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:
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
First Pitch · Marianne Moore
At Tate Britain · William Blake
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
print layout
tell a friend