That Shakespeare wrote the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece for his patron the Earl of Southampton at a time when the theatres were closed because of the plague is certain. It is not always easy to draw the line between such conjectures and fiction. 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.Īny biography of Shakespeare has to mix conjecture with established fact since there must be a measure of continuity in the narrative that the known facts cannot themselves provide. 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. It is as though shrouded by the foggy veil through which we can rather see the features of Burgess and Dombrovskij themselves than of the Stratford playwright that remains a riddle for readers.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. The fundamental complexity is to create the image of the historic figure in general and Shakespeare in particular. Similarities speak of the commonality of the tendencies in the European historical and literary process of the 20th century, and also of the creative biography of writers, their aversion of totalitarianism and aspiration to create an image of a free person.

Distinctions of the images are explained, first of all, by the different literary tradition and poetics of realism and modernism accordingly. A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life” (1964) by the English writer Anthony Burgess and in the stories “The Dark Lady”, “The Second Quality Bed” and “The Royal Rescript” (1969) by the Russian writer Jurij Dombrovskij. The purpose of the article is to compare images of Shakespeare in the novel “Nothing like the Sun.

Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess