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by Bill Bryson


  Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language (ninth edition). Garden City, N.Y.: 1956.

  Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. London: Penguin, 2000.

  ———. The Age of Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

  Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953.

  Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies. London: Methuen and Co., 1957.

  Mulryne, J. R., and Margaret Shewring (eds.). Shakepeare’s Globe Rebuilt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  Picard, Liza. Shakespeare’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. London: Orion Books, 2003.

  Piper, David. O Sweet Mr. Shakespeare I’ll Have His Picture: The Changing, Image of Shakespeare’s Person, 1600–1800. London: National Portrait, Gallery, 1964.

  Rosenbaum, Ron. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups. New York: Random House, 2006.

  Rowse, A. L. Shakespeare’s Southampton: Patron of Virginia. London: Macmillan, 1965.

  Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  ———. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

  Spevack, Marvin. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1973.

  Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.

  Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Thomas, David. Shakespeare in the Public Records. London: HMSO, 1985.

  Thurley, Simon. Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

  Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999.

  Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare for All Time. London: Macmillan, 2002.

  ———. Shakespeare & Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His, Story. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006.

  Wells, Stanley, and Paul Edmondson. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (eds.). The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

  Wolfe, Heather (ed.). “The Pen’s Excellencie”: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, D.C.: Folger Library Publications, 2002.

  Youings, Joyce. Sixteenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1984.

  Acknowledgments

  IN ADDITION TI THE kindly and patient interviewees cited in the text, I am grateful to the following for their generous assistance: Mario Aleppo, Anna Bulow, Charles Elliott, Will Francis, Emma French, Peter Furtado, Carol Heaton, Gerald Howard, Jonathan Levi, Jacqui Shepard, Paulette Thompson, and Ed Weisman. I am especially indebted to Professor Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon for generously reviewing the manuscript and suggesting many corrections and prudent qualifications, though of course any errors that remain are mine alone. Special thanks also to James Atlas for his enthusiastic encouragement throughout, and to the astute and kindly copy editors Robert Lacey and Sue Llewellyn. As always, and above all, my greatest debt and most heartfelt thanks go to my dear wife, Cynthia.

  About the Author

  Eminent Lives, a series of brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch’s Livesf to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.”

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  BOOKS IN THE EMINENT LIVES SERIES

  Michael Korda, on Ulysses S. Grant

  Robert Gottlieb on George Balanchine

  Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Jefferson

  Paul Johnson on George Washington

  Francine Prose on Caravaggio

  Edmund Morris on Beethoven

  Matt Ridley on Francis Crick

  Karen Armstrong on Muhammad

  Peter Kramer on Freud

  Joseph Epstein on Alexis de Tocqueville

  Ross King on Machiavelli

  Bill Bryson on William Shakespeare

  GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS

  ALSO BY BILL BRYSON

  The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

  A Short History of Nearly Everything

  The Lost Continent

  The Mother Tongue

  Neither Here Nor There

  Made in America

  Notes from a Small Island

  A Walk in the Woods

  I’m a Stranger Here Myself

  In a Sunburned Country

  Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words

  Bill Bryson’s African Diary

  Credits

  Jacket illustration by Roderick Mills

  Engraving of William Shakespeare by Martin

  Droeshout/Corbis

  Copyright

  SHAKESPEARE. Copyright © 2007 by Bill Bryson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061983658

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  * This was probably stretching it. If the Wallaces averaged five minutes, say, on each document it would have taken them 416,666 hours to get through five million of them. Even working around the clock, that would represent 47.5 years of searching.

  * It was an unlikely courtship. The queen was old enough to be his mother—she was nearly forty, he just eighteen—and the duke moreover was short and famously ugly. (His champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard.) It was only the duke’s death in 1584 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.

  * A tailor by profession, Stow spent a lifetime and endu
red decades of poverty to put together his great history. He was seventy-three when it was published. His payment was £3 in cash and forty copies of his own book. When James I was asked to provide some charitable patronage for the old man, he merely sent him two letters giving him permission to beg. Stow actually did so, setting up alms bowls in the streets of the City, though without much effect.

  * The word piccadill was first recorded by the playwright Thomas Dekker in 1607 in Northward Ho. Eventually a house near the modern Trafalgar Square became informally but popularly known as Piccadilly Hall, possibly because its owner made his money selling piccadills. The street running west toward Hyde Park took its name from the hall, not the ruffs.

  * Fettiplace’s book is a gossipy, wide-ranging compendium of recipes, cleaning tips, and other domestic concerns gathered from relatives and friends. Among these friends was John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law. So it is entirely possible that she knew the playwright himself; she must certainly have known of him. But if she had any idea of his importance to posterity, or how grateful we would be for even the slightest word of his character and appetites, she failed to note it in her household accounts.

  * Stephen Orgel makes the point that sodomy, though inveighed against in law, was tolerated in practice as long as it was discreet. Far more at risk of prosecution were incautious heterosexual females, because illicit births added inexcusably to the poor rolls.

  * A groat was a small coin worth four pence.

  * An edition that includes the complete works and notes from various commentators.

  * A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem perfected by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), the fourteenth-century Italian poet. The word comes from sonetto, or “little song.” The Italian sonnet of Petrarch was divided into two parts—an eight-line octave with one rhyme scheme ( abba, abba) and a six-line sestet with another ( cde, cde or cdc, dcd). In England the sonnet evolved a different form, and came to consist of three quatrains and a rather more pithy couplet at the end as a kind of kicker, and with it came a distinctive rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

 

 

 


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