Indeed, it's asserted in the epilogue that this disease is responsible for the uncategorizable genius of late Shakespeare, and is moreover perhaps the dark secret at the centre of all truly great art. The novel's subtitle tells us it's a (pointedly, not the) 'Story of Shakespeare's Love-life' and by the seventeenth-century the syphilis has put the old in-out, in-out behind him. It's also a young Shakespeare: apart from a brief, almost hallucinatory epilogue, it only takes us up to 1599, but Burgess has that covered.

This is a deliberately disreputable Shakespeare randily bisexual, not well liked by his fellow players, physically unprepossessing (especially at the end, as syphilis increasingly raddles him). The novel was published for the tetracentenary of Shakespeare'sīirth in 1964, part of a year of general celebration, and it evidently seeks to put (as the phrase goes) clear blue water between itself and the more piously stodgy establishment encomia. Then again, we might object that Burgess’s rich stylistic Shakespeare-via-Joyce is something like the sun, or there’d be no point in us reading it. What is it (to appropriate Lear's words) that 'comes' of this particular nothing? Comes has a sexual double-meaning, you know. And the nothing is Shakespeare, too: the ungentle, non-aristocrat Shakespeare: ‘But I am a mere nothing,’ he says to the Earl of Southampton, prior to shagging him. O (nothing the letter the round of the Globe theatre) proves but a pale imitation of the Platonic reality of illumination.

How could it be? Of course, he folds other meanings into his title.

Burgess means: his pastiche Shakespeareanisms (from the stream-of-consciousness account of the inside of WS’s head to whole new sonnets gorblimeyed up out of the proper Elizabethan idiom) is not a patch on the original. Nothing Like The Sun is a modest-enough title, when you come to think about it.

Nothing like the sun burgess