Shakespeare the Thinker.
Kennedy, William J.
A. D. Nuttall. Shakespeare the Thinker.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv + 428 pp. index. $30.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11928-2.
Anthony D. Nuttall, professor of English at Oxford University, died
last January just three months before Yale University Press published
his Shakespeare the Thinker along with reissues of his Two Concepts of
Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1967)
and A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (1983).
This new book can rightly be considered a summa of the author's
lifetime teaching and scholarship on Shakespeare. But it is also more.
Besides reprising some of his influential ideas about individual plays
while refining others in the light of recent criticism, Nuttall surveys
most of the canon, reflects upon texts he had not written about before,
traces relationships among these texts, and situates them in a context
of theoretical frameworks for literary study. The result is a learned,
urbane, wonderfully illuminating appreciation of intellectual power
radiating from Shakespeare's drama.
Nuttall's argument holds that "the artistic achievement
of our best playwright is internally generated. It is the product, not
of his time, but of his own, unresting, creative intelligence"
(25-26). From this argument extend several claims. One is that, pace New
Historicist assumptions about cultural construction, Shakespeare's
thought is not historically determined. Though "the major
question" of his era concerns religious belief, Shakespeare
"disquietingly interrogates" both Old Catholic and newly
Reformed versions of belief (26). Another is that, pace
Poststructuralist assumptions about externally constituted identity,
Shakespeare "excels at characterization" based upon an
essential core selfhood (46). A third is that, with respect to
brand-name ideas, "it is remarkably hard to think of anything
Shakespeare has not thought of first, somewhere. Marxian, Freudian,
feminist, Structuralist, Existentialist, materialist ideas are all
there" (265). Ultimately, Nuttall's respect for these modern
systems of thought prevents him from applying them indiscriminately to
the plays. Shakespeare is everywhere--well, Shakespeare, neither
entirely of his own time nor of ours, but somehow relevant to both.
Beginning with the three parts of Henry VI, Nuttall detects great
sophistication in representing the lateral effects of "group
motivation," whereby individuals find themselves acting and
reacting strongly because others around them are behaving in a certain
way (31). Such representation "outside-in" would become a
feature of the playwright's mature comedies and tragedies,
signaling a dominant motif of his thought about human motivation.
Another feature, this time detected in Love's Labour's Lost
and other early comedies, concerns a certain "Nominalist fear that
verbal abstractions refer to nothing at all," or, better, that
people "can, by a trick of the mind, focus on the formal
expression, and so lose full engagement" (99). This feature, too,
would pervade his mature work.
In Richard II, the playwright fuses history with tragedy as he runs
two stories concurrently: a "supernatural" one about divinely
appointed royal absolutism thwarted by usurpation, and a
"naturalist" one about a not-entirely-competent king in
difficulties (144). As such, he begins to evolve thoughts about history
and tragedy in the Henry IV plays and Henry V, where the character of
Hal develops as a "white Machiavel" (151); in Julius Caesar,
which depicts the repressive effects of Brutus's Stoic rhetoric and
the likewise disastrous effects of Marc Antony's Asiatic rhetoric;
in Hamlet (accorded surprisingly cursory attention), where the prince is
a kind of Machiavel who plots revenge in a world controlled by God; and
in Troilus and Cressida, which turns the "substance" of
identity into a set of accidental relations that prove "obscurely
chilling" (213).
Disposing of chronological order, Nuttall considers the comedies
from Much Ado about Nothing to All's Well that Ends Well, where
fears about verbal abstraction in the early plays materialize as
"impediments of wit" exercised by strong women as well as
weaker men, from Beatrice to Parolles (221). He examines The Merchant of
Venice and Measure for Measure, where Shylock in the first, and Angelo
in the second, test the workings of Christian mercy in a fallen world.
In the book's most unusual reading, one based upon a Gnostic
"readiness to merge the Devil with Christ," the
"demonized" Angelo functions as a Christ figure who must
himself suffer in order to serve as a bearer of justice (274). Nuttall
returns to the idea of lateral motivation in the tragedies from Othello
to Macbeth and Coriolanus, and in a fine study of King Lear he argues
movingly about the "savage nihilism" of the play's action
which nonetheless leaves us with an anything-but-nihilist
"sharpened sense of the difference between good and evil"
(309).
In the late plays, Nuttall traces a movement "away from the
tense engagement with Christian doctrine ... and toward a naturalized version" (341). Oddly, he draws inconclusive attention to a
repressed homosexuality affecting Leontes in The Winter's Tale.
Against the current fashion of arguing for multiple authorship, he holds
that even contested scenes in Pericles are "unmistakably"
Shakespeare's (333). The book makes no significant mention of
Shakespeare's contributions to Henry VIII and The Two Noble
Kinsmen, nor does it explore his lyric and narrative poetry as distinct
achievements of intellection. But, given the energy, wit, and often
uncommon good sense of Nuttall's overall presentation, it would
seem churlish to counter such predilections. We are instead grateful for
his insights about the scope of Shakespeare's thinking and its
enactment in the canonical plays.
WILLIAM J. KENNEDY
Cornell University
