WS

Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life by Anthony Burgess.  Norton.  234pp. *****

I am constantly amazed by Anthony Burgess.  Using the evidence of the surviving poetry, especially the sonnets, and what is known about the chronology of the plays, Burgess has spun an utterly credible narrative of Shakespeare’s early life.  More astounding to me is the way he recreates the atmosphere of England in the sixteenth century; the story teems with detail.  And then there’s the language.  The man who did studies of both Shakespeare and Joyce really cut loose with the words in this novel; I guess he figured that if they could do it, he could do it.  The result is an intoxicating mix of rich language, historical detail, and small bits about the poems and plays.  It’s not a quick or easy read.  But it’s worth the effort we put into it.

Take the opening of the fourth chapter:

“It was this sonnet, then, copied in a good hand with no blot, that nestled snug in his breast that warm evening of May as, with S. Brailes, Ned Thorpe and Dick Quiney, he walked or slued (a skinful of ale to enthrone boldness) westward to Shottery.  These were good brown laughing fellows who knew little of bookish learning or of poesy either, but they dearly loved a jest, especially if it entailed sore hurt for others, as for example, skull-cracking, jibing, making skip the rheumy ancientry, thieving, wenching and the like.”

They almost sound like the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, in Elizabethan England.

When I took a class in linguistics in grad school, our professor told us that Joyce had the third largest vocabulary of any writer in English, Milton the second, and Shakespeare the first.[1]  I honestly wonder where Burgess would rank.  You could say he’s not at the same level as those writers in terms of talent, and I wouldn’t dispute that.  But for sheer variety of style, he ranks with almost anyone.  A number of his early novels (like One Hand Clapping) employ utterly simple diction.  But this book, along with A Clockwork Orange, explodes.

The novel is divided into two parts, the first covering late adolescence and early adulthood, until 1587, the second from 1592-99, by which time Shakespeare had written a number of famous plays but not his greatest tragedies, which scholars date after 1600.  The young Shakespeare that Burgess portrays is not an aspiring writer, especially.  He does feel constrained by provincial life in Stratford, longing for something larger, and has an overwhelming wish to be a gentleman.  His father is a glover, but his mother came originally from a prominent family.  Shakespeare works for his father for a time, learning the trade, but also making connections.  It is while he apprentices with another man that he first encounters a prostitute named Fatimah, who will become the Dark Lady of the sonnets, but he can’t get involved with her then, as much as he wanted to; he doesn’t have the money.

Young WS—as Burgess refers to him—does have an eye for the ladies, and isn’t terribly particular.  One early affair was with an older woman named Anne Hathaway, the most experienced and ardent lover he’d come across.  Unfortunately, he gets her pregnant—an occupational hazard for a young rake—and her family forces him to marry her.  I thought she was a catch at the time, level-headed and more experienced, very much in love with the young man.  She moves in with his family in Stratford—his father, mother, and two brothers—and somehow there is a strain from the start.  I honestly didn’t understand what the problem was.  I think it was more provincial life than Anne herself who bothered him.  He longed to get away.

He begins composing verse in a desultory way, sonnets and also longer narrative poems (it’s hard to see Venus and Adonis as a casual pastime).  One way for a young man to get ahead was to find a royal patron, and he discovers that Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, has a love for language and verse similar to his.  The man is wildly enthusiastic, happy to become Shakespeare’s patron, and eventually the men become lovers.  Wriothesley is good-looking, slightly feminine, and quite sensual.  Soon WS was consorting with theater people and beginning to compose plays, which enabled him to live in London and support the family back in Stratford.

Burgess by that time is in full-bore speculative mode, finding ways for the known plays of that time to correspond with moments in WS’s life, also his various interests.  Eventually Fatimah comes back into his life—she is seen as a rare beauty among the aristocrats—and Wriothesley grows interested in her too.  WS contracts syphilis from the woman—another hazard of the day—and Burgess seems to suggest that the mental changes the illness brings about account for the more imaginative later plays.  I don’t know if I buy that, but Burgess details the progress of the disease in painful detail.

My writing mentor, Reynolds Price, once told us in class that Tolstoy knew as he was writing his great novels that he was one of the great writers in world history.  Milton knew.  Wordsworth knew.  I wondered about that.  The William Shakespeare that Burgess portrays has no idea if his early narrative poems have any worth at all; he isn’t sure if his dedication to Wriothesley might be presumptuous.  And the older Shakespeare just works assiduously, trying to make a living, with no particular understanding that Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV Part I are among the finest things ever penned in English.  There’s also the question of where it all came from.  How did this son of a glover, who never attended university, have such a gift of language and knowledge of humanity?  Of that, I’m afraid, Burgess doesn’t have clue.

But how could he?   It’s inexplicable.  Just as inexplicable as his own vast talent.

[1] Modern estimates dispute that.  They put Joyce first and Shakespeare second.