Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his bio graphy has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from to...

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his bio graphy has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed. Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

★当今最有趣的非虚构作家。——《泰晤士报》

★就算是写药品说明书，也能让人笑到头掉！——《卫报》

★代表作主要包括旅游类随笔、幽默独特的科普类作品——《万物简史》《布莱森英语简史》等。

★曾任英国杜伦大学校长，取得两所大学的文学博士学位、九所英国知名大学的荣誉博士学位。

★曾任职于伦敦《泰晤士报》《独立报》，同时为《纽约时报》《国家地理杂志》等撰文。

★因文学贡献获得大英帝国官佐勋章，同时也是首位成为“英国皇家学会荣誉会员”的非英国籍人士。

★获得詹姆斯•乔伊斯奖（设立于1993年，由以创作了《都柏林人》《尤利西斯》的爱尔兰作家乔伊斯的名字命名的“乔伊斯基金会”主办。）塞缪尔•约翰逊（极富盛名的非小说类奖，成立于1999年）等多个文学奖。