Things Dreamt Of in His Philosophy; A British Scholar and Critic Traces Shakespeare's Ideas From Play to Play

thoughts on shakespeare: Shakespeare the Thinker
Yale university press
the national post

Two of the best Hamlets I have seen were from actors named Albert: Finney in London, Schultz in Toronto. They had other things in common besides the name. Both were, in literal terms, too old for the character they were meant to be playing, who is said in the play to be 30 and who for most of the time seems younger. Both were physically stocky, active actors, far removed from the frail, sensitive Hamlet stereotype. Finney, in particular, was slagged for this; the conventional wisdom was that he didn't look or sound like an intellectual and so couldn't conceivably be one. In fact, both Alberts seemed to me to cut straight to the centre of Hamlet, which is that he never stops -- cannot stop-- thinking.

In which respect, he is like his author. That is the theme of a recently published book that is in fact called ‘Shakespeare the Thinker’ (Yale University Press, $35.95) and is the work -- posthumous, alas -- of a British scholar and critic, A. D. Nuttall.

Nuttall belongs in the tradition of what I would call enjoyment- based critics who have survived the batterings of at least three generations of literary theorists. The most celebrated of these is Harold Bloom, who says on the dust-jacket that "Tony Nuttall is my hero!" So he should be, since Nuttall does what Bloom did in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and does it better. Like Bloom, he surveys all the plays (or nearly all -- he leaves a couple out), and he is as trenchant and suggestive as Bloom--in that book, anyway --is bullying and windy.

You can read page after page of Bloom rhapsodizing about Falstaff, his favourite, without being any the wiser as to why Bloom loves him so much. You may also reach the conclusion that he thinks the two parts of Henry IV to be very bad plays, since he seems contemptuous of everything in them that isn't Falstaff, i.e, half of each play. Nuttall has comparatively little to say about Falstaff, but what he says ("an astonishing compound of gargantuan appetite and sharp intelligence. His love for Hal is deep, his selfishness complete") touches all the bases. He crams the Henry IV plays and Henry V into a single section, so he, too, leaves a lot out, but in his case, the losses are focused and, I think, implicitly acknowledged. He concentrates on Prince Hal, who "knows from the first that he has an enormous responsibility and a very difficult job to do" and grows up to be a king who "is still acting, naturalistically, brilliantly."

This, of course, is character criticism, something that was officially declared dead in the 1930s by a generation who thought that "character" had no meaning in drama (or in the novel) and that everything was image and symbol. This mandarin movement has in its turn been decried by the successive waves of structuralists and historicists (each of whom have one valid thing to say, and just keep saying it), but psychological humanism -- I can't think of a better phrase for it -- still gets a bad academic rap. It's considered ludicrous to speculate on what happened to characters before they entered the play (or, in the old scholarly catchphrase, to ask "how many children had Lady Macbeth?"), but, as Nuttall points out, that's what audiences -- and, he might have added, actors -- do all the time, and good playwrights work from that premise.

Nuttall isn't writing "performance-based criticism," and he only mentions two specific productions, both of them occasions that confounded their audiences' preconceptions by making them cry. (One was Vanessa Redgrave, playing Imogen in Cymbeline.) But he has a range of reference that goes from classics to comics, or from philosophy to Star Trek; he relates Captain Kirk saying: "Are you feeling emotion, Mr. Spock?" to Prospero's surprise at finding that Ariel, the "mysterious electrical being" has feelings. I hope he got to see the stunning Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest in which Patrick Stewart, Captain Kirk's successor, played Prospero in an Arctic setting that, in a totally unexpected way, fulfilled his own stipulation that "the staging must be neutral."

Nuttall doesn't often play critic-as-director; what he does, far more valuably, is to offer literary readings that are theatrically aware. Nor, despite his title, does he make claims for Shakespeare as a systematic philosopher.

What he does is to trace ideas that a supremely intelligent writer kept discovering in the stories he set out to tell and anticipate most of what has been thought since.

Some he traces from play to play. In the early Henry VI, he finds squabbling noblemen propelled into civil war by the very act of taking sides; they pick flowers and, before they know it, it's the Wars of the Roses. Much later, we find history shaped in Julius Caesar by the kinds of thoughts the protagonists can think, the kinds of speeches they're equipped to make. Another early play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona ("How bad is a bad Shakespeare play? Not very."), sets the scene for later comedies by showing "male friendship in conflict with heterosexual love," with the latter invariably winning out. It works in tragedy too: Romeo essentially leaves Mercutio for Juliet; Iago takes a terrible revenge on Othello who's abandoned him for Desdemona.

Sometimes, Nuttall gets too ingenious. His description of Angelo, the wrecked Puritan of Measure for Measure, as a sort of inverted Christ-figure, taking the sins of the world on his shoulders for the sake of a higher legalistic good, is a fascinating if strenuous read, but I can't see any way it could be made to work in the theatre. On the other hand, he makes more imaginative sense of Antony and Cleopatra and the contrast between "cold, dry" Rome and "wet, formless, erotic" Egypt than anyone I've ever read; I want to see it staged by a director who's read him. I think Nuttall may have a considerable influence on future productions. At the very least, I expect to see him quoted endlessly in program notes.