Where there’s a Will . . .

Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from Shakespeare scholars such as Stanley Wells, Frank Kermode and Stephen Greenblatt, and from knowledgeable non-specialists such as Peter Ackroyd.

In consequence, however, many aspects of his life — the provincial childhood, the lost years, the first reference to him in print (as an ‘upstart crow’, by Robert Greene), the fact that he bequeathed only his

second-best bed to his wife — have become so well-worn that the more successful recent books have tended to offer something different. James Shapiro’s 1599 (2004), about the year when Shakespeare changed from the greatest living writer into the greatest ever writer, is an example of a more focussed book, while Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare & Co. (2006) is a broader one, setting the Bard among contemporaries such as Dekker, Middleton and Marlowe.

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson, however, is a straightforward biography. The latest in the ‘Eminent Lives’ series of brief portraits of major historical figures, it has the difficult task of breezing through familiar territory without seeming superfluous. That Bryson just about pulls it off, despite recycling old anecdotes and offering no critical perspective on the works, is testimony to a style which is witty and infectiously enthusiastic, yet underpinned by scepticism towards legend and supposition.

His approach is more informal than that of most Shakespeareans, and his authorial tone suggests he is presenting the fruits of recent research rather than setting out a lifetime’s learning.