In May 1963 Anthony Burgess reviewed – not entirely favourably – Henrietta Buckmaster’s book, All of the Living: A Novel of One Year in the Life of Shakespeare. Harold Bloom referred to the book as 'Joycean fiction about Shakespeare', and called it 'Burgess's best novel'.Nothing Like the Sun: a story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life: : 2 The style of the novel owes something to both Elizabethan English and Joycean wordplay. It also includes a plot of Shakespeare becoming cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who had stayed in Stratford, a thesis Burgess first encountered in literature in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of James Joyce's Ulysses.

It portrays his affair with Fatimah, a black prostitute, from whom he contracts syphilis and is driven mad by pain and fever. The main narrative then tells the story of Shakespeare's life, up to the writing of the Sonnets. Burgess' proposes that this is proof of Shakespeare contracting syphilis, and that Dark Lady's name is spelled in acrostic in the poem, the letters F T M H being a latinization of the Arabic name 'Fatjmah', meaning 'destiny'. Burgess' reading Sonnet 147, in which Shakespeare describes his love for his mistress as a fever. Burgess' is delivering his final lecture on the life of Shakespeare before returning to the United Kingdom, while progressively becoming more drunk on rice wine and gradually less inhibited as the lecture progresses. : 1–2 Synopsis Īs Burgess reminds readers in his foreword, the novel has a frame story in which a professor of a Malaysian college named 'Mr. The title refers to the first line of Sonnet 130, 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', in which Shakespeare describes his love for a dark-haired woman.īurgess recounted in his Foreword added to later editions that the novel was a project of his for many years, but the process of writing accelerated so that publishing would coincide with the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, on 23 April 1964. It tells the story of Shakespeare's life with a mixture of fact and fiction, the latter including an affair with a black prostitute named Fatimah, who inspires the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of William Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess first published in 1964.

Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess