Thinking makes it so

This is, alas, a posthumous publication. Anthony Nuttall was a literary critic who was also trained in classics and philosophy; unlike many others with a similar background, he was suspicious of the grand claims of theory. His most famous book, A New Mimesis (1983), argued firmly for the existence of an external world to which language refers and about which things can definitely be known; he had no time for Derridean nonsense about there being nothing outside the text. In the preface to Shakespeare the Thinker, Nuttall tells us that he had originally aimed to write “a short, tightly organized book on certain points of philosophic interest in Shakespeare.” I wish he had done this, but his publishers persuaded him to cover virtually the whole canon. The more relaxed pace has led to loss of edge and diffused focus, and the impact of the many striking passages is blunted.

Shakespeare was embarrassed, even ashamed, by his own seemingly effortless linguistic inventiveness in this first phase of his writing.

He really begins to soar around a hundred pages in, when he is considering Love’s Labour’s Lost as a play about the tension between Nominalism and Realism, marked by both joy in, and chronic suspicion of, language. The initial project of the solemn young noblemen, to live an exclusively cerebral, academic life, in which words are ends in themselves, collapses as soon as a troupe of pretty girls arrives. Instead of keeping reality at bay, language becomes a means of embracing it (and the girls). A sequence of vertiginous displays of verbal brilliance is shattered by the dark dénouement, with its notes of death, grief, and penitence. The play is not naïve; silence is not an option, but language must learn its own limitations. Nuttall proposes that Shakespeare was embarrassed, even ashamed, by his own seemingly effortless linguistic inventiveness in this first phase of his writing; he had to slow down, to learn what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult.”

You don’t have to be a philosopher, simply a lover, to agonize over the problem of whether another person can be truly known. The early and middle comedies revolve this question endlessly. The varying degrees of success with which the lovers in Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream understand and control their own experiences anticipate the post-structuralist claim that we are confined by language, and refute it by showing that we do not need to be. Bottom’s speech beginning “I have had a most rare vision” is, as Nuttall says, the most profound in the Dream (and should never, in my view, be played for laughs); it admits the possibility of “a reality beyond categories,” synthesizing the competing theories of truth and perception which the daylight and moonlight worlds offer. There is a reality independent of ourselves, but we differ in our capacity to perceive and articulate it, and to convince others of its validity. That, Shakespeare says in effect, is why some relationships work, and others do not.

Passing rather curtly over Much Ado About Nothing as “a play in which Shakespeare himself has chosen not to think hard,” Nuttall finds in As You Like It a philosophical engagement with pastoral (that paradoxically artful celebration of artlessness) and a self-conscious concern with poetry as truth-bearing fiction which hark back to the Dream. He underestimates the extent to which Twelfth Night is colored by neo-Platonism. This is odd, because his bold interpretation of Measure for Measure takes up ideas from his book The Alternative Trinity (1998) to suggest that Shakespeare explores Gnosticism in this play, with Angelo as a Christ-figure who is also wicked (Gnostics identified the serpent in Eden with Christ). I am not convinced, but the argument is exciting. Shakespeare is plainly interested in theology in more predictable places, such as The Merchant of Venice, as well as less predictable, such as Timon of Athens, where the protagonist’s banquet of revenge on his enemies becomes a parody of the Eucharist.

Nuttall is shrewd on the Roman tragedies, though uncomfortable with Troilus and Cressida, which ought to have been central to his project. He is least satisfactory on the late plays. To say that Shakespeare “denies the audience the miraculous resurrection they expect” in the statue scene of The Winter’s Tale is to brush aside genuine ambiguities in the text. Conversely, Nuttall discerns some ambiguities where there may be none, being puzzlingly quick to suspect incestuous feelings between Leontes and Perdita, and Prospero and Miranda. (The incest in Pericles is explicit.) Nor do I see why Prospero’s request to the audience to help him out by “prayer” and applause is “embarrassing” or “bizarre.” On the contrary, it seems a beautiful touch, as does the related pun on “indulgence” a few lines later. Prospero has abjured his magic powers as he once abdicated his political responsibilities; now he is brought down to our level, a man as dependent on the supernatural but not magical resources of a Christian community as any other member of it. The character’s need of human support, and the actor’s professional request for appreciation, blend wonderfully together. I also disagree that “any director must resolve” the ambiguity over whether or not Caliban remains on the island after everyone else has left it. He has had an exit line forty lines before the play’s end, in a speech saying he will “be wise hereafter/ and seek for grace.” Nuttall comments, “It is most unlikely that Caliban has suddenly got religion,” but the point is that he has realized he was practising a sham religion in taking “this drunkard [Stephano] for a god.” All he is saying is that he hopes to be wiser hereafter, whether on or off the island.

Even more baffling is Nuttall’s description of Prospero’s great speech after the masque (“You do look, my son, in a moved sort,” etc.) as “close to full nihilism,” expressing “Prospero’s fear … that he has never really been born at all.” Nuttall does not consider that what he admirably says about King Lear might apply here too: that it is not a nihilist play because, rather than leaving us thinking that good and evil have no meaning, it gives us “a sharpened sense of the difference between good and evil, and, lying behind that, of the difference between goodness and nothingness.” Prospero has not found forgiveness easy, but he can’t deny that “the rarer action is/ In virtue than in vengeance.”

It is irresistible to quote T. S. Eliot’s tease, in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”: “The poet who ‘thinks’ is merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought. But he is not necessarily interested in the thought itself… . Did Shakespeare think anything at all? He was occupied with turning human actions into poetry.” Nuttall is too wise to think that a coherent system can be abstracted from the plays, and his attempt to discern every glinting facet of Shakespeare’s prismatic mind deserves respect. If this is not his best book, it is the last testament of a great humanist, and it should make us grateful, as it will certainly make us think.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 25 Number 10, on page 84
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