Anthony burgess brief biography of william

Burgess and Shakespeare:

elcome to Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare.

Throughout his career, Anthony Burgess was fascinated by the writing and life of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, and the story of his life, inspired Burgess to write novels, critical studies, a biography, a ballet, chamber music and a musical film. As a teacher, Burgess passed on his love of Elizabethan drama to his students through lectures and textbooks; and as a journalist, he celebrated Shakespeare’s language and his importance in our own time.

Explore these pages to find out about the influence of Shakespeare on Anthony Burgess, and the fresh interpretations Burgess brings to his work.

Listen to our podcasts on Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare (see below): we examine Burgess’s Shakespeare biography, his novel Nothing Like the Sun and his other imaginative fictional interpretations of the bard’s life, and hear some of Burgess’s Shakespeare music. as well as a newly-discovered series of Shakespeare lectures.

Get thee to: Greetings | Burgess and the bard | A talk about Shakespeare | Shakespeare podcasts | Another Shakespeare section (see links at top of page)

nthony Burgess first studied Shakespeare’s poetry and drama when he was a schoolboy at Xaverian College in Manchester.

He recalls his first reading of Venus and Adonis as an emotional experience: he was immediately struck by the poem’s sensuality. In the 1950s, when he lived in a village near Stratford upon Avon, Burgess was able to identify autobiographical elements in the poem’s English pastoral setting and in its central characters. Adonis is wooed by Venus, as Shakespeare was by Anne Hathaway. Burgess argued that an understanding of Shakespeare’s work can be enhanced by a knowledge of his life.

In 1958, writing as John Burgess Wilson, Burgess published a history of English literature in which he provides an overview of Shakespeare’s character, aspirations and experie

During the years 1963 to 1968 Anthony Burgess was living in Chiswick, West London. He moved there with his first wife Lynne the year after A Clockwork Orange was published, and stayed there for five years, writing 6 novels, 3 books of criticism and several translations. A few months after Lynne’s death in March 1968, Burgess left West London and England for good.

This period was a time of great creativity for Burgess. He wrote several novels, including his biographical novel about Shakespeare Nothing Like the Sun[1], thriller Tremor of Intent and the comic sequel Enderby Outside. He was also composing piano music at this time, and in 1968 he wrote the script, lyrics and music for an unmade Hollywood musical about Shakespeare, under the working title ‘The Bawdy Bard’.  

1964 was the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, and Burgess’s major contribution was the publication of his novel Nothing Like the Sun. He’d rushed to finish it the previous autumn it so it could be published in April 1964 to coincide with the Shakespeare anniversary; and he wanted to be in London to promote the novel.  

Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of Shakespeare. So its plot derives from the known historical facts about Shakespeare’s life and work: his Stratford social and family context; his parentage, marriage and children; his success as a poet and playwright; his connection with the Earl of Southampton; his participation in the business side of the London theatres; his death in Stratford in 1616. In his autobiography Burgess wrote:

I had been reading pretty widely, ever since my student days, in books about Shakespeare, in Elizabethan documents, in scholarly background history. I had taken a lot of notes feverishly, making a chronological table which related the known facts of Shakespearean biography to the wider events of the time.[2]

But you can’t make a novel with this set of facts. So Burgess used invention,

1964 fictional biography of William Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess

For the Sting album Nothing Like the Sun, see Nothing Like the Sun (Sting album).

Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of William Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess first published in 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. 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.

Background

Burgess 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.

Synopsis

As Burgess reminds readers in his foreword, the novel has a frame story in which a professor of a Malaysian college named "Mr. 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.The "lecture" begins with "Mr. Burgess" reading Sonnet 147, in which Shakespeare describes his love for his mistress as a fever. "Mr. 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 "Fatimah", meaning "destiny".

The main narrative then tells the story of Shakespeare's life, up to the writing of the Sonnets. It portrays his affair with Fatimah, a black prostitute, from whom he contracts syphilis and is driven mad by pain and fever. It also includes a plot of Shakespe