Yale Press Log: Panel at Yale in honor of Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker

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Shakespeare's inner thought process will be the subject of a panel discussion held at Yale tomorrow, October 30. "Shakespeare the Thinker" will be at 4:30 p.m., in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street. The panel is free and open to the public.

Among the notable panelists are literary critic Harold Bloom and Connecticut Poet Laureate John Hollander. The event is hosted by Yale University Press, the Yale Center for British Art and the Whitney Humanities Center.

According to the Yale University Office of Public Affairs, the event was organized in honor of the late A. D. Nuttall and the recent publication of his book, Shakespeare the Thinker.

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.