Every Shakespeare biography is 5 percent fact and 95 percent conjecture, Bill Bryson recalls being told. He is determined to reverse the figures. The purpose of his 200-page Shakespeare: The World as Stage, he explains, “is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.” He doesn’t have an argument, particularly; instead Bryson aims to relate the facts of Shakespeare’s life as briskly as possible, while acknowledging puzzles, deductions, guesswork, and unsatisfactory explanations where they exist. He is not a scholar but a facile writer and assimilator of information, best known for A Short History of Nearly Everything, and he quotes liberally from eminent Shakespeareans like Stanley Wells, Frank Kermode, Sylvan Barnet, and Samuel Schoenbaum. He also conducted interviews with scholars in London’s National Portrait Gallery and National Archives, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Shakespeare biographers, says Bryson, generally indulge in speculation or rely on supposition, even “surrender themselves to their imaginations,” and have done so since the poet Nicholas Rowe inaugurated the genre in 1709; filled with hearsay and rumor, Rowe’s biography offered readers eleven facts, eight of which were wrong. The problem, of course, is that despite centuries of scholarly zeal, we simply don’t know very much about the poet’s life. He was born in Stratford in 1564, received an unusually fine education at King’s New School, married (at eighteen) a twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway, and disappeared from history for eight