Shakespeare - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson, best known for his travel writing, has turned his attention to the life and times of the world’s best known playwright and poet. This slender volume, appropriately reflecting the little actually known about Shakespeare, explores the world of Shakespearian scholarship and Elizabethan England as much as the life of its’ subject, imparting a flavour of mystery and detection that I don’t usually associate with English Literature (the subject).
Throughout the book Bryson convincingly counters the charges that support arguments Shakespeare did not author the many works attributed to him. For example:

Far from having ‘small Latin and less Greek’, as Ben Jonson so famously charged, Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing and reciting in Latin, often in the most mind-numbingly repetitious manner… Through such exercises Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis and others equally arcane and taxing… a more thorough grounding in Latin rhetoric and literature than ‘most present-day holders of a university degree in classics’.

And now I know the very many forms of rhetoric of which I am woefully ignorant.
Bryson also explains where the allegations came from, and the extraordinary devotion of both accusers and defenders of Shakespeare – an entire seething community I was primarily unaware of and am now fascinated by. This, I think, is the true gift of Bryson – he invests the worlds he explores with interest and flavour in all his writing (and in person, having heard him speak in Melbourne and, being something of a Bryson fan girl, having read every one of his books) - from travels far-flung and domestic to the history of language and the history of the world. He so genuinely conveys his own absorption in it that the reader cannot help but be transported along with him, in a torrent of writing that is never dry and often wry, or laugh aloud funny.
Aspects of the book resonated unexpectedly with other aspects of my life – I read Shakespeare not long after attending a seminar of pandemic influenza, and found the discussion of plague and exotic illnesses (like ‘English sweat’, which came out of nowhere and was so severe many patients died the same day they manifested symptoms, then vanished in the 1550s) eerily relevant. But even without that element this is a great book, well worth reading if you have only the most cursory interest in the life and times of Shakespeare but have any interest whatsoever in literature, history, writing, conspiracies, detection, or people. - Alex