bill bryson shakespeare the world as stage summary

“… you are begging the question - assuming the truth of the very point being challenged! “There is an extraordinary - seemingly an insatiable - urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare.” Whittemore, quoting from the same section of the “Claimants” chapter as Gray, cites Bryson’s line: “Looking through Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare: The World as Stage … I just couldn’t help wondering how he managed to get through writing it without recognizing his own contradictory statements and outright falsehoods, not to mention his snide, snickering dissimulation.” Well, gee, who could argue with that? In his comments on Bryson, Oxfordian Hank Whittemore cuts right to the chase: The stagnant swill that chokes the marginal banks of the turgid river of serious scholarship. “They join that scourge of the information age, the conspiracy theorists with their wayward and unsubstantiated stories about the Lincoln or Kennedy assassinations, deniers of the holocaust, promoters of chariots of the gods, alien abductions, the Protocols of Zion, and so on. Gray then quotes Bryson, ‘So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment –actually all of it, every bit– involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact.’ Bravo Bryson.

Redressing these ridiculous claims does become a biographic imperative. “It is a sad commentary on our time, and we should expect more of ourselves, having more access to facts, that Bryson must add a final chapter to his book dealing with ‘claimants’ … that is, the crackpot modern notion … that someone else wrote Shakespeare.

These two commentaries ( “Bravo Bryson” from Stratfordian Terry Gray and “Bryson’s Folly” from Oxfordian Hank Whittemore) are a neat little capsule summary of the state of the authorship debate, circa 2009.įirst off, we should begin towards the end of Terry Gray’s piece. Recently on this blog there were several commentaries on Bryson posted under Touchstone’s Recommended Reading which I wished to comment on at the time, and will do so now. One of the more recent is Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: the World as Stage (2007), which has received numerous good reviews from the media and the public (see reader reviews at for a sampling). But in fact it’s only a couple each year, but still, in the past 20 years or so, that adds up. The Shakespeare biographies keep coming …sometimes it feels like almost every week.

Bill bryson shakespeare the world as stage summary