Posted by Sterling on 9/4/2012, 22:09:24, in reply to "Nothing like the Sun"
98.71.94.180
Yes, it certainly does drag you straight into Eliizabethan London. I don't know that I thought the prose was "sixties" (what would that be? Updike? Roth? To Kill a Mockingbird? In Cold Blood?) so much as Joycean. Burgess' study of Joyce, Re Joyce, was published at almost the same time. I think that A Dead Man in Deptford makes an interesting and useful contrast. Thirty years later, he wrote another novel that is also drenched in Elizabethan color, but without the flashy stylistic flourishes (although it is still pretty flashy in its way).
My reading is that Burgess explicitly portrays WS as having a physical love affair with HW. I think, though, that we are meant to see him as fundamentally a heterosexual (goddess erotic reveries, skirt-chasing as a young man, sexual fixation on Dark Lady) who wanders off the path with the "Fair Youth." Again, this is contrasted with the frankly homosexual Marlowe of ADMID.
--Previous Message--
: I finished it last night, and I'm still thinking I'm
: living in Elizabethan London. WS came through as a
: very likable man, a normal human being with his fears,
: passions, business relations, etc. Although Burgess's
: prose is very "sixties", I didn't think it
: was difficult to follow, except perhaps at the
: beginning. The mixture of XX Century's vanguardist
: style with archaic terms worked very well, although I
: had to recur to the dictionary very often. I learned
: many words I'll never use!!
:
: I recently watched the movie "Anonymous",
: which puts forward the old theory that WS didn't write
: his works, but the Earl of Oxford did. The movie is
: quite good, although I think the theory is just bogus.
: Most certainly the movie writers read this book and
: elaborated upon it, but played down the role of HW.
:
: Am I wrong or "Nothing like the Sun"
: portrays WS as bisexual? Or was his relationship with
: HW only the product of, first, interest, and then
: friendship?
:
: A big, welcome byproduct of this book: I read or
: re-read several of WS's sonnets, fragments of plays,
: as well as works by Marlowe, Jonson and others
: mentioned, out of Harold Bloom's "Best Poems of
: the English Language".
:
: Just some random thoughts on this book, while I wait
: for your comments.
:
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