Thinking with Shakespeare: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Essays (review)

This engaging volume of essays aims to honor the wide-ranging work of the late A. D. Nuttall, notable for his influential interdisciplinary studies of early modern literature, most recently Shakespeare the Thinker (2007). Poole and Scholar explain their choice of title by noting that "Shakespeare's plays and poems alike may be said to draw their audiences and readers into thinking with them—and, like the ghost of old Hamlet, to haunt that thinking—because they dramatize with particular intensity certain questions that concern us to this day" (1). To approach Shakespeare's canon philosophically in the manner of Nuttall's work is to interpret it "not according to the established procedures of philosophy as an intellectual discipline, but rather by poetic, dramatic, and imaginative—in short, literary—means" (2). Quick to point out that this project need not be understood as " 'unhistorical' " (3), the editors remark "that the intellectual culture of Shakespeare's age is robust enough to bear many speculations that we might too hastily deny it" (3) and that in any case, Shakespeare's texts can help us "to reflect on philosophical issues that may really have been uncodified in his age" (3). The introduction makes a compelling case that Shakespeare's work is a particularly apt place to carry out such an inquiry, given the recent trend that considers "the text . . . as a readerly object" in its own right, "not merely coextensive with dramatic performance" (2).

Part 1, entitled "Approaches," opens with Colin Burrow's witty piece, "Why Shakespeare Is Not Michelangelo," in which he claims that Michelangelo's poetry fails to live up to its promise, namely, a "sculptural goal of permanence and transcendent beauty" (15). Such poetry exemplifies a "category error," in which Michel-angelo tries to "carve stillness out of a medium that is at home with process" (15). Shakespeare, by contrast, practiced a profoundly "unsculptural aesthetic"; as Burrow remarks, "Shakespeare likes metamorphoses that are reversible, and in which people do not finally become objects that express what they intrinsically are" (16). After a fine interpretation of Sonnet 60, "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore," which depicts Shakespeare's love of how things change, Burrow concludes, "The aesthetic power of these poems does not come from being in any simple sense objects of beauty, or static forms; it comes from their mobility" (17).

In the next essay, "The Opinion of Pythagoras," Gabriel Josipovici outlines some fundamental differences between Twelfth Night and Shakespeare's putative source, Barnabe Rich's Of Apolonius and Silla (1581), concluding that while Rich is engaged by the plot confusions and surprise ending (in which Silla disguised as Silvio declares her reciprocal love for Polonius), Shakespeare is more interested in psychological realism: "everything Viola does and says conveys her character to us; we respond to her not as to a set of characteristics, but as we respond to someone we meet and who makes a powerful impression upon us" (27). Shakespeare's refusal to provide tidy closure in this play and others is an example of his "exploring a field" (30), by which Josipovici means that his works, like Dostoevsky's, are so open ended that the reader or audience member is "made to realize . . . the possibilities of human life, more fully and with more intensity than ever before" (31).

Charles Martindale's "Shakespeare Philosophus" shifts toward a more general assessment of what literary texts, especially Shakespeare's plays, can add to the arid theorizing of analytical philosophy. He agrees with Martha Nussbaum and others who argue that literary texts usefully place characters in contexts that can test rarefied philosophical concepts, although Martindale takes issue with any philosophical approach that imposes theoretical presuppositions on a play. In this, Martindale extends Josipovici's notion that Shakespeare's genius was to develop psychologically realistic, irreducible characters who are not purely allegorical types. Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's unparalleled characters in this...