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  • Shakespeare

  • The World as Stage
  • Written by: Bill Bryson
  • Narrated by: Bill Bryson
  • Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (39 ratings)

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Shakespeare

Written by: Bill Bryson
Narrated by: Bill Bryson
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Publisher's Summary

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from academics to eccentrics. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunker-like basement room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air", "foregone conclusion", "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's: the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

©2007 Bill Bryson (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers

What the critics say

"Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive." ( Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about Shakespeare

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Wonderful

I have taught Shakespeare’s works for over 25 years - I loved all of them and now only wish I’d have had this to read way back when. A wonderful concise measure of the Bard and his works. Fantastic and I will definitely listen to it again.

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My favourite author writing about my twelfth

I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.

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Bill Bryson…entertaining and informative as always

A short “read” but also
very interesting and informative. One of my favourite authors always.

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