This is the second Burgess book in a row that has positively *thrilled* me in its opening movements and then started to drag around the halfway point before finally limping to a conclusion. I guess it proves that style will only sustain you for so long; eventually, you need to some story.

Having said that, the rendering of the man Shakespeare is convincing and occasionally beguiling - though too often limited by Burgess' insistence on examining only his life as it relates to sexual and romantic conquests.

Strange for a book that often bored me, but I could have done with more of it. More scope, more time spent outside the bedroom, more detail, more incident.

Still, the language is absolutely to die for, and enough to recommend it - even if the overall effect is less than the sum of its magnificent parts.

Nothing Like the Sun (1964) imagines the life of Shakespeare from his coming of age to middle age. To me it seemed more of a word-drunk Joycean jeu d'esprit than a historical novel, although I believe it's faithful to known historical and biographical facts. How credible to those who truly know their stuff is what that Burgess invented? I couldn't tell you. Some of the fiction is concerned with positing solutions to "known unknowns" about WS's life, the big one being, who was the "Dark Lady." Although I have some background in WS and his period, as I read I could feel a lot of whooshing as jokes and vocabulary and historical references went over my head, and the metaphysical terms in which WS's artistic development was couched were often too convoluted for me to follow. Still, the erudition and verbal pyrotechnics were grounded in a coherent story supported by interesting quotidian details of Elizabethan life. On the whole, I liked it a lot. I might even return to it again someday, if I can do so with a greater knowledge of Shakespeare's plays.

I'm inclined to agree with Harold Bloom that this is the best novel ever written about Shakespeare -- although I can't say I've read many. Very lively, funny, bawdy, smart, and as is always the case in books like this, the more you know about the subject the funnier it is.

I read this book years ago but only just thought about it when I was musing today that I can't think of many memorable historical novels by men. By 'historical novel' I mean a novel based on real people and events. This one speculates on William Shakespeare's love life and was published to coincide with his 400th birthday. Its title references the sonnet: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", and proposes that the much-speculated-upon 'Dark Lady of the Sonnets' was a prostitute and madam named Lucy Negro.

Burgess sticks with a conventional Shakespearean-scholar interpretation of a love triangle between WS (as he's referred to throughout), the Dark Lady and his early patron Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. He also portrays Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway as a teenage folly he's forced into after getting the much older woman pregnant. After he leaves her behind in Stratford to go to London, his brother seems to step into his marital role.

What's striking about this book is Burgess's use of a cod-Shakespearean English. I'd have to re-read it to be completely reminded of it, but I remember the language as being vivid and earthy, and the sex as being very enthusiastically, voluptuously described. The story is pretty bog-standard soapie stuff (which I ate up nonetheless!) and it's not really that much about the plays – although, again, perhaps I'd find it more intertextually satisfying on re-reading. Rather, my lasting impression is of a vanished everyday England brought oozing and stinking to life. We often think of the past as a pretty pageant, but certain historical novels I've read capture an ordinariness that's both recognisable and alien.

I first remember encountering this mode of 'grunge history' in n  Playing Beatie Bown and its vision of a disgusting 19th-century Sydney where cabbages and rotting rabbit heads bobbed in overflowing gutters. Then I encountered it again in n  Perfumen's vision of 18th-century France, this time olfactorily. Nothing Like the Sun does this too. The next time I encountered such a vision of Tudor England was in Hilary Mantel's n  Wolf Halln. These books remind us that powerful, influential, creative people were also vulnerable, mortal creatures with everyday routines and concerns.

n  Nothing Like the Sunn has made me a Burgess fan, since I was never going to finish reading A Clockwork Orange beyond the fist two pages, which I tried doing back in my late teens and got thoroughly turned off (the beginning of the movie isn't much more inspiring to me, so I'm not tempted to make more efforts no matter how many "best of" lists that title is feature on). This book purports to be a biography of Shakespeare and introduces him from his late teens, when he was presumably occupied chasing women and bedding every single one of those who accepted his advances, until he got caught into marriage by the brothers of one Anne Hathaway, one of the several women he impregnated, though not at all his first or last choice as a wife. The story follows his career path from his first pen scratchings until his demise from syphilis, with his first sonnets devoted to what was reportedly one of the greatest loves of his life: a young teenage lord of great beauty, here presented as being Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. His second great love is a "Dark Lady", also mentioned in his sonnets, who was probably from Indian descent, from the details we glean in this fictionalized history. Burgess presents a ridiculously lusty William Shakespeare who seems entirely convincing considering the countless bawdy references in his plays, but also a very realistic portrait of a man of genius who is unsure of himself and his position in the world, blending the sublime and the ordinariness of life. Among my favourite books this year (2015).

I should mention I listened to an excellent audio version narrated by Sean Barrett, and also that I'm very glad I didn't let the utterly confusing beginning of the novel discourage me from continuing on; I can be very slow on the uptake sometimes, and it took me some time to catch on to the fact that "WS" was our main man. I've got two more Burgesses waiting in the wings, one being the Booker shortlisted Earthly Powers, which I look forward to tackling though it is of rather impressive length and scope.

4.5 stars: I will likely revisit this book at least once.

“For love is one word but many things.”

Anthony Burgess has written a clever book in “Nothing Like that Sun, a novel that imagines Shakespeare’s love life during his teens and his early years as a young actor and playwright in London. This novel is a wordy, at times poetical, text and one that can require your focus to truly appreciate it. The initial reading is slow going and a little confusing due to Mr. Burgess’ style and word usage. It is not a novel that is easily penetrated (pun totally in line with the spirit of this text) but then you start working with the style and language and you and the book adapt to each other and the experience flows better.
The text goes from the late 1570s to 1599 (the year Shakespeare’s writing went to a whole other level). A great pleasure in the book are the numerous cleverly inserted allusions to Shakespeare’s work, the Bible, and other writers and writings of the period. They abound in this text, and it is a small joy in and of itself when you catch them.
Mr. Burgess imagines in the book that once Shakespeare moves to London and starts writing that he gets caught up in a love triangle of sorts between the Earl of Southampton (often thought to be the young man addressed in the Sonnets) and an African woman. He gets the impetus for this idea from the Sonnets which are divided between those addressed to a young man and a “dark lady”. It is a clever device and works well, especially for those who have read the sonnets. You will catch quite a few references in this bit.
Other highlights include a chapter where a young Will writes his first sonnet off the cuff while at the family dinner table. It is a great moment depicting the igniting of artistic impulse. Also fun is the depiction of Will and his wife Anne Hathaway’s early sex life. It is the stuff of Elizabethan kink.
As I finished reading “Nothing Like the Sun” I felt it was very Ecclesiastical in nature as the text constantly made me think of that book’s injunction that “all is vanity.” As I read the novel’s epilogue I am not sure that I “get” it, but I think that biblical verse influenced the themes of this text greatly.
Mr. Burgess’s style can make for dense reading, but I enjoyed this story. Those who love Shakespeare, and/or artful renderings of sex, lust, unselfish love and all those conflicting pulls of the heart that make us so wonderfully human will enjoy this book.

We all know or think we know something about William Shakespeare: everyone knows the titles of at least a couple of his works, everyone knows some basic biographical facts about him, and everyone knows his portrait which is featured not only on the cover of Burgess’ novel but also in probably every single high school textbook of literature.

The main character of Nothing Like the Sun is William Shakespeare, and the novel is about his life and artistic career. Just like a regular biography, the book features such details as Shakespeare’s birthplace, the name of his spouse, and the names of the theaters and companies he worked for after moving to London from Stratford-upon-Avon. However, all this is just background, and this novel is about everything which is usually left out from the regular biographies: what was Shakespeare like as a friend, lover, father? What were his passions and how did he live his everyday life? Where did he get the ideas for his plays and sonnets from? Who or what inspired him? What was he like as a person – honest, open, careful, corrupt?

400 years after his death, these questions, of course, cannot be answered with any kind of „scientific” accuracy and authenticity – and Burgess didn’t attempt to do this. What he wrote is not a biography proper, but rather an exceedingly clever and entertaining fictive biography in which he doesn’t write about the „real” Shakespeare but about the poet as he may-have-been.

The great playwright starts out as a true poet-in-the-making: during his teenage years, when he should spend his time learning the basics of his father’s trade (glove-making), his mind is occupied not with gloves and leather, but with puns and as yet immature and clumsy sonnets. And even though the young bard is not at all sure that he has any artistic talent whatsoever, he is definitely sure that he doesn’t want to spend his life working as a glover, so when he’s presented with the chance to join a theater company, he doesn’t think twice before leaving his family for London. After his escape, he spends most of his time in London where a lot of work, a lot of animosity and a lot of success lies a-waiting for him – and this is also where he meets his two muses: the golden man and the dark lady who inspire him to write his sonnets.

Shakespeare, as depicted/imagined by Burgess, is an intriguing and ambiguous character: he is very practical and businesslike, but his mind is just as full of fascinating ideas and free-floating lines of poems as we like to think about great poets; he enjoys the company of his lovers and his life in general, but he cannot for a moment forget the melancholy fact that he’s getting older; he seems to neglect his family and hardly ever pays them a visit, but he never forgets to send them enough money for their daily needs. And so on.

Reading about the (fictitious) course of the poet’s life is exciting in itself, but Burgess offers other thrills and games as well. For instance, he includes some famous lines from Shakespeare's plays in the poet's conversations with others, or he mentions a seemingly unimportant episode in Shakespeare’s life in which you can recognize the basis or a crucial plot element of one of his later works. Just one example: Shakespeare once witnesses an execution which is carried out by the executioner cutting out the convict’s heart. And of course you never know how a real life event is actually transformed into the artistic output of a writer (or if it ever gets transformed into art), this episode may easily remind you of The Merchant of Venice, the plot of which, among other things, revolves around cutting out a pound of meat from a man’s body, and you may think that Shakespeare must have gotten this element of the play from the execution he saw several years earlier.

And the novel is full of literary games like this, so if you happen to enjoy thinking about topics such as the connections between reality and fiction, and their effects on each other, and if you’re prone to look for allusions and half-hidden references even in the most innocent lines of a novel, then you will quite probably enjoy this creative and marvelously witty book.

This is Shakespeare in love, the prequel. The interweaving of known history, the sonnets and hints from all over the map lead to a very thoughtful journey of discovery and surprising romps by WS himself. You will never feel that the author is just running away with his imagination. It all seems so believable. Now I must get back to the poetry to feel it in a new light. I implore you to read this one and all.

How many novelists can you think of with the required talent and ambition to take on the task of writing a novel about Shakespeare's love life?

Anthony Burgess had both the daring and the talent to give it a try. It doesn't feel like a stretch to have such an ambitious polymath imagine himself inside the Immortal Bards head at the moment of creation, nor in his bed at the moment of climax.

Burgess' Bard is as lusty and ambitious as all young men, yet full of pity and sympathy also, unable to hold his drink, inspired by the golden vision of a Dark Lady indirectly inspired by the ravings of a local Stratfordian loon.

Outmanoeuvred into marrying Anne Hathaway after loving a different Anne entirely, Will heads to London to make his name, finding patronage and companionship with the kind and reckless Henry Wriothesley, then discovering his Dark Lady in a black exile from the East Indies named Fatimah, who gives him the 'gift' of more than just her love.

Burgess completely revels in the idiom of Elizabethan language, the compounds, the wordplay, the endless puns - there must be a dozen on the Bard's first name alone. The fullness of the words they enjoyed are testament to a confident nation still stretching out their relatively new language, words such as 'croshabells', 'galligaskins', 'peripatottering' etc.

This passage, with young Will drowning his sorrows in a salubrious pub, should help you decide if you want to read the novel or not:

'Drink, then. Down it among the titbrained molligolliards of country copulatives, of a beastly sort, a;;, their browned pickers a-clutch of their spilliwilly potkins, filthy from handling of spade and harrow, cheesy from udder new-milked, slash mouths agape at some merry tale from that rogue with rat-skins about his middle, coneyskincap on's sconce.'

Loved the subject matter, loved the daring approach to it.

Sub-titled "A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life", this fictional account of what WS got up to in London while working on his plays. At times amusing, at others puzzling but always well written in Burgess' dense and lyrical style, this is not to be taken as a serious attempt at filling in the gaps but an enjoyable and imaginative foray into Elizabethan life and loves. His relationship with his wife, his patron [Earl of Southampton] and the famous "dark lady" are all attempted with flair and bawdy extravagance.

We also learn about illnesses at the time, the intrigues of the royal succession, actors and other playwrights - their bitchiness and rivalries - but most of all how Shakespeare moved around them all avoiding scandals and political trouble where possible. How feasible is all this? Who knows? But it's a jolly good read, if you can extract all from the writing.

What do we think when we think of William Shakespeare? There are so many things, indeed. For almost everyone of us, he is the greatest poet, the Bard, so to speak, of all time. For many of us, he was one of the most consummate and adept of storytellers who has and continues to inspire and influence other literature and forms of storytelling significantly and indelibly across the world. For some of us, he was a controversial figure, a man whose works could be accused, in today's modern perspective, as either old-fashioned, sexist, misogynist, Anti-Semitic or gratuitous. And for that equal number of people, he was a rebel, an adroit and taciturn revolutionary of his times whose works and ideas challenged the usual norm of gender, race and human morality. There are some who think him overrated, not without good reason and there are some who think he was criminally underrated as a poet. For everyone of us, though, he continues to remain as an enigma, a fabulous mystery of a man.

For Anthony Burgess, whose "Nothing Like The Sun", the title derived from one of his most quoted and famous sonnets, William Shakespeare, referred to as W.S casually throughout the novel, is a man beset by his earnest but misguided efforts to be good, to conform, to please people and to stay away from sin and a man eventually lured on to sin and vice and thus condemned to pay for his indulgence of the same. The novel is however, hardly, a biography in the conventional sense, spanning from the cradle to the grave and instead settles for a loosely fictional, bawdy, audacious yet frequently poignant story that is concerned primarily with W.S struggling and then finding his footing, first with couplets and then with wildly popular plays, and of course, in the process, falling head over heels, devastatingly, in love with a mistress.

That mistress is of course the primary subject of Burgess' novel, as evidenced by the title; the words come from the sonnet in which he praises his mistress for the wires of black hair that grow on her head, for her breasts of dun and her eyes which are nothing like the sun. The narrative is designed, in a typical touch of post-modernism, as a metaphysical story, narrated by a Professor Burgess, an English academician in Malaysia (the writer's favourite literary landscape) to his audience, while gulping down the local rice wine in gallons as the story keeps on unraveling in its sordid and sprawling fashion. We are introduced to W.S as a young boy just on the brink of adolescence, discovering the first taste of his sexual lust at his young age, married, as a matter of social compromise, to one Anne Hathaway and thus, shortly thereafter, thrust on a mostly humdrum but slowly rewarding journey to fame and acceptance as a man of words, a journey which also leads him to his doom.

While the post-modernism is unmistakable and while Burgess' customary penchant for a whimsical but also precise prose style also nods at the likes of both Joyce and Pynchon, "Nothing Like The Sun" is even more entertaining and rambunctious as a read because the writer also keeps the irreverent, tongue-in-cheek spirit of Fielding and Sterne intact in orchestrating the story of a man of letters rising and falling in love and lust with a slapdash aesthetic and a rollicking, boisterous pace that ensures that we keep on reading and even get swept and drunk on its reckless tone and vigour. Burgess writes dexterously with a fanatical, almost feverish glee throughout the length of 234 pages, starting the narrative with soft notes of whimsy and then tugging us to the larger scene of the tumultuous milieu of the main narrative with miraculous ease. The smaller, more personal moments of domestic quarrels, slapstick and cuckoldry are staged with deadpan wit while the bigger, more absorbing scenes - the pestilential plague sweeping across the breadth of England, the gruesome spectacle of the Spanish traitors hung, drawn and quartered for the conspiracy, the impending doom of the invasion of the Spanish armada - are brilliantly staged, rich with the grittiest details possible and yet rendered neatly and plausibly so that the whole of the horror and anarchy sink into our senses.

Wisely enough, Burgess strips Shakespeare of all potential for greatness. We see him as yet another writer struggling to overcome his bare, hardly notable beginnings and establish some semblance of a livelihood - we should never forget that great literature has been, on many occasions, the result of a simple, unpretentious purpose - of putting quill or pen to paper to tell a story that would catch the fancy of an entire reading public without compromising on quality or credibility. There are ingeniously devised scenes in the narrative that predict or mirror the iconoclast themes of his greatest plays - a hilariously ribald farce with twin sons precedes the same confusion of "A Comedy Of Errors"; the death sentence of Lopez, one of the alleged Spanish traitors and also a Jew, first stirs in him the desire to critique the commonly held views against the race in "The Merchant Of Venice"; an incident of betrayal in marriage inspires both "Hamlet" and "Othello". And most notably, the initially frivolous and then strained friendship between him and his younger aristocratic friend Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, directly serves as the basis of the relationship between Falstaff and King Henry.

There are times, only a few and infrequent, that is, when the writer loses focus of his narrative, when he is too absorbed in grasping the general drift of the times and when W.S himself becomes too anonymous for our benefit, almost losing even credibility as a character. There are times when Burgess' switching of point-of-view interrupts the pace, though it benefits the book vastly once the mistress herself comes into the picture. The book gains a transcendent poetry of its own as it chronicles the tempestuous love, bursting with sexual desire, between W.S and the exotic and enigmatic woman who catches his fancy and tugs him on a path of delicious doom and Burgess writes even more feverishly and vividly than ever, culminating in one of the most spectacular, sensuous and devastatingly poignant conclusions I have ever read recently.

Racy, raunchy, ravishingly beautiful and even a little recklessly put together, "Nothing Like The Sun" , even with its faults and flaws - largely those of overarching ambition - is nothing like any other book you would have read on Shakespeare or even on deconstructing the muse of his sonnets. The dialogue has the whip-cracking punch of Greene, the pace is superbly sustained and even as Burgess honors an entire English tradition of unbridled and boisterous storytelling and wit, this book is enough of his own accomplishment to endure as something of a flawed but fabulous reading experience.

I was already impressed with Burgess' language skills in Clockwork, although I now hear he pans that book as a 15 minute bezoomy lark, but there are lines in this book that a good Shakespeare scholar might think that Will wrote himself . I really wanted to give it 4 1/2, because it drags a little in the 4th quarto, but 5 is more accurate than 4 . I would quote to prove myself, but I'm lazy and it's late.
Addendum--
I especially like the scene early in the book, with Will  as a teenager ( I think..he's still living in his dad's house with a batch of brothers and sisters). He's writing poetry whilst his (greasy) sister Joan "keels the pot", his little idiot brother is running inside to escape some mischief he caused outside, (shades of Bottom and many other Shakespeare goofballs). His parents are chiding him for wasting time on verse, a point of stillness in a whirlwind of chaos. I also like the tavern scenes.

I think it would be hard to appreciate this book if you are not a hardcore Shakespeare fan and familiar with many of his plays and sonnets (which I am). I know I wouldn't have got many of the connections, even after my college courses on Shakespeare, because it takes a more slow and savoring Bard reading to feel the whole vibe here. I loved it . Here's a quote that doesn't so much try to use the Elizabethan dialect (other parts do)--yet has Shakespearean imagery:

"the city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the rat-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited foul living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus."