SHAKESPEARE THE THINKER by AD Nuttall Yale £19.99 pp440

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE COMPLETE WORKS ed Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen Macmillan £30 pp2,486

We know nothing about Shakespeare’s opinions on any subject. AD Nuttall’s book concedes this from the start. Even on pressing concerns of his day, such as the split between Catholics and Protestants, we cannot tell where he stood. His plays are “a huge vanishing act”, avoiding topical issues altogether. Nuttall’s quarrel with fashionable “historicist” criticism, which argues that, say, Coriolanus is really about the Midlands corn riots of 1607, is that it mistakes the whole nature of his creativity.

To find what Shakespeare did think about, Nuttall sifts through the plays chronologically, noting how ideas form and reform. He detects a persistent interest in motivation and, related to that, in personal identity. “Who am I?” is a question that runs through the plays from The Comedy of Errors to Hamlet, and beyond. Do we have a central core of self? Or are we created by our relations with family and society? Or are we defined by the parts we play in the world, like actors? In modern terms, he notes, these last two possibilities might be called the structuralist and the existentialist theories of behaviour, and it is typical of Shakespeare to anticipate modern thought in this way. Because he concentrated on big, permanent issues, he articulated ideas that were rediscovered by later belief systems, Marxism, feminism, nihilism and ethical relativism, among others.

But with Shakespeare the ideas never harden into a system. He was not a reductionist, but an experimenter. He asked himself — What other way might there be of seeing this? What else could be going on? This habit of fruitful doubt directs the overall evolution of the plays, as Nuttall shows, and also produces what he calls “islands” in the action where a minor character speaks out against the grain of events. Examples are the schoolmaster Holofernes reprimanding the derisive courtiers in Love’s Labour’s Lost (“This is not generous, not gentle, not humble”), or Williams, a common soldier, refusing Henry V’s purse (“I will none of your money”). In The Merchant of Venice an island becomes the main character, Shylock, who claims a common humanity (“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”) that the Christians deny.

Nuttall’s conclusion is that Shakespeare was simply too intelligent to persuade himself that any problem was completely solved, and his genius for doubt extended to his own activities as a playwright. The ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost condemns the very linguistic felicity out of which the play is made. Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most thoughtful character, criticises the “pale cast of thought”. Prospero, in The Tempest, dismisses the drama he has staged as an “insubstantial pageant”. Shakespeare’s mind was big enough to see the littleness of everything, including himself, and it is possible, Nuttall thinks, that, looking back over a body of work for which the world has never ceased to feel grateful, he was “ashamed at what he had done”. This sounds like despair, but it was twinned with fathomless humanity. The Shakespeare who could uncover so much frailty, yet continue to perceive goodness, was “a figure of immense, intelligent charity”.

The delight of Nuttall’s book springs not just from the incisiveness of his ideas but from the deftness with which he unfolds scenes and speeches. It is like walking through the countryside with someone who recognises every bird’s song and each wild flower. Trained in Greek and Latin literature and philosophy before he turned to English studies, he is at home among the tangled roots of Renaissance culture, and can also lucidly outargue the fanciful theorists who cast a pall of obscurity over literary debate in the later 20th century. He is gloriously unstuffy, alluding to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas or television’s Wife Swap as easily as to Aquinas, Epictetus, Borges or Dostoevsky. He invokes, also, his own childhood. In 1940s Hereford, teenage girls in the park would fling verbal abuse at the boys as a form of courtship, just like Beatrice and Benedick, and there was a “cunning woman” with spells and cures, like one of Macbeth’s weird sisters. The bitterness of reading his dazzling book is that it will be his last, for he died in January.

His suggestion that Shakespeare was ashamed of or unimpressed by the plays he had written is borne out by the fact that he took no steps to ensure they would survive. None of the single-play pamphlets published in his lifetime (known as the quartos) was authorised by him, so far as we can tell, and only in 1623, seven years after his death, did his fellow actors John Hemings and Henry Condell, put together an edition of his collected plays, the first folio. Half the plays in the folio had previously appeared in one or more quartos, and there are many thousands of differences between the quarto and folio texts (5,000, for example, in Troilus and Cressida alone). Shakespearian textual scholarship, which sets out to decide which readings are the right ones, is a morass into which whole armies of editors have sunk, and in his new edition of the complete works Jonathan Bate sagely leads his editorial team round the edge of this bottomless swamp by opting simply to reprint the folio text, while modernising its spelling and correcting obvious printer’s errors.

The logic of this, he explains, is that the first folio was prepared by actors, and his Royal Shakespeare Company edition is aimed at actors. Unless you think actors are the best editors of Shakespeare, this is not a strong argument. But others are stronger. Hopes of recapturing what Shakespeare wrote, or what his company performed, are illusory, Bate observes, because modern scholarship shows that plays were revised and rewritten. The Oxford Shakespeare prints two distinct versions of King Lear, for example, and the 2006 Arden edition prints three separate texts of Hamlet. In this uncertainty it seems best to select a text that was carefully prepared by people close to Shakespeare and his manuscripts, and the first folio alone answers these conditions. Differences between surviving copies of it show that it was scrupulously corrected as it went through the press.

Of course, the scrupulous correcting was not done by Shakespeare, and those who find that favourite bits of the plays have disappeared from Bate’s edition will point this out sourly. The loudest cry of protest, I guess, will be over the omission of one of Nuttall’s “islands” — the servant in King Lear who says that he will apply flax and whites of eggs to Gloucester’s blinded eye sockets. Other omissions include Hamlet’s last, magnificent soliloquy (“How all occasions do inform against me”). However, we should not fuss too much. Even if the RSC decides to rob future audiences of these lines, they will not disappear from the world’s memory, and anyway they are printed, with all other passages that appear only in quartos, as appendices in Bate’s edition. It also has excellent, succinct notes and introductions to each play, and it is the nearest most of us will get to owning a copy of the first folio.

Beastly behaviour

Nuttall reminds us that A Midsummer Night’s Dream — popularly seen as a gossamer affair — has the grossest of classical stories at its heart. Titania’s passion for the donkey-headed Bottom echoes Ovid’s story of Pasiphae, who fell in love with a bull. Our laughter at Bottom’s innocence, Nuttall insists, is tinged by anxiety at the idea of a beast mating with a woman.

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