April09_4

Bill Bryson's books line up in two rows. The romping travel yarns (I've read all of those) and the smart, tricky books (I've read none). I see a pattern appearing. 'Shakespeare', offered to me by a chap at work, was a lovely surprise. Did you know Shakespeare introduced the words critical, horrid, lonely, eventful and zany into the English language, and about 2030 others? Insultment, bepray and exsufflicate failed to take hold, but it was a very good effort in any case. One fell swoop, the milk of human kindness, cold comfort, foregone conclusion... all Shakespeare. Or Shakspeare, or Shakspere - the one spelling WS never used himself is the one we now assume is correct. Bill Bryson seems to have a real fondness for the dedicated and often madly obsessed scholars who daily add to the vast weight of reflection about WS, but the theme of Bill's slim volume is how little there is truly known in the details of WS's life. I keep going back to one line: "On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was." When I die it would be a simple matter to fix me in time and place with a mass of digital detail, but for a life of so little enduring merit.