nothing like the sun a story of shakespeare's love life

It's another one to exclude from the course. That's a harsh, unorthodox view, but I can't imagine having much to say in a classroom about this novel. They all seem exactly the same, and they all seem as dull as ditch water. It's not just the pseudo-Renaissance English style in which the book is written it's also the indistinguishability of the characters. In fact, my disappointment at this book early in my Shakespeare studies led me to swear off Shakespeare-related novels entirely for several years. I've tried on numerous occasions to choke through this novel, but I find it unpleasurably difficult and unnecessarily abstruse. That is not the case with Nothing Like the Sun. A Clockwork Orange is a bit too much for me, but I clearly see its literary merit. Norton, 1964.Įnglish teachers are also supposed to like the edgy work of Anthony Burgess. Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life. In short, it's not very interesting, and that's reason enough for it to be excluded from my Modern Shakespearean Fiction course.īurgess, Anthony. Some parts read like a tale of Courtly Love (with all that that term implies), some parts have a faux Medieval flavor, all the parts about sex are thoroughly modern or post-modern, and some parts are sprinkled with inauthentic Renaissance lingo. Its last chapter overlaps with Act I, scene ii of Hamlet.īut the novel is very inconsistent. It tells the backstory to Shakespeare's play, using bits and pieces of that play and of Shakespeare's source material for the play. His late novel Gertrude and Claudius is, for me, a dud. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-not once, but twice!-and he's enormously prolific. And I do like the rabbit books (though I actually think The Centaur is even better). I mean, he's the author of the most famous rabbit books since Beatrix Potter. New York: Random House, 2000.Īs an English teacher, I'm supposed to like John Updike.

nothing like the sun a story of shakespeare

Here are three novels that often appear in conversations about modern Shakespearean fiction and a few brief comments about each of them.

People have their own texts-whether favorites or classics-classified under that genre, and they're sometimes offended that I haven't chosen those texts for my course. courses, but it was also the case with the Modern Shakespearean Fiction class I taught for the first time this past semester. Whenever I talk to people about a course I'm teaching, I always encounter the 'Why aren't you teaching this text?' lists.

Nothing like the sun a story of shakespeare's love life