小黄书也可以写得这么严肃吗……

3.5 stars. An interesting historical fiction novel about William Shakespeare’s love life. The story follows Shakespeare’s coming of age and adulthood, focussing on sex, writing and his work / business life. A young William marries a pregnant Anne Hathaway in Stratford. He leaves his wife in Stratford and goes to work in London. In London he chases other women, becoming particularly attached to Fatima, a black woman. He rarely returns to his home and family.

This book was first published in 1964.

My third time through, to supplement stories for the Veritas Shakespeare class, which was canceled in the Coronavirus scare. The second time I recall not caring for it, but this time through, I liked it a lot. The focus is on his early life and career, before Hamlet and the tragedies, but ending on a note that looked toward them. Here we are largely in WS's head, a poet from the start, able to crank out verse even when being hounded by his family at the supper table. The details of how he got involved with the London theater world is left vague, but we see his early struggles, his willingness to crank out popular dreck while he longs to do more serious work, his at first fawning relationship with Southampton, then his growing dissatisfaction with being used as a sort of amusement for the young lord, who is smugly delighted in pitting WS against a rival poet, Chapman, and then in sleeping with WS's Dark Lady (to whom he gifts a dose of the clap, which she then shares with Will). We see briefly his regard for and jealousy of Marlowe, the way he antagonized the untalented (except for vitriol) Robert Greene, and his ongoing artistic feud with Will Kemp, whom he conspires to kick out of the company when they build the New Globe in Southwark. And that's where Burgess leaves WS: emotionally bereft, betrayed by friend, lover and wife (and brother), a major sharer in the new theater (underwritten by Southampton), ready to delve into the darkness he sees all around him.
An audacious effort, finely limited in scope, and often persuasive in very subtle ways. A necessary book for the amateur Shakesperian.
I will remember the bratty punk Southampton, the necessarily unfaithful Fatima (a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to survive) and the portrait of WS as an ambitious literary guy, an ordinary, if artistically gifted young man trying to make his way in the world.

Burgess’s florid and fruity language steeped in Elizabethan English and Shakespearean quotations reveals the Bard’s love life in poetic terms. It’s widely accepted that Shakespeare was bisexual (by today’s standards) and while most of the book is inevitably conjecture, there is a ring of truth to it that makes it credible.

A novel about Shakespeare written 2 years after "A Clockwork Orange." This begins and end with the manic wordplay of the previous book. Burgess "answers" a few questions about the Bard's sketchy life. He was betrothed to one Ann but the other one was with child, so he married her.
And the "second best Bed" questions of the will is also answered. Shakespeare is a gentleman with some money and buys the New Place in Stafford for his family and retirement. He enjoys the ride "home", walks into a quite house, opens a bedroom door and there Ann and his Brother Richard are together.. in the second best bed! I enjoyed the creativity of the novel

When I read Shakespeare's sonnets on my local community radio station, as I do from time to time, I always suggest that listeners enchanted by the music and passion of those poems read this novel. It is a shimmering, surprising, enlightening book.

A masterpiece of the English language, a clunker plot-wise. The parts where a young WS runs around chasing tail are infinitely more interesting than the ones where an older WS writes poems and plays. This says a lot for Burgess's stylistic talents, as precious few write as well about sex as they think they do. But it's also a mark against his imagination: making the life of Shakespeare seem hopelessly dull is quite a feat (not the good kind).

I have serious issues with the novel's misogyny. I'm aware that how women in Shakespeare's time were thought of and treated was none of Burgess's doing; still, Burgess made authorial choices, and the way women are treated and the (utter lack of) regard in which they are held says more to me about his own beliefs about women than about Elizabethan London.

This is great fun. Burgess was channelling Shakespeare, so it's full of bawdy imagery, puns and alliterations, all that playful stuff, even poignant at times. There's often rhythm to the prose, and I keep expecting him to break into verse. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Shakespeare's life and work to judge whether Burgess' take is valid, or even remotely convincing. But in my ignorance, it's very enjoyable. Recommended.

Ellen, Elizabeth, have you read this?

"Anne Hathaway pegged WS"
—Anthony Burgess

Burgess ou Borges? Parece que um é a versão inglesa do outro. Ao menos na tentativa de incorporar o personagem WS e com ele ali dentro, nos contar todas as suas dúvidas, dívidas, medos, amores, amantes e família. Só isso já poderia dar uma ideia de quem foi este homem. Mas, acrescento: "Desde garoto ouço frases graves sobre meus deveres para com a família, a igreja, o país, ou a esposa. Mas já tenho idade suficiente para saber que o único dever autoevidente que temos é para com a imagem de ordem que todos nós trazemos em nossos cérebros, o único dever do homem é manter o caos lá embaixo, seja com pisadas ocasionais ou tábuas de assoalho permanentes." Ou "Aquilo era como fazer luvas: apenas um ofício (atuar). Talvez não fosse um ofício tão mesquinho, mas também tratava-se de acertar o tamanho e receber encomendas só que para homens inteiros, e não para cinco dedos. E certamente era um ofício que corrompia mais." Essas foram as situações encontradas na narrativa que me deram a dimensão deste personagem que ficou na história. Era isso que ele queria. Uma imagem para todo o sempre e que fosse imorredoura. Tudo para que seu filho (e filhas) desfrutassem no futuro da fortuna fornida do suave Mestre Shakespeare. O filho morreu com onze anos: Hamnet.

It’s a funny question to ask yourself when reading a novel on Shakespeare’s love life, but while reading this the question kept coming to mind when I least expected it—does Anthony Burgess actually understand Shakespeare? Does he even like him? Or did he just hang around the other Shakespeare fanboys a little too much and too long and so not liking Shakespeare would have been socially gauche?

So this book is little more than Shakespeare erotica, tastefully written, with a good feel for the spirit of the Elizabethan lingo and ethos—bouncy, condensed, smooth-flowing. That is all the good Burgess accomplishes from this otherwise uselessly masturbatory exercise. Although there are plenty of cute allusions to the works, little nuggets sprinkled here and there, little of Shakespeare’s life, works, or personality is brought to any convincing life. The Sonnet drama is especially followed in a tiresomely literal way with little self-awareness, clever reshuffling, or even explanation of the holes and ambiguities in the record beyond the obvious. Most disappointingly, neither Southampton nor Fatima (as this particular Dark Lady is called) have any agency as complete characters. Since the love stories do not satisfy, and Anne is rendered almost monstrous, the erotica falls flat in its face. And something is very wrong when you make a bisexual love triangle unsexy, uncomfortable, and even regressive. (Burgess, you fiend.)

This is the trouble, I think, with Shakespeare historical fiction (or as the youths now would call it, RPF): It tends to refashion one of history’s most mysterious figures into a likeness of its author. Likewise, the Bard here is a complete mishmash of slightly paradoxical character traits with little coherency: Boorish and elitist, horny and straight-laced, solipsistic and...well, just solipsistic. When he is not pondering on his inspiration or acting on the imperatives of his libido, he provides meta commentary and delivering neat packaged aphorisms of his wisdom. Example: “Marriage is order. One suffers but cannot break it. Learn from that. One suffers that order may be maintained.” Ha, kill me now.

The Bard is not the only one who suffers from character assassination, unfortunately. His family and peripheral characters don’t fare well either as the quickly sketched two-trait caricatures they are, and even Elizabethan England is drawn with all the brutish-and-short clichés of medieval times, bordering on suffering porn.

But by far the worse off is Anne Hathaway. Hands down the worst portrayal of her in fiction, and that is saying something. A nymphomaniac who date-rapes young Shakespeare while he sleeps off a hangover under the crab tree, (referencing an old legend), she also cheats on Shakespeare with his brother Richard. Burgess!Shakespeare almost crows in triumph when he finally discovers them in flagrante, “beginning to glow and shiver with the cuckold’s unspeakable satisfaction, the satisfaction of confirmation, the great rage which justifies murder and the firing of cities and makes a man rise into his whimpering strong citadel of self-pitying aloneness.” Or this: “‘It was she,’ he said. ‘It was she that made me.’ He began to whine. ‘I did not want to, but she——’ He even pointed a trembling finger at her, standing, arms folded, bold as brass by the second-best bed of New Place. ‘Aye, aye,’ said WS, almost comfortingly, ‘it was the woman.’” This is so textbook it hurts.

Misanthropy aside, I suppose it is understandable, the urge to kick influential historical figures off their pedestals and humble/humiliate them as flawed, outrageous, silly men. Shakespeare, after all, is more than just a man or even a body of work, but a pillar of western literature, institutionalized and ubiquitous. And where there is inflation, there will always be the urge to deflate, humanize, yank firmly down to earth. But aren’t you supposed to be above this adolescent subversion-for-subversion’s sake rebel attitude? Isn’t this bashing more appropriate for bad faith critics and edgelords than fandom geeks? It’s one thing to have Shakespeare cheerfully romping about Italy with the Dark Lady, it’s another to draw him up as an elitist bisexist misogynist with rape-y and pedophilic tendencies. Not to mention falling for the most clichéd explanations for legendary creativity possible—an active sex life. Shakespeare in Love called, it says it already did this, and (technically) better.

Pity. Burgess is a good stylist, his understanding of language nigh masterly; but there are limits even to good writing. Without the substance that should attend this, this becomes a mere mirror of the worst of scholarly excesses and fandom-style speculation, both of the 60s and now. Once again Shakespeare shames everybody with his mastery of both. He had something to say and boy, did he say it the best.

if 'going full burgess' were a common thing to say, this book would be the best reference for trying to explain what it means.