BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

SUN: a

NOTHING LIKE THE SUN: story of Shakespeare's love-life, by Anthony Burgess. N.Y., W. W. Norton Co., 1964, 234 pp., $3.95.

This book is a pastiche. A pastiche is not a good thing. It is a worthless thing. To speak with another's voice is paradoxically both easy and impossible. As a result this novel succeeds and in its success fails. Anthony Burgess can no more be William Shakespeare than Shakespeare could have been Burgess. Less so, for Burgess has less talent.

He does have nerve. He set out to imitate the robust style of Elizabethan writing and he succeeded. The style sounds precisely like what it is-an imitation. There is no life in it. When Burgess heaves his dummy Shakespeare on to his knee it simply crush-

es him.

The facts Burgess had to work with are familiar to us all. Shakespeare was born in Stratford, the son of a merchant politician. He married an undistinguished lady and she bore him children. He went up to London, acted, wrote poems and plays, made money, returned to Stratford and, after a few years of retirement, died.

Burgess, in gratuitously knobby prose, retells this story with elaborations. For 300 years the identity of the youth to whom the sonnets are addressed has been a puzzle. Burgess gives the handiest answer: he was

26

Henry

Henry Wriothesley, young Earl of Southhampton. Was Shakespeare in love with him? Yes. Was it at the behest of the boy's worried mother that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets urging the boy to marry? And for pay? Yes to both questions.

Who was the dark lady of the sonnets? Why a Negress, of course, from the West Indies, brought to England by Sir Francis Drake. Surprised? Your surprise and mine are as nothing to the howls of incredulous outrage from Shakespeare scholars at this fancy. To explain why would take more time and space than a review affords. Actually, Burgess makes it seem quite as improbable as it is.

If you care, in this novel Shakespeare sleeps with a ten-year-old boy when, as a young man, he is hired to tutor the sons of a wealthy squire. The episode is without detail. Later, and often, Shakespeare sleeps with the adolescent Wriothesley. Details of their love life are not given, either. The only detailed sex episodes in this book are with women. Maybe Burgess is trying to tell us he is so straight he can't even imagine what two males would do in bed together except sleep.

To finish with the plot, we have a final lapse of taste. Wriothesley brings back from a military campaign with Essex "some French pox or other." Naturally Shakespeare contracts it. What does it turn out to be? Why, what