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Monday 7 July 2008

The divine pork butcher

Warwickshire innocent, insulated by a parochial culture, ineptly essaying a classical theme beyond his understanding. It is the modern reader who is commonly unable to match the sophistication of the Elizabethan dramatist.

For this reason there is a tinge of melancholy evident here and there in the book, a sense of coming too late on the scene. Nuttall takes on the task of showing us the full depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s thought just at the moment when we are becoming incapable of absorbing most of it, like a tennis coach who only turns up after you have developed incurable tennis elbow. A great deal of the thought in the plays is simply too difficult for us to follow, partly for linguistic reasons. Nouns and verbs have changed their meaning; the use of prepositions has altered subtly too. Meanings are often highly compacted and further obscured by poetic locutions. Nuttall takes 57 words to provide a modern paraphrase for the Fool’s eight-word line in Twelfth Night: ‘Words are very rascals since bonds disgrac’d them’ — or, as they say in the City these days, you can’t trust anyone’s word since the lawyers moved in.

And if the reader is often nonplussed, the poor playgoer, who has no time to decode the knottier bits, is baffled. Ditto the actors. They shout or mumble out of sheer embarrassment when they don’t understand what they are saying. Sometimes I yearn for a kindly Dr Bowdler who would iron out, this time not the obscenities, but the obscurities. Without a little help from somewhere, I suspect that directors will increasingly give up on the words, keeping only the plot and the songs, returning the plays to the condition of mere masques.

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