Shakespeare the Thinker A. D. Nuttall

A. D. Nuttall's study of Shakespeare's intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare's thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall's book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work. Much recent historicist criticism has tended to 'flatten' Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-cliches of his time, and this in its turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as unthinkingly racist, sexist, and so on. Nuttall shows us that, on the contrary, Shakespeare proves again and again to be more intelligent and perceptive than his 21st-century readers. This book challenges us to reconsider the relation of great literature to its social and historical matrix. It is also, perhaps, the best guide to Shakespeare's plays available in any language.

A. D. Nuttall is professor of English at Oxford University and the author of numerous books, including A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination and Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? His books Two Concepts of Allegory and A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality are published by Yale University Press.

'... elegantly written, the product of a fine and wide-ranging mind.' - Ralph Berry, Contemporary Review

'Nuttall's panoptically wise Shakespeare the Thinker ought to send the reader fizzing back to the plays.' Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

'This beguiling book - charmingly written, utterly readable - by the late, great critic takes on the charge that the Bard's mind was a mess, howvever high his imagination soared. Play by play, Nuttall champions a teasing, nimble pragmatist who exposed the flaws in every limiting system as a "philosopher of human possibility". The Independent

'[Nuttall's] real achievement is to cover almost the entire dramatic oeuvre in a series of inspiringly astute and original readings ... enjoyably provocative and largely persuasive.' John Dugdale, The Guardian

'Nuttall returns emphatically to the words on the page and spoken in the theatre. His close reading of the plays unearths unexpected insights into nearly all of them and his final book becomes not just an investigation into Shakespeare's elusive thought but a brilliant tour d'horizon of the work as a whole.' Sunday Times

'[this] fine book is an old fashioned thematic trawl through the Shakespeare folio. Worth reading merely for his declamatory dismissals of destruction and new historicism, Nuttall's humble acceptance that even an Oxford professor of English is nowhere near as clever as Shakespeare makes his work all the more convincing.' Christopher Bray, Financial Times Magazine