The Muse

Anthony Burgess
The Hudson Review, Spring 1968, 109-26.

Burgess’ seductively written sci-fi short story dramatizes our desire to know Shakespeare as a person, with our frustration at the impediment of the history and time that stands between Elizabethan England and us. Set in the 23rd Century, Paley, a scholar, time-travels through parallel universes to London in 1595. His goal is to meet William Shakespeare and establish if he really did write the plays. Burgess brilliantly expounds the expectations of Shakespearean mythology against the pathos of real experience, so Paley’s first sight of an original outdoor theatre is ‘something like disappointment’. Burgess’ life-long obsession with the Bard, ranging from his fictionalized biography Nothing Like the Sun to a musical based on Shakespeare, is always focused on the relationship between Shakespeare’s life and work because Burgess personally identified with Shakespeare. Therefore, the Shakespeare we meet in this story is more likely a portrayal of Anthony Burgess in the sixteenth century. –VL