Shakespeare

[sawyl]

Spent part of today reading Bill Bryson's brisk, breezy, enjoyable Shakespeare, his biography of the Bard of Avon. I now know that I know that we know both quite a lot about the life of Shakespeare and annoyingly little. I've which of his friends came together to stump up the cash for the first folio editions, how the editions varied based on the ineptitude of the printers working on it, and how much Shakespeare scholarship owes to rich cranks.

I particularly enjoyed Bryson's demolition of the Shakespeare conspiracy theories. He notes that until the early 19th century, no one had any doubts who wrote the plays and how the posited authors' reasons for using Shakespeare as a front-man for their own hidden genius don't really add up.