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Anthony David Nuttall (April 25, 1937 – January
24, 2007) was an English literary critic and academic.
Nuttall was educated at Hereford Cathedral School, Watford Grammar School for
Boys and Merton College, Oxford,where he
studied both Classical Moderations and English Literature. As a
postgraduate he wrote a B.Litt thesis on Shakespeare's The Tempest
subsequently published as Two Concepts of Allegory (1968), and
considered by some to be his most original book. Nuttall first
taught at Sussex University where he was successively
Lecturer, Reader and Professor of English and where his students
included the philosopher A.C. Grayling and the critic and
biographer Robert Fraser. After a tumultuous period as
Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Sussex, he moved on to New
College, Oxford in 1984, eventually being elected to an Oxford
chair. His published works include studies of Shakespeare and works on the
connections between philosophy and literature. Prominent among the
first is Shakespeare the Thinker (2007), in which he examines the
philosophical issues implicit in Shakespeare's plays, and among the
second A Common Sky in which he follows through the literary
repercussions of the English empiricist tradition and of the idea
of solipcism. His work is characterised throughout by wide reading
(especially in classical sources), common sense, a deep and broad
humanity, a robust sense of humour and by occasional - and
sometimes eccentric - references to popular culture (In Shakespeare
the Thinker, for example, he cites the TV series "Wife Swop".) His
brother Jeff
Nuttall was a poet and an important figure in 1960s counterculture.
To him he dedicated his book The Alternative Trinity, a study of
the Gnostic tradition in English literature through Marlowe and
Milton to William Blake, a poet to whom both brothers had been
attracted in their youth, if in rather different ways.
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