{"version":"1.0","type":"link","provider_name":"Hardcover","provider_url":"https://hardcover.app","cache_age":86400,"title":"Shakespeare: The World as Stage","url":"https://hardcover.app/books/shakespeare-the-world-as-stage","description":"William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today\u0026#39;s most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare\u0026#39;s plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world\u0026#39;s largest collection of First Folios is housed.Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases (\u0026quot;vanish into thin air,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;foregone conclusion,\u0026quot; \u0026quot;one fell swoop\u0026quot;) that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else\u0026#39;s—the beneficiary of Bryson\u0026#39;s genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.","author_name":"Bill Bryson","author_url":"https://hardcover.app/authors/bill-bryson","thumbnail_url":"https://assets.hardcover.app/edition/13396527/7281320-L.jpg","thumbnail_width":331,"thumbnail_height":500}