I’ve been guided through the course of my recent Shakespeare obsession by some really outstanding books, including the invaluable Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd’s very interesting biography, and Bill Bryson’s brief but enjoyable book. But none of these books (except Asimov) is as good as A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare The Thinker. In brief and clear language, Nuttall takes the reader on a tour of almost all of the plays, examining the fascinating philosophical issues that Shakespeare often raises, defending some intriguingly clever interpretations, and—most refreshingly—deflating some of the sillier modern “deconstructions.” Nuttall’s writing is intelligent and extremely well-researched, and yet it never swamps the reader or leaves him feeling like the idiot in the back of the classroom. What’s more, his take on the plays is often very convincing. I found it particularly interesting how often Nuttall came back to a theme I’ve found cropping up time and again in Shakespeare—the distinction between the world of reality and the world of words that we use to describe, or in corrupt cases, try to use as a substitute for, the real world. This really comes to the fore in his examination of Coriolanus, who seems to be a creature of his social upbringing—and yet isn’t; as Nuttall shows, he comes at the end of the play to reveal an inner self that is independent of, and able to stand to some degree outside of, his social context. Such a reading flies in the face of the Historicist or post-modernist readings that have been so popular of late, but Nuttall defends the points quite well.
There are plenty of other books out there that give an overview of Shakespeare’s plays and investigate their deeper meanings. But I have often found them unpersuasive or lacking in unity. Harold Bloom, for example, reaches conclusions that seem more designed to impress than to convince, by denigrating as much as by over-exaggerating his greatness. (Here might be a good point to mention again the great Joseph Epstein essay on Bloom). And although Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All is a very helpful reference with its explanations of historical context and possible biographical clues, she seems to lack any single thematic interpretation, often backing away in one paragraph from a claim made in the previous one. Nuttall, by contrast, offers us a thorough, readable, thoughtful, whole Shakespeare, in a very enjoyable book for the layman who wants to get in deep with the plays. I say get them all—but where you should use these others as references to look up the play you’re going to see that night, you should read Nuttall’s book all the way through.
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