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Saturday 11 October 2008

The divine pork butcher

Nuttall contends that the greater part of this work is ‘internally generated, the product not of Shakespeare’s time, but of his own, unresting, creative intelligence’. Nuttall’s Shakespeare won’t stop still long enough to be pinned down. That is why he annoys some people. Shaw notoriously declared that ‘there is no eminent writer I can despise as heartily as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his’, which tells us more about GBS’s mind than Shakespeare’s (Ralph Richardson once said that every time he did Shakespeare or Chekhov the part came out differently, but that acting Shaw was like running on tramlines). ‘If we set aside technological advances like mobile telephones,’ Nuttall argues, ‘it is remarkably hard to think of anything Shakespeare has not thought of first, somewhere. Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Structuralist, Materialist ideas are all there.’ Christian apologists pounce triumphantly upon each little glimpse of religious allegiance, but, as Gary Taylor says, ‘if Shakespeare has been the god of our idolatry for four centuries it is because he created scripture for an emerging secular world’. You want relativism: here’s Hamlet. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ Freud, himself a passionate lover of Shakespeare, took inspiration from Hamlet’s sexual jealousy of Claudius. For the dawn of introspection, see Richard II, passim. Or consider the debate between Perdita and Polixenes on plant-breeding in The Winter’s Tale. Perdita says she cares not to gather slips of carnations and streaked gillyflowers because they are Nature’s bastards, but Polixenes tells her that ‘the art which adds to Nature is itself Nature’ — pure Darwin.

From the unpromising terrain of Henry VI, Part I, Nuttall plucks these lines:

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