Marlowe, Shakespeare, Burgess

Marlowe, Shakespeare, Burgess

Anthony Burgess and his Elizabethan Affiliations

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were twin stars in Anthony Burgess's intellectual and artistic firmament. Inspired by them he wrote and composed abundantly, from his dissertation on Marlowe's Dr Faustus as a student at the University of Manchester to the last novel published in his lifetime, A Dead Man in Deptford. On Shakespeare he was prolific : two novels - Nothing Like the Sun and Enderby's Dark Lady - a biography, short stories, journalistic articles and scholarly chapters, a film script, a television series, a symphony and songs inspired by his plays, even a ballet suite for full orchestra about the career of Shakespeare, Mr W.S. performed for the first time in November 2010 during the fourth international symposium of the Anthony Burgess Centre at the University of Angers.

Marlowe, Shakespeare, Burgess : Anthony Burgess and his Elizabethan Affiliations is a collection of papers from that symposium with contributions from Katherine Adamson, Andrew Biswell, Gareth Farmer, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Aude Haffen, Jonathan Mann, Charles Nicholl, Alan Shockley, Rob Spence, and Teodora Wiesnmayer. Paul Phillips and Pascal Terrien each examine aspects of Burgess's Shakespeare ballet, the synopsis of which is published here for the first time.