Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

I actually listened to this one as an audio book, but I’m still going to write it up in here. I haven’t quite decided whether I think that listening to a book is the same thing as reading it. I think that for me, it’s actually more challenging. Regardless, I’m reading through it in book-format now.

For all that I love Shakespeare, I’d never read a biography of him before. This one came quite highly recommended by quite a few people, and as I really like Bill Bryson, and was curious to hear him read his own work, I decided to listen to his book. I was surprised to learn as I started listening to it how little I actually knew about Shakespeare.

Bryson’s work emphasizes the fact that I’m clearly not alone in this. Very little is known for certain about Shakespeare at all. I loved the way that Bryson exposed this fact while still managing to put together a coherent biography, and simultaneously avoided making assumptions as many other scholars have. He also filled in the gaps in Shakespeare’s life with a fascinating sketch of London as Shakespeare would have known it.

I think the part of the book that surprised me the most was the section about the Sonnets. I’d never read the Sonnets before, despite having taken a class on Shakespeare alone in university, and never read about them either. So I was surprised to learn about the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and interested to hear the theories about who these subjects may have been in Shakespeare’s life. Regardless of who they were, or if they even had counterparts in Shakespeare’s life, I am grateful for this section of the book for introducing me to the Sonnets. I’ve fallen in love!

My one complaint about this book is that when discussing possible likenesses of Shakespeare, Bryson failed to mention the Sanders portrait. I don’t generally approve of scholars making unfounded assumptions, but I still do it myself, and to me, the Sanders portrait is the face of the Bard.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1888 – 1912 (Virginia Stephen)
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
Originally published in England as The Flight of Mind

The reason I read this book is quite simple: I love Virginia Woolf. I’m slowly making my way through everything she wrote, and I hadn’t read any of her personal writing before this book. I was originally going to start with her diaries, but the letters begin when she was younger so they seemed like a more logical place to start. Besides, I’ve been having difficulty finding copies of them, so I wanted to read at least the first volume while I had access to my university library.

There are 638 letters included in this volume. The first was written to her godfather when she was only six years old, and the last when she was thirty on the day before her wedding to Leonard Woolf. I would guess that the majority of letters in this collection were written to her older, close friend Violet Dickinson. Indeed, Virginia wrote to Violet so frequently for much of this period of her life, that it is possible to get a good sense of her day-to-day life from these letters.

What struck me the most from reading these letters was how Virginia’s voice spoke to me so clearly across the years. Even though these letters are old, and Virginia Woolf has since passed on, and the letters were not written for me in the first place, I feel as though I have become her correspondent in a very one-sided exchange. Reading her letters makes years separating the moment when she laid her words on paper with pen and ink, and the the day when I picked up a copy of this book, typeset and bound, collapse and fold up like a telescope. She can travel time to speak to me as though we were only separated by distance.

A true letter, so my theory runs, should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions. Let me explain that I began some minutes since to review a novel and made its faults, by a process common among minds of a certain order or disorder, the text for a soliloquy upon many matters of importance; the sky and the breeze were part of my theme. A telegram however, with its necessary knock and its flagrant yellow, and its curt phrase of vicious English — I know not which sense was most offended — hit me in the wing and I fell a heaped corpse on the earth. The sense, if that can be said to have sense which has so little sound, was to discredit the respectability of a house in Fitzroy Square. And there you see me in the mud.
- to Clive Bell, February 1907