Pillors of Fier 
Frank Kermode
- Nothing like the Sun: reissue by Anthony Burgess
Arguing – redundantly? disingenuously? – that ‘every Shakespeare-lover’ has the right ‘to paint his own portrait of the man’, Anthony Burgess published his version in 1970. Though ‘eschewing invention’, he confessed to an element of ‘conjecture’, adding that the reader should spot his venial departures from fact and excuse them as inevitable in the work of a fiction-writer, his hand subdued to what it had hitherto worked in. Conscience compelled him to end one speculatively ‘onomastic’ paragraph, in which he fools around with the names of Shakespeare’s children, with the words: ‘The whole of this paragraph is very unsound.’ Here is an example of candour rarely matched by Shakespeare’s biographers.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
print layout
tell a friend