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

nothing like the sun a story of shakespeare

Bloom, however, does recognises both the aesthetic power and presence that Burgess succeeds in creating from Stephen’s comparatively jejune theories. In his brief discussion of Burgess’s use of Stephen’s theories, his focus is upon Joyce’s struggle with Shakespeare and not on the ways in which Burgess took that theory and expanded it into a recreation of Shakespeare’s life that is much more aesthetically complete than any representation of Shakespeare created in Joyce’s writings. Paradoxically, Bloom’s own theories offer one of the clearest explanations of how Burgess uses the ideas that Joyce puts into the mouth of Stephen Dedalus in order to break free from Joyce’s vision of Shakespeare and pursue his own engagement with the playwright.īloom's oversight is understandable. The first is the obvious one that Burgess’s primary interest lies not in Joyce but in Shakespeare’s life and works the second is his own clear recognition of the essential differences between the theories of Stephen Dedalus and Burgess’s use of them for his own aesthetic purposes. Note 2 In treating Burgess’s use of the theories that Joyce puts into Stephen’s mouth as the use that a 'loving disciple' might make of his master’s work, Bloom ignores the ways in which Burgess writes against Joyce and overlooks two facts.

This is all rather curious given that it was Bloom himself who, in The Anxiety of Influence, developed the theory ofhow new writers, or ephebes, must engage and wrestle with the works of earlier strong writers if they are to succeed in creating their own distinctive vision. Anthony Burgess's Factification of Shakespeare's Life By Alan RoughleyĪlthough Harold Bloom declares Nothing Like the Sun to be 'wonderful' and describes Burgess’s factual fictionalisation of Shakespeare’s life as his 'best novel' and the 'only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare,' he reads it from the perspective of a critic who views Burgess primarily as a 'loving disciple of Joyce.' Note 1 The part of Nothing Like the Sun that Bloom seems most to value is Burgess’s adaptation of Stephen Dedalus’s theories on the fictional relationships between Hamlet and his father’s ghost the factual relationship between Shakespeare and his son, Hamnet and the amalgamation of fact and fiction in the relationship between Ann Hathaway and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.

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