








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.1 (2009) 123–135] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.123 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Shakespeare’s “Philosophy”: Looking or Thinking?

DAVID SchALkWyk

University of Cape Town 
David.Schalkwyk@uct.ac.za

colin McGinn. Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning  
Behind the Plays. New york: harper collins, 2006. 230 pp, hB $24.95, 
ISBN 9780060856151; PB $13.95, ISBN 9780060856168.

A.D. Nuttall. Shakespeare the Thinker. New haven, cT and London: yale 
University Press, 2007.  428 pp, hB $30.00, ISBN 9780300119282; 
PB $19.00, ISBN 9780300136296.

Shakespeare’s Philosophy is a popular book, intended for the non-aca-
demic reader acquainted with Shakespeare who may also be intrigued 
by the thought that the playwright was also a philosopher. Everything 
about the book—its subtitle, layout, tone, and choice of plays—sig-
nals this appeal. The subtitle, for example, “Discovering the Meaning  
Behind the Plays,” does a perfectly good marketing job in piquing the 
ordinary reader’s interest. But to anyone seriously concerned with the 
question of “meaning,” it is a howler. Meaning doesn’t lie “behind” 
things, whether they are gestures, words, utterances, or plays. Further-
more, colin McGinn knows this, since he is a significant contributor 
to recent debates in the philosophy of language that has put paid to 
the idea that meaning lies in a domain separate from what is said or 
done.  

how, then, should we judge the philosophy of language or meaning 
implied by the subtitle, and therefore attributed to Shakespeare? Do we 
ignore it as so much marketing puff, or do we read it as a symptom of 
a refusal to think seriously about literary scholarship because, well, it’s 
just literary, and literary scholars don’t know much about philosophy 
anyway?  The “depth” of Shakespeare’s plays, McGinn tells us, lies in 
their “underlying philosophical concerns …We feel large themes at work 
in the plays, shaping the poetry and the drama” (emphasis added).  



124 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

Until McGinn turned his attention to Shakespeare in an idle moment 
at the end of a sabbatical, however, no one had been able to account 
for this depth. “Little attempt has been made to identify and articulate 
these philosophical themes in any systematic way … the philosophi-
cal ideas suffusing them receive only passing mention.” Literary critics 
have not felt brave enough to move beyond “issues of character, plot, 
and diction [and] social and political context” because “philosophy, 
perhaps, makes them nervous” (1).

Anyone who has read even a smattering of the Shakespeare scholar-
ship and criticism from the past three decades would find these claims 
as outrageous as they are ignorant. The last thirty years of Shakespear-
ean scholarship has been obsessed with issues that, though deeply phil-
osophical, have, however, been engaged by the name “theory.” They 
may, however, not seem philosophical to McGinn, because analytical 
philosophers tend not to count Marx, hegel, Nietzsche, heidegger, 
Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Lacan as philosophers at all.  McGinn’s 
account makes Shakespeare an epistemologist, deeply embroiled in the 
disputes at the center of skepticism concerning the difference between 
dream and real worlds, the inscrutability of other minds, and the sta-
bility and continuity of personal identity. If Descartes and hume may 
be used to illuminate Shakespeare’s philosophical preoccupations it, is 
their sixteenth-century precursor, Michel de Montaigne, who is Shake-
speare’s guiding light.  

There is nothing essentially wrong with these claims in the broad-
est sense. But McGinn seems not to have noticed that Shakespeareans 
have embraced Montaigne with no hint of nerves, although they have 
been circumspect about the precise historical relation between the two 
writers. It is uncertain exactly when Shakespeare may have had access 
to Montaigne’s Essais, although the matter is complicated by the theo-
retical (or philosophical) difference between the intertextual circula-
tion of ideas and direct influence as a necessarily antecedent source.  
McGinn doesn’t address these problems central to literary debates 
about influence. he merely juxtaposes passages from Montaigne with 
a philosophical idea or theme culled from each of five plays (A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest), 
in the assumption that the statement of a philosophical idea in an essay 



Book Reviews 125

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

corresponds to, or is caused by, the “deep” thesis that lies “behind” the 
play’s dramatic dialogue and action.   

That McGinn ignores the large body of scholarship within Shake-
speare studies for which the relationship between Montaigne and 
Shakespeare is as complex and uncertain as it is compelling should not 
be of serious concern.  Scholarship is not his aim: he is, after all, not a 
literary scholar by training.  But literary criticism should perhaps have 
made him just a little nervous. For the readings of the plays that he 
does offer are not so much wrong, or misguided, as banal: he tells us 
little that has not been the stock-in-trade of literary criticism at some 
point in the past fifty years or been subjected to trenchant critique 
in the past twenty.  It is hardly illuminating to be told by a profes-
sional philosopher that “appearance and reality” is a major theme in 
Shakespeare (4, 22, 24–25, 42, 62–64, 67–71, 72–75, 92, 102–104, 
162–164); or that Shakespeare “excels at giving us a portrait of human 
vices and failings” (174); that “his genius lies in flawless imitations of 
imaginary characters” (202); or that the effect of his art is “to upset 
the apple cart, to shake us up” (200). More seriously debilitating than 
a penchant for cliché1 is McGinn’s unwillingness to engage with the 
theatrical or dialogical quality of Shakespeare’s work, despite his lip-
service to the fact that we should not make assumptions about what 
Shakespeare thought from what individual characters say.  

A.D. Nuttall’s contemporaneous book, Shakespeare the Thinker,  
engages in a different way with Shakespeare’s philosophy. Far more 
wide-ranging than McGinn’s (Nuttall includes a discussion of almost 
all the plays, by and large in chronological order), Nuttall also ad-
dresses an informed popular audience, and many of his philosophical 
concerns overlap with McGinn’s. Nuttall and McGinn share a similar 
Anglo-Saxon tradition, in which the key philosophical questions con-
cern the certainty of our knowledge of reality, the self, and the power 
of language either to represent or shape each of these supposed en-
tities. But that makes the difference between Shakespeare’s Philosophy 
and Shakespeare the Thinker all the more striking. McGinn is a philoso-
pher who regards the big philosophical questions as templates that give 
Shakespeare’s more local, theatrical concerns their real depth. Since the 
philosopher claims that no one before him has given these questions 



126 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

in Shakespeare any systematic attention, he is implying that his book  
reveals the true depth of Shakespeare’s work for the first time. As a lit-
erary scholar by profession, Nuttall has a wide-ranging interest in phi-
losophy, but he regards the dialogism of theatrical interaction in Shake-
speare as the chief vehicle for the representation, not of the meaning 
behind the plays, but rather of conflicting conceptions of self and the 
world in the plays. Whatever philosophy is embedded in them speaks 
through the formal arrangement of the plays as an essentially dramat-
ic medium. For Nuttall, Shakespeare thinks through the embodied  
interaction of his characters; for McGinn, Shakespeare shapes play and 
character in order to express an underlying philosophical theme.  Even 
if they recognise similar philosophical preoccupations in the plays, their 
respective approaches to philosophy or thinking yield different results.

The Construction of Character

character is the driving force of Shakespeare’s Philosophy, but its treat-
ment is beset by a curious contradiction between McGinn’s conception 
of Shakespeare’s philosophy of character and selfhood as an essentially 
unfixed kind of performance, and his own tendency to write as if the 
way into the plays were via the “intrinsic nature” of particular charac-
ters. The former position is derived from the passage in Montaigne’s 
essay, “On the inconstancy of our actions,” that there is no fixed self, 
but rather an ever-changing series of self-perspectives. For McGinn, 
Hamlet is the classic exemplum of the notion that, beneath the dis-
play of “outward show,” the mystery of the real self (which “knows 
not seems”) is a void.  Following William Empson on hamlet’s “self ” 
(although he makes no reference to Empson), McGinn claims that “to 
speak of hamlet’s ‘character’ is already to misrepresent him.  hamlet is 
not so much a human being as a universe” (41).  Empson’s argument 
is that—in relation to the peculiar literary representation that we call 
hamlet—it makes no sense to search for any motives for his action or 
inaction.  McGinn, however, goes on to generalize hamlet’s inscruta-
bility into a philosophical statement about the essence of human self-
hood: it prompts us to ask “whether we are all mysteries … a gap where 
the simple self ought to be—a kind of throbbing nothingness” (43).  

This however contradicts McGinn’s general, and much more interest-



Book Reviews 127

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

ing claim that to talk of human beings or their mimetic counterparts 
is necessarily to talk of “traits that have a moral dimension … Virtues 
and vices are qualities that people intrinsically have” (179). In the same 
breath as he proposes the overriding Shakespearean philosophy of the 
emptiness of personal identity, McGinn talks of character as if it does 
have a hard, intrinsic, core or nature. “As with many Shakespearean 
characters, hamlet’s first words in the play are revealing of his nature” 
(41, emphasis added), he states, writing elsewhere that Edmund is 
a “hard-headed realist” (119), Iago “an adventurer, an enthusiast of  
extreme sports, and a risk taker—as well as being intrinsically nasty” 
(85, emphasis added), and of “Lear’s true, intrinsic nature” (117, em-
phasis added). McGinn’s instinctive recourse to the language of intrin-
sic selfhood stems from a compelling but undeveloped argument in 
the chapter “Shakespeare and Ethics” that to speak of human beings 
or their representations is to talk of moral qualities: “In witnessing a 
Shakespeare play our consciousness is engaged morally in an intense 
and unavoidable way” (178). human character is defined by moral 
concepts: asked to describe a friend or colleague, politician or family 
member we will “list traits that have a moral dimension”; an account 
of a person which used no moral terms would be “thin and uninforma-
tive.” The evaluative description of moral qualities is intrinsic to the 
concept of a human being—part of its nature, not above or behind it 
(179).  This goes some way towards explaining why neither character 
nor ethics can be abandoned or displaced if we are to do justice to 
Shakespeare’s mimetic art, although it would be good to see this argu-
ment developed in a more philosophically rigorous context.   

If McGinn is all too ready to see a postmodern notion of subjective 
flux in Shakespeare’s representation, Nuttall retains a sense, itself rela-
tively well-established within historicist criticism, that Shakespeare’s 
great discovery or creation is precisely the notion of incorrigible in-
teriority that subtends the actions that a man might play.  McGinn 
believes that Shakespeare has a single, philosophical position on self-
hood, that we all forge our selves through play.  Nuttall offers a more 
nuanced reading of Shakespeare’s developing notion of self and action.  
he suggests that Shakespeare begins with a notion of human causality 
as something sociologically conceived in his early history plays, but 



128 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

that in Richard III, Richard II and Hamlet, he produces a notion of 
“core identity” that contradicts both his contemporary Montaigne and 
the postmodern conviction that selfhood is a fluctuating construct. 
There is no final answer to these questions. The self-reflexivity of Shake-
speare’s theatrical practice represents character as something invented 
and enacted, but the same theatrical technology enables Shakespeare 
to suggest an interior self with nothing more than the trappings of 
“outward show.”  

Nuttall’s approach to Shakespeare’s thinking differs most radically 
from McGinn’s insofar as he refuses to attribute to Shakespeare any 
single, identifiable philosophical position: 

[Shakespeare] never falls into that easy universalization of the idea that 
rendered so much of late twentieth-century “constructionism” so vul-
nerable, philosophically. he never says “All is externally constituted; 
there is no ‘core self ’ ” … The truth is that when Shakespeare wrote 
the notion of a publicly constituted identity was readily available.  The 
new, exciting thing was the inner, truly originative self. (298)

Shakespeare’s theatrical situation rendered him alive to the fact that the 
uses and effects of language are not reduced or limited by the fact that 
they are spoken by an actor.  The monstrosity of the player’s passion 
before a character who has declared that he has “that within that passes 
show” applies to hamlet himself, who as actor has nothing within to 
sustain his earlier claim to an inscrutable interiority.  But the practical 
circumstances of Shakespeare’s profession led him to recognize that 
language can operate without any essentially informing core being.2  
This does not, however, destroy the need for a retrospective concep-
tion of interiority as the sustaining ground for concepts like personal 
integrity, truthfulness, and ethical reliability: the very things that for 
McGinn are an integral or natural aspect of our very notion of human-
ity, and which hamlet tries to sustain in the face of society in which 
such integrity has been dissolved by the corrosive transformation of all 
private life into the glare of controlling publicity.

McGinn’s attribution of performative existentialism to Shakespeare 
comes from his taking Shakespeare’s medium for this message.  he con-
fuses the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s representation of character 
for his personal philosophy of the nature of human selfhood.  Moreover, 



Book Reviews 129

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

a literary scholar who has grappled with the theoretical and historical 
problem of influence and intertextuality would know that citing isolat-
ed passages from Montaigne as a signal of what Shakespeare thought is 
misleading.  Montaigne may indeed reflect on the flux of the self when 
he subjects it to introspection, but at other times he assumes a stable 
self as the basis of ethical action. had McGinn asked more nuanced 
philosophical questions about how utterances interact in Shakespeare, 
he may have noticed the Shakespearean insight that for speech acts 
fundamental to the negotiation of love and political allegiance—such 
as oaths, vows and promises—a unitary self is indispensable.  The prac-
tice of these language-games depends upon the fact that people’s core 
identities do not change from moment to moment.  

Cosmic Tragedy

Shakespeareans of the past two decades have allowed overly reductive 
accounts of the relationship between text and history and a virulently 
anti-humanist elevation of ideological structure over local agency to 
skew our sense within academia of Shakespeare’s richness. Nonetheless, 
there is something peculiarly bloodless about an account of King Lear 
or Othello that focuses so completely on the “big” or “deep” problems 
of cosmology, causality and other minds that it ignores the fact that 
these plays are about people struggling over power and love in con-
crete, material circumstances: that they are concerned with actions for 
which human beings, not some inscrutable, blind force, are ultimately 
accountable. King Lear may well “reflect the irrational, random, unjust 
nature of causation,” but to claim that therein lies the “deeper meaning 
of the play” (121) is to rob it of its concern with the ways in which peo-
ple construct the possibilities of personal and social relations.  McGinn 
conforms to an orthodox position in literary criticism in his claim that 
“Shakespeare is inclined to a non-teleological view of causation” (15).  
It is one thing to argue that such a position implies a secular, non-
rationalist rejection of the idea of “cosmic justice,” but unless one spells 
out the human consequences of that perspective, it threatens to mys-
tify relations of power between human agents by turning them into 
the effects of an overarching, random cosmic force. McGinn may have 
learned something (if only as the object of focused critique) from the 



130 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

philosophical analysis of Marx and Adorno, Althusser and Raymond 
Williams about human agency in its relation to transformable material 
conditions.  

Neither McGinn nor Nuttall show that philosophy has much to add 
to our sense of the distinctively human horror and mystery of the great 
tragedies.  knowingly or not, McGinn recycles Stanley cavell’s analysis 
of the terrors of skepticism in Othello and Lear, but without the latter’s 
insights into the local failures of the paradoxical human need for and 
peculiar revulsion from love and acknowledgement. McGinn offers no 
more than a single, glancing reference to this philosopher, who has 
engaged consistently and deeply, over a long period, with Shakespeare’s 
relation to the very issue that McGinn regards as central to philoso-
phy and Shakespeare alike: skepticism or the problem of other minds.  
Stanley cavell has made this terrain his own, in Disowning Knowl-
edge in Seven Plays by Shakespeare (2007) and a lengthy disquisition on 
Othello in The Claim of Reason (1999). The latter is primarily a work 
of critical philosophy rather than literary criticism, so it is surprising 
that McGinn ignores it.  Instead he blithely writes, the self-depreca-
tion barely hiding the claim to originality: “In my view, then, Othello 
is predicated upon the problem of other minds, with all its ramifica-
tions—moral, personal, and metaphysical” (67, emphasis added).  

Looking, Thinking and Saying  

The Tempest, McGinn claims, is essentially “about the power of lan-
guage” (135). This is again no news to Shakespeareans and literary 
scholars, who may be said to have been obsessed over the last thir-
ty years with the constructive capacity of language to shape self and 
world. But McGinn represents that power in such broad—indeed, after 
Saussure, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Austin and Derrida, 
banal—terms as to empty his general claim of real critical significance.  
It needs no philosopher come from across the corridor to tell liter-
ary critics that language is able to “create its own world” and “human 
nature as we experience it” (137), or that Shakespeare may have had 
a sense of such power.  Indeed, claims to the power of language have 
become such a debilitating, thoughtless shibboleth of contemporary 
literary theory that McGinn would have done us a service if he had ap-



Book Reviews 131

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

plied some sharp critical analysis to the limits and limitations of linguis-
tic constructivism.  McGinn offers a word of caution when he writes,  
“I don’t think Shakespeare is offering us any very definite thesis about 
language in this play,” but his conception of its representation of our 
burdened, conflicted relation to words offers neither genuinely illumi-
nating analysis nor coherent philosophy: “We are trapped in language, 
formed by it, slaves to it; we feel a desire to break its bounds and dis-
tance ourselves from it.  It is both marvellous and corrupting, sublime 
and base (and at its most ostensibly sublime it can be basest)” (142).

Nuttall is more precise and careful. his method of finding (often 
contradictory) philosophical positions in the utterances of individual 
characters is both more faithful to the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s 
genre and more circumspect about attributing monolithic philosophi-
cal doctrines to the mind behind the plays. he is also more attentive to 
shifting philosophical positions between plays, as they occupy various 
positions in theater history, inhabit different genres, and embrace or 
distance themselves from various forms of social, political and cultural 
history.  I have mentioned his analysis of the move from social causality 
in political action in the early history plays (a brilliant piece of analysis) 
to the forging of core interiority in some of the later work.  Shakespeare 
the Thinker is more true to Shakespeare’s dialogue with history and un-
derstanding of human interaction when Nuttall suggests, for example, 
that hippolyta and Theseus engage in an argument about coherence 
and correspondence theories of truth in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
(in contrast to McGinn’s argument that the play as a whole questions 
the distinction between dream and real worlds); that Shakespeare can 
simultaneously consider Brutus to be an honorable man and a repre-
sentative of the pathological withdrawal of Stoicism from “an over-rich 
and hurtful universe” (184), and, in another especially illuminating 
analysis, that the “feast of language” in Love’s Labour’s Lost represents 
the playwright’s ambivalence about his own seductively dazzling lin-
guistic facility.

Despite the fact that Nuttall declares, against current literary fashion, 
that “there is a human being behind these plays, but the man himself is 
elusive, endlessly mobile … not a systematic philosopher … a drama-
tist” (387), he takes no refuge in the notion that Shakespeare perfected 



132 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

the philosopher’s art of asking questions to which he knew there are 
no final answers.  If he claims that “we do not know what he thought 
—finally—about anything” (380), Nuttall nevertheless argues that 
the substantial outcome of Shakespeare’s dialogical engagement with 
the questions of philosophy lies in his capacity, as “the philosopher of 
human possibility” (381), to “join verisimilitude to wonder” (383). 
That’s nicely put. It indicates the precise difference between Nuttall 
and McGinn’s sometimes overlapping conceptions of Shakespeare’s 
engagement with or anticipation of the modes of philosophy. com-
pare McGinn: 

Part of my aim in this book is to work out exactly what [Shakespeare’s] 
view was, insofar as it is represented in the plays.  If I were to award 
him a single label, it would be “naturalist,” in somewhat the sense that 
one speaks of a student of natural history: he is a clear-eyed observer 
and recorder, sensitive to the facts before his eyes, not swayed by dog-
ma or tradition … he is simply saying, This is the way things are, like it 
or not.  he is a detached, supremely sane student of human beings and 
their world, intent on descriptive accuracy. (15)  

The lack of philosophical self-consciousness in McGinn’s bardolatry 
is especially surprising.  Absent from this formulation of Shakespeare’s 
philosophy are any of the complicated difficulties that philosophy itself 
has always strewn in the path of claims to purely descriptive knowl-
edge.  These are in fact the central preoccupations of Shakespeare’s Phi-
losophy itself: the corrosive doubts of skepticism; the struggle between 
coherence and correspondence theories of truth; the uncertainty of 
causality; the place of language in constructing the human world; and 
the fluctuating nature of the observing and representing self. To these 
we might add problems from the so-called “continental” tradition, 
systematically ignored by McGinn, but which have been central to 
Shakespeare critics’ interrogation of the possibility of value-free knowl-
edge: the historical situatedness of the observer; his or her formation by 
ideological and social forces; and the hermeneutic problems of match-
ing the reader’s “horizon of expectation” with the “past significance” 
of a literary text, on the one hand, and the impossibility of fixing a 
context absolutely, on the other. McGinn argues that Shakespeare  
encompasses and even endorses forms of skepticism that blur the dis-



Book Reviews 133

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

tinction between dreaming and waking, call into question the stability 
of personal identity, and the very possibility of disinterested observa-
tion.  yet Shakespeare nevertheless stands above them as the impartial, 
objective, and stable recorder of human nature: the genius who tran-
scends the messy flux not merely of human ideology and presupposi-
tion but also of the vagaries of our epistemological instruments.

The Limits of Philosophy

No matter how subtle or brilliant the identification of a philosophical 
position in Shakespeare’s work or an organizing metaphysical preoccu-
pation in his mind, it is in danger of missing the distinctiveness of his 
theatrical situation and practice.

Brilliant and path-breaking as cavell is in his analysis of the lived 
costs of skepticism in Shakespeare’s texts, he also signals the dangers of 
a philosophical approach to Shakespeare that, for all its caveats about 
avoiding generalization and encompassing variety, tends to miss more 
local questions that may in their own way be called philosophical.  Thus, 
in his pursuit of the social and personal costs of skepticism, cavell fails 
to investigate the relations among and differences between the similar 
but not identical concepts of “skepticism,” “doubt,” “suspicion,” and 
“uncertainty.” McGinn likewise shows no interest in this kind of con-
ceptual discrimination. This is strange, because Wittgenstein does, and 
both cavell and McGinn have written extensively and perceptively 
on precisely this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.  Shakespeare, on 
the other hand, is fully alive to such conceptual differences, and the  
relations among the concepts clustered around doubt and uncertain-
ty could be traced simply by attending to the way in which they are  
embodied and put to work in the various worlds of his plays. Nuttall 
hints at the root of the conceptual differences that cavell misses when 
he writes that Much Ado about Nothing is “innocent of epistemological 
implications”: that in this play, “Shakespeare had chosen not to think 
hard” (226). Despite its apparent concern with “knowing the mind’s 
construction in the face” the play is in fact not troubled with the 
“deep” metaphysical problem of  skepticism about other minds, but 
rather with what McGinn would presumably consider the “shallow” 
ideological and personal problems of local suspicion and uncertainty.  



134 Expositions

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

But if Much Ado about Nothing “looks hard at social practice” (225), 
does that mean that in focusing on such “looking” Shakespeare had 
given up “thinking”?  

Looking hard at social practice is a subtly elusive kind of hard think-
ing.  It’s something Shakespeare does especially well. he is uncannily 
good at showing how concepts at the center of social life work their 
way through the determining conditions—gender, class and personal 
education and experience—from which the forms of life that give them 
their meanings are constituted. This kind of conceptual analysis, which 
pays close attention to the embodied place of words in social practice, 
is as philosophical as any of the grander queries about the causes of 
the universe or the certainty that I can know only what is in my own 
mind.  This is the philosophy that Shakespeare does best. Not because 
he was an avid reader of the Philosophical Investigations or How to Do 
Things with Words, or failed to take an interest in historical doctrines 
of Stoicism or Pyrrhonism, but because his mimetic practice as a man 
of the theater enabled him to represent fully the interaction through 
which language engages with and is resisted by the social and material 
world.  This is the philosophy at the heart of all creative mimesis.  In 
this sense, then, McGinn is correct to declare Shakespeare a superb 
observer—not as someone untouched by dogma, tradition or the in-
sanities of social tensions and affection, but rather as a dramatist deeply 
rooted in and creatively attentive to the hurly-burly of activities from 
which concepts are shaped.  

Despite the depth and wisdom of his engagement with Shakespeare 
as thinking dramatist, Nuttall goes too far in separating thinking hard 
from looking hard at social practice. McGinn, on the other hand, is 
too uncritical about both the philosophical and historically specific, 
ideological complexities that inform Shakespeare’s observation. he 
might have written a better book, even for popular consumption, if he 
had allowed himself an attack of philosophical nerves about the very 
philosophizing that he attributes to Shakespeare.  That is to say, if he 
had considered more carefully, before he watched the DVDs or picked 
up the text of a play, what exactly it means to attribute philosophy to 
a dramatist.



Book Reviews 135

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

Notes

1. A few examples: hamlet is a “born performer” (46); he “suffers from weakness of 
the will” (49); the idea that we may be dead but only dreaming that we are alive 
is “a vertiginous thought” (55); hamlet is not a “model of discretion” but he is 
a “master of irony” (56); Iago “lies through his teeth” (66); Othello cannot see 
the “distinction between appearance and reality” (74); Iago is a “creative genius, 
in his own depraved way” (86); Macbeth is “an absolute bastard” (92) but he is 
human, “tragically so” (93); he is “all too ready to be taken in by his imagination” 
(99) and a “victim of his own mystery” (103); Regan is a “beady-eyed realist” 
(131)—a quality she shares with Shakespeare, “who had a remarkably beady eye” 
(166); king Lear is “in need of a complete cognitive overhaul,” but “by the end he 
has shaped up, epistemologically” (131); and at the end of Othello Emilia “gives 
[Iago] a mouthful” (177).  

2. compare Wittgenstein 1982, 38: “[T]he best example for a sentence with a par-
ticular meaning is a quotation in a play. And whoever asks a person in a play what 
he’s experiencing when he’s speaking?” (1982, §38).

References

cavell, Stanley

1999 The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.  2nd 
ed.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2007 Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare.  Updated ed. cam-
bridge: cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

1982 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: Preliminary Studies for Part 
II of the Philosophical Investigations.  Vol. 1. Ed. G.h. von Wright and 
heikki Nyman, Trans. c.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. chi-
cago, IL: University of chicago Press.




