A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the ThinkerShakespeare the Thinker. A. D.Nuttall. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+428.

Abstract

But this is precisely where Shakespeare the Thinker saves itself from trivializing Shakespeare. Yes, Nuttall thinks Shakespeare has lots of fascinating ideas about the way things are; and yes, he himself, as a brilliant and erudite scholar-teacher, quite obviously and properly cherishes wit and cleverness as characteristics of civilization. But civilization and refinement (as refined, civilized people often notice) can be overesteemed; and the cleverest and subtlest authors are not infrequently suspicious of these very attributes (think of James's picture of Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady [1880–81]). Nuttall believes Shakespeare disliked the unwholesomeness that often attends mere ingenuity and style: Troilus and Cressida shows us a world “sick with intelligence” (207); and in numerous places Nuttall notices how Shakespeare shows wit and “stylish language” can become “glittering cage[s]” that “act as a screen, cutting [characters] off from reality” (222, 225). He launches out on the highly speculative and deeply interesting thesis that Shakespeare himself was “oppressed” by his own astonishing “verbal facility” (94). And there is—isn't there?—occasionally something faintly nauseating (as well as magnificent, exhilarating, wondrous, and so on) about the unstoppable Shakespeare Language Machine. According to Nuttall, in the most fascinating strand of argument in the book, Shakespeare repeatedly shows himself to be on his guard against “premature articulateness” (99), “glittering, vacuous formalism” (109), and “glittering cleverness” (203). “Thought,” observes Nuttall, “is making Hamlet ill” (202). Shakespeare preferred reality to ideas (which preference, I suppose, is strictly speaking an idea, though not one we would need to go to an intellectual for; it is rather an intuition about what is important in life that many a nonthinker must have stumbled upon). What Nuttall's account suggests is that Shakespeare had an almost Dostoyevskian fear of thought unanchored in simple kindness, goodness, and feeling for reality. King Lear shows us what universal horror an intellectual revolution—such as that which occurs in those very clever persons Goneril, Regan, and Edmund—can result in when unconnected to ordinary fellow-feeling.