“For love is one word but many things.”Anthony Burgess has written a clever book in “Nothing Like that Sun, a novel that imagines Shakespeare’s love life during his teens and his early years as a young actor and playwright in London. This novel is a wordy, at times poetical, text and one that can require your focus to truly appreciate it. The initial reading is slow going and a little confusing due to Mr. Burgess’ style and word usage. It is not a novel that is easily penetrated (pun totally in

What do we think when we think of William Shakespeare? There are so many things, indeed. For almost everyone of us, he is the greatest poet, the Bard, so to speak, of all time. For many of us, he was one of the most consummate and adept of storytellers who has and continues to inspire and influence other literature and forms of storytelling significantly and indelibly across the world. For some of us, he was a controversial figure, a man whose works could be accused, in today's modern perspectiv...

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.."Virginia Woolf has written of the new biography in which fact and fiction are commingled in an entirely novel and delicious manner thus bringing forth the true personality of the subject of that biography. Anthony Burgess' 'Nothing Like The Sun' epitomises the new biography. A story of Shakespeare's love life, it is also a revelation of his incandescently fascinating mind. I knew about Shakespeare's literary history and a little of his personal life,...

I was already impressed with Burgess' language skills in Clockwork, although I now hear he pans that book as a 15 minute bezoomy lark, but there are lines in this book that a good Shakespeare scholar might think that Will wrote himself . I really wanted to give it 4 1/2, because it drags a little in the 4th quarto, but 5 is more accurate than 4 . I would quote to prove myself, but I'm lazy and it's late.Addendum--I especially like the scene early in the book, with Will (view spoiler)[ as a teena...

This is great fun. Burgess was channelling Shakespeare, so it's full of bawdy imagery, puns and alliterations, all that playful stuff, even poignant at times. There's often rhythm to the prose, and I keep expecting him to break into verse. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Shakespeare's life and work to judge whether Burgess' take is valid, or even remotely convincing. But in my ignorance, it's very enjoyable. Recommended. Ellen, Elizabeth, have you read this?

I read this book years ago but only just thought about it when I was musing today that I can't think of many memorable historical novels by men. By 'historical novel' I mean a novel based on real people and events. This one speculates on William Shakespeare's love life and was published to coincide with his 400th birthday. Its title references the sonnet: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", and proposes that the much-speculated-upon 'Dark Lady of the Sonnets' was a prostitute and madam...

A masterpiece of the English language, a clunker plot-wise. The parts where a young WS runs around chasing tail are infinitely more interesting than the ones where an older WS writes poems and plays. This says a lot for Burgess's stylistic talents, as precious few write as well about sex as they think they do. But it's also a mark against his imagination: making the life of Shakespeare seem hopelessly dull is quite a feat (not the good kind).I have serious issues with the novel's misogyny. I'm a...

A carnival of language! Burgess had a life-long love affair with words, as witness A Clockwork Orange, and this glorious pastiche of 16thc idioms is a poem to the Bard. Forgive the copious in-jokes that only scholars might detect, not least its cryptic nods to Ulysses and Freud. Enjoy the wit, fun and vibrant color!

This is the second Burgess book in a row that has positively *thrilled* me in its opening movements and then started to drag around the halfway point before finally limping to a conclusion. I guess it proves that style will only sustain you for so long; eventually, you need to some story.Having said that, the rendering of the man Shakespeare is convincing and occasionally beguiling - though too often limited by Burgess' insistence on examining only his life as it relates to sexual and romantic c...

Summary:Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun is a highly fascinating, albeit fictional, re-telling of Shakespeare’s love life. In 234 pages, Burgess manages to introduce his reader to a young Shakespeare, developing into manhood and clumsily fumbling his way through his first sexual escapade with a woman, through Shakespeare’s long, famed (and contested) romance with Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and, ultimately, to Shakespeare’s final days, the establishment of The Globe theater,...

It’s a funny question to ask yourself when reading a novel on Shakespeare’s love life, but while reading this the question kept coming to mind when I least expected it—does Anthony Burgess actually understand Shakespeare? Does he even like him? Or did he just hang around the other Shakespeare fanboys a little too much and too long and so not liking Shakespeare would have been socially gauche? So this book is little more than Shakespeare erotica, tastefully written, with a good feel for the spiri...

How many novelists can you think of with the required talent and ambition to take on the task of writing a novel about Shakespeare's love life? Anthony Burgess had both the daring and the talent to give it a try. It doesn't feel like a stretch to have such an ambitious polymath imagine himself inside the Immortal Bards head at the moment of creation, nor in his bed at the moment of climax.Burgess' Bard is as lusty and ambitious as all young men, yet full of pity and sympathy also, unable to hold...

I'm not quite sure what to make of Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess. The only other book I'd read by Burgess was A Clockwork Orange, a strange and interesting story of a dystopic future. Nothing Like the Sun is a tale of William Shakespeare and his purported relationships with the Earl of Southampton and Fatima, the Dark Lady. Like Clockwork, Burgess has a way with language, Nothing Like the Sun written in an oldish English, as if you are reading a Shakespearan play. The story, itself, st...

As impressed as I was that Burgess captured the Shakespearean tongue in novel format. The story never capitavited me or brought my interest below the surface. I didn't get into WS head or even learn more about his upstart or career. It's told in small vignettes, most of which aren't very interesting. It's an interesting approach, but I felt that chapter 7 in part 2 was the peak for the book, when the chapter is told through a series of journal entries. As far as criticizing a book of this magnit...

Read this while I was taking a college Shakespeare class. I enjoyed it then. I would like to reread it after 40 years tho...

Creative sex scenes, clever ejaculation imagery, and deep thoughts for godless societies.Burgess offers wonderful sex scenes to illustrate that God’s favorite activity for married humans can be rendered into beautiful words. That this novel was written over half a century ago testifies to his enduring literary power.Of course, contemporary society may not appreciate how the author writes about sexuality since some misguided souls think that sex is just a pastime instead of a fulfilling part of m...

Between Shakespeare in Love, Upstart Crow and that episode of Doctor Who, among many others, the life of William Shakespeare has become almost as rich a source of entertainment as his own works. Most of the time, though, we enter the action with the mature man, already established, writing and rehearsing, a man about the Elizabethan town.Burgess starts his story earlier. We meet the newly pubescent teenage Shakespeare, obsessed with wordplay and fornication, one of which will make him his fortun...

This rating should be qualified: a four for readers who are already fans of Anthony Burgess or who have the cast of mind to become so, and a two for readers not susceptible to his particular charms.This book is thrilling for readers who bemoan the increasing simplicity of language favored in modern fiction. When we reduce our prose to something any eight-year-old could understand, we lose much of the precise nuance and shades of color that are the great gifts of our language...we don't have the

My third time through, to supplement stories for the Veritas Shakespeare class, which was canceled in the Coronavirus scare. The second time I recall not caring for it, but this time through, I liked it a lot. The focus is on his early life and career, before Hamlet and the tragedies, but ending on a note that looked toward them. Here we are largely in WS's head, a poet from the start, able to crank out verse even when being hounded by his family at the supper table. The details of how he got in...

"Literature is an epiphenomenon of the action of the flesh", so Anthony Burgess' Shakespeare declares. The statement encapsulates the novel. From his youth to his death, Shakespeare is presented as a bawdy, sex-mad boy. His first adventures result in a precocious pregnancy and hasty marriage. Afterwards he absconds from his father's glove-making business to become a Latin schoolmaster in a small home, where in the course of a lesson on Plato, he shocks them with impromptu lessons about Athenian

No real review because I read this for a class with a specific focus, but I just can't go without writing some words about this, especially after scrolling through the many praising reviews here on Goodreads. Nothing Like the Sun was almost a torture to read through. There's the writing style for once, that was the kind of pretentious that may work for some, but for me was just confusing without making it any more profound or lyrical. I appreciate the author's talent for words, but it was just...

An odd book, that's almost three separate short novellas in one. The best, and first, is the beginning of the book, which follows young Will on his youthful amorous adventures, hoodwinked into a hasty Elizabethan shotgun marriage with an older bride at the precipice of spinsterhood. This is a Joycean like feast of language and becoming; comedy and bawdyness. The second phase is a paraphrased version of his relationship with Southhampton, and the composition of the sonnets. Some decent dialogue,

I read this probably 20 years and forgot about it until I recently finished Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet, itself a fictionalized retelling of the life of William Shakespeare. I remember enjoying the book despite not really being a Shakespeare guy (just a few years later I would become an English teacher, but would remain not really a Shakespeare guy). When I read this, I think I'd recently finished A Clockwork Orange and thought that maybe Burgess would become my new favorite author. He didn'...

This has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while, mainly because I find getting back into Old English so tough after 3 years of studying it at university. However, this novel offered a really interesting account of Shakespeare's life, intertwined with other prominent literary texts of the time (such as Marlowe of 'Dr Faustus'). He also considers the perhaps more controversial sides of his life, such as his affairs with black women and men in Tudor England, as alluded to in many of his texts. Wh...

A novel about Shakespeare written 2 years after "A Clockwork Orange." This begins and end with the manic wordplay of the previous book. Burgess "answers" a few questions about the Bard's sketchy life. He was betrothed to one Ann but the other one was with child, so he married her. And the "second best Bed" questions of the will is also answered. Shakespeare is a gentleman with some money and buys the New Place in Stafford for his family and retirement. He enjoys the ride "home", walks into a qui...

This is an odd one - a bit like A Clockwork Orange, the narrative style is a bit strange and it took me a while to get my eye/ear in with it. However once I did (& it took around 200 pages, which is most of the book, mind), this is an intriguing reimagining of Shakespeare's love life and the back story to the Dark Lady/youth of Shakespeare's sonnets. Burgess has a great turn of phrase and I read this in pretty much one sitting. It's not the best book I've ever read, but it's okay for passing an

This novel has been described by a Shakespeare scholar as the only such which functions as a work of art, and I would agree. It is a delicious wander through a possible sexual and romantic life of Will, not to be considered in anyway a history but nonetheless it has more than a ring of truth at moments. The language is, in typical Burgess fashion, a joy. Definitely one for fans of him and of course, of the. Are. Not for the prude nor the weak of stomach, however!

i didn't love this as much as i could have, but i'm willing to guess that it's because of my reading slump, combined with the fact that i made my brain read this quickly.despite the fact that my enjoyment of this wasn't as great as i had hoped, i will say this: we're doing burgess a big disservice when we praise clockwork orange and then disregard the rest of his body of work completely. his ability to play with language shouldn't go unnoticed, or be limited to one novel (which he himself didn't...

This book is a fictional biography of Shakespeare, Burgess paints a brilliant and realistic portrait of WS. Shakespeare. Burgess explores his complicated family and love life. This is the core of the Story. This is where Burgess creates a dynamic character...a balding, sometimes self loathing middle aged WS. Frustrated by circumstance and aware of his own mortality.

A fictional biography of Shakespeare in which Burgess takes the 'facts' and fleshs them out. As a youth Shakespeare is driven to hear his fortune from Old Madge who tells him that there will be a journey and 'Catch as catch can. A black woman or a golden man.' Shakespeare seeks the meaning of these words which Burgess ties in to the Sonnets.