Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

by Bill Bryson

the Shakespeare he portrays is a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as Mark Twain memorably put it) the ‘deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder’.

Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away.

Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis and others equally arcane and taxing.

No one set scenes more brilliantly and economically than Shakespeare. Consider the opening lines of Hamlet: Barnardo: Who’s there? Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand, and unfold yourself. Barnardo: Long live the King! Francisco: Barnardo? Barnardo: He. In five terse lines Shakespeare establishes that it is night-time and cold (‘unfold yourself’ means ‘draw back your cloak’), that the speakers are soldiers on guard, and that there is tension in the air. With just fifteen words – eleven of them monosyllables – he has the audience’s full, rapt attention.

Shakespeare may be the English language’s presiding genius, but that isn’t to say he was without flaws. A certain messy exuberance marked much of what he did.

Shakespeare’s genius was not really to do with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering – things that aren’t taught in school.

Attachment to Latin was such that in 1568, when one Thomas Smith produced the first textbook on the English language, he wrote it in Latin.

Jonson rather pugnaciously styled the book his ‘Workes’, prompting one waggish observer to wonder if he had lost the ability to distinguish between work and play.