Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage examines what can and cannot be known about William Shakespeare from the surviving historical record. Bryson approaches his subject with skepticism, arguing that much of what has been written about Shakespeare rests on conjecture rather than fact.

Bryson opens by surveying the three surviving likenesses of Shakespeare, each flawed or uncertain. The Chandos portrait, which became the founding work of London's National Portrait Gallery, dates to the right period but cannot be confirmed as Shakespeare. The Droeshout engraving, used as the frontispiece of the 1623 First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, is artistically mediocre and was made seven years after Shakespeare's death. The painted bust at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon lost its original detail when a scholar ordered it whitewashed in the 18th century. Shakespeare, Bryson concludes, is paradoxically the best known and least known of historical figures.

About a hundred documents relating to Shakespeare survive, but these are legal records that reveal nothing about his inner life. Only 14 words in his own hand exist: six signatures and the phrase "by me" on his will. No letters, manuscripts, or contemporaneous descriptions survive. Senior archivist David Thomas at the National Archives explains the difficulty of searching 16th-century records, written on sheepskin parchment in variable handwriting and arcane clerical Latin without any indexing. Bryson recounts how Charles and Hulda Wallace, an American couple, beginning in 1906 spent years combing documents at the Public Record Office, eventually discovering the Belott-Mountjoy case, a 1612 court dispute in which Shakespeare appeared as a witness. The case yielded 24 new mentions of his name and the only transcript of him speaking in his own voice.

Bryson describes the dangerous world into which Shakespeare was born in 1564. England's population stood between 3 and 5 million, ravaged by plague, tuberculosis, and smallpox. Shakespeare was baptized on April 26 in Stratford-upon-Avon; plague struck the town three months later, killing at least 200 people. England was undergoing a turbulent religious transition under Queen Elizabeth I, who demanded outward Anglicanism but faced constant threats from Catholic plots.

Shakespeare's father, John, was a glover who rose through civic offices to become high bailiff, effectively mayor, in 1568, but was prosecuted in the 1570s for illegal wool trading and usury and withdrew from public life in 1576. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a minor branch of a prominent family and bore eight children. William probably attended King's New School, a grammar school where boys spent long days studying Latin rhetoric. In November 1582, at 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older and already pregnant. They had three children: Susanna in 1583 and twins Judith and Hamnet in 1585.

From 1585 to 1592, the period known as the "lost years," virtually nothing is documented. Various theories place him as a schoolmaster, soldier, or tutor, but none can be confirmed. He made his way to London, a city of roughly 200,000 where plague was endemic and life expectancy rarely exceeded 35. Theaters as dedicated entertainment spaces were new; the first, the Red Lion, opened in 1567. All were built in "liberties," areas outside the City walls exempt from municipal regulation, and companies performed five or six different plays per week to meet audience demand.

Shakespeare's first certain appearance in the literary record comes in 1592, when the pamphleteer Robert Greene attacked him as an "upstart Crow." Plague then shut the theaters for nearly two years, during which Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis (1593), dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton. The poem was reprinted at least 10 times in his lifetime. A second poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), carried a warmer dedication to the same earl. Rather than pursue a literary career under patronage, Shakespeare returned to the theater, joining the newly formed Lord Chamberlain's Men. His chief rival, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, had been stabbed in Deptford in 1593 at age 29 in disputed circumstances.

Bryson devotes attention to the plays, tracing their uncertain chronology, Shakespeare's borrowing from Plutarch, Ovid, and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, and his breaking of classical dramatic rules. Shakespeare mixed comedy into tragedy, employed soliloquies, and violated the unities of time, place, and action, the classical principles confining a play to a single day, a single location, and a single storyline. His geographical errors were frequent, but his genius lay in his command of language. He coined or first recorded some 2,035 words and produced phrases embedded in common English, from "one fell swoop" to "foregone conclusion."

The years 1596 to 1603 brought personal loss and professional triumph. Shakespeare's son Hamnet died in 1596 at age 11, yet Shakespeare wrote some of his most celebrated comedies and histories in the years that followed. He purchased New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, and secured a coat of arms for his family. When the lease on the Theatre expired, the Lord Chamberlain's Men dismantled the building in late 1598 and transported its timbers across the Thames to construct the Globe, which opened in 1599. In February 1601, agents of the Earl of Essex—a disgraced royal favorite who had fallen from Elizabeth's grace—paid the company to stage the politically provocative Richard II as a prelude to a failed coup. The company escaped punishment; Essex was executed. Elizabeth died in March 1603.

Her successor, James I, renamed Shakespeare's company the King's Men and employed them for 187 court performances. Shakespeare produced his greatest tragedies during this period, including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a Catholic conspiracy to blow up Parliament, led to harsh anti-Catholic measures. Shakespeare's 154 sonnets appeared in 1609, probably without his consent, generating centuries of speculation about his personal life, though Bryson stresses that their autobiographical content remains unknowable. In his later years Shakespeare collaborated with the playwright John Fletcher, and he appears to have written nothing after 1613, the year the Globe burned down.

Shakespeare revised his will in March 1616 amid family turmoil: His daughter Judith's new husband, Thomas Quiney, had been fined for fornication with Margaret Wheeler, who died giving birth to his child. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, from unknown causes, leaving an estate of roughly £1,000. His wife Anne received only the famous "second-best bed." No manuscripts survive, and his personal inventory was likely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Bryson credits Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell with preserving his legacy. In 1623 they compiled the First Folio, putting 18 plays into print for the first time, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Twelfth Night. Without their effort, these works would almost certainly have been lost. Shakespeare was not the most esteemed playwright of his own era; the playwrights Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, along with Ben Jonson, all enjoyed greater popularity. His enduring fame owed much to 18th-century champions, particularly actor-manager David Garrick.

Bryson concludes by addressing the anti-Stratfordian movement, which has generated over 5,000 books claiming someone else wrote the plays. Candidates have included Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan philosopher and statesman; Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604 before many plays were written; Christopher Marlowe; and more than 50 others. Bryson argues that all such theories rest on the baseless assumption that a provincial upbringing disqualified Shakespeare from greatness, ignore textual details reflecting a rural Warwickshire background, and require an impossibly vast conspiracy of silence among his contemporaries.