Shakespeare the Thinker (review)

Postmodernist criticism tends to deny the authority of Shakespeare and to be interested in textual instability and issues relating to performance. A. D. Nuttall knew this well enough but went his own independent way, quite certain of Shakespeare's authority and that the dramatist was "not only a master of imaginative and emotional effects but that he was also very intelligent" (17). Nuttall disarmingly begins his intriguing investigations of Shakespeare as a thinker by acknowledging that "we have no idea what Shakespeare thought, finally, about any major question" (1), but he assumes that the plays are the product of "a single remarkable mind" (377) and argues that his powerful and original ideas can be traced. He was a "philosopher of human possibility" (381). The book has numerous references to and comparisons with philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Hume, Ryle, Wittgenstein, and more. Shakespeare outstrips them all: "If we set aside technological advances like mobile telephones, it is remarkably hard to think of anything that Shakespeare has not thought of first, somewhere. Marxian, Freudian, feminist, Structuralist, Existentialist, materialist ideas are all there" (265). If this seems a wild claim, there is an excitement, an unacademic boldness, and a freshness about Nuttall's line of inquiry that is attractive.

In digging out what Shakespeare thought, Nuttall is concerned almost entirely with the words characters speak. He treats these figures as autonomous beings, men and women with minds, whose psychology can be investigated. He tends to define them unequivocally as morally good or bad. Above all, he looks for evidence of their intelligence, and finds the most intelligent, thinking characters in the histories and comedies, as he works his way chronologically through most of the plays except Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. After Hamlet and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's plays become less interesting to him in so far as the protagonists become less intelligent: "Hamlet, Brutus, Richard II . . . are all clever men. Othello and Lear are not" (286); neither is Macbeth, who begins with thought and ends in passion. Thinking is done best in the earlier plays, and notably by women: "A good rule of Shakespearean criticism might be, 'Always listen to the lady'" (347)—in this case, Hermione, although most of the ladies he celebrates are in early plays, notably Katherine Minola, Juliet, and Rosalind.

According to Nuttall, one of the "moments of major philosophical importance" in the plays occurs in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in "the exploration of the ontological status of the imagination" (382). Here, in a typical move, Nuttall starts from a great speech, that of Theseus in Act 5 on imagination working in "'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet'" (247). Theseus is characterized as "strutting" with "a sort of insensitivity that is perhaps peculiar to males" (122) and is something of a dimwit. Hippolyta "is at least twice as intelligent as he" (122), as shown by her response to his "'cool reason'" (121), reminding him that "'all their minds transfigur'd so together, / More witnesseth than fancy's images / And grows to something of great constancy'" (123).

Hippolyta, says Nuttall, is "thinking philosophically," as he takes the term "'constancy'" to mean "'consistency'" or "'coherence,'" so that she is "on the brink of articulating what will be known in the twentieth century as 'the coherence theory of truth'" (123). Here, Aristotle, Alfred Tarski, Gilbert Ryle, and Dorothy Emmett are invoked. Nuttall says that Hippolyta "is thinking about the way, in practice, we do trust propositions that cohere with other propositions" (124). This is evidence of her "alpha brain" (124), in contrast with the "reductive doctrine" (125) of Theseus. Nuttall would no doubt have loved to teach Hippolya as one of his students.

Objections come to mind. The obvious meaning of "constancy" in Hippolyta's short speech is fidelity or faithfulness, as in Henry V, where Henry begs Katherine to accept him as husband by taking "a fellow of plain and uncoin'd constancy" (5.2.153–54). Hippolyta picks...