Abstract
Helms enters the debate about the usefulness of character criticism, joining critics such as Michael Bristol, Jessica Slights, and Paul Yachnin in arguing for a criticism that considers characters as if they were real people living in recognizable worlds. Mindreading is the human ability to look at a person or a literary character and contemplate what that person is thinking, feeling, and planning. Drawing particularly on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen and Alvin Goldman, Helms reviews contemporary cognitive science and the philosophy of mind to identify two methods of mindreading: inference (the theory-theory of mindreading) and imagination (the simulation theory of mindreading). Helms adds to this conversation by applying cognitive science to discussions of character in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.
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- 1.
Bradley concludes that Macduff is most likely speaking of Malcolm’s childlessness rather than Macbeth’s. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 462.
- 2.
Ibid., 316.
- 3.
Ibid., 456.
- 4.
Yachnin and Slights, Shakespeare and Character, 3.
- 5.
Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 20.
- 6.
Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 12.
- 7.
Yachnin and Slights, Shakespeare and Character, 1.
- 8.
Ibid., 3.
- 9.
Ibid., 6–7.
- 10.
Bristol, “How Dark Was It in That Room?”, 19–34.
- 11.
Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay.
- 12.
Fahmi, “Quoting the Enemy.”
- 13.
Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition.
- 14.
McConachie, Engaging Audiences.
- 15.
O’Dair, “On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life,” 83.
- 16.
Ibid., 86.
- 17.
Ibid., 85.
- 18.
Ibid., 91.
- 19.
Ibid., 89.
- 20.
Ponech, “The Reality of Fictive Cinematic Characters,” 52.
- 21.
Bristol, “How Many Children Did She Have?”, 19.
- 22.
Bristol, “Confusing Shakespeare’s Characters with Real People,” 38.
- 23.
Morton, Frames of Mind.
- 24.
For a defense of theory-theory based on developmental psychology, see Doherty, Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others’ Thoughts and Feelings.
- 25.
Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts, 32.
- 26.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 10–13.
- 27.
Ibid., 10.
- 28.
Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness.
- 29.
Gopnik, “How We Know Our Minds,” 1–14.
- 30.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 19.
- 31.
Ibid., 20.
- 32.
Jackson, “All That Can Be at Issue in the Theory-Theory Simulation Debate,” 77–96.
- 33.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 30.
- 34.
“empathy, n.”; “sympathy, n.” OED.
- 35.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 4.
- 36.
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 327.
- 37.
“compassion, n.” 2.a. OED.
- 38.
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 329.
- 39.
Ibid., 333.
- 40.
Ibid., 334.
- 41.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 43–45.
- 42.
Zunshine, ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 153.
- 43.
Barr and Keysar, “Mindreading in an Exotic Case,” 271–83.
- 44.
Goldman, Joint Ventures, 35.
- 45.
Schoenfeldt, “Shakespearean Pain,” 198.
- 46.
“cipher,” v., 3, 6. OED.
- 47.
Jacobson, “The Elizabethan Cipher in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” 348.
- 48.
Arkin, “‘That Map Which Deep Impression Bears,’” 366.
- 49.
Schoenfeldt, “Shakespearean Pain,” 195.
- 50.
Or as Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo would say, the painter has failed to take “regarde of the concorde and discorde of the motions.” Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Painting, 2.77.
- 51.
Physiognomy is the study of, as Montaigne writes, “the conformity and relation of the body to the spirit.” Montaigne, The Complete Essays, III.12, 809.
- 52.
Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation,” 89.
- 53.
Belsey, “Tarquin Dispossessed,” 333.
- 54.
“Crushed or broken in spirit by a sense of sin, and so brought to complete penitence.” “contrite,” adj., 2.a. OED.
- 55.
Weaver, “‘O Teach Me How to Make Mine Own Excuse,’” 424.
- 56.
Meek, “Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale,” 391.
- 57.
Ibid., 393–4.
- 58.
Ibid., 406–7.
- 59.
Meek, “‘O, What a Sympathy of Woe Is This,’” 296.
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Helms, N.R. (2019). Reading the Mind: Cognitive Science and Close Reading. In: Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03565-5_2
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