This short biography of William Shakespeare by world famous travel writer Bill Bryson, brims with the author's inimitable wit and intelligence.
In true Bryson style, in a study that manages to be witty, amusing and anecdotal as well as informative, on one of the greatest British dramatists that has ever lived, he recounts his travels during which h discusses Shakespeare and his lie with expert academics, actors, directors, and theatre managers, all the time following the Statford tourist map route.
Building on a biographical tradition that can be traced back to Aubrey's Brief Lives, Dr Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, the exciting and ground–breaking new Eminent Lives series pairs great biographers, historians and novelists with iconic subjects, the writing bristling with original and distinctive points of view. '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.'