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Nobody knows much, if anything at all about Shakespeare: that’s the premise Bryson sets out to prove in this slim, amusing volume. The fact that it runs to fewer than 200 pages is testament to the playwright’s relative anonymity, despite the global recognition of his work.

So it seems a little disingenuous for the back-cover to describe this book as a ‘biography’. Sure, it tells us a little about who the man was, but at the same time it tells us far more about who he was not.

That is perhaps its genius.

We don’t know what he looked like - not for sure. The popular image we have of a pasty white scribe who should have seen the sun more often is based on one of three existing paintings, none of which we can be sure are really of the man himself.

Of the six signatures in existence he supposedly penned himself, none is the same as any other and at least three could easily be fakes. Shakespeare rarely ever spelled his name the same from one signing to the next and so to a modern-day investigator he remains an enigma. The temptation must clearly be to invent appealing facts through either frustration or an attempt to produce some meaty content that would bolster sales.

Bryson, to his credit, steers well clear. As well he might. His name, alone, would guarantee sales - and so he is free instead to dissect the work of others, exposing their lies, half-truths and cod theories, and showing how quickly they collapse under the lightest scrutiny. This, it must be said, makes for a riveting read.

Perhaps it’s a case of schaudenfreud: we all like to see stuffed shirts brought down a peg or two, or to stand by the fringe of a fight - even a literary one of this type.

So ultimately Bryson comes out on top, as you would expect, and we turn the last page having learned comparatively little beyond one simple lesson: that you shouldn’t believe half of what you read about Shakespeare. Much of it is more even fanciful than some of his plays.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.