Shakespeare - The World as Stage (Bill Bryson)(1) -...

e m i n e n t l i v e s
S h a k e s p e a r e
The World as Stage
Bill Bryson

To Finley and Molly and in memory of Maisie±

Contents
Chapter One
In Search of William Shakespeare 1
Chapter Two
The Early Years, 1564–1585 22
Chapter Three
The Lost Years, 1585–1592 45
Chapter Four
In London 66
Chapter Five
The Plays 96
Chapter Six
Years of Fame, 1596–1603 117
Chapter Seven
The Reign of King James, 1603–1616 132
Chapter Eight
Death 152
Chapter Nine
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Claimants 181
197

About the Author
Other Books in the Eminent Lives Series
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Credits
Other Books by Bill Bryson

Chapter One
In Search of William Shakespeare±
B
efore he came into a lot of money in 1839, Rich-
ard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Gren-
ville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely
uneventful life.
He sired an illegitimate child in Italy, spoke occasionally
in the Houses of Parliament against the repeal of the Corn
Laws, and developed an early interest in plumbing (his house at
Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the fi rst flush toilets
in England), but otherwise was distinguished by nothing more
than his glorious prospects and many names. But after inherit-
ing his titles and one of England’s great estates, he astonished
his associates, and no doubt himself, by managing to lose every
penny of his inheritance in just nine years through a series of
spectacularly unsound investments.
Bankrupt and humiliated, in the summer of 1848 he fl ed
to France, leaving Stowe and its contents to his creditors. The
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Bill Bryson±
auction that followed became one of the great social events of
the age. Such was the richness of Stowe’s furnishings that it
took a team of auctioneers from the London firm of Christie
and Manson forty days to get through it all.
Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait,
twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the
Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the
Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched and
was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was (and
still is) lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of
about forty who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a
gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This
is not a man, you sense, to whom you would lightly entrust a
wife or grown daughter.
Although nothing is known about the origin of the paint-
ing or where it was for much of the time before it came into the
Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be
of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like William Shake-
speare—but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three
likenesses of Shakespeare from which all other such likenesses
are taken.