Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

He is at once the best known and least known of figures.

deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the business of a person’s life, but almost nothing about the emotions of it.

there is nothing—not a scrap, not a mote—that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person.

We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession.