SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson ; Published by Harper Collins; Pages200; Price Rs 325/-

                            ********************

An impressive series of biographies edited by James Atlas include “Muhammad” by Karen Armstrong, “Thomas Jefferson” by Christopher Hitchens and “Beethoven” by Edmund Morris. The latest in this series is “Shakespeare’ by Bill Bryson. Bryson, is of course the well known author of “A Short History Of Nearly Everything”, which book was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, bagged the Aventis Prize for Science books in 2004 and was also awarded the Descartes Prize in 2005. Bryson’s last book was the semi-autobiographical hilarious “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”. 

 The book under review is a biography of William Shakespeare which will cause several eyebrows to be raised—Since there are thousands of books on the Bard of Avon—why one more?. Reading the volume will make one realise that biographies of Shakespeare have so far been based on a jungle of wild speculation based on negligible, unverified facts.

Bill Bryson has waded through the entire Shakespeare-iana, sifted and recorded episodes in his research with considerable wit and commendable vigour. The biography is at once a vivid, fast paced work that encompasses every facet of the Bard’s life and times.

Facts unavailable hitherto tumble out of this cornucopia and a few are culled out and given for the entertainment and education of the reader.

Scholars have counted every word Shakespeare wrote, logged every dib and jot. Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks ; ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays ; his characters refer to ‘love’ 2,259 times but to ‘hate’ only 183 times; altogether he left us 888,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.

Much is made of Shakespeare’s learning—he knew as much as a lawyer, doctor or statesman or accomplished professional of his age. He is supposed to have deduced the orbital motions of heavenly bodies well before any astronomer did. Shakespeare was made into a Committee of Talents. His vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs and natural history. He mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms.

However ,Bryson proves that Shakespeare’s knowledge was not all that distinguished. He gets his geography wrong. He puts a sail- maker in Bergamo-- the most landlocked city in Italy. If he knew Venice had canals, he gave no hint of it in the plays he set there. Ancient Egyptians played billiards. Caesar’s Rome has clock –the first one ticked fourteen hundred years later. Whatever his other virtues Shakespeare was not conspicuously worldly.

Shakespeare’s real gift was as a phrasemaker. Many of his phrases have entered the common language. Among them : one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, more in sorrow than in anger, tower of strength, foregone conclusion.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, then roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances in English are from Shakespeare- –an impressive proportion, indeed.

Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost except for the efforts of his close friends John Hemminges and Henry Condell who brought out a folio edition of his complete works. It contained 18 plays. The great repository of the First Folio today is a modest building two blocks away from the Capitol Hill in Washington D.C—the Folger Shakespearean Library.

Mention must be made of the ludicrous attempt of P.T.Barnum of “ Barnum and Bailey Circus” fame –who tried shipping to U S A the birthplace of Shakespeare , placing it on wheels and sending it on a perpetual tour round the country—a prospect so alarming that money was swiftly raised in Britain, through a Committee headed by Charles Dickens-- to save the house as a museum

and shrine.

 This reviewer had a chance to pay homage to Shakespeare at his birth-place and was deeply moved by the impressive manner in which it is preserved for posterity.

Lytton Strachey wrote , “the first duty of a biographer is to preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant”. Strachey who evolved a new genre of biographical writing could not have had a better disciple than Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson’s book is a tour-de-force and worth reading and re-reading many times. It is pure nectar.

P.P.Ramachandran.

19/7/2020.