Novel: Nothing Like the Sun

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life is a bravura, fictional reimagining of William Shakespeare’s passions and the making of his art. Taking its title from Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”, the book follows Shakespeare from Stratford youth to London playwright and finally to retirement, anchoring his poetic and dramatic genius in desire, jealousy, disease, and the rough abrasions of Elizabethan life. Rather than a cradle-to-grave biography, it is a sensuous, linguistic performance that treats the sonnets and plays as fuel and flashpoints for a story about erotic obsession and creative transmutation.

Frame and Voice
Burgess casts the tale as a lecture by a bibulous scholar whose fevered erudition and slangy inventiveness tilt the narrative into a heady, mock-Elizabethan register. The frame gives license to speculation and to the novel’s volatile, punning style, so that the life of Shakespeare is less a set of proved facts than a dramatic hypothesis, one in which language crackles with the same energy as lust and ambition. Through this voice Burgess fuses high scholarship with bawdy street-talk, suggesting that the poet’s world holds both university wit and tavern cant.

Story
The young Will is shown in Stratford as the son of a faltering glover, a bright provincial at odds with his diminished prospects. His hasty marriage to the older Anne Hathaway binds him to domesticity and a household that soon includes children. Yet a restless need, creative and carnal, pushes him toward London, where the theatres bloom, the plague threatens, and fortunes turn on patronage and popular favor.

In London the book entwines his rise as actor and playwright with a piercing erotic education. Burgess imagines the “Fair Youth” of the sonnets as a beautiful young aristocrat whose favor and friendship draw Shakespeare into a charged orbit of admiration, dependence, and wounded pride. The more shattering entanglement is with the “Dark Lady,” rendered as a dark-complexioned courtesan of the stews whose magnetism is equal parts mockery and mastery. She becomes the mistress whose body and betrayal ferment the sonnets’ mingled rapture and disgust. Burgess dares the old conjectures that such a liaison exposed Shakespeare to the “pox,” making illness itself one of the book’s dark muses.

The theatre milestones arrive refracted through this private fire: tragedies and comedies bear the imprint of personal loss, risk, and longing. Hamnet’s death shadows the middle years; plague closures and censorship dog the troupe; rivalries among players and poets sting. The Globe rises and burns; new plays surge from a mind forever turning shame and desire into speech. Success brings money and a way home, but not ease.

Themes and Style
Burgess’s Shakespeare is at once husband, father, court-dependent artist, and ravished, raging lover, a man who writes to master chaos and to bind faithless flesh into form. Language is the true protagonist: Burgess mints his own fierce, quasi-Elizabethan idiom, thick with puns, neologisms, and the ripe slang of London’s underbelly. “Nothing” works as a recurring key, both the bawdy nothing of the sonnets and the hollowness left by death and betrayal, while “sun” becomes the blazing, ironic measure against which love and art are tested.

Aftermath
The novel’s closing movement returns Shakespeare to Stratford, prosperous yet haunted. Distance from London’s ferment yields neither purity nor peace; the past abides in scars and in the plays themselves. Burgess leaves the poet among his words, hard-won, impure, magnificently alive, suggesting that the life’s torments were the price, and the source, of their radiance.