-- My mother-in-law has been, I believe, a good wife to him. She has been faithful throughout. He himself, though, has been guilty of bed-breach.
-- Let us hearken. He mumbles something.
--Aye. It will not now be long. He will come very soon now to his final utterance.
-- Was he a great man? Shall we take the utterance down?
Daughter can overcome power of evil. Son not. Nor Hamlet nor Othello, both my sons. That poor Kate Hamlet was drowned for love. Water and a virgin girl. They are our only cleansers.
-- The last word is usually nonsense.
v.
MY summary, physician.
I thought, that day, that what happened to me was manner of a contagion from my brother Gilbert. It was on-stage. It was Hamlet. I was the Ghost, croaking my objurgations. Then (they told me this, shocked, thereafter) I let forth a great shriek, fell, foamed, kicked, rolled. The audience accounted it fine acting.
What followed was of little use to the playhouse. I forgot lines, my brains were constantly tired, I neglected my affairs, I raged, I hated then loved, loved then hated. One day I shocked myself by pissing openly near Whitehall. I woke three nights with so extreme a desire for ale that I went out, near-naked, to knock up the landlord of the Triple Tun. I took to brothel-going. And there it was, in Clerkenwell, that I----
She looked not diseased, only her golden flesh seemed changed to an iron-colour. Her breasts sagged, her belly pouted, her hair was a tangle of wires, here and there a tooth was gone. We looked at one another, and I saw myself in her eyes -- hair vanished in tufts, fat stolid face, doublet unbuttoned for the greater ease of my flesh. I nodded and nodded in a sort of satisfaction that we both exemplified the rottenness of the world. And then I said what had long been on my mind: --
-- A gift from him, was it not?
She hung her head, saying nothing. We might all then, the three of us, be drawn into the one corruption. But the work of those two was done. Consummatum est, erat. I could no longer lie with her. Yet, leaving, I could have wept, had there been in me any longer the capability of tears, for all the Beauty that the Enemy took away. I must eternise that tawny queenliness, cursing.
Not lie with her, but with others. Joan, Kate, Meg, Susan, Margery, Tooth, Samson, the Yellow One. The cock crowed to bursting. Meantime I spent my money, often without premeditation -- on the house in Blackfriars, the red Hungarian cloak, a job of malt, a share in a company that did not exist, a pipe of Canary, horses (one an Arab), a doublet studded with glass cut like jewels. Back here in Stratford I roared my greatness out. That night with Ben and Drayton in the inn I shouted that I was God. But the goddess was firm within me: she had opened up these terrible Indies but remained as my navigatrix. The lands, Hoby, you told me of, the strange birds, the talking fruit, the three-legged men -- they all exist; you were no liar.
vi.
QUESTIONS? You wish to know how ventriloquial all this is, who is really speaking? This is no impersonation, ladies and gentlemen. When the Poisoner comes he comes to break, and walls are among the things he breaks. I am sick and tired and long for my East. Take off at. Your faces are very dim about me.
What is your great crime, then?
Love, love, and it is always love. Not wisely but too. Fatimah. I will distribute copies of that sonnet after the lecture. You can never win, for love is both an image of eternal order and at the same time the rebel and destructive spirochaete. Let us have no nonsensical talk about merging and melting souls, though, binary suns, two spheres in a single orbit. There is the flesh and the flesh makes all. Literature is an epiphenomenon of the action of the flesh.
How about blood?
The West is eveningland, the East morningland. He sent his blood out there. I am of his blood. The male line died in the West. It was right it should continue in the East. Summon no one. I shall be all right. One short sleep past.
Subject-matter?
Oaklings, footsticks, cinques, moxibustion, the Maccabees, the Lydian mode (soft, effeminate), the snow-goose or whitebrant, rose-windows, government, the conflagration of citadel and senate-house, Bucephalus, the Antilegomena, Simnel Sunday, the torrid zone, Wapping, my lord's top-boots, the shoeflower, prostitute boys, dittany, face-ague, cosmic cinefaction, the Antipodes, the Gate of Bab, Fidessa, Rattlin the Reefer, Taliesin, the dead head in alchemy, the bar, dungeons, skylarks, the wind, Thaumast, the dark eyes of London, the fellowship of the frog, Gesta Regum Anglorum, Myrddhin, faithful dealing, A Girle worth Gold, viticulture, the Queen that's dead (bee, meadow, chess, Bench, regnant), imposts of arches, pollards, sea-fox and sea-hog and sea-heath, the sigmoid curve, cardinals, touchability.
What would you have now?
No more. No no no more. Never again.
One last word. One last last last last word.
My Lord.
Copyright (c) 1964 by Anthony Burgess Copyright renewed 1992 by Anthony Burgess
First published as a Norton paperback 1975; reissued 1996, 2103
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burgess, Anthony, 1917-1993.
Nothing like the sun : a story of Shakespeare's love-life / Anthony Burgess.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-34640-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-393-34676-3 (e-book) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Fiction.
2. Great Britain--History--Elizabeth, 1558-1603--Fiction.
3. Dramatists--Fiction. 4. Biographical fiction. 5. Love stories.
I. Title.
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