Akenside – Burgess

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

Shakespeare’s Memory

Jorge Luis Borges
First published in Veinticinco Agosto 1983 y otros cuentos. Madrid: Siruela, 1983
Translated into English by Andrew Hurley in The New Yorker, 13 April 1998: 66-69

Borges contemplates not so much a spirit of Shakespeare as the memory palace of the Bard, which has been transmitted to various takers over the years. When a Shakespeare scholar obtains the memories, he is finally able to understand his subject perfectly. But what at first seems a boon, soon becomes a curse.

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit

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

Rutland

Lewis Bostelmann
New York: Rutland Publishing Company, 1911

“A chronologically arranged outline of the life of Roger Manners, Fifth Earl of Rutland and author of the works issued in folio in 1623 under the nom de plume Shake-Speare” followed by two plays. The first play has the Earl setting up a certain William Shaxper as his “dummy and strawman,” while the second deals with the making of the First Folio nine years after Earl Rutland’s death. When the Earl of Pembroke wants to publish Rutland’s works in folio, Ben Jonson, Martin Droeshout, Heminge and Condell all agree to work on the project, and a few of them even remember the real Shaxper who could not even sign his own name.

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Greatness Thrust Upon Him

Don Sancho

or, The students whim, A ballad opera of two acts, with Minerva’s triumph, a masque
Elizabeth Boyd
London: Printed by G. Parker, at the Star in Salisbury-Court, and sold by C. Corbet at Addison’s Head over-against St. Dunstan’s Church Fleet-Street, and the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1739

In a garden in Oxford, the necromancer Don Sancho helps student Joe Curious [sic] and his friends resurrect Shakespeare. Shakespeare, who is accompanied by Dryden, does not appreciate the effort. Somewhat miffed at having been dragged from his heavenly bliss, he does not tarry, asking that they never again disturb the “happy Bard.”

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1700's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit

Shakspere and company. A comedy, in five acts

Christopher Brooke Bradshaw
London: Printed for the author. Sold by Charles Fox, 67, Pater-noster Row, 1845

In this play, Shakespeare embroils himself in the convoluted romances of his three sisters while also pranking a miserly money-lender and putting on plays at the last minute to amuse the Queen. The plot aspires to Shakespearian complexity, but does not achieve it, although there are amusing lines that recall the spirit of Shakespearian dialogue:

1st SERV. What, he that played…the ghost in what d’ye call the play?
2nd SERV. Amblit, Prince o’ Dunkirk
1st SERV. You’re right. One would think, to see him act his part, he’s served an apprenticeship in a county churchyard, he ghosted it so gravely.

In one notable scene, Shakespeare comforts his sister Kate, who has fallen in love with a Jewish merchant, and makes a speech on behalf of inter-racial marriage. -CP

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1800's Akenside - Burgess Gentle Shakespeare

No Bed for Bacon

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon
London: Michael Joseph, 1941

In an anticipation of the plot of the film Shakespeare in Love, Lady Viola Compton disguises herself as a boy, becomes a player, and falls in love with Shakespeare. In this version of history, the fire at the Globe theatre is started deliberately by the jealous Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, and the book ends with the Essex rebellion and the first night of Twelfth Night at Court; Francises Drake and Bacon also appear, the latter scheming to acquire a bed that the Queen has slept in (hence the title). The relentlessly hearty prose and the running joke about Shakespeare’s inability to spell his own name may not be to the taste of every reader. —SJJ

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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

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