Anthony burgess shakespeare biography and his worksheets

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For more than three hundred years, in purof William Shakespeare, scholars have combed the archives, romantics have given play to their fantasies, cryptographers have attempted to "decode" the plays. The man has eluded them. Now the hunt is joined by a writer most suit

brilliantly

apt for

it:

Anthony Burgess,

man of peculiarly Elizabethan temper in his curiosity and creativity. Out of his profound and sympathetic knowledge of Shakespeare's England - its life, language, landscape, its great and ordinary people - and out of his artist's comprehension of the English drama as it grew from, and out-grew, the medieval morality play, he projects in rich and persuasive detail the world and the spirit of William Shakespeare. Interweaving his narrative with a superb collection of portraits and contemporary scenes, Burgess begins with the Stratford of Shakespeare's boyhood, the lively market town, the shabby-pretentious establishment of the poet's father, merchant glover and would-be gentleman, the petty school where Latin was force-fed to boys hustled into adulthood. He gives us Will at eighteen in love with one Anne, married to another eight years his senior. He makes immediate the complex, dazzling, squalid London of the 1580's as it spread before the ambitious young provincial from Stratford, arriving unknown to seek his fortune: a roistering, often brutal, world of alehouse poets, of playhouse rivalries, of rioting apprentices, of dangerous political intrigues, of fire, famine, and plague - but everywhere, always, the show going on, on open-air stages the melodramas of Marlowe and lesser men, at court the masque played by and for the aristocrat, and for the populace the bear pit and the public execution. Burgess captures - and communicates the inspired garrulity of that most verbal time and place, the pervading exuberance of language which was to be distilled in Shakespeare

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993): novelist, critic, composer, librettist, screenwriter, biographer, translator, linguist, educationalist and man of letters. Born in Manchester, England, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe. His fiction includes the Malayan Trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain’s empire in the East; the Enderbyquartet of novels about a poet and his muse; Nothing Like the Sun, a recreation of Shakespeare’s love-life; A Clockwork Orange, an exploration of the nature of evil; and Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced works on linguistics such as Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific reviewer, writing in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen for the stage; scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen; invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire; and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

THE LIFE

Childhood

Burgess was born “John Burgess Wilson” on February 25, 1917 in Harpurhey, a northeastern suburb of Manchester, to a Catholic father and a Catholic convert mother. He was known in childhood as Jack. Later, on his confirmation, the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He began using the pen-name Anthony Burgess in 1956.

His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, died when Burgess was one year old, a casualty of the 1918—19 Spanish flu pandemic, which also took the life of his sister Muriel. Elizabeth, who is buried in a Protestant cemetery in Manchester (the City of Manchester General Cemetery, Rochdale Road), had been a minor actress and dancer who appeared at Manchester music halls such as the Ardwick Empire and the Gentlemen’s Co

This is my first blog post for the Burgess Foundation where I have started as an AHRC-funded Cultural Engagement Fellow for a three-month placement working on Anthony Burgess, John Keats and Rome. This is a postdoctoral position, my PhD having been written on the work of the contemporary poet Michael Symmons Roberts. It is perhaps unsurprising that given my interest in studying and writing poetry, that my attention was drawn to one of Burgess’s own poetical engagements. What makes this project particularly fascinating for me is the way in which the resources at the Burgess Foundation offer such an extensive opportunity to observe in detail the creative process of a writer of Burgess’s reputation.

In 1977, Anthony Burgess published Abba Abba, a fictionalised account of the last days of the poet John Keats and a speculative meeting that took place between Keats and poet of the Roman vernacular Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. The first part of the book contains the narrative of this meeting. The second part consists of seventy-odd translations of Belli’s sonnets, which are irreverently and scatalogically irreligious in both content and language. Over the next three months, my research project will centre around this book. I will be considering the broad range of materials the Burgess Foundation has in relation to the book (Burgess’s notebooks, annotated books, letters, films) as well as trying to source new materials from other archives.

My first week has been spent in the archives and getting used to these new materials. It has been a real pleasure to be able to enjoy the marginalia that accompany the objects. These include for instance the receipts, serviettes, sheets of cigarette packet foil and ticket stubs that Burgess used to bookmark the enormous volumes that comprise Belli’s thousands of sonnets.

Burgessian bookmarks

It also includes an angry, circular scribble through one of his poems I mistook for a fit of a creative tem