Burgess on Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun
Anthony Burgess writes about his Shakespeare novel, now available in a new edition.
Anthony Burgess’s novel Nothing Like the Sun is a wild and inventive retelling of Shakespeare’s life, from his early years in Stratford to the height of his fame at the Globe Theatre in London. Written in a style which imitates the rhythms of Elizabethan English, Burgess’s story examines Shakespeare’s personal relationships, charting connections between fleshly desire and the powers which create art. The novel recreates Elizabeth London, pairing Shakespeare’s genius with the bloodthirsty grimness of everyday life in the city’s golden age.
Nothing Like the Sun has been published in a new edition by Galileo, with a reset text and a new introduction by Robert McCrum, author of Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption.
To celebrate the appearance of Nothing Like the Sun, we are reprinting the foreword that Burgess wrote for the 1982 edition.
You can order Nothing Like the Sun from the Burgess Foundation at bookshop.org (affiliate link).
Foreword to Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess
This brief novel — whose brevity is not a fair index of the amount of work that went into the writing of it — first appeared in April 1964, which was the quatercentenary of its hero's birth. I remember the date of publication well. My publisher gave a little party to celebrate the occasion, and I was torn between attending it and looking at the first emission of the second BBC television channel, due the same evening. Strictly, I was professionally bound to see this, as I was at the time a television critic for the Listener, but some miracle appropriate to Shakespeare's birthday, St George's Day, and British syndicalism forced the BBC to postpone the opening till the following evening, so everything turned out all right.1 The main item in the inauguration of the new channel was a production of Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate, which showed the right Shakespearian spirit and balanced the claims of demotic entertainment and centennial piety.
Nothing Like the Sun was not well understood by its first reviewers, most of whom failed to see that the story of Shakespeare's love life was presented in the form of a drunken lecture given to students in a Malaysian college: the lecturer, who is a character called Mr Burgess, gets progressively drunker and drunker on Chinese rice spirit, and he ends by identifying his own stupor with the delirium of the dying Bard. It is also his final lecture before flying back West, and he is entitled to irresponsibility. He seems especially irresponsible in stating that Shakespeare's tragic genius was fired by syphilis, which he is presented as having acquired through his association with a dark lady of East Indian origin. Shakespeare has been traditionally immune from the imputations of sexual sin, and even the birth of his first child Susannah six months after his marriage has been explained in terms of a special dispensation of nature. But Shakespeare, as my title indicates, was no flaming luminary exempt from human weakness. It is not at all improbable that he suffered from venereal disease: there seem to be few great men in history who have not been touched by the great morbid aristocrat.
Another feature of the story is Shakespeare's cuckolding by his younger brother Richard, which is a thesis put forward by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses. This is not Joyce's original idea, though his great novel has given it literary sanctification. I have heard, especially in the English Midlands, many folk tales about Shakespeare, and the story of the neglected Anne Shakespeare seeking sexual comfort with one, or all three, of her brothers-in-law is one of them. Shakespeare's getting ‘a dose from a black woman’ is another piece of apocrypha I picked up from a Stratfordian who set up as an innkeeper in Oxfordshire. I put him in an early novel of mine called The Right to an Answer, along with his scandalous but plausible tale.
Many readers have missed the ‘acrostical significance’ of the lines from one of Shakespeare's sonnets which I prefix to the novel. The first letters of these four lines give F T M H, which is — if we substitute Arabic letters for the Roman — the spelling of the name Fatimah (or Fatmah, meaning destiny). This acrostic gave me the name of my heroine. Another sonnet, written by myself but imputed to the youthful Shakespeare, spells out acrostically the name in its English transliteration, forwards and backwards. This may be taken as implausible magic, and readers have always been at liberty not to look for it. For the rest, the known history of Shakespeare's life has not been tampered with: the exterior biography is probably correct, and the interior, or invented, biography does not conflict with it. This is, in Jane Austen's words, ‘only a novel,’ and it was never intended to add to Shakespeare scholarship, but Professor Schoenbaum, the expert in Shakespeare biography, was good enough to say that it is the only novel about Shakespeare which functions as a work of art. I hope this is true, but the reader is asked first to look for diversion and to forget about art, which is solely the artist's concern. The book is intended to be a presentation of life and real people, who remain much the same whether in the proto- or the deutero- Elizabethan age.
© International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 1982
Find out more
Order Nothing Like the Sun from the Burgess Foundation (affiliate link).
Nothing Like the Sun is published alongside Honey for the Bears, Burgess’s novel about Cold War Leningrad (affiliate link).
Listen to Robert McCrum talk about his book Shakespearean:
Buying books from the Burgess Foundation’s affiliate shop at Bookshop.org helps support the work of the Foundation and independent bookshops in the UK.
Despite Burgess’s claim that the delay to BBC 2’s opening night was due to ‘British syndicalism’, it was in fact delayed because a fire at Battersea Power Station caused a power outage in central and west London.