In a fast frolic through Elizabethan England, Bryson tells us what we know about Shakespeare (not much) and what we don’t (a lot). He runs through various theories and assumptions that critics have made about Shakespeare’s life, debunking the Shakespeare didn’t write it crowd. What makes this book fun (and longer than a chapter or two) is the the social history of Shakespeare’s day.
For example, culinary taste ran to sweet syrupy sauce over everything, to the point where those who could afford it had blackened teeth, and those whose teeth were white painted them black for the fashion of it. It was a toothless, violent and mysteriously fevered as well as plague filled time. The population of England before the black death was 4.5 million. After the decimation, it took about 200 years to recover, just as Shakespeare was reaching his literary peak and theatre was the newest, best, most popular entertainment ever.
Nobody knows why Shakespeare bequeathed his wife his second-best bed or who the young man was that he dedicated a number of love sonnets to. One popular guess is Southampton, who paid 5000 pounds to get out of his engagement (equivalent to 1 ½ million pounds today, or about 2 ½ million dollars), leaving him free to date boys.
Bryson makes a point of saying that Shakespeare was the preeminent gay poet of his day because of those love sonnets, and contradictorily also the preeminent playwright of heterosexual romance. However, given that boys had all the female roles in the theatre, it seems to me pretty consistent. While in continental Europe women played female parts, in England women on the stage was considered far too risque and therefore illegal. Hence boys were women, which gave an underlying sexual ambiguity to the play’s romance, even more so in the plays where young male actors played young women pretending to be boys. Add to that the men playing men falling in love with them, confused until the unmasking of their lover as a boy woman. Gender bending has a long and fine history.
