Three stars for the effort it must have taken to keep up this onslaught of Shakespearean-style, and actual Shakespearean, word coinages for 300 pages.

On the other hand, I could have substracted five stars just for the crime (the feat?) of making Shakespeare dull. Burgess‘ character WS comes across as downright dim-witted in this; a bumbling idiot who is – just barely – floating along on the tides of life and periodcally crashing into obstacles that are as generic as they are avoidable. Nothing he does seems very interesting, least of all his writing. Burgess provides creation myths for a lot of memorable quotes from Shakespeare‘s sonnets and plays, and in each instance I found it hard to believe that the dull oaf I was following around would have come up with these elegant and witty turns of phrase.

All in all, it should have been a bawdy romp, but it ended up being a rather perfunctory, drudging march from one bullet point to another; youth – marriage – pest in London – sonnet boy – Romeo and Juliet – latest affair – death of Hamnet– etc., with no room for an independent story to unfold.

Burgess‘ Marlowe book, A Dead Man in Deptford, accomplishes this brilliantly, perhaps because with Marlowe, Burgess had less information to work with and had to construe a plausible fictional story. I’d say, skip Shakespeare, in this instance, and go directly to Marlowe.

Could not read this book! After reading 15% of the book I realized I had no idea what was going on. Very rarely I do not finish a book but this was one of those rare times.

Brilliant language, evening you suspect not all the words are real. As satisfy I ng and gorgeous as you might hope for.

Scholar or newcomer, this book grabs you and you feel every happiness or pain the characters do, whether you intended to or not.

Γραμμένο σε γλώσσα και λεξιλόγιο της Ελισαβετιανής εποχής, κατάλαβα περίπου τα 2/3, ήταν δύσκολο και μαγευτικό ταξίδι.

Burgess is such an impressive writer, and he does a really fine job of imagining Shakespeare's love lives in this novel. At times it feels a little too pat when he's foreshadowing lines that will appear in plays that his main character has yet to write, but in the main it all feels right and you get a sense that this is more than just pastiche.

Brilliantly written, Bard-approved. Not for the prudishly faint of heart.

Just gross. Unless your interested in a Clockwork Orange treatment of Shakespeare, skip it.

At times, Nothing Like the Sun is extraordinarily gripping. During certain scenes, such as WS writing a sonnet at home early in the book or WS witnessing the executions, the brilliance expected from Burgess is on clear display. Unfortunately, much of this book is sorely lacking this brilliance. As a great fan of Burgess, I was a little disappointed with this story, but it was still enjoyable.

Looking back, this might be a book that requires a second reading to truly appreciate.

Oh wordy friendlies.

A fictional biography of Shakespeare in which Burgess takes the 'facts' and fleshs them out. As a youth Shakespeare is driven to hear his fortune from Old Madge who tells him that there will be a journey and 'Catch as catch can. A black woman or a golden man.' Shakespeare seeks the meaning of these words which Burgess ties in to the Sonnets.

Oh, I can't I can't I can't.

Not for me and I don't want to know the people who found it agreeable. I haven't read A Clockwork Orange but if that is anything like this (which some reviews have said it is) then evidently it's a waste of my time.

The prose was eloquent, and judiciously woven. But peeling back the well-written prose would reveal a body of self-laudatory, masturbatory male-supremacist history smut that believes itself humourous in that unfortunate, conservative way.

are the straights okay?????

This book is so great. It takes you into the mind and times of Willie himself, all the bawdiness and intrigue and plagues and sources for all his amazing language innovations. It personalizes the man behind the image of Willie and is at once intimate and informative. Burgess knows language so well that he uses it as the perfect entry point