Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life
Nothing Like the Sunis a fictional biography ofWilliam ShakespearebyAnthony Burgessfirst published in 1964. It tells the story of Shakespeare's life with a mixture of fact and fiction, the latter including an affair with ablackprostitute named Fatimah, who inspires theDark Ladyof theSonnets.The title refers to the first line ofSonnet 130,"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", in which Shakespeare describes his love for a dark-haired woman.
Background
[edit]Burgess recounted in his Foreword added to later editions that the novel was a project of his for many years, but the process of writing accelerated so that publishing would coincide with the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, on 23 April 1964.[1]: 1–2
Synopsis
[edit]As Burgess reminds readers in his foreword, the novel has aframe storyin which a professor of a Malaysian college named "Mr. Burgess" is delivering his final lecture on the life of Shakespeare before returning to the United Kingdom, while progressively becoming more drunk onrice wineand gradually less inhibited as the lecture progresses.[1]: 1 The "lecture" begins with "Mr. Burgess" readingSonnet 147,in which Shakespeare describes his love for his mistress as a fever. "Mr. Burgess" proposes that this is proof of Shakespeare contractingsyphilis,and thatDark Lady'sname is spelled inacrosticin the poem, the letters F T M H being a latinization of the Arabic name "Fatimah", meaning "destiny".
The main narrative then tells the story of Shakespeare's life, up to the writing of the Sonnets. It portrays his affair with Fatimah, a black prostitute, from whom he contractssyphilisand is driven mad by pain and fever. It also includes a plot of Shakespeare becoming cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who had stayed in Stratford, a thesis Burgess first encountered in literature in theScylla and Charybdisepisode ofJames Joyce'sUlysses.[1]: 2 The style of the novel owes something to bothElizabethan EnglishandJoycean wordplay.
Reception
[edit]Harold Bloomreferred to the book as "Joycean fiction about Shakespeare",[2]and called it "Burgess's best novel".[3]
Notes
[edit]- ^abcBurgess, Anthony (1992) [1982].Nothing like the sun: a story of Shakespeare's love-life(repr. ed.). London: Vintage.ISBN0-09-919431-7.
- ^Bloom, Harold (11 November 2009)."Road Trip".New York Times.Retrieved22 October2012.
- ^Bloom, Harold (2014).The Western canon: the books and school of the ages.New York: Houghton Mifflin HarcourtBooks. p. 416.ISBN9780547546483.
Editions
[edit]- Burgess, Anthony (1992).Nothing Like The Sun.London: Vintage.ISBN0-09-941690-5.
- Burgess, Anthony (2013).Nothing Like The Sun.New York: W. W. Norton & Company.ISBN978-0-393-34640-4.
Further reading
[edit]- Franssen, Paul J. C. M. (2016). "Wilde imaginings".Shakespeare's Literary Lives: The Author as Character in Fiction and Film.Cambridge University Press.ISBN9781107125612.