1900’s

The Immortal Bard

Isaac Asimov
First published in Universe Science Fiction, 5 (May 1954). Republished in several collections and anthologies, including Earth Is Room Enough (1957) and The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986)

What would the Bard make of the Shakespeare industry that his work has engendered? Does the universality of thinking, exhibited in his plays, mean that Shakespeare could operate as successfully in any age? Would he understand what academics write about his work? These are the kind of questions that are raised in Asimov’s clever science fiction short story, which involves raising Shakespeare and other notables from the dead and time travel. Based on Asimov’s own experience of the academic response to his work, Asimov’s opinion is concentrated in the humorous punch line to the story. –VL

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Not of an Age

Everything and Nothing

Jorge Luis Borges
First published in El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960
In an anthology of the same name. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, John M. Fein, and, James E. Irby.
New York: New Directions, 1999

In Everything and Nothing, opposites entail each other. The struggle and the union of extremes is a prevalent theme in Borges’ work and in this short story he teases out the metaphysics of what it means to be Shakespeare by equating the playwright with God. Or does God equate himself with the spirit of Shakespeare? At once the essential necessity and nihilism of creativity are invoked, alongside an examination of what it is to be human/actor/writer through the complicated construction of the self, recalling As You Like It’s ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Ultimately, Borges brilliantly manages to bend the end of the dichotomy of everything and nothing together; making Shakespeare nobody and everybody. —VL

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit

Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life

Anthony Burgess
London: Vintage, 1964

This highly-fictionalized, slightly seedy pseudo-biography of Shakespeare is presented in a frame story as a bravura exposition of sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever,” etc., by a drunken professor, “Mr. Burgess,” to his Malaysian students. Its most salient feature is the extravagant chaos of its prose, presented as Shakespeare’s own stream of consciousness; the novel is written in an exuberant, head-spinning, sometimes-distracting style, modeled on Joyce’s Ulysses. Burgess uses snippets from Shakespeare’s own plays as well as slang, some historical, some invented, to evoke Elizabethan English. Life in contemporary London is presented in vivid, lavish detail as equal parts chaotic, squalid, and spectacular. Notorious Elizabethan prostitute Lucy Negro is cast as Shakespeare’s East Indian mistress, a former Muslim originally named Fatjmah, and the Dark Lady of his sonnets. She is seduced by Shakespeare’s foppish friend, patron, and occasional lover, the Earl of Southampton, catches syphilis from him, and imparts it to Shakespeare himself. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who stayed behind in Stratford, as proposed in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, and whom Shakespeare discovers here in bed in flagrante with Anne Hathaway.—PG

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare in Love

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

1900's Akenside - Burgess Not of an Age

Sweet Will, The Cleopatra Boy, and The House of Women

Erick Lawson Malpass
Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 1973-75

This trilogy of historical novels follows William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway from the first years of their marriage through the separation years when William makes his name in London to their retirement together in Stratford. Malpass explores his characters’ psyche as they adjust to what life brings them. Shakespeare’s successes and inspirations are there, as is bustling Elizabethan London, and a women’s perspective on a patriarchal age, but the real focus is on relationships and how the choices we make in life affect us in unintended, tragic, and surprising ways. -VH

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1900's Gentle Shakespeare Leigh - Rowlands

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death

Edward Bond
London: Eyre Methuen, 1974

Originally produced in England in 1973, and revived in 1974 starring John Gielgud as Shakespeare, Edward Bond’s play Bingo examines Shakespeare’s retirement to Stratford-on-Avon in a series of bleak scenes set in 1615 and 1616. Bond is particularly interested in the controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s involvement in “enclosure” in Warwickshire as recorded in the historical records of his life. Bond’s Shakespeare is melancholy, world-weary, and more concerned with his money than the common good. He is also border-line senile and prone to distracted, staccato musing. At its weakest points, the play might read to some as a poor attempt to write Shakespeare as a character in a Beckett play. But it offers a searing imaginative creation of the man behind the celebrated canon: a profoundly gifted artist whose insight into humanity and interpersonal relationships was reserved for his fictional creations. Alienated from his daughter Judith and his wife, who is never seen on stage, this Shakespeare is a Pericles or Leontes desperately in need of the sort of familial redemption he imagined in his late plays. Allusions to King Lear abound, and readers well-versed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical scene will delight in the play’s strongest and most memorable scene, which showcases Ben Jonson telling Shakespeare what he really thinks of him (it’s not good). –BW

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Breaking Bard

Will Shakespeare

John Mortimer
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977

John Mortimer, the creator of TV’s Rumpole of the Bailey, brings Shakespeare to life through the memories of a former boy actor named John Rice (the name of a real actor at Shakespeare’s Globe). His reminiscences—both those that are historically grounded and those that are imagined—take place largely in the theater world and in conjunction with the creation of particular plays. In 1978, the book was made into a six-part television series starring Tim Currey as Shakespeare.

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1900's Leigh - Rowlands Upon the Boards

The Merchant of Stratford

Frank Ramirez
In Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 3:7 (July 1979):125-33

The first time traveler in history goes to 1615 to meet William Shakespeare. But when he arrives, he finds (not surprisingly, if time travel is possible) that other chronologically unfettered fans have been coming for quite some time. Indeed, Shakespeare has made a business out of it. Our pioneer traveler is further flummoxed when he himself becomes an object of historical curiosity among later time travelers. Not missing a beat, Shakespeare offers to become his business manager, taking only a 40% cut. –VH

1900's Leigh - Rowlands Not of an Age

Loves Labours Wonne

Don Nigro
New York: Samuel French, 1981

In this five-act play, a slightly spifflicated Shakespeare reviews his life as a man and artist. He wanders into the empty playhouse, where spirits from his life, his longings, and his own inspired works arise to review his time on earth with him. As they torment, taunt, or tantalize him, we gain some insight into Shakespeare’s artistic temperament and creative process.

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1900's Leigh - Rowlands Rare Talent