Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life

When, in 1963, Anthony Burgess finally started work on the novel he had long planned to write, a challenge lay ahead of him. There was never any doubt in his mind that his fictional biography of Shakespeare should be written in a language that was, if not exactly that of the late sixteenth century, then an 'approximation to Elizabethan English'.

A Journey Through Shakespeare's Life

Nothing Like the Sun opens with a young WS (as he is known throughout the novel) at home in Stratford-upon-Avon. WS is desperate to escape the confines of a domestic life in which he is distracted from great thoughts by being called in for tea. He hears the 'world, the wide world crying and calling like a cat to be let in, scratching like spaniels.'

We follow WS as he:

• Becomes trapped into marriage with the older and possibly already pregnant Anne Hathaway.
• Is indentured as a tutor to the sons of a Gloucestershire magistrate.
• Takes on roles such as a lawyer's clerk, a father, an actor, a writer, and a lover.

And then, of course, there is Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, as well as a certain Dark Lady...

A Triumph of Imagination and Research

The novel is a triumph of imagination, but imagination fired by the most extraordinary research into Shakespeare's life. Only Burgess could have written this literary romp.