The play's the thing...

Bill Bryson, like the subject of his biography, Shakespeare The World A Stage, is a writer of great skill. You want to take every sentence, every paragraph, and linger over it. Bryson is funny and erudite, and his subject matter is always fascinating. My favorite books of his have been A Walk In The Woods and In A Sunburned Country, which have subject matter widely distant from one another, and at least as distant as his biography of William Shakespeare.

Just shows, to paraphrase the Bard, "All the world's a book, and Bryson merely writes it."

Bryson's bio is part of a series of short biographies--for modern short attention spans?--Eminent Lives, edited by a man with the wonderful name of James Atlas. What Bryson does is tell us all that is known of Shakespeare, and according to this book, not much is known about the most famous writer in the history of the English language. There are things that are written down in the contemporary records, but most of what we know about Shakespeare is misinterpreted information, guesses, deductions made from his writing, or out-and-out fabrication.

What this book does is present Shakespeare in context of his times, which sounds boring, but isn't. England during the Elizabethan era, with its plagues and pestilences, court intrigues and wars, was anything but boring. Bryson paints a vivid picture of life in London which sounds to modern sensibilities like the Seventh Circle of Hell. Life was short and brutal.

Bryson devotes the last chapter to the folks who think Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, but one of a laundry list of different royals or playwrights of the era. The people who follow up these theories, crackpot as they might be, are the same folks among us today who cherry pick the information about 9/11 and come up with their own conspiracies and plots. Their stories all sound good, but they fall apart under scrutiny.

Bill Bryson is the most interesting author at work today, and in this case is talking about the most interesting author of all time. We probably know more about Bryson from the dust jacket biographies of him than we do about Shakespeare, but what little we know about Shakespeare is told as entertainingly as possible in this book.

*******

I believe if Shakespeare were alive today he might be writing for the HBO series, The Wire. Unlike the Sopranos or Six Feet Under, The Wire doesn't fall into the doldrums those series fell into as they gasped out their last episodes. Where The Wire has succeeded is by including in each season a major plot involving some aspect of life in Baltimore. In Season Two it was the dockworkers, in Season Four it was the school system and a group of students, and in this, the last season, the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

The characters in The Wire are Shakespearean. The major players, the police, are actually the least interesting. The most fascinating characters are people like Bubble, the junkie trying to clean up, Marlo Stanfield, the druglord working with the most murderous pair of hitmen ever presented on TV, and the best of all, Omar Little, the gay stickup man who goes solely after drug money.

Michael K. Williams as Omar

All of these characters are deeply flawed by their criminal lifestyles, but are also understandable as being part of the environment of life on the streets in Baltimore. When I mentioned above that Bill Bryson's description of Elizabethan London read like the Seventh Circle of Hell, that's also true of the representation of life in the inner city of Baltimore. I don't know how the Baltimore Chamber Of Commerce feels about this series, but they couldn't be happy.

Like Shakespeare, the dialogue can be maddening and non-understandable, the plots can twist and turn around until they show their true purpose, but like Shakespeare the play's the thing: While you're watching The Wire you're watching major drama that builds until the ultimate conclusions, then leaves you walking away shaking your head, thinking, "Man, I'm glad I stuck that out!"