“This is not Shakespeare!”

Abstract

This chapter surveys a number of works by Anthony Burgess—his novels Nothing Like the Sun and Enderby’s Dark Lady, his biography Shakespeare, and his unproduced Hollywood musical The Bawdy Bard, in order to demonstrate continual interpenetrations in his work between historical scholarship, literary criticism, and fiction-making. Holderness then goes on to demonstrate how these different methodologies can be made to interact, introducing extracts from his own short story, “The Seeds of Time.” Underpinned by a cultural materialist study of the presence of Shakespeare in a series of national festivals—the great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the London Olympics of 2012—this story uses imaginative methods to pursue a critical inquiry, combining documentary evidence and critical argument with imaginative speculation.