Robert Nye’s novel Falstaff, purportedly the memoirs of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff dictated in 1459 by Johanis Fastolfe, or Fallstiff, or Talstof (as his name was variously rendered) himself, won the 1976 Guardian fiction prize, followed by the Hawthornden. Anthony Burgess accounted it, in Ninety-Nine Novels (1984), one of the finest novels since 1939. “We shall not be able to meet the great original,” Burgess asserted, “without thinking of this other Fallestelf or Farstalff.” It combined salacity, wit and sheer Rabelaisian fun with brilliant scholarship from Nye, who has died aged 77, and some Falstaffian “whoppers”.
Shakespeare was an abiding theme in Nye’s work – three of his nine novels concern William Shakespeare and another Shakespeare contemporary, Walter Raleigh – and sexual history furnished another. The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989) reconstructed the memoirs thought so scandalous by Byron’s publisher, Murray, that they were burned in 1824, through surviving letters and journals, as if dictated by Byron’s drunken spirit. The Life and Death of My Lord Gilles de Rais (1990) mined the depravity of the nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc, and who, accused of witchcraft, heresy, sodomy and child murder, was said to be a model for Bluebeard; it took Nye 60 days to write and marked the apotheosis of his 35-year obsession with Joan of Arc and her marshal of France.
Nye’s novels rarely began in scholarship, but often came to him in dreams, and grew from ideas first expressed in his poems. The origins of his work on Gilles de Rais, for instance, can be traced to the 1961 poem The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans and he resurfaces in Nye’s first novel, Doubtfire (1967), a dense bildungsroman, sexy and allusive, whose protagonist, William, a Romeo with the mind of Hamlet, is a descendant of Gilles de Retz or Rais.
Nye was born in London. His father, Oswald, was a civil servant; his mother, Frances, a farmer’s daughter who was the youngest of 21 children, was a former lady’s maid. Her “innate peasant storytelling ability”, Nye declared, marked him deeply. He attended Southend high school and published his first poem, Kingfisher, in the London Magazine at 16. He left school in 1955 and despite the advocacy of the poet and critic Martin Seymour-Smith, which gained him a place at Keele University in 1972, did not pursue academic study.
Nye never regretted it: he worked as a newspaper reporter, milkman, postman, garden labourer and sanatorium orderly (in lieu of national service, as a conscientious objector), but by 1973 he had produced three Faber Introductions, to Raleigh, William Barnes and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Nye’s first volume of poetry, provocatively entitled Juvenilia 1 (1961), was followed by Juvenilia 2 (1963), which won the Eric Gregory award. Both were well-received, but although his poems were highly accessible (as in Drinking Hot Chocolate in the Rain, which ends: “This, this is ecstasy, to stand and drink /Hot chocolate in the rain, lost in a crowd / Of strangers, and to feel for them such love / As Dante felt for Beatrice when he saw / Her passing by and own heart bowed down”) and were praised by other poets, they were never fashionable. His finest work here will endure: The Rain and the Glass: 99 Poems, New and Selected (2005) won the Cholmondeley award in 2007.
Early on, he managed to sour relations with John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine, with a misdirected sexual joke; a pity, since editing was one of Nye’s gifts. He became chief book reviewer of the Scotsman from 1965 until 2000 and its sometime poetry editor, and poetry critic of the Times from 1971 until 1996, and also reviewed fiction for other publications including the Guardian.
Nye married Judith Pratt in 1959; and by 1961 they had moved to a cottage in Wales. Living in the countryside was essential to Nye, but it did not help his marriage, which ended in divorce. They had three sons, Jack, Taliesin and Malory – for whom Nye began writing children’s fiction in March Has Horse’s Ears. In 1967 he married Aileen Campbell; they had a daughter, Rebecca.
During the 1970s Nye wrote radio plays for the BBC and a Covent Garden libretto for Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Kronia (1970). He was writer-in-residence at Edinburgh University in 1976-77, then moved to Cork.
The fine novel Merlin (1977), a first-person (possibly hallucinated) narrative from “the singing grave” of “the Matter of Britain”, preceded his masterpiece, the Raleigh-inspired The Voyage of the Destiny (1982), wrought with tragedy and bloody farce. Two works based around Shakespeare were lighter in tone: Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993), shrewishly affectionate memoirs, especially of a trip to London; and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998), an engrossing novel narrated by Pickleherring – by 1666 an aged ex-boy-actor – in 100 dodgy episodes, which Nye declared his last. Both were dramatised for Radio 4.
Generous even to difficult people, he was a penetrating, precise critic, privately and publicly.
Nye is survived by his wife and children, and by his stepdaughter, Sharon.
• Robert Nye, poet, novelist and critic, born 15 March 1939; died 2 July 2016
