9780061555343
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Shakespeare audiobook

  • By: Bill Bryson
  • Narrator: Bill Bryson
  • Category: Literary Criticism, Shakespeare
  • Length: 5 hours 29 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: October 23, 2007
  • Language: English
  • (36049 ratings)
(36049 ratings)
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Shakespeare Audiobook Summary

Shakespeare: The Illustrated Edition is an exquisitely illustrated, updated edition of Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare that takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship. With more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, and updated to include recent discoveries, Shakespeare: The Illustrated Edition evokes the superstitions, academic discoveries, and myths surrounding the life of one of the greatest poets, and makes sense of the man behind the masterpieces.

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Shakespeare Audiobook Narrator

Bill Bryson is the narrator of Shakespeare audiobook that was written by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's bestselling books include One Summer, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home, A Walk in the Woods, Neither Here nor There, Made in America, and The Mother Tongue. He lives in England with his wife.

About the Author(s) of Shakespeare

Bill Bryson is the author of Shakespeare

Shakespeare Full Details

Narrator Bill Bryson
Length 5 hours 29 minutes
Author Bill Bryson
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date October 23, 2007
ISBN 9780061555343

Subjects

The publisher of the Shakespeare is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Literary Criticism, Shakespeare

Additional info

The publisher of the Shakespeare is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780061555343.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Always

February 13, 2020

I'm really not a fan of Shakespeare but reading this book really did help explain his popularity, at least in my mind. Everything we know about him seems to be questionable and when you don't know anything conclusive about someone, that leaves a lot up to discussion. Also I never really appreciated how he changed the way English is spoken, probably because I don't know enough about the history of spoken English. I enjoyed the book though, I learnt a lot I didn't know before and I think the author did a good job going over the information we have about Shakespeare as well as the popular theories involving him, especially all the things about who actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Also I really appreciated that he acknowledged that Shakespeare doesn't make any sense some times because for some reason everyone seems resistant to agreeing when I mention it, but come on some times the writing is incoherent.

Nandakishore

October 04, 2019

At the outset - if you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life and times of William Shakespeare, you are going to be disappointed. Bill Bryson simply doesn't write like that. Those of you who are familiar with his oeuvre would know that he is a "love-him-or-hate-him" author: people either love his snarky humour, or hate it with passion. And there are merits to both viewpoints.I am not a big fan of Bryson's travelogues - too sarcastic for my taste, and I don't like his humour which sometimes borders on insult - but as a collector of historical trivia, he is unparalleled in my opinion. He writes history concentrating entirely on its amusing sidelines, with a perspective which is delightfully skewed. He does it for America in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States; for the domestic life in At Home; for the English language in The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Here, he does it for the Great Bard, the father of the English language as we know it - William Shakespeare.In his typical style, Bryson starts off by saying that we do not know what the hell Shakespeare looked like; and apart from a few dry facts and statistics, we knew absolutely nothing about the man. We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.For the rest, he is the literary equivalent of an electron - forever there and not there. This is typical Bryson hyperbole, however - once we go through this slender volume we understand we do know a lot about Shakespeare: as much we can expect to know about a person who lived five centuries ago. We must remember that his iconic status came into being much later. At the time of his life, Shakespeare was just a phenomenally successful playwright.The book traces the bard's life quite faithfully, from his birth in Stanford in 1564, through his journey up the ladder as a playwright to be reckoned with, the pinnacle of fame he reached at the turn of the Seventeenth Century, up to his death as a gentleman of some means. It also discusses his legacy of plays as well as those conspiracy theories which maintain that all Shakespeare's plays were written by someone else. But if it were just that, this tome would have been most boring. But no: true to form, Bryson floods us with trivia about Elizabethan England (and about Queen Elizabeth herself); disease-ridden London and her penurious population who still found time to go to plays, in spite of a fourteen-hour workday; the playhouses which also hosted inhuman sports such as animal baiting; persistent Protestant-Catholic skirmishes; the idiosyncrasies of King James who succeeded Elizabeth; and (of course!) the utterly cooky conspiracy theories of the people who insist that the bard never wrote his plays. Along with this, we come to know that Shakespeare probably plagiarised passages verbatim (in fact, it was a common practice among writers those days) and that we don't actually know how he spelled his name. In fact, it is a trivia-fest - the ideal book to be enjoyed over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.But it does give references to a number of books which may be referred to by those interested in seriously studying the life and works of Shakespeare and the world he inhabited. So this book may be considered a primer on the Immortal Bard.

Theresa

November 07, 2021

This biography of William Shakespeare is mostly about how much we don’t know about him. I found it interesting how people of the time didn’t care about spelling things consistently, including their own name. I’ve worked as an editor for years, and the notion of spelling words haphazardly is completely contrary to everything I’ve ever been taught.This has more detail than I really needed. I had no idea how unhinged some people can be in trying to find facts about Shakespeare as well as how obsessed some people are trying to prove Shakespeare didn’t write the plays that we read and see performed today. Part of the reason some folks don’t believe he could have written what is ascribed to him is that he didn’t have the kind of formal education other of his contemporaries did. “Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school.”There is some humor in this as Bryson’s work is known for—mostly the jokes come at the expense of the Puritans who hated joy and were forever trying to shut playhouses down. There is also a lot of talk about how frequent plagues shuttered the theaters and devastated the population, something to keep in mind since all of us, in the last year and a half, were a bit shocked how a pandemic meant closing much of the world to attempt to avoid overwhelming hospitals and trying to keep the rates of severe illness and death down. It was a new thing for people who live today, but a completely common occurrence back then.

Roy

March 19, 2018

This man was so good as disguising his feeling that we can’t ever be sure that he had any. In many ways Shakespeare is the perfect subject for a Bryson book. Shakespeare scholars have included some colorful and eccentric characters—such as Delia Bacon and J. Thomas Looney—which is one of Bryson’s specialties. Shakespeare is also sufficiently mysterious, most of his life being buried in the oblivion of history—an important thing for Bryson, who is attracted to gaps in our knowledge. Two more of Bryson’s fixations come into play: his interest in the history of the English language, and in daily life of bygone days. The book is refreshing for Bryson’s deflating humor. More than any other author, Shakespeare attracts untold myths, legends, theories, and pure idolatry; but Bryson’s approach is cool and investigative. He is constantly reminding the reader of the limits of the available evidence. What thus emerges is a portrait of Shakespeare’s times, a bare outline of his life, and refutations of unfounded notions. You might say the book is limited to this investigative track. Bryson is no literary critic and does not attempt any serious appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. But this is just as well since so many great works of criticism already exist elsewhere. Bryson does what he’s good at, and that’s good enough for me.

Kevin Lopez (on sabbatical)

May 31, 2021

Bill Bryson’s short biography, Shakespeare: The World as Stage, is an excellent addition to the already vast corpus of literature about the life and times of William Shakespeare. If you’ve already had some contact with Shakespearean scholarship, I’d recommend checking out something a little meatier, such as Stephen Greenblatt’s terrific biographical study of Shakespeare, Will in the World (or, for that matter, any of the other myriad books on Shakespeare by the likes of such literary luminaries as Bloom, Shapiro, and many others). Either way, though, Bryson’s Shakespeare is a quick and engaging read, regardless of your familiarity with the subject. If you haven’t encountered any of the innumerable dissections, dissertations, postulations, monographs, opinions, theorems, theses, hypotheses, studies, surveys, sketches, and reckless speculations, all bounded, not in a nutshell, but within the vast infinitude of past Shakespearean scholarship (or the seemingly endless torrent of new scholarly works currently being dreamed up, written, and eagerly published), then Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage is the perfect place to start. It’s a brief but efficient introduction to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, that fascinating but tumultuous era into which Shakespeare was born, lived, and worked—written with Bryson’s trademark blend of humor, wit, contagious curiosity and irrepressible exuberance that defines all of his work. It’s a short book, written for an ongoing and widely- read biographical series that focuses on “great lives,” or, somewhat less grandly, on persons of historical interest or import. The brevity of the book, though, turns out not to be so much a hindrance as a rather helpful restriction. As Bryson rightly points out early in the book, William Shakespeare’s historical footprint—excepting his published works of course, which are quite an exceptional exception to make—is practically nonexistent. And the depressingly few facts we do know (with something approaching certainty) wouldn’t fill a single page—much less a book. So the prescribed brevity of Bryson’s biography actually ends up doing him a favor. Unlike most Shakespeare scholars (a slightly snobbish cohort to which Bryson, happily, does not belong), he doesn’t have to fill pages with empty inferences and shoddy speculation. Tellingly, though, even with all his succinctness and pith, Bryson’s brief biographical sketch still necessitates the inclusion of a fairly large amount of educated guesswork, speculative musings, and other fillers. If one were truly to stick only to the known facts about William Shakespeare, one wouldn’t end up with a book, but a paragraph. Luckily for readers, then, that the mysteries of Shakespeare’s life, and the unending speculations over them, are a large part of the fun.

Jason

March 13, 2008

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)No matter where on the planet you're from, it seems that there is at least one figure from the early Renaissance period (1400-1600 AD) who's had a huge and profound impact on your society's culture ever since: here in the English-speaking world, for example, that would be playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and in fact it's guessed that a huge majority of all new novels and movies coming out in English these days are based or inspired in one way or another on something from "The Bard"s old works. But that's the ultimate irony about Shakespeare; that although he is one of the only Elizabethan playwrights in history to have almost all his works preserved and reproduced over the ages (a main factor behind him being as influential as he now is), hardly any facts about the man himself exist, and in fact apart from his creative writing you would scarcely even know he was a physical human who actually once lived. Over the centuries, then, it has led to wild speculation about Shakespeare's life on the part of thousands, and an entire wing of academic study about the man so in the center of all Western artistic thought.So for those like me who hardly know anything about the subject, Bill Bryson's new book Shakespeare: The World as Stage is going to be a godsend; it is a tight, funny 200-page overview of what exactly we factually know about the man and what we don't, peppered with a lot of anecdotes about the various crackpots over the years who have gotten obsessed with the question. And in fact this is the entire reason for the book to exist in the first place, is to give a short and tidy overview of a famous person's life; it is in fact the latest installment of James Atlas' "Eminent Lives" series, where for years he's been asking intriguing writers in other fields to pen short accessible works about various famous thinkers in history. For example, for those who didn't know, Bryson himself is mostly known in the publishing world for extremely sharp, funny and bitter travelogues; and here he puts that style to good use, taking us from one interesting historical and academic site to the next, as he with us unravels the mystery of this playwright we know so little about.In fact, that's about the only big drawback to this book as well, if you want to look at it that way; that a 200-page manuscript simply isn't enough to fully get into the mysteries behind Shakespeare and his work, and that the main enjoyment Bryson's book contains is with all the astounding trivia-style facts he rattles off throughout. (Did you know that there are only fourteen words in existence actually written in Shakespeare's hand? That of 3,000 plays written in the Elizabethan Era, we only have printed copies of 200 of them, with nearly 40 of them being from Shakespeare himself? That his collected work contains 884,647 words, 15,785 question marks, and 10 instances of the term "dunghill?") As far as I'm concerned, though, that's what's to like about this book, not dislike; it's no scholarly treatise by any means, but Bryson's Shakespeare is definitely a pleasant little unintimidating ladder into the endless underground cavern which is Shakespearean study. And given that other titles in this series deal with such other fascinating characters from history as Thomas Jefferson, Muhammad, and Machiavelli, I'm also looking forward to reading more.Out of 10: 9.2

Vanja

August 04, 2019

Bil Brajson i ja nismo kliknuli na prvu, pa ni na drugu knjigu. Ovo je moj treći susret sa njim, ali isključivo zbog teme. Naime, odlučila sam da mu dam šansu budući da sam pisala jedan stručni rad u okviru kojeg sam i sprovela jedno skromno empirijsko istraživanje o relevantnosti Šekspirovih drama za savremenu pozorišnu umjetnost i ovom prilikom želim da zahvalim svima vama koji ste popunili anketu i dali vaš doprinos ovom istraživanju. E sad, što se tiče samog Brajsona, mislim da će naše druženje ovdje završiti osim eventualno ako ne napiše recimo biografiju Selindžera ili Fantea ili nešto slično. :) Ima nešto u njegovom načinu pisanja što mi se ne sviđa, nisam sigurna šta, možda neka prevelika samouvjerenost i izvjesna nadobudnost koje provejavaju sa svake stranice. Svejedno, ovdje je bilo mnogo prijatnih iznenađenje gdje je djelimično i uspio da suspregne svoje stavove i da i mnogo kvalitetnih objektivnih zapažanja o Šekspirovom stvaralaštvu. Ipak, ovdje dominira ozbiljan istraživački rad koji je Brajson sproveo ispisujući tako jednu nepretencioznu, istinitu i nadahnutu biografiju najvećeg engleskog dramskog pisca svih vremena. S druge strane, Brajson ne piše suvoparnim dokumentarističkim, akademskim i naučnim jezikom nego zadržava svoj šmekerski izraz i svoj specifičan humor koji, možda, nekima neće odgovarati. Djelo je prožeto i mnogim zanimljivostima i anegdotama iz Šekspirovog vremena koje, sigurna sam, mnogi od nas, uključujući i nas koji smo izučavali Šekspira, najvjerovatnije, nismo imali priliku čuti kao dio nekog opšteg znanja i kulture i time ovo djelo ima svoj značaj. Sve u svemu, pitko i kvalitetno. Slijede dva kratka paragrafa iz ove knjige koja su mi bila posebno upečatljiva i interesantna:"Duvan koji se u Londonu pojavio godinu dana posle Šekspirovog rođenja, isprva je predstavljao luksuz, ali je uskoro postao tako rasprostranjen da je u gradu krajem veka već bilo ništa manje nego sedam hiljada duvandžija. Korišten je ne samo iz zadovoljstva, već i kao lek za raznovrsne boljke, ubrajajući tu i venerične bolesti, migrenu, pa čak i neprijatan zadah, i smatrao se tako dobrom preventivom protiv kuge da su čak i decu podsticali da ga koriste. Izvesno vreme učenicima u Itonu pretila je kazna batinama ukoliko se ustanovi da zanemaruju duvan.""Slatka hrana je bila omiljena u svim slojevima društva. Mnoga jela bila su prelivana slatkim lepljivim sirupima, pa se čak i vino ponekad izdašno zaslađivalo, kao i riba, jaja i sve vrste mesa. Šećer je bio tako omiljen da su ljudima često crneli zubi, a oni kojima se to nije dogodilo prirodnim putem, ponekad bi veštački pocrnjivali zube da pokažu kako i oni jedu dosta šećera."

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