Shakespeare The World as Stage

I have just finished Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  I enjoy all Bryson's books owing to his wit and wry humor but this one is especially valuable.  Shakespeare is a magnet for rampant speculation and wild theorizing.  Bryson cuts through that, focusing only on what we do know.  

For someone who lived 450 years ago, that we know anything is astonishing and that we have surviving records remarkable.  That those records are few and the facts meager, frustrating.  One of the leitmotifs running through the book is unresolvable ambiguity.  

Bryson fleshes out the record with known factual context of the period - always informative, frequently amusing, sometimes shocking.  This is a history not of Shakespeare only but of Elizabethan England and of the emergence of Theater as we know it today.  

I enjoyed Shakespeare The World as Stage  thoroughly.