thing Like the Sun 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 which he finds to be highly distracting. He hears ‘the world, the wide world crying and calling like a cat to be let in, scratching like spaniels.’ We see him trapped into marriage with the older and possibly already pregnant Anne Hathaway, indentured as a
tutor to the sons of a Gloucestershire magistrate, become 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.
The novel is a triumph of imagination, but imagination
fired by the most extraordinary research into
Shakespeare’s life. It is also written in a style which
would have been familiar to the Bard himself. Only
Burgess could have written this literary romp.
The book has a wonderful new foreword by Robert
McCrum, critic, journalist and author of the
acclaimed Shakespearean. McCrum calls Burgess’s
novel both ‘a remarkable work of fiction’ and ‘a
masterpiece of literary eroticism.’