Book review: “Nothing Like the Sun” by Anthony Burgess

I came to realize, as I read Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun, that I have an image of William Shakespeare that is somewhat larger than life.  Make that a lot larger.

In Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess imagines the poet — whom he refers to as WS — during his teenage years and early twenties (roughly 1577-1587) and then in his late twenties and early thirties (1592-1599).

His Shakespeare is a very human sort of person.  As a youth, he’s unsure of what he should do with his life.  He seems to be moving carefully and clearly toward a good (i.e., financially stable) marriage with a girl named Anne but, while drunk, gets sexually assaulted in a pleasant way by another Anne whose family forces him into a shotgun (not yet invented, but you get the idea) marriage when she turns up pregnant.

She’s not exactly a shrew like Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, but close enough to bring to the reader’s mind that she might have inspired the play although Burgess makes no comment.  WS, something of a soft-heart, is eventually appalled by her sexual aggressiveness, and, besides, he’s hankering for a dream goddess of dark skin.

WS falls in with a troupe of actors and follows them to London where he lives, separated from Anne and their children, except for visits, for about thirty years.

It’s there he finds a patron who gives him money and, as Burgess envisions it, expects him to engage in occasional gay sex.  And it’s there he finds his dream goddess of dark skin, Fatima.  And it’s there, as Burgess envisions it, that Shakespeare gets the sexual disease that will sap his body until his death.

 

“Burgess’s best novel”

The Shakespeare of Nothing Like the Sun is, like any of us, more than a bit at sea each day, working to make ends meet and send cash home, working to find his place in the world, attuned to the personalities of others without having much sense of control over his life.

My suspicion is that the Burgess novel is richest and most entertaining for those who know everything about the life and poetry of Shakespeare.  Indeed, Harold Bloom, the literary critic and Shakespeare expert, called the book “Burgess’s best novel” which is saying a lot since Burgess also wrote A Clockwork Orange.

I’m not a Shakespeare expert so I’m sure that I missed many of the ways Burgess wove the real-life facts about the poet with his made-up people and scenes.

I also suspect that, as a writer of highly acclaimed novels, Burgess has a sense of what it was like for Shakespeare to be a writer of highly acclaimed plays and poems.  There were moments Burgess gave some of this kind of insight, such as when he has WS taking in the vast amount of people and action going on around him as he stands on a London street.

A sense that Shakespeare had some sort of antennae to take in and, in some way, connect to each person doing whatever he or she was doing.

As a writer myself, I have antennae of my own although much weaker than Burgess would have had and much, much weaker than Shakespeare would have had.  Still, I know, in my vague way, that feeling.

 

Preternaturally gifted

I think it was more of that sort of thing that I was looking for in Nothing Like the Sun — the feel of Shakespeare as someone who was preternaturally gifted in his insight into other humans and the human condition.

And not only that, but also someone who was extraordinarily skilled as a writer — not just in putting words on a page, but in his knowledge of the natural world and the human world and the political world and the social world.

Burgess wrote a novel about a guy named William Shakespeare.  I can’t think of WS as a guy.

Let me amend that:  I think of Shakespeare as a guy who, unlike other humans, was weighed down with a huge mind and personality, encompassing a profound insight into what it means for people to live and what it means for people to interact with each other within a natural world of such great richness, what it means each day to feel pain and pleasure, deal with ideals and urges, with friends and enemies.

 

Length, width and depth of his mind

Given the mammoth length, width and depth of Shakespeare’s mind and heart, it’s amazing to me that he didn’t go crazy.  It’s also amazing that he was able to live and work with people who had no such depths.

Yet, in some way, it seems that he was one of the guys.  Seven years after he died, his friends paid for the publication of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, a collection of 36 of his play, known by scholars as the First Folio.

Burgess’s novel shows the playwright as one of the guys.  But it doesn’t, to my mind, get into the genius of the man.

Maybe I would get more of a sense of that if I knew more about Shakespeare’s life and his plays like Harold Bloom.

Or maybe it’s just not possible to try to describe the inside of the head of a genius — unless, like Shakespeare, you’re a genius.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.7.25