The divine pork butcher
It is to undo all this that Professor A. D. Nuttall devoted his last book (he died in January). Tony Nuttall was a charismatic figure at Oxford, the son of a Herefordshire village headmaster and younger brother of the Sixties guru-poet Jeff Nuttall, author of Bomb Culture. He aims to restore to us the depth and brightness of Shakespeare’s thought, to undim him, like a good picture cleaner. And he has succeeded magnificently. The book starts unpromisingly with an introduction which tells us that one Oxford academic encouraged him to write the book and another one told him to stop ‘when you find yourself writing about Shakespeare’s essential Englishness’. But when Nuttall sets about his work, I immediately became entranced. He moves from play to play, at first in chronological order of their first playing or publication, later grouping them by theme, devoting no more than eight or ten pages to each, leaving out only a couple of duds like King John and Henry VIII. Each essay lights up some crucial moment or nub in the play, usually one I had not thought about and I could not wait to scurry on to see what he had to say about the next. Not since Harley Granville Barker has there been such an illuminating field guide to what Johnson called ‘the great forest’ of Shakespeare’s work.
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