Marlowe signed his name Merlin sometimes? SWEET!

I'm a huge fan of Bill Bryson -- he's a tremendously curious cat who likes to use his book's ostensible subjects (retracing a teenage Eurotrip as an adult; wandering the Appalachian trail; recounting his childhood in the 1950s) as a jumping-off point for any and all fascinations he tumbles into along the way. As such, the news about a year ago that he'd written a book on Shakespeare came as a welcome surprise which i promptly ignored until this Christmas.

It's about what you'd expect from Bryson -- unsentimental but fond, tracing the genius of Shakespeare's work while wandering through what we know of his life. And, in his usual style, Bryson eventually turns the book somewhat away from Shakespeare, spending a good deal of his time looking instead at Shakespeare scholaship, and generally ridiculing it for its wild, hopeful speculation and factual error. The general formula is: This is what we know about Shakespeare. The experts hypothesize this, for these reasons. This is why that hypothesis is an olympic stretch of the imagination. Let's move on.

Instead of spending his time expanding the few facts about Shakespeare into wild theories about trips to Italy or teenage years spent on a ship (both of which Bryson politely shoots down as fairly unlikely), Bryson spends a fair deal of time looking at Shakespeare's world and culture -- the earnings, social customs, and legal arrangements of Elizabethan and Jacobean periods -- and uses that to give us a sense of what Shakespeare was surrounded by. It's much more sturdy than the assumption that his Italian plays stemmed from a hypothetical trip to Italy (during which he would, apparently, not have noticed canals in Venice or that Florence is landlocked) and, frankly, much more interesting reading.

It's fun stuff, informative if slight (as Bryson points out, what we actually know about Shakespeare is remarkably limited, so there's no reason for it to be much longer than it is, given his aims), and saves a tremendously fun smackdown against the Oxfordians (and other Shakespeare-wasn't-Shakespeare types, who surprisingly count Orson Welles and Derek Jacobi among their ranks) for its final chapter. It's a nice note to close on: we may know very little about Shakespeare, but at least we and our scholarly brethren have some grounding in reality.