Tony Nuttall was an unusually learned man, equally at home in philosophy, classical studies, theology, English literature, and popular culture. He was a master, above all, of what William Empson described as argufying, an art to which he brought – like Empson himself, and Nuttall’s admired Oxford colleagues, Gilbert Ryle and Iris Murdoch – an endearing blend of colloquial ease and philosophical precision. His thinking was invariably independent and, at its best, highly original, maintaining at all times a sceptical distance from critical fashion. In the opening chapter of Shakespeare the Thinker, he recalls walking out of ‘the clotted discussion in the lecture-room’ during an International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1960s into the fresher air of the surrounding countryside, wondering if he couldn’t find Shakespeare more swiftly through his own independent and empirical enquiries than through the laboured exchanges of the conference hall. Nuttall continued this impetuous walk out into the fresh air, one might almost say, throughout his lifetime, his journey becoming in time the matter of the present book.

Nuttall was especially critical of two dominant and, as he saw it, convergent doctrines in recent academic thinking: formalism and historicism, which he believed had had an impoverishing effect on contemporary discussion of Shakespeare. Formalism, summed up in Jacques Derrida’s famous phrase Il n’y a pas de hors-texte, acknowledged no reality beyond the text itself, an artefact compounded of many accidentals of playhouse, printing house, and linguistic history that lay ultimately beyond the control of the putative author – whose very name was generally suppressed in formalist criticism or placed knowingly within inverted commas (‘Shakespeare’). Historicism, offering to redeem these excesses, sought rather to explain Shakespeare’s works in terms of the social and political events of his times: Coriolanus, as it might be, in relation to contemporary corn riots in the Midlands.

Both styles of reading ran counter to Nuttall’s over whelming-instinct, which forms the central contention of the present book. For all their miraculous diversity, Shakespeare’s writings, Nuttall maintains, testify to the work of a single, and singular, cognitive intelligence. It is Shakespeare’s exceptional intelligence, he believes – the exhilarating sense of a person of extraordinary intellectual powers thinking – that compels our fascinated attention as we read the plays. Such thinking, moreover, is never, in Nuttall’s view, time-bound: the plays cannot simply be explained in terms of contemporaneous events, doctrines and mentalités. For like all great artists, Shakespeare was able to think imaginatively beyond the historical period within which he happened to live, to anticipate ideas and perceptions (Humean, Wordsworthian, Freudian, Marxist, feminist … ) that had not yet been formally articulated. To speak of Shakespeare’s intelligence in this way is not to speculate, in any simple sense, biographically, for the deduction is drawn from his art, not from the life records. ‘The socially climbing Shakespeare who emerges from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s biography, Ungentle Shakespeare, seems as a personality ethically thin, far from admirable,’ Nuttall remarks while discussing the scene in Julius Caesar in which Brutus receives the news of his wife Portia’s death. ‘But the Shakespeare who can uncover so much frailty and continue to perceive goodness,’ he goes on, ‘the Shakespeare behind the plays, is a figure of immense, intelligent charity.’

But how, exactly, does a dramatist such as Shakespeare do his thinking? The title of Nuttall’s book may perhaps have been triggered by that of a celebrated study by the American critic Eric Bentley: The Playwright as Thinker (1946). Irked by the popularity of the Broadway musical and the light theatrical entertainments of his day, which afforded ‘a pleasing titillation of the senses and of that small part of the brain which the simplest jokes call into play’, Bentley lined up against Rodgers and Hammerstein the opposing forces of serious European drama: the big boys, who made you really think – Wagner, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, Sartre, Brecht. The contrast that Bentley attempted to draw was never wholly convincing, for a dramatist such as Shaw (to take a single instance) had in fact appropriated many of the popular theatrical traditions of his day, and was clearly an entertainer as well as a thinker. It is indeed through his very power to entertain – as another American critic, Martin Meisel, has recently argued – that Shaw compels you to think: propositions and ripostes ricocheting amusingly back and forth across the net as in a dazzling hand of tennis (Shaw Annual, Vol. 27). Tom Stoppard – the most intellectually brilliant of modern dramatists, as well as the most playful – is in this respect, as Meisel suggests, Shaw’s natural heir, the ideas in his plays cascading restlessly, wittily, without formal resolution, this way and that. The ‘element which I find most valuable’, Stoppard himself has said, reflecting on this process,

is that there is very often no single clear statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-frog. You know, an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so there is never any point in this intellectual leapfrog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word.

Philosophical enquiry itself often proceeds, of course, in precisely this way, through a playful, restless, provocative, and ultimately unresolved dialectic – and this in turn is one kind of thinking that Shakespeare, like Stoppard, teasingly pursues within his plays. Nuttall notes this characteristic while analysing the logical movement of Hippolyta’s speech in Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘But all the story of the night told over’, wondering briefly why Shakespeare fails to bring this logic to a final resolution.

Once more we sense unfinished business. But philosophy is like that. Gilbert Ryle once observed that it is a fiction encouraged by historians of ideas that philosophers have certain doctrines or tenets; real philosophers think continuously, and the ‘tenets’ in the history books are obtained by artificially arresting the processes of their thought.

Early in his career, by at least the time of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare had already mastered these Shavian, Stoppardian arts of dazzling verbal exchange. His skill in this department serves indeed as one index of his quick intelligence as a writer, his status, in some sense, as a thinker. But Shakespeare had already also felt the limitations of this kind of intelligence; sensing the need, as Nuttall puts it in a nicely illustrated phrase, to learn not to run:

A friend of mine and I once saw three small boys (choristers) moving across an open space in a peculiar lurching manner. ‘Why are they moving like that?’ my friend asked, and then answered himself, ‘I know! They’ve been told they mustn’t run, and this is the result.’ Small bodies, crackling with natural energy, eager to reach the destination, experience the requirement that they must walk (not run) as a grotesque impediment. Shakespeare’s youthful genius is a runner, a dancer. He has to learn to move at the more temperate pace that comes naturally to the rest of us. He has to learn not to run.

With the arrival of Mercade at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost bearing news of the king’s death, and the final modulation of the play into another, graver register, Shakespeare exhibits, in Nuttall’s view, a new and deeper form of intelligence, an awareness of the limitations of mere verbal dexterity; of the need, intellectually speaking, not to run. Such moments of quieter and at times speechless reflection in Shakespeare’s later drama engage some of Nuttall’s most alert writing: the closing phase of Romeo and Juliet, the unexpected entry of Hymen in As You Like It, Leontes’ silent confrontation of the apparent statue of his late wife in The Winter’s Tale.

The ‘intelligence’ that Nuttall seeks to reveal in Shakespeare’s plays is, in short, something that finally transcends mere rationality or logical skill. Intriguingly, as he points out, the central figures of Shakespeare’s tragedies seem to become progressively less intelligent, less prone to philosophising, as his career advances; yet even in the later tragedies, he suggests, ‘the slow diminution of intelligence is itself of philosophical interest’, and the richer wisdom of ‘the Shakespeare behind the plays’ always perceptible. There are plays in the canon, nonetheless, which disappoint him intellectually, in which Shakespeare’s characteristic intelligence seems temporarily suspended (Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, Cymbeline). There are others that distress him in human terms, as Dr Johnson was distressed by the painfulness of Othello and King Lear, plays he re-read only with reluctance while preparing his great edition of Shakespeare. Nuttall writes perfunctorily, for example, about Titus Andronicus, a play that has recently enjoyed a return to critical favour but that still makes him ‘flinch’, and of Troilus and Cressida, a play he finds lacking in ‘rich humanity’. Antony and Cleopatra disappoints him through its ‘ethical poverty’, while the ending of The Tempest (the sense of whose epilogue he seems uncharacteristically to misjudge) strikes him as ‘somehow infected’.

Several of Nuttall’s readings may seem curious, even faintly perverse: the oddest of all being his interpretation of Measure for Measure in terms of Ophite Gnosticism (a heresy which figures the divinity as evil and Satan as good), through which Angelo emerges, somewhat bizarrely, as the only morally consistent character of the drama. Yet even the least sustainable of Nuttall’s readings force one to look at the plays again with fresh curiosity, and convey, like the plays themselves, the sense of a person of high intelligence perpetually thinking.

This is an exceptional book, to rank alongside the finest Shakespearian criticism of recent years. Read it if you can.