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Shakespeare Studies and Consciousness

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Shakespeare and Consciousness

Part of the book series: Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance ((CSLP))

Abstract

Edward Pechter argues that the turn toward cognition in literary studies is a retrenchment of the supposedly discredited idea of literary character. The decline in character studies through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth parallels a decline in literary criticism’s focus on the literary and a rise in its concerns with the linguistic, the political, and, more recently, the scientific. Pechter sees in literary criticism’s appropriation of these scientific theories a rationalization of its methods in an attempt to reclaim its cultural authority. A turn toward consciousness and/or cognition will not, in Pechter’s view, solve the problem of the decline of the humanities. Pechter concludes with a consideration of William Flesch’s Comeuppance, largely because Flesch does not claim determining privilege for his theoretical arguments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Substantial parts of this essay appeared as “Character Criticism, the Cognitive Turn, and the Problem of Shakespeare Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 42, eds James R. Siemon and Diana E. Henderson (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2014), 196–228. I am grateful to the editors and the publisher for permission to reprint excerpts from it here.

  2. 2.

    Raphael Falco, Shakespeare Studies 34, ed. Susan Zimmerman (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 21–4, esp. 21.

  3. 3.

    Jonathan Culler, New Literary History 25 (1994), 869–879, esp. 873.

  4. 4.

    Falco, 21.

  5. 5.

    Ruth Morse, “The Year’s Work in Shakespeare: Critical Studies,” Shakespeare Survey 56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 300–33, esp. 304; Emma Smith, Review of Sadowski, The Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare, TLS, October 1, 2004, 31; Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Yachnin and Slights (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2009), 1–18, esp. 1. The final quotation is taken from the Ashgate catalog description of Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage, eds Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgot (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

  6. 6.

    Rita Felski, “Introduction,” New Literary History 42 (2011), v–ix, esp. v.

  7. 7.

    Johnson on Shakespeare, in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 8:981.

  8. 8.

    Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1.

  9. 9.

    Paul Cefalu, “The Burdens of Mind Reading in Shakespeare’s Othello: A Cognitive and Psychoanalytic Approach to Iago’s Theory of Mind,” Shakespeare Quarterly 64 (2013): 265–94, esp. 288.

  10. 10.

    Quoted ibid., 289.

  11. 11.

    Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–2.

  12. 12.

    Some examples, Shakespearean and otherwise, not including items mentioned elsewhere in this piece: Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); Ellen Spolsky and Alan Richardson, eds, The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Mark Turner, ed., Shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Science, Shakespearean International Yearbook 4 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 1–131; Joseph Carroll, “Intentional Meaning in Hamlet: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Style 44.1-2 (2010), 230–60; Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman, eds, Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Angus Fletcher, Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, eds, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  13. 13.

    David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), x–xi.

  14. 14.

    Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies: Commentators from Rowe (1709) to Boswell-Malone (1821) (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1986); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

  15. 15.

    Brian Vickers collects the main primary texts in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Vol 6 1774–1801 (London: Routledge, 1981) and provides an overview of the topic in “The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–1800,” Shakespeare Survey 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11–21.

  16. 16.

    See Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets: With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (1769), ed. Arthur Freeman (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1970), 81. Freeman remarks in his Preface that Montagu’s Essay was reprinted six times by 1785 after its generous initial print run.

  17. 17.

    Richardson regularly revised and reprinted his work. I am quoting from the first edition (London: J. Murray and W. Creech, 1774), 1 and 43.

  18. 18.

    Preface to Shakespeare (1765), in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 7:59-113, esp. 71.

  19. 19.

    Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 3–4.

  20. 20.

    See Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse of October 27, 1818 in the Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 195.

  21. 21.

    William Hazlitt, “On Poetry in General,” Lectures on the English Poets, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 5:1-18, esp. 15; Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, eds Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 229–32, esp. 232; and Keats’ letter to J. H. Reynolds of February 3, 1818, in Scott, Selected Letters, 86-7.

  22. 22.

    See the Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1983), 7:2:6.

  23. 23.

    Robert Witbeck Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766–1799: A Study in English Criticism of the Late Eighteenth Century (1931; repr. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 226.

  24. 24.

    The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.52, in G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Subsequent references to Shakespeare are interpolated parenthetically.

  25. 25.

    Scott, Selected Letters, 194-5.

  26. 26.

    Lectures 1808–1819, ed. R. A. Foakes, in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. 5, 2:313-14.

  27. 27.

    Sherbo, Works, 8:1047.

  28. 28.

    Foakes, Lectures, 5:2:315.

  29. 29.

    See “Mr. Kean’s Iago,” in Howe, Complete Works, 5:211–15, esp. 213.

  30. 30.

    See Maurice Morgann’s Essay in Maurice Morgann: Shakespearian Criticism, ed. Daniel Fineman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 143–288, esp. 237.

  31. 31.

    See Fineman’s Introduction, 3–140, 20–24, for the Romantics’ ignorance of Morgann. This has not precluded a consensus, shared equally among Morgann’s most admiring and his most disapproving critics, that the Essay is a profoundly resonant anticipation of romantic character criticism. For celebration, see A. C. Bradley, “Eighteenth Century Estimates of Shakespeare,” Scottish Historical Review 1 (1904), 291–95, esp. 294. For censure, see L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism” (1933), in Knights, Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 15–54, esp. 27. Subsequent references to Knights interpolated parenthetically.

  32. 32.

    See James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1213.

  33. 33.

    See “Mr. Kean’s Iago,” in Howe, Works, 5:213.

  34. 34.

    “Mr Kean’s Iago (concluded),” in Howe, Works, 5:215-21, esp. 217.

  35. 35.

    “Desdemona: A Footnote,” in Howe, Works, 20:401.

  36. 36.

    For “poetical reading,” see A. C. Bradley, “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1901; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 3–34, esp. 28. For “orphaned writing,” see Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 316.

  37. 37.

    “L. C. Knights on A. C. Bradley,” in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 106–110, esp. 109. A. D. Nuttall remarked about the broad acceptance of Knights’ claims that “the whole debate may be complicated by the presence of unacknowledged historical factors,” a “pre-rational historical reaction” against “the over-heated Victorian age.” See “The Argument About Shakespeare’s Characters,” Critical Quarterly 7 (1965), 107–20, esp. 109.

  38. 38.

    See the Preface (1945) in Knights, Explorations, 9–12, esp. 11.

  39. 39.

    Michael Bristol, “Introduction: Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher?,” Shakespeare and Moral Agency, ed. Michael D. Bristol (London: Continuum, 2010), 1–12, esp. 2.

  40. 40.

    Cary DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168.

  41. 41.

    Robert Shaughnessy, “Introduction,” Shakespearean Tragedy (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), xii–xlix, esp. xix.

  42. 42.

    See Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Characters: The Generation of Sylvia,” Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 68–100; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 255-83, esp. 266–73; Stanley Cavell, “Skepticism as Iconoclasm: The Saturation of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress. Los Angeles, 1996, eds Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 231–47, esp. 232; and Peter Thomson, “Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama,” A New History of English Drama, eds John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 321–36, esp. 321. Simon Palfrey subjects this claim to some shrewdly skeptical analysis in Doing Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2005), 184.

  43. 43.

    W. B. Yeats, “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 64–67, line 43; and see Roy Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xv.

  44. 44.

    See Michael D. Bristol’s review of Christy Desmet, “Reading Shakespeare’s Characters,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 226–29, esp. 226.

  45. 45.

    Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 178.

  46. 46.

    Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 23 and 24.

  47. 47.

    William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7.

  48. 48.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, 23; Flesch, Comeuppance, 7.

  49. 49.

    Hogan, Cognitive Science, 148 and 141.

  50. 50.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, 40.

  51. 51.

    Vermeule cites Suzanne Keen, whose “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14 (2006), 207–36, focuses the argument of her Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) on mirror neurons.

  52. 52.

    Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 18 and 70 ff.

  53. 53.

    See Tony Jackson, “Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Criticism,” Poetics Today 21 (2000), 319–47, esp. 320.

  54. 54.

    Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “The Modular Nature of Human Intelligence,” The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence, eds Arnold B. Scheibel and J. William Schopf (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 1997), 71–101, esp. 85.

  55. 55.

    Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011), 315–47, esp. 328.

  56. 56.

    See David J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 60. The competitive situations may be understood as versions of “the prisoner’s dilemma,” which should be familiar as a staple of police procedurals: suspects accused of complicity in the same crime are interrogated in separate rooms where they are invited to inform against each other. In Comeuppance (23 ff), Flesch brilliantly analyzes the staggering complexity of this situation.

  57. 57.

    See Lisa Zunshine, “Lying Bodies of the Enlightenment: Theory of Mind and Cultural Historicism,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Zunshine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 115–33, esp. 119.

  58. 58.

    See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, eds John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Jerome Barkow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–136; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002); and, for the quoted material, Bill Brown’s Introduction to a “cluster” of essays on “Textual Materialism,” PMLA 125 (2010), 24–26, esp. 24.

  59. 59.

    Howe, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, in Works, 4:165–361, esp. 200.

  60. 60.

    Jonathan Franzen, remarking “that we experience sympathy so readily for characters” in fiction, and that “sympathy, or its absence, is involved in almost every reader’s literary judgments,” evidently feels no need to appeal to the recent discoveries in neuroscience that might support his claims. David Denby remarks in passing about a current movie that “it’s in the nature of our relation to central figures in a narrative that we want to identify with them,” but in affirming that “we commonly identify with the protagonist,” as Hogan puts it, Denby shows no indication that he is aware of the advances Hogan attributes to cognitive turn of “the past decade or so.” See “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” The New Yorker (February 13 and 20, 2012), 60–65, esp. 63 and 60; and “The Current Cinema: Risky Business,” The New Yorker (September 24, 2012), 98-99, esp. 99.

  61. 61.

    Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Power of the Imagination,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948), 68–76, esp. 68.

  62. 62.

    Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 2–3.

  63. 63.

    Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 176.

  64. 64.

    When cognitive practitioners take ideas from Darwinian biology or neuroscience, they regularly reduce complex questions and ambiguous evidence to straightforward answers and unequivocal conclusions, extending the reach of scientific explanation beyond what working scientists themselves are willing to claim. For some of the many arguments along these lines, see (in alphabetical order): Buller, Adapting Minds, 191–5; Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 137 and 162; Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of Saint Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 205, ser. B (1979), 581–98; Gould, “More Things in Heaven and Earth,” Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, eds Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), 101–26; Alison Gopnik, “Cells That Read Minds? What the Myth of Mirror Neurons Gets Wrong About the Human Brain,” Slate (April 26, 2007), <http://www.slate.com/articles/life/brains/2007/04/cells_that_read_minds.html>, last accessed August 15, 2015; and Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” 318–24.

  65. 65.

    Jackson, “Questioning Interdisciplinarity,” 328 and 339.

  66. 66.

    Hans Adler and Sabine Gross, “Adjusting the Frame: Comments on Cognitivism and Literature,” Poetics Today 23 (2002), 195–220, esp. 210.

  67. 67.

    McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 13, 14, and 15.

  68. 68.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, 249.

  69. 69.

    See Hogan, Cognitive Science, 122, 36–7, 151, and 153–55; Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 30–36; and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 209–379.

  70. 70.

    Hogan, Cognitive Science, 3.

  71. 71.

    Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 110.

  72. 72.

    Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” The American Scholar 49 (1980), 165–79, and many times reprinted.

  73. 73.

    McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 207.

  74. 74.

    Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 322.

  75. 75.

    Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen, “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 23 (2002), 1–8, esp. 4 and 6.

  76. 76.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, xi, xii, and 7.

  77. 77.

    I may be naive here. The Kardashians have become celebrities independently of any skills or talents—famous for being well known. In “Celebrity Shylock,” PMLA 126 (2011), 935–49, Emily Hodgdon Anderson, acknowledging indebtedness to Vermeule, tries to make the case that our interests in celebrities and in fictional characters are inherently analogous.

  78. 78.

    McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 18.

  79. 79.

    Jackson, “Questioning Interdisciplinarity,” 319 and 228.

  80. 80.

    Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” 338.

  81. 81.

    Leader and O’Neill, eds, Shelley: The Major Works, 681 (cited note 21).

  82. 82.

    Eva M. Dadlez, What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 5.

  83. 83.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, x.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., x, 16, and 17.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 201.

  86. 86.

    “Cells that Read Minds?,” cited in note 64.

  87. 87.

    Jackson, “Questioning Interdisciplinarity,” 331.

  88. 88.

    On the nonidentity of mind and brain, see Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Colin McGinn’s pieces in the New York Review of Books: 58.5 (March 24, 2011), 60.5 (March 21, 2013), 60.12 (July 11, 2013), and 61.7 (April 24, 2014); and Alan G. Gross and Joseph E. Harmon, Science from Sight to Insight: How Scientists Illustrate Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 118–20.

  89. 89.

    Orr, “Fooled by Science,” New York Review of Books 58.13 (August 18, 2011), <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/david-brooks-fooled-by-science/?page=1>, last accessed August 15, 2015.

  90. 90.

    Anthony Grafton, “Can the Colleges Be Saved?,” New York Review of Books 59.9 (May 24, 2012), 22–24, esp. 23. Grafton is probably thinking of Franco Moretti’s recent work, as in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). Readers who think that Grafton is indulging in parody should take a look at Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J. Kruger, Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

  91. 91.

    Vermeule, Why Do We Care?, 16.

  92. 92.

    See Stanley Fish, “Anti-Professionalism,” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 215–46.

  93. 93.

    Flesch, Comeuppance, ix and 1.

  94. 94.

    S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on “King Lear” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). I take “old wine in new bottles” from an endorsement on the back cover of Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). The phrase hardly requires quotation marks, but the overspecified provenance allows me to express my admiration for Crane’s book, which displays many of the same qualities as Comeuppance.

  95. 95.

    Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Presentation,” The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903), 1:97–111, esp. 102–03.

  96. 96.

    See Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2005), 172–175.

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Pechter, E. (2016). Shakespeare Studies and Consciousness. In: Budra, P., Werier, C. (eds) Shakespeare and Consciousness. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_3

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