• Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage (HarperCollins, 208 pp., $19.95), the latest entry in James Atlas’s “Eminent Lives” series, represents an attempt by the author to find out “how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record,” then cram the results into a 200-page book. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know much about Shakespeare, which is why most full-length biographies consist mainly of speculation and criticism. By taking the Joe Friday approach and including nothing but facts, Bryson manages to say quite a lot in not much space.

Time and again Shakespeare: The World as Stage told me things I didn’t know, or presented them in a new way that hadn’t occurred to me. Did you know, for instance, that no more than “a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family” have survived? That Shakespeare’s London was “only two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour”? That he is the first writer known to have used 2,035 words, of which 800, including critical, dwindle, eventful, excellent, horrid, lonely, and vast, are still in use today? That the word also appears only 36 times in his plays, and the word “bible” not at all? Bill Bryson knows all these things, and why they matter. No less important, he also knows what we don’t know about Shakespeare:

It cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing—not a scrap, not a mote—that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it…. More than for any other writer, Shakespeare’s words stand separate from his life. This was a man so good at disguising his feelings that we can’t ever be sure that he had any. We know that Shakespeare used words to powerful effect, and we may reasonably presume that he had feelings. What we don’t know, and can barely even guess at, is where the two intersected.

In other words, it’s what Shakespeare wrote that matters, not who he was—though one of the best chapters of Shakespeare: The World as Stage, as it happens, is the last one, in which Bryson sums up the claims of the some-other-guy-wrote-Hamlet crowd with devastating brevity: “One really must salute the ingenuity of the anti-Stratfordian enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history, without the benefit of anything that could reasonably be called evidence, 400 years after it was perpetrated.”

This is the best short book about Shakespeare ever to come to my attention. Even if you think you know the Bard cold, don’t pass it by.