I remember an occasion from my University-besmirched past, talking to Me As A Protestant about Alan Bennett’s recently televised “102 Boulevard Haussmann”, his television play about Proust, he said: “Oh God, what a combination: Alan Bennett and Proust.”
Now I am a fan of both those people, subscribing to the (not exactly revolutionary) idea that “A La Recherche de Temps Perdu” is the greatest novel in existence; and that Alan Bennett (whose star appears to be on the ever-ascendant – certainly more so than it was during my University days, which prefigured the excellent “The Madness of King George III” and the incomparable “The History Boys”) was a magnificently talented dramatist.
So, I found myself in an odd situation when presented with a copy of Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare” – a best-selling entry in the “Brief Lives” series.
While I absolutely recognise, and enjoy Bryson’s (ironically, illogically, factually incorrect) “British” sense of the ludicrous, his relish for the minor detail, his enthusiasm for idiosyncrasy, I was very far from convinced that he was the man to tackle the man who is (for my money) not only the greatest writer in the history of the world, without exception – but is the greatest mind in the history of the world, without exception.
And I was wrong. The book is brilliant: I read in straight through in four hours, finding it smart, concise, unsentimental and illuminating: an absolute triumph for a book of its brevity (it’s under 200 pages long), and a magnificent complement to the (equally fabulous) more exhaustive ambitions of such relatively recent publications as “1599: A Year In The Life of William Shakespeare”.
It’s fun, but not trivial; informative, but not stuffy; Bryson, but not not-Shakespeare. Quite a feat.
