Bill Bryson issues lavishly illustrated and updated biography of Shakespeare

"Shakespeare/The Illustrated and Updated Edition" (HarperCollins, 256 pages, $29.99), by Bill Bryson: There's no play attributed to Shakespeare about a Puritan woman who whipped her cat for catching mice on Sunday.

The lack doesn't prevent Bill Bryson's biography of the poet from including a picture of the legendary scene. It recalls Shakespeare's dislike of Puritans such as the comic Malvolio in "Twelfth Night."

The scores of pictures range from little sketches such as the woman and her cat, tucked into the corner of a page, to a brightly colored four-page panorama of London in the 1600s. This one image stretches across the inside of both the front and back covers.

Text as well as pictures make it a great Christmas gift to any earnest high-schooler trying for advanced placement in English.

The text reproduces part of the panorama, with an inset of a building captioned "The Globe." Meticulously and entertainingly, the author explains that a recent scholar showed pretty conclusively that the panorama derives from a drawing done 30 years earlier, before the theater of that name existed.

The Dutch engraver of the panorama seems never to have been to London. Still, it's one of the few pictures we have of what Shakespeare's theater may have resembled.

Portraits reproduced in full pages show what two of his rivals — Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson — actually looked like.

Bryson carefully evaluates pictures accepted or supposed to be of Shakespeare himself. They include the Cobbe portrait, long thought to represent Sir Walter Raleigh but recently endorsed — or rejected — as Shakespeare by scholars in a 21st-century dispute. Time may tell, Bryson says, but those convinced it's Shakespeare have an uphill fight.

Scenes from the plays have rarely been portrayed with great artistic imagination. This volume has an impressive two-page reproduction of one by Sir Edwin Landseer, a favorite artist of Queen Victoria, now largely forgotten.