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The best chance to visualize a living, breathing William Shakespeare. Beautifully written.
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Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life
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Before Shakespeare in Love , there was Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun : a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life.
234 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,1964
This edition
- Format
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234 pages, Paperback
- Published
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January 1, 1996 by W W Norton \u0026 Co Inc
- ISBN
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9780393315073
- ASIN
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039331507X
- Language
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English
About the author
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air. His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire. He composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air. His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire. He composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.
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Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
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99 reviews All reviews
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I enjoyed seeing snippets of Shakespeare's plays and poems presented throughout the text. More than implying that even the greatest of artists are mere thieves of the lives that flow around them, Burgess takes these moments to inject interesting critiques of Shakespeare's work (e.g. the particularly Christian nature of Ophelia's madness). However, I'm no Shakespeare scholar and I probably missed most of these elements. Certainly, I did not gather enough of them to find a bold new framework for reading Shakespeare. Instead, most of my insights were to Burgess himself and the time he was writing.
If sci-fi futures ultimately are reflections of the present's fears and hopes, then these historical recreations seem to offer us a reflection on what the writer assumes motivates and forms those historical people whose lives he is trying to reconstruct. Orientalism, hedonism, and the love that (quite literally in this book) dare not speak its name are what can puncture the prosaic world and allow for The Muse to bless a writer. Meanwhile, Burgess implies, living a more traditional domestic existence kills all artistic creativity. That a man in his 40s, moving back home to England after living in Borneo, would be so influenced by the 60s zeitgeist speaks greatly of its power.
If sci-fi futures ultimately are reflections of the present's fears and hopes, then these historical recreations seem to offer us a reflection on what the writer assumes motivates and forms those historical people whose lives he is trying to reconstruct. Orientalism, hedonism, and the love that (quite literally in this book) dare not speak its name are what can puncture the prosaic world and allow for The Muse to bless a writer. Meanwhile, Burgess implies, living a more traditional domestic existence kills all artistic creativity. That a man in his 40s, moving back home to England after living in Borneo, would be so influenced by the 60s zeitgeist speaks greatly of its power.
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Nothing Like the Sun is a rich and downright sensuous novel that focuses on Shakespeare’s love life, particularly his relationship with the Dark Lady and Fair Youth of the sonnets. While the style has a learning curve, it’s quite rewarding, being poetic, seemingly spontaneous, and period-appropriate. If you enjoy Shakespeare or just wonderfully written books, I highly recommend this.
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I read this probably 20 years and forgot about it until I recently finished Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet, itself a fictionalized retelling of the life of William Shakespeare. I remember enjoying the book despite not really being a Shakespeare guy (just a few years later I would become an English teacher, but would remain not really a Shakespeare guy). When I read this, I think I'd recently finished A Clockwork Orange and thought that maybe Burgess would become my new favorite author. He didn't, and this remains the only other novel by him I've read. Still, I remember finding Nothing Like the Sun interesting and well-written.
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i didn't love this as much as i could have, but i'm willing to guess that it's because of my reading slump, combined with the fact that i made my brain read this quickly.
despite the fact that my enjoyment of this wasn't as great as i had hoped, i will say this: we're doing burgess a big disservice when we praise clockwork orange and then disregard the rest of his body of work completely.
his ability to play with language shouldn't go unnoticed, or be limited to one novel (which he himself didn't even regard that high and sold the film rights to jagger for 500 bucks).
despite the fact that my enjoyment of this wasn't as great as i had hoped, i will say this: we're doing burgess a big disservice when we praise clockwork orange and then disregard the rest of his body of work completely.
his ability to play with language shouldn't go unnoticed, or be limited to one novel (which he himself didn't even regard that high and sold the film rights to jagger for 500 bucks).
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Read this while I was taking a college Shakespeare class. I enjoyed it then. I would like to reread it after 40 years tho...
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An absolute gem: Shakespeare via Joyce's Poldy Bloom. And we get to see the conception and execution of the Richards, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo & Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, the Henrys, the sonnets, and inklings of what will become Hamlet. Burgess's true strengths here are the language-play and the evocation of the period. Never before has Elizabethan England felt so real. This is undoubtedly a book I will be traversing again.
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One word - 'Brilliant'.
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