SHAKESPEARE - THE WORLD AS STAGE

William Shakespeare left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from 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'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.