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"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 the playwright's preoccupations. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get to 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 to be more intelligent and perceptive than his twenty-first-century readers."--Jacket.… (more)
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Nuttall is at his best when
However, clearly, the aged Nuttall never enjoyed a direct answer when the more complex would do. Perhaps I'm just not as intelligent as I thought, but much of this book struck me as reaching. Certainly not a book for the general public (as someone born and raised very much in the Bardolatry tradition, I still struggled), "Shakespeare the Thinker" is almost a parody of academia. It is an endless spiral of beautifully worded emptiness. (Whenever I read non-fiction, I use sticky-notes to mark important passages, so I can transcribe them into a computer file later. When I finished this book, I realised that 90% of my sticky notes referred to fascinating turns of phrase from Nuttall's generation that I wanted to remember, rather than insights!)
Perhaps my dismissiveness really is naive. This is clearly a book written for academics - and philosophers, at that. Nuttall is overly fond of the phrase "everyone knows" or "Everyone remembers" when discussing elements of Shakespeare's plays. It's painful, whether he's recalling events from the rarer plays or putting forth an opinion. There probably is an audience out there for this particular brand of criticism. Probably. I have a bookshelf groaning under the weight of Shakespeare criticism. At this point, "Shakespeare the Thinker" will probably find its place as one of the least.