It is not widely known that Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, was also a bit of a Shakespeare scholar. Well, sort of—he self-identified as a “Shakespeare-lover” who aimed to “paint his own portrait”—or portraits—“of the man”.1 Although Burgess professed on numerous occasions that he was “a novelist and not a scholar”, he still accumulated a considerable artistic, historical, and biographical series of commentaries on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. He wrote articles about Shakespeare, reviewed Shakespeare scholarship, gave lectures on Shakespeare, and taught a university course on Shakespeare at the City College of New York in the spring of 1973.
One facet of my research as a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library via an ACLS research grant involves transcribing and annotating these lectures, recordings of which exist at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, UK.2 The other part of my research involves annotating and introducing a critical edition of Burgess’s 1984 novel Enderby’s Dark Lady, the final “Enderby” novel in the tetralogy that has his titular character traveling to Indianapolis, Indiana to help with a Broadway-style musical about Shakespeare’s life. Lyrics included in the novel are actually taken from Burgess’s own screenplay that was set to be made into a Hollywood film in the late 1960s, but was ultimately canceled.
The A Clockwork Orange guy was a prominent Shakespearean commentator?! Are you shocked? Confused? Let’s get into it.
Timeline of Burgess’ work related to Shakespeare
For a brief introduction to the numerous Shakespearean works of Anthony Burgess, let’s take a chronological look.
1940s
Burgess studied Renaissance or Elizabethan English drama as an undergraduate English major at Manchester University. He graduated in 1940 after defending his undergraduate thesis on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is also fictionalized in Burgess’s posthumously published novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993). This early academic focus shows that Burgess had, from a young age, been enamored with not just Shakespeare but his contemporaries and the historical period.
1950s-1960s
Burgess’s English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958) includes a lengthy commentary on The Bard. Research done for this survey, as well as his teaching of Shakespeare during and after World War II (Burgess was a lecturer in the Army Educational Corps during WWII and then an education officer in Malaya as well as a secondary school teacher back in England) likely led to his most famous Shakespearean iteration: Nothing Like the Sun; A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (1964), written for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth (1564). His short story “The Muse” was also written in this year, but did not appear in publication until 1968.
Next came Will!, or the Bawdy Bard (1967), a Hollywood film script that never made it to production, and which included music and lyrics written by Burgess. His 1968 essay “Genesis and Headache” discussed the writing of Nothing Like the Sun and the essays “In Search of Shakespeare the Man” and “Dr. Rowstus” (in which Burgess begins a feud with the Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse). These last two essays were republished in Urgent Copy (1968).
1970s
In 1970, came Shakespeare (his biography of Shakespeare) and several articles such as “Is Shakespeare Relevant?” in the New York Times and “Shakespeare’s Marriage” in Prose—likely an extract from Shakespeare.
While teaching at Princeton (and Columbia) University in 1971, Burgess presented the lecture “In Search of Shakespeare the Man” at the Princeton Public Library. In the spring 1973 semester at CCNY Burgess taught the course “William Shakespeare: The Man and His Work”.
In 1975, Burgess gave the lecture “The Celluloid Swan or: Can one Really Make a Movie of Shakespeare’s Life?” at the University of Iowa, and in April 1976, at the International Shakespeare Association in Washington D.C., he presented the lecture: “Shakespeare as Culture Hero in an Anti-Heroic Age”. His short story about Shakespeare, “Will and Testament” was published in 1977 after first being introduced at the Folger at a Shakespeare in America conference the previous year. A circa April 1976 typescript copy of the short story is in the Folger archives, along with other documents concerning the event.
In 1979, his ballet suite on Shakespeare, entitled Mr. WS (yes, you read that correctly, a Shakespeare-inspired ballet suite), devised out of the music never used for the Hollywood film, was put on by the BBC Orchestra. In the same year his monograph They Wrote in English, a history of English literature, was published with more Shakespeare material.
1980s
Burgess’s essay “Henry VIII” was included in Shakespeare in Perspective vol. 1 (1982). In 1984 his article “Shakespeare and the Modern Writer” was published, as well as Enderby’s Dark Lady in which Burgess used some of his unused Hollywood script content in the narrative. The short novel or novella is sandwiched by two previously published short stories about Shakespeare, but in this iteration the material is suggested to have been written by Enderby himself: “Will and Testament” (1977) and “The Muse” (1964). “Will and Testament” is a kind of reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s Shakespeare story “Proofs of Holy Writ”, in which Burgess imagines Shakespeare being involved in the writing of the King James Bible; “The Muse” is a science fiction Shakespearean tale utilizing Ben Jonson’s famous reporting that Shakespeare “never blotted out a line” in order to probe at the concept of authorship.
The essay “Miss Shakespeare” appears in his 1986 collection of journalism and essays, Homage to QWERT YUIOP, or; But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? The short story collection The Devil’s Mode (1989) includes two Shakespeare-adjacent stories: “A Meeting at Valladolid”, in which Burgess imagines Shakespeare meeting Miguel de Cervantes, and “The Most Beautified”, that spotlights Hamlet’s time at university before he is called back to Denmark upon receiving the news of his father’s death.
Research at the Folger
My research explores where Burgess acquired his Shakespearean and Elizabethan knowledge, and tries to separate fact from fiction. He gives some clues about his sources in book reviews, his personal library, and a very brief bibliography in Shakespeare. Other indications are littered throughout his published and unpublished canon, so I’ve been digging through the extensive collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library trying to figure out the puzzle that is Burgess’s kaleidoscopic entanglement with Shakespeare.
Some of the most intriguing items that Burgess discussed in his lectures and Enderby’s Dark Lady that I’ve been able to access include Greenes Groatsworth of Witte, Eastward Ho!, Westward Ho!, Lily’s Latin Grammar books, the arraignment of the Earl of Essex, and Ben Jonson’s collected works, where he lists Shakespeare and other prominent figures as actors. I have also been going through the Open Stacks to look over books that Burgess owned, reviewed, or mentioned in his Shakespearean commentaries. This includes Shakespearean and Elizabethan scholars such as Samuel Schoenbaum, Leslie Hotson, A. L. Rowse, John Murry, Peter Alexander, T. S. Eliot, L. C. Knights, Martin Holmes, J. B. Black, and Frances Yates, among others. Finally, investigations into more contemporary authors and scholarship is helping to confirm historical, orthographical, phonological, and biographical details about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and Elizabethan and Jacobean life. The Folger Shakespeare Library, and its erudite and helpful staff of librarians, have been indispensable to my research and I cannot thank this wonderful organization enough for the opportunity to conduct research here and receive assistance from their wonderful staff of scholars and archivists.
What I hope my work will do, and my presence at the Folger Shakespeare Library has already achieved, is show that Burgess was a significant contributor to Shakespearean discourse and that perhaps his contributions deserve some more attention and scrutiny. Some of the most prominent Shakespeare scholars of the last half-century have already taken notice, with Burgess being mentioned numerous times by Stanley Wells, Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom, and Samuel Schoenbaum. Now, perhaps, it’s time for a larger audience to take notice.
In closing, I think that Burgess’s brief summative comment about where he fits into Shakespearean scholarship is apt. In 1973 at CCNY, Burgess opened his first class meeting with what is a great encapsulation of his fascination and reverence for The Bard: “I can only present myself to you as a man who has read Shakespeare, idolized Shakespeare, and tried to be influenced by him in my own craft of writing. I still believe him to be the best influence and the best model: the man who knew better than any of us how to manage this very intractable thing called the English language”.3
For more on this topic, you can watch a lecture I gave about Burgess’s commentaries on and/or about Shakespeare.
- Adams, Phoebe. ‘Short Reviews: Books.’ Atlantic, v. 226, no. 5, November 1970, p. 143, qtd. in Boytinck, Paul. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide, New York: Garland Publishing, 1985: p. 126.
- Burgess, Anthony. ‘My Dear Students; a Letter,’ New York Times, 19 November 1972, p. 22
- Burgess, Anthony. Lecture at the City College of New York, 5 February 1973, International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives.
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Comments
What a fascinating deep dive into Anthony Burgess’s engagement with Shakespeare! It’s always insightful to see how literary giants interpret each other’s work.
Suraj — September 24, 2025