Marlowe – Shakespeare – Burgess:

Anthony Burgess and his Elizabethan Affiliations

The Anthony Burgess Centre invites proposals for the Fourth International Symposium to be held in Angers, 18th - 20th November 2010. Proposals should be submitted to Graham Woodroffe at graham.woodroffe@univ-angers.fr , no later than 17th May 2010.

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 MA thesis on Marlowe’s Dr Faustus to the last novel published in his lifetime, A Dead Man in Deptford. He absorbed Shakespeare along the way, spawning Nothing Like the Sun, Enderby’s Dark Lady, a biography, short stories, articles both journalistic and scholarly, a film script, a television series, songs, even a ballet suite for full orchestra. In this, its fourth international symposium, the Anthony Burgess Centre intends to address the contrasted influences of these two Elizabethan heavyweights on Burgess and his work, exploring what they brought to it and what he, in turn contributes to our understanding of them.

Some of the themes we would like to explore are: The origins of and reasons for Burgess’s interest: the intellectual, literary and theological as well as the personal. What was it in his family, social and religious background that drew him to the history and the culture of pre and post-Reformation England? In what ways did Burgess’s enthusiasm for music contribute to his interest in these two writers?

Burgess’s contrasting identification, on the one hand with mercurial Cambridge graduate Marlowe, the uncompromising artist and risk-taking apostate whose life ended abruptly and prematurely, on the other with lower-born, more conventional social climber, Shakespeare, a workaday poet prostituting his talent to please the vulgar masses, misunderstood and underestimated. The yin and yang of Burgess’s universe or irreconcilable opposites?

The tissue of influences of Marlowe on Burgess, of Marlowe on Shakespeare and of Shakespeare through Marlowe on Burgess. Their influences on his craft and on his convictions but also the influence on us of Burgess’s view of them. What do we learn from Burgess’s writings about Marlowe and Shakespeare? What do we learn about Burgess?

Elizabethan sources of inspiration. The ways in which the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare and their Elizabethan milieu less directly inspired the form and content of prose works such as Earthly Powers, The Right to an Answer, A Clockwork Orange, The Pianoplayers, End of the World News, Abba Abba. Might equally be considered, the attempts to bring his Shakespeare to the screen, Elizabethan sources of inspiration for his music or for his writings on linguistics. In short, what is the extent of intertextuality in Burgess?

Underlying themes. An underlying theme in Burgess’s exploration of the work of these twin stimuli is sexuality and literary creation. It is a theme with many sub-themes: the image of women; heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality; dark ladies and dark men; cuckoldry; syphilis and artistic genius, etc. How does the exploration of these themes help us to understand Burgess and his creative work?

Proposals of around 300 words for 30-minute papers in English, accompanied by a short bio-bibliography should be sent to Graham Woodroffe at graham.woodroffe@univ-angers.fr no later than May 17, 2010. The symposium will be followed by a publication. A selection of papers from the 3rd international symposium will be published late 2009 by Cambridge Scholars’ Press under the title ‘Literature in Music and Music in Literature.’