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In the finale of Clockwork Testament (1975), Visiting Professor Enderby succumbed to a weak heart and culture shock on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Yet now ("to placate kind readers" who objected, Burgess maintains in a sub-subtitle) he pops up again.
This time Enderby is in Indianapolis, reluctantly scribbling the libretto to a musical crudely based on the life of Shakespeare. His position, as usual, is hopeless. Middle America is all Philistine hostesses and barbarous hotels. At the theater, he bemoans the "limited talents, New World phonemes and intonations and slangy lapses, cecity towards the past, Pyrrhonism and so on of this weak cry of players." His only consolation is his Dark Lady, a savvy black soul singer named April Elgar, who rekindles his lechery (but not his performance) and stuns him by sprinkling her jive talk with quotations from Kant.
As it was in Enderby's previous incarnations, his buffoonery is a form of martyrdom to art. What gives it weight here is a pair of short stories he writes about Shakespeare. They form the opening and closing chapters of Dark Lady. The first, Will and Testament, is a bawdy historical pastiche in which Shakespeare, with Ben Jonson's connivance, manages to insert his name in the King James translation of the 46th Psalm ("Though the mountains shake . . . He cutteth the spear . . ."). The other, The Muse, tells of a scholar from an alternative universe who time-travels to Elizabethan England to verify Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. The scholar meets a bad end, but his copies of the plays fall into the hands of the Bard, who blithely plagiarizes them.
For Enderby, made superstitious by a fire and other misfortunes that plague the Indianapolis musical, the stories are a way to make a fondly mocking peace with Old Will's ghost. As he insists to the actors, "The human side of a great poet . . . must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel."
—By Christopher Porterfield