5/31/2023 0 Comments Nothing like the sun novelThe novel was published for the tetracentenary of Shakespeare'sīirth in 1964, part of a year of general celebration, and it evidently seeks to put (as the phrase goes) clear blue water between itself and the more piously stodgy establishment encomia. Then again, we might object that Burgess’s rich stylistic Shakespeare-via-Joyce is something like the sun, or there’d be no point in us reading it. What is it (to appropriate Lear's words) that 'comes' of this particular nothing? Comes has a sexual double-meaning, you know. And the nothing is Shakespeare, too: the ungentle, non-aristocrat Shakespeare: ‘But I am a mere nothing,’ he says to the Earl of Southampton, prior to shagging him. O (nothing the letter the round of the Globe theatre) proves but a pale imitation of the Platonic reality of illumination. How could it be? Of course, he folds other meanings into his title. Burgess means: his pastiche Shakespeareanisms (from the stream-of-consciousness account of the inside of WS’s head to whole new sonnets gorblimeyed up out of the proper Elizabethan idiom) is not a patch on the original. Nothing Like The Sun is a modest-enough title, when you come to think about it.
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