A Pox on It

NOTHING LIKE THE SUN by Anthony Burgess. 234 pages. Norton. $3.95.

The arty little historical novel about a sensitive young man who wants to be a poet and is troubled by homosexuality would seem to be a perfectly standard commodity--except when the hero turns out to be William Shakespeare, when the style is a rich, impenetrable soup of pseudo-Elizabethan, and when the author is that prickly, unpredictable English satirist, Anthony Burgess. In that case, the book begins to look strangely like a hedgehog. Normally intrepid critics approach it with extreme care, handle it gingerly, natter nervously about the inventiveness of the language. After all, nobody wants to miss the point of a joke, especially a bawdy one.

In fact, this "story of Shakespeare's love life" is experimental in style but clearly serious in intent. Burgess starts with the slim known facts of Shakespeare's life, including the fact that though he married and had at least one child, he wrote amatory sonnets to a young man with whom he may well have been on homosexually intimate terms, as well as to a woman, "the Dark Lady." To this Burgess adds his own freewheeling doses of invention, more or less plausible. Among the less: the idea that the Dark Lady was a Malayan brought to England by Sir Francis Drake.

This kind of fantasy must be entertaining, consistently intelligent and tasteful in order to maintain the illusion. Too often, Burgess is none of these things. He loads in the sex scenes but makes his Shakespeare a timid, ineffectual "Stratford bumpkin," afraid of impotence and 'baldness, who could hardly tell an iamb from his two left feet. He nonetheless calls the book an act of homage to Shakespeare.

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