Shakespeare the Thinker A. D. Nuttall
- Price: £14.99
- Add to Basket
Share this page:
- Format:
- Paperback
- Publication date:
- 22 Apr 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780300136296
- Imprint:
- Yale University Press
- Dimensions:
- 448 pages: 235 x 156mm
- Illustrations:
- 1
- Sales territories:
- World
Categories:
"A close reading of the plays that tries to map the creases and folds in Shakespeare's mysterious, elusive brain."— New York Times Book Review
A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. 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 his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall’s book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work.
Much recent historicist criticism has tended to “flatten” Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-clichés 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 again and again to be more intelligent and perceptive than his 21st-century readers. This book challenges us to reconsider the relation of great literature to its social and historical matrix. It is also, perhaps, the best guide to Shakespeare’s plays available in English.
A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. 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 his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall’s book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work.
Much recent historicist criticism has tended to “flatten” Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-clichés 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 again and again to be more intelligent and perceptive than his 21st-century readers. This book challenges us to reconsider the relation of great literature to its social and historical matrix. It is also, perhaps, the best guide to Shakespeare’s plays available in English.
A. D. Nuttall was professor of English at Oxford University and the author of numerous books, including A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination and Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? His books Two Concepts of Allegory and A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality are published by Yale University Press.
-
Of Human Kindness
Paula Marantz Cohen£20.00 -
Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
Harold Bloom£25.00 -
Hamlet's Choice
Peter Lake£35.00 -
The Politics of Parody
David Francis Taylor£35.00 -
How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage
Peter Lake£25.00 -
The Poet of Them All
Elisabeth R. Fairman£35.00 -
Hamlet
Gabriel Josipovici£20.00 -
Making Make-Believe Real
Garry Wills£36.00 -
Dream in Shakespeare
Marjorie Garber£15.99 -
Rome and Rhetoric
Garry Wills£11.99 -
Remembering Shakespeare
David Kastan£18.99 -
The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library
Alan Bell£65.00 -
The Tainted Muse
Robert Brustein£46.00 -
Henry the Fourth, Part One
William Shakespeare£4.50 -
The Tempest
William Shakespeare£4.50 -
Othello
William Shakespeare£6.99 -
The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare£4.50 -
John Payne Collier
Arthur Freeman£155.00 -
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare£4.50