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Acknowledgments
IN ADDITION TI THE kindly and patient interviewees cited in the text, I am grateful to the following for their generous assistance: Mario Aleppo, Anna Bulow, Charles Elliott, Will Francis, Emma French, Peter Furtado, Carol Heaton, Gerald Howard, Jonathan Levi, Jacqui Shepard, Paulette Thompson, and Ed Weisman. I am especially indebted to Professor Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon for generously reviewing the manuscript and suggesting many corrections and prudent qualifications, though of course any errors that remain are mine alone. Special thanks also to James Atlas for his enthusiastic encouragement throughout, and to the astute and kindly copy editors Robert Lacey and Sue Llewellyn. As always, and above all, my greatest debt and most heartfelt thanks go to my dear wife, Cynthia.
About the Author
Eminent Lives, a series of brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch’s Livesf to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.”
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BOOKS IN THE EMINENT LIVES SERIES
Michael Korda, on Ulysses S. Grant
Robert Gottlieb on George Balanchine
Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Jefferson
Paul Johnson on George Washington
Francine Prose on Caravaggio
Edmund Morris on Beethoven
Matt Ridley on Francis Crick
Karen Armstrong on Muhammad
Peter Kramer on Freud
Joseph Epstein on Alexis de Tocqueville
Ross King on Machiavelli
Bill Bryson on William Shakespeare
GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Lost Continent
The Mother Tongue
Neither Here Nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
In a Sunburned Country
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
Credits
Jacket illustration by Roderick Mills
Engraving of William Shakespeare by Martin
Droeshout/Corbis
Copyright
SHAKESPEARE. Copyright © 2007 by Bill Bryson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* This was probably stretching it. If the Wallaces averaged five minutes, say, on each document it would have taken them 416,666 hours to get through five million of them. Even working around the clock, that would represent 47.5 years of searching.
* It was an unlikely courtship. The queen was old enough to be his mother—she was nearly forty, he just eighteen—and the duke moreover was short and famously ugly. (His champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard.) It was only the duke’s death in 1584 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.
* A tailor by profession, Stow spent a lifetime and endu
red decades of poverty to put together his great history. He was seventy-three when it was published. His payment was £3 in cash and forty copies of his own book. When James I was asked to provide some charitable patronage for the old man, he merely sent him two letters giving him permission to beg. Stow actually did so, setting up alms bowls in the streets of the City, though without much effect.
* The word piccadill was first recorded by the playwright Thomas Dekker in 1607 in Northward Ho. Eventually a house near the modern Trafalgar Square became informally but popularly known as Piccadilly Hall, possibly because its owner made his money selling piccadills. The street running west toward Hyde Park took its name from the hall, not the ruffs.
* Fettiplace’s book is a gossipy, wide-ranging compendium of recipes, cleaning tips, and other domestic concerns gathered from relatives and friends. Among these friends was John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law. So it is entirely possible that she knew the playwright himself; she must certainly have known of him. But if she had any idea of his importance to posterity, or how grateful we would be for even the slightest word of his character and appetites, she failed to note it in her household accounts.
* Stephen Orgel makes the point that sodomy, though inveighed against in law, was tolerated in practice as long as it was discreet. Far more at risk of prosecution were incautious heterosexual females, because illicit births added inexcusably to the poor rolls.
* A groat was a small coin worth four pence.
* An edition that includes the complete works and notes from various commentators.
* A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem perfected by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), the fourteenth-century Italian poet. The word comes from sonetto, or “little song.” The Italian sonnet of Petrarch was divided into two parts—an eight-line octave with one rhyme scheme ( abba, abba) and a six-line sestet with another ( cde, cde or cdc, dcd). In England the sonnet evolved a different form, and came to consist of three quatrains and a rather more pithy couplet at the end as a kind of kicker, and with it came a distinctive rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg.