This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]
Anthony Burgess’s second commission from Michael Langham, the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, was an adaptation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. He had recently completed the novel MF, whose incest theme also reflected Burgess’s interest in Freud and Oedipus. He had little knowledge of Greek and a hazy knowledge of ancient […]
In 1970 Anthony Burgess was commissioned by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to make a new translation of Edmond de Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. The artistic director Michael Langham was looking for a sharp, witty approach to the text and Burgess aimed to recreate what he described in You’ve Had Your Time as ‘the […]
New research into the Foundation’s archive of literary manuscripts has uncovered a number of previously unknown poems and songs by Anthony Burgess. To celebrate the 104th anniversary of Burgess’s birth on 25 February 2021, and the US publication of Collected Poems on the same date, we are presenting one of the new poems here. ‘A […]
As he approaches the end of his research into Anthony Burgess’s 1973 Shakespeare lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra. In his lecture course ‘William Shakespeare: The Man and His Work’ delivered at City College New […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD student Sam Jermy writes about his work on Burgess and Shakespeare, and his new research project with the Foundation. Anthony Burgess was continually interested and engaged with the writing, world and life of William Shakespeare. This creative engagement was sustained throughout […]
Anthony Burgess was nominated for a Grammy in 1974 for his work on the musical version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. He shared the honour with his collaborator Michael J Lewis, a Welsh composer of music for film and theatre. Burgess was originally commissioned to translate Cyrano de Bergerac by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater […]
Review by Andrew Biswell.