The Dark Lady is probably the book's biggest problem - she doesn't feel at all real, although there are some beautiful pieces of writing about the texture and look of her skin. The plot from this point on largely concerns the triangle sketched out in the Sonnets: the pure love with the young man (which WS realizes is not so pure at all) and the degraded lust he feels for the Dark Lady. He writes his first so-so plays ( Titus, The Comedy of Errors) and meets Henry Wriothesley, a spoiled but charming aristocrat, who becomes his patron and occasional lover. The bulk of the book occurs in London after WS has left. None of the people quite came alive for me as complete people - Anne Hathaway and WS's family were vivid but generally creatures of a single characteristic - but Burgess's recreation of the physical and linguistic life of the era was a real delight. The dialogue in particular is wonderfully handled. He is seduced by a much older woman, gets her pregnant, and is forced to marry.Īll of this is beautifully told in a mixture of Elizabethan and modern English. It begins with WS (as he is called throughout) in his adolescence, delivering gloves for his father as his family deals with declining fortunes. I should begin by saying that I know very little about Shakespeare or Elizabethan England, so Burgess could have gotten away with almost anything - but, to the extent that one can sense historical rightness, this book felt right.
I included it on a list of my favorite historical novels, if anyone is curious. On the back of this book is some of the most hilariously faint praise I've ever read: "Of all the books about Shakespeare that 1964 will bring forth, none is likely to make livelier reading than Anthony Burgess's historical novel, Nothing Like the Sun." Well said, Country Life magazine - I might even go farther and assert that of all the books about Shakespeare that I have read this year, this is the best.
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