Some years back when I laid my hands on A Walk in the Woods by Bryson it was with a curiosity to see how one could write no less than a novel on a trek in the Appalachians. Surely, a trek was to be trekked and not written about? After reading the book, I changed my views. I emerged from the book as tired and exhausted as from a trek, yet refreshed. Since then I have found more time to read treks then walk them.

So also, I wondered what could Bryson be writing on Shakespeare that has not been written. While I haven’t read all the treatises that exist, I knew the gist. But trust it to Bryson, who I knew would make it worth a read. Bryson dons Holmes’ cap as he takes the beaten trail and sifts through all that is written to arrive at the most plausible tale of Shakespeare and his times.

Bryson brings home the fact that we know very little of the ‘best known and least known’ of literary figures.

We know he was born in Stratford, married Anne Hathaway, had three children, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will and died. As Bryson notes, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare— his baptism, wedding and birth of two children. For the rest, he is, as Bryson puts it succinctly, “kind of literary equivalent of an electron forever there and not there.”

Besides legal documents there is not a single note or letter or page of manuscript from his work that survives.

The man who penned a million words of text, has left just 14 words in his own hand.

Working from ever so faint a clue, Bryson leads us from the troubled times when Shakespeare was born, a time when plague was taking a deadly toll; “in a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.”

And builds the scene from there with how young William probably got interested in plays, thanks to his dad’s stint as high bailiff who had to approve payment of town funds by performing troupes visiting Stratford.

Grammar education

He makes a case for Shakespeare’s education, questioned by many scholars, cites references to his education at the local grammar school, where Latin was served in large doses. The principal text of the day taught students 150 different ways to say ‘thank you’ in Latin, he notes while observing that these exercises helped William learn every possible rhetorical device and ploy. If nothing more!

The marriage bond and the amount paid is proof of the urgency of marriage, provoked by possible pregnancy. He was only 18 and she eight years older.

Bryson encapsulates the Elizabethan era in his engaging style in a few precise pages. The catholic vs protestant climate, the puritans who detested sensual pleasure and brought the closure of theatres eventually, the strict regulations that bound life where the crown decided who could wear what (and eat what), life in the walled city of London with its traffic problems (even then!) and the way theatres (banished to beyond along with brothels, prisons and asylums) functioned are recounted in his witty, vivid style.

In the much talked about debate on the bard’s sexuality, and the identity of the fair youth and dark lady, Bryson prefers to toe Auden’s belief that knowing the identity of the youth would hardly illuminate the sonnets themselves.

As he builds up the mystery, Bryson is in his element reviewing the bard’s genius— his work. Acknowledging that his success was not without shortcuts, Bryson puts it cleverly as “he was a wonderful teller of stories as long as someone had told them first! … what Shakespeare did was to take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and often greatness.”

Despite the bard’s ‘messy exuberance’ and often getting his geography all wrong, as also anachronisms plenty in his plays, Bryson points to how his genius was “not to do with facts but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering … the kind not taught in school.”

His strength was not hard intellectual application but a positive and palpable appreciation of ‘transfixing the power of language’, in the ‘joyous possibility of verbal expression’.

Interestingly that is also perhaps what differentiates Bryson from other Shakespearean scholars. The power of language and the ease with which he uses it, aided by sharp logic.

In the last scene of revelation, Bryson takes on the arguments of those who believed Shakespeare was a wool merchant with no literary connections. And believed variously that it was Francis Bacon, Earl of Oxford or Marlowe who wrote the plays we now revere as the bard’s.

Bryson asks what makes the doubters believe that Shakespeare was unsatisfactory as author of brilliant plays.

“His upbringing was not backward or deprived, except for lack of college education but so did Ben Jonson, and no one doubts his works!”

Bryson makes the final deduction thus: “When we reflect on his works it is an amazement that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, varied, thrilling body of work… only one man had the gift to do that... and that was William Shakespeare, whoever he was.”

Shakespeare
By Bill Bryson
Harper press, 2007, pp 200, Rs 260