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Friday 18 July 2008

The divine pork butcher

Nuttall defends old-fashioned critics who were not ashamed to speculate how many children Lady Macbeth had and old-fashioned anthologists who liked to excerpt ‘beauties’ from Shakespeare. For the dramatis personae are not like types in a masque, they are characters with background. And from the first there are ‘arias’ and ‘islands’ in the plays, passages in which a character steps forward, sometimes out of character and sings — there is no other word for it — as Mercutio does in his Queen Mab speech, or the dying John of Gaunt, or Gertrude narrating Ophelia’s death. He points out too how rapidly Shakespeare can change register, from the bitchy crosstalk of The Taming of the Shrew to Petruchio’s heart-stopping lines:

Kate like the hazel twig
Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue
As hazel-nuts, and sweeter than the kernels.
O, let me see thee walk.

Nuttall takes delight in telling us that the critic who called Kate’s speech in defence of wifely submission ‘the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written’ was none other than Dr Germaine Greer, who regards Katherina as uncommonly lucky to find Petruchio.

It is in an instant too that the backchat about Falstaff being too pissed to know what time it is provokes the old man to make his marvellous plea:

Marry then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon.

Nuttall insists that what catches and holds Hal’s affection, and ours, is not that Falstaff is just a charming old barfly but that he is, even in his ruined state, so blazingly articulate and intelligent.

But here comes the problem, which Nuttall candidly confesses. It is not that Shakespeare in, say, Troilus and Cressida is a

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