Nothing Like the Sun

When, in 1963, Anthony Burgess finally started work on the novel he had long planned to write, a challenge lay ahead of him. There was never any doubt in his mind that his fictional biography of Shakespeare should be written in a language that was, if not exactly that of the late sixteenth century, then an ''approximation to Elizabethan English''. 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 in which he is distracted from great thoughts by being called in for tea. 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. Only Burgess could have written this literary romp