Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is ostensibly a short biography of William Shakespeare. But Bill Bryson has a common sense curiosity about a wide range of related subjects too: the world Shakespeare lived in, the history of English theater, the reliability of what we believe we know about Shakespeare (“Every Shakespeare biography is 5% fact and 95% conjecture”), and the modern debates about the authenticity of his writings. And he has a great line about this elusive subject: “he is the literary equivalent of an electron — forever there and not there."