Shakespeare the Thinker

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Yale University Press, 2007 - 428 Seiten
A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare’s thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall’s book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work.
Much recent historicist criticism has tended to "flatten” Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-clich s of his time, and this in its turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as unthinkingly racist, sexist, and so on. Nuttall shows us that, on the contrary, Shakespeare proves again and again to be more intelligent and perceptive than his 21st-century readers. This book challenges us to reconsider the relation of great literature to its social and historical matrix. It is also, perhaps, the best guide to Shakespeare’s plays available in English.

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Inhalt

To the Death of Marlowe
25
Learning Not to Run
87
The Major Histories
133
Urheberrecht

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Autoren-Profil (2007)

A. D. Nuttall was professor of English at Oxford University and the author of numerous books, including "A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination" and "Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?" His books" Two Concepts of Allegory" and "A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality" are published by Yale University Press.

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