This came at the end of the day of the Christie's visit, and appropriately the first page mentions an auction held by the "London firm of Christie and Manson" which put up for sale the effects of the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos from his house in Stowe. It was "among the furnishings of the house," Bryson explains, that the "Chandos Portrait," believed to be possibly of Shakespeare, was found in 1848. It is one of the few possible (varied and unsatisfying) likenesses of Shakespeare that we have. And on that note begins my new favorite biography of the man. Bryson manages to create a biography that contextualizes the author, and includes notes about when discoveries about him have been made and by whom. I was struck by the plethora of simple facts that I had never come across. For example, a lot of attention and praise is given to Shakespeare as a prolific writer, a fact I took for granted, but Bryson points out that compared with other writers of his day, he was decidedly not.
Bryson manages to include details about Elizabethan society, even performance techniques and traditions, including the fact that sheep's or pig's organs "and a little sleight of hand made possible the lifting of hearts from bodies in murder scenes" (so it wasn't just stylized red cloth or corn syrup!) and the fact that admission money was "dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safe keeping- the box office." (word origin always fascinates...me, anyway.) But these details pepper the book, providing a constant stream of information both about and around Shakespeare, rather than comprising a separate chapter on, say, "stage conventions in Shakespeare's England." Bryson also spends a good deal of time on the First Folio (including a trip to the Folger in D.C) and details the process of its creation whereby one scholar "determined that no two volumes...[are] the same."
The biography finishes with a vehement argument against anti-Stratfordians in which Byson states that "one must really salute the ingenuity of the anti-Stratfordian enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history without the benefit of anything that could reasonably be called evidence, four hundred years after it was perpetuated." (I feel compelled to say that nothing but my own, personal agreement with that statement made me repeat it here. Also, Bryson takes the anti-Stratfordian argument apart, by both presenting and refuting each of its proponents very deftly- but you should read the book if you want to see how he does so.) I particularly enjoyed the fact that of the anti-Stratfordians in the early twentieth century, some surnames included: Looney, Sillimen and Battey.
Other than the opinion that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, (an opinion you'd have to be of to pen a biography- lets hope) Bryson is refreshingly un-opinionated (or at least, without some hidden intention) when it comes to Shakespeare himself. He is not creating a character (Greenblatt, Burgess) or imposing a value system (Bloom, Auden) but rather presenting how much we do and do not know about Shakespeare, the time in which he lived and the times which have embraced him since.
Next, I'm moving onto his A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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