue. He has definitively debunked the dubious backers of Bacon, Marlowe, de Vere, et al. Hopefully, once and for all.
Bryson’s brief look at the life, the times and the works of Shakespeare is understated and unsentimental. It’s the perfect approach for those who prefer to let the plays and the sonnets speak for themselves.
Huh? Bryson has “debunked” the Oxfordian case for de Vere’s authorship of the Shakespeare canon? Only someone who doesn’t know of what that case consists could possibly promulgate such a claim. Bryson knows next to nothing about the case; how could he “debunk” it? Indeed, Bryon’s book is an ignorant tissue of half-truth and self-delusion little better than the tradition he ostensibly critiques as one in which contrary evidence has never been an impediment to monumental dogma. For an antidote to this kind of pretentiousness, I recommend Mark Anderson’s *Shakespeare by Another Name,* which illustrates a continuity between biography and literary interpretation that orthodox bardographers, Bryson included, would die for.
In one of the first classes I took in university, a student asked “Will we be covering the issue of whether Shakespeare wrote the plays?” The professor looked momentarily surprised, but quickly explained that this would not appear on the syllabus, because it wasn’t even considered worthy of debunking by most serious Shakespeare scholars.
Of course, this could just have been the bias of one particular professor, or, as I was to later learn, the position of the vast majority of the academic establishment. However, after doing my own research, I’m as convinced as I can be that the man who wrote the plays is the man whose name appears on the First Folio of 1623. The historical evidence exists: his name on the plays and on his earlier narrative poems, the records of his participation in the theatre company as both actor and shareholder, as well as records making it clear that the shareholder-Shakespeare was the same William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, a letter to Shakespeare and his will, as well as his appearance in court records.
True, the documentary record for Shakespeare is scant, but this is the case for many of his contemporaries.
I’m also skeptical about the reliance of the de Vere case on a vast conspiracy, at the time and since, to conceal the “true” identity of a playwright. Furthermore, much of the evidence put forward is outright wrong, from the claim that there were no eulogies for Shakespeare (when several circulated relatively soon after his death), to the shaky parallels established between the plays and de Vere’s life. There are many improbabilities to the Oxford theory, but perhaps the final nails in the coffin come from allusions in two plays to events that occurred after Oxford’s death.
And I can’t resist repeating Bryson’s jab that the original Oxfordian had the unfortunate last name Looney.
Lastly, a quote from one of the most brilliant Shakespeare scholars of today, Gail Kern Paster, emphasizes the extent to which Oxfordianism is considered a fringe belief system: “to ask me about the authorship question… is like asking a paleontologist to debate a creationist’s account of the fossil record.” (David Kathman also quotes her in his excellent Letter to Harper’s, part of the The Shakespeare Authorship Page (http://shakespeareauthorship.com/#how), which amasses evidence for Shakespeare as…well, Shakespeare.)
All in all, the Bryson book is not a work of great scholarly significance, but a friendly and conversational introduction to perhaps the greatest playwright who ever lived. Yep, William Shakespeare.