Book Review

Poetry of yearning and reality

Shakespeare the Thinker

John Keats, who read Shakespeare with uncommon care and intelligence, was convinced that the works and the life of the Bard were intimately connected: "Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it." In Shakespeare Revealed, René Weis sets out to decode this secret history. His hero is an impetuous youth who found ways around the sexual sanctions of his time and then disgraced himself and his family, first by poaching illegally, then by retaliating against the lord of the manor by satirising him in verse. Forced to move to London, this convicted felon had homosexual and heterosexual affairs and probably fathered an illegitimate child in Oxford. This explains the celebration of the power of sexuality that emerges as one of the enduring themes in the plays and poems. Witty, charming and deep in conversation, Shakespeare was fascinating company. Despite a physical affliction that made him limp and might account for his unusually large forehead (Weis suggests spina bifida) he remained to the very end quite irresistible. 

All these "revelations" are nuanced by the frequent use of "probably", "perhaps", "might have been", "the possibility cannot be ruled out", occasionally by that most desperate of words, "surely". In a biography of one who left no letters or diaries we cannot expect much else, but in the end Weis never gets us any closer to Shakespeare. It seems impossible to know what he actually thought about anything. His political caution is explained by reference to his alleged conviction for felony; on the Catholic question, the numerous clues pull in opposite directions and "nothing is certain"; and on the prevailing culture of his time, all certainties turn into doubts and the moral and philosophical themes of the works are instead approached in relation to the death of his son, the love of his father and his daughters, and his various sexual experiences.

A.D. Nuttall, late Professor of English at Oxford University, opts for a more confident approach. Shakespeare the Thinker is an exhaustive exploration of the many interconnected themes that run through the plays. Behind Shakespeare's uncanny ability to recycle his material  without ever repeating himself, Nuttall reveals a prodigiously fertile intellectual life.

Running through it is a principle that simultaneously sustains and transcends Shakespeare's ability to "endow an individual with autonomous identity amid the hurly-burly of the play's action". It expresses itself in innumerable excursions from the raw and the concrete to the abstract and the metaphysical. Take Brutus in Julius Caesar: his character is a clear indictment of Stoicism as a philosophy "pathologically subject to degeneration into detachment" - not the detachment of the "Olympian observer" but that of the "frightened fugitive". Shakespeare saw this with staggering clarity and yet, without a hint of irony, still called Brutus "the noblest Roman of them all". Similarly, Coriolanus is "a figure of pathos", "psychically stunted, undernourished, deprived", and yet Shakespeare nevertheless granted him "the instant of final anagnorisis" - rather like the moment when Richard III realises that he has not in fact become "nothing" after being deposed. This extraordinary ability to uncover so much frailty and yet continue to perceive goodness in human nature makes Nuttall's Shakespeare "a figure of immense, intelligent charity". 

Nuttall has a genuine and learned interest in philosophical questions, and he deals with them with gusto. Take, for instance, his analysis of what Shakespeare made of the "philosophical potency" of the pastoral tradition, where nature and art are irreconcilable opposites. There is a well-known snag here: as artists, pastoral poets are forever divided from their ideal. This should be fertile ground for comedy, but in Shakespeare's hands, the paradox yields to an exquisite poetry of yearning where the artless is convincingly celebrated in art. In As You Like It, for instance, Duke Senior is spectacularly artful: even as he condemns language he turns everything into language, finding sermons in stones, tongues in trees, books in running brooks. Yet Shakespeare subtly allows the Duke to pass from a "soft" evocation of the pastoral life as idyllically free of toil, reminiscent of Virgil's Eclogues, to a "hard" realisation, more reminiscent of the Georgics, that it involves ploughing, sowing, endless toil. And Shakespeare goes well beyond the Virgilian notion that toil merely makes men tough: the important thing as far as the Duke is concerned is that rural hardship acquaints men with reality.

Again and again Nuttall points to an ability to ask fundamental questions that Shakespeare shared with the major philosophers but does not with his modern readers. In discussing Troilus and Cressida, for instance, Nuttall notes that modern commentators repeatedly get Ulysses wrong. "It is one thing to say that the eye cannot see itself but by reflection ... and another to say that there is no such thing as a truly intrinsic quality." Here Nuttall suggests that Shakespeare seems close to the "Structuralist intuition that context is not posterior to identity but on the contrary confers identity". It is this ability to anticipate and to subvert subsequent philosophical speculations that, Nuttall argues, gives Shakespeare's thought its enduring appeal and significance. The repeated affirmation that good and evil are meaningful, for instance, makes it clear that Shakespeare rejected nihilism; yet, Nuttall observes that if there is any transcendence in Shakespeare, it is always a "this-worldly" type of transcendence, one that effects "a profound transformation of Platonism, fusing it with the physical".

The question here is: had not Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer already done this? Nuttall seems forgetful of this philosophical tradition, and overstretches Shakespeare's philosophical originality beyond recognition. What modern readers repeatedly miss in Shakespeare is his interest in the philosophical intuition of being - not the modern understandings of it, but the intuition of being as the only meaningful answer to the most radical of all questions: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is precisely this that gives Cordelia's "Nothing" in King Lear, or Hamlet's "To be or not to be", the ontological potency that modern audiences often miss.

Being leads to transcendence, but transcendence must fuse with the physical because it is ultimately incarnational. It is a pity that Nuttall fails to plunge into the deep Catholic roots of this most Shakespearean of themes. But his marvellous exploration of Shakespeare's work is a huge leap in the right direction.

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