Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life
Heinemann
)Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of
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.[1]: 1–2
Synopsis
As Burgess reminds readers in his foreword, the novel has a
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
Elizabethan English and Joycean wordplay
.
Reception
Harold Bloom referred to the book as "Joycean fiction about Shakespeare",[2] and called it "Burgess's best novel".[3]
Notes
- ^ ISBN 0-09-919431-7.
- ^ Bloom, Harold (11 November 2009). "Road Trip". New York Times. Retrieved 22 October 2012.
- ISBN 9780547546483.
Editions
- Burgess, Anthony (1992). Nothing Like The Sun. London: Vintage. ISBN 0-09-941690-5.
- Burgess, Anthony (2013). Nothing Like The Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-34640-4.
Further reading
- Franssen, Paul J. C. M. (2016). "Wilde imaginings". Shakespeare's Literary Lives: The Author as Character in Fiction and Film. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107125612.