Shakespeare in pictures

Bill Bryson (HarperCollins, £20)

Considering how little we actually know about Shakespeare, it’s astonishing how many books about him have been, are being and will go on being published. Bill Bryson’s includes a picture of shelves groaning with titles – Shakespeare’s Rat Pack; Shakespeare’s Wife; Sex, Lies and Shakespeare, and so on. He modestly says that his own book was written “not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, as because this series does”.

It isn’t a commentary on Shakespeare’s plays. Nor is it a biography, though it does give the basic facts about his life, nor a study of Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon.

Instead, here is a luxurious coffee table book, with almost every page including woodcuts from Shakespeare’s time and lovely colour pictures of old London, Elizabeth I and her contemporaries, Millais’s Ophelia and so on.

Two of these pictures are recently discovered and extremely interesting – a possible portrait of the bard himself, a good-looking man with a cast in his left eye, and an extraordinary, effeminate one of his patron, the Earl of Southampton.

Nothing else was new to me, but I still love this book. Apart from all the illustrations, there is a witty and well-informed text about Shakespeare’s life and afterlife, with an account of how the Folios came to be published and how his reputation declined in the 100 years after his death. That is why the facts are so scarce; no one bothered to interview his daughter, although she lived until 1662. The last chapter, called ‘The Claimants’ (there exist more than 5,000 books claiming that Shakespeare was someone else) is particularly funny and convincing. This book would make a fine Christmas present — especially as it comes with a CD of selected sonnets, read by John Gielgud.