Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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Bryson discusses a wide range of matters relating to Shakespeare, his time and work, for example the Chandos portrait [1] and the existence (or not) of Anne Whateley. After reading Bryson's book, I feel like I know as much as any modern person can know, simply because so few facts have survived. They define this biography series according to Strachey’s stated objective of: “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant”. Bryson also wrote two popular works on the history of the English language, The Mother Tongue and Made in America—and, more recently, an update of his guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (first published as The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words in 1983). If you are still wondering how to get free PDF EPUB of book Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.

I'm really not a fan of Shakespeare but reading this book really did help explain his popularity, at least in my mind. When the famous bone examiner George Cuvier receives some mammoth bones in France, he names the creature a “mastodon” (meaning “nipple teeth”) and develops the theory of extinction. At the outset - if you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life and times of William Shakespeare, you are going to be disappointed. Bryson attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding instead to backpack around Europe for four months. I enjoyed the book though, I learnt a lot I didn't know before and I think the author did a good job going over the information we have about Shakespeare as well as the popular theories involving him, especially all the things about who actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.The author of ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’ isn’t, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Its mission and content is to tell us about Shakespeare, yet it tells us in exhaustive and repetitive detail that almost nothing is or can be known about the man ("a wealth of text but poverty of context").

Around the same time, the influential Compte de Buffon makes damning comments about the “New World,” claiming it’s a toxic wasteland full of tiny, shriveled animals and disfigured natives. Jefferson is unable to believe that God would allow for such a cruel fate as extinction to happen, so he commissions an expedition westward to seek out living mastodons and disprove Cuvier’s claim. The size of London, the way it nestled inside the city walls, people packed in there like sardines; the diseases that swept the city (and England) every few years, particularly the Plague; the fact that the first theaters were made to locate outside the city walls, in a horrible “suburbs” filled with tanning houses, brothels, graveyards, and other dreadful establishments and waste areas that must have presented theater-goers with a number of sensory (olfactory) challenges. Here, he does it for the Great Bard, the father of the English language as we know it - William Shakespeare.Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures. I found it interesting how people of the time didn’t care about spelling things consistently, including their own name. These columns were selected and adapted to become his book I'm a Stranger Here Myself, alternatively titled Notes from a Big Country in Britain, Canada, and Australia. I entertained the notion when I encountered it back in school, but having looked at the evidence and given it a good think, I've come to the conclusion that it is a ludicrous question.