The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0169 Friday, 23 February 2007
[1] From: Matthew Steggle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 2007 18:30:42 -0000
Subj: Recent Deaths
[2] From: Stephen Hazell <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 23 Feb 2007 13:55:32 +0800
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0165 Recent Deaths
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Matthew Steggle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 2007 18:30:42 -0000
Subject: Recent Deaths
I very much admired Tony Nuttall. He co-supervised me for part of my D
Phil, and did so with thoroughness and humanity.
One of my personal favourites among his writings on Shakespeare is A.D.
Nuttall, 'Bottom's Dream' (Notes and Queries 48[2001] 276). It's a
brilliant idea, expressed with rigour and wit, and yet also a model of
concision - the whole thing fits onto a single page.
Matt
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stephen Hazell <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 23 Feb 2007 13:55:32 +0800
Subject: 18.0165 Recent Deaths
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0165 Recent Deaths
Tony Nuttall was one of my tutors at Merton College in the early 1960s.
My first recall is of a young man always laughing, in a generous way,
embracing the possible interest of the idiosyncratic ideas put to him,
while delicately suggesting alternative lines to pursue.
He did not supervise my Shakespeare studies, but I remember an informal
conversation about Henry IV Part Two. He was amused by Justice Shallow
casting around in his country residence for something to offer Falstaff
by way of a feast, and turning up only last year's apples (pippins) and
some caraway seeds. (What was not available by way of meat was made up
for by the flow of drink.) Then Tony moved out from this specific moment
of social comedy into a riff about orchards in the European imagination
(note: he was from Herefordshire, a very fruit-laden county not so far
from Warwickshire), then to a light allusion to Arden and the 'golden
age', all exemplifying the amplifying resonances with which Shakespeare
can charge the ordinary; the Shallow even. (I think the pun may be my
embellishment.)
Tony had large Latin and more Greek - he must have started, at school
and university, with Classics as his main studies. A New Mimesis is
probably still his best-known publication. That work alone shows how
much more he is than the pastoral dreamer that my anecdote might
inadvertently seem to imply.
In the way of things, I met him only a couple of times after Oxford, at
conferences. At a Sussex conference in the late 1970s, I saw that he was
a highly attentive and supportive presence for his colleague, Jonathan
Dollimore, though I doubt that he was by nature sympathetic to the
ground-swell then of cultural materialism.
This summer, I shall return to Britain after a long stint at a
university in Singapore. One of the things I had been promising myself
was to look in on Tony Nuttall. Alas.
All the more keenly, I look forward to Shakespeare the Thinker (and to
time spent seeking the company of old friends).
Stephen Hazell
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