By Bill Bryson
What's fascinating about Shakespeare is how little we actually know about him. We have copies of most of his plays. We have some legal records, his birth, marriage, will & death certificates and a few mentions of him in various public records. And that's it. We know next to nothing about who he was like as a person. We have no personal letters. No letters from friends. No personal effects. Everything we know about him personally is conjecture. This book covers the endless conjecture, and how it came to being.
That we know so little of him isn't that surprising. We know very little about anyone who lived at that time. In addition, for any Shakespeare's artifacts to have survived to today, they would have had to survive calamities such as the Globe Theater fire of 1613, the Great London fire of 1666, and the bombings of London in World War 2. It is surprising is that we have as much as we have.
And the conspiracy theories... that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays. The book emphatically disagrees with them. There is no evidence that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays.
What's fascinating about Shakespeare is how little we actually know about him. We have copies of most of his plays. We have some legal records, his birth, marriage, will & death certificates and a few mentions of him in various public records. And that's it. We know next to nothing about who he was like as a person. We have no personal letters. No letters from friends. No personal effects. Everything we know about him personally is conjecture. This book covers the endless conjecture, and how it came to being.
That we know so little of him isn't that surprising. We know very little about anyone who lived at that time. In addition, for any Shakespeare's artifacts to have survived to today, they would have had to survive calamities such as the Globe Theater fire of 1613, the Great London fire of 1666, and the bombings of London in World War 2. It is surprising is that we have as much as we have.
And the conspiracy theories... that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays. The book emphatically disagrees with them. There is no evidence that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays.
1 comment:
You know I seen this fact before and it is very mysterious given the amount of classic works attributed to him there are no personal writings and many of the play were only put down in writing years later. It is like trying to find the source of the books of the bible.
Yet his works are so well crafted with very structures of the stories are used in so many works today.
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