Bryson’s Shakespeare: of genius and confabulations
The Dutch subtitle of Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare is “Een biografie” (A Biography). I read the book and found this subtitle misplaced.
The subtitle of the english original is “The World as a Stage”. How does that translate to “Een biografie”?
Bryson writes right in the beginning of the book that very little is known about Shakespeare. So little, that you realistically can not expect more from a book about Shakespeare than the description of a handful of meagre facts, augmented with assumptions, phantasies and preliminary conclusions about the life and times Shakespeare.
Bryson even admits this is the reason the book has such a modest modest size.