Abstract
Considering references to characters as shadows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its metatheatrical elements, Cook focuses on how Shakespeare’s plays make audiences aware of the construction of drama as an act that is aware of both the embodied condition of actors and the projected creation of characters. Character is an attribute that requires comprehension if drama is to be in any way coherent, but such understanding arises out of simulations which are dependent upon culturally specific categories. After discussing character scholarship in the context of cognitive linguistics and embodied and distributed cognition, Cook, observing the rude mechanicals’ performance and multiple overlapping identities, argues that such complex cognitive artifacts create narrative gaps that can be fruitfully analyzed in the context of consciousness and audience experience.
Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook. (3.2.347)
If we shadows have offended
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumb’red here . . . (5.1.423-5)
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Notes
- 1.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition.
- 2.
I thank the Indiana University graduate students in my Cognitive Approaches to the Arts and Humanities seminar, Sp. 2014 for their weekly inspiration on issues of character and celebrity. In particular, I thank Sara Taylor for helping me make sense of shadows.
- 3.
In the Chorus’ first speech in Henry V he apologizes for the mere actors, the “unraised spirits,” that have dared to tell such an important story. He goes on to argue that perhaps these “ciphers” can be part of an epic story just as the zeros that follow a one can make up a million. See Amy Cook, “The Narrative of Nothing: The Mathematical Blends of Narrator and Hero in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Blending and the Study of Narrative, eds Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 343–65.
- 4.
Cited in Ellen Spolsky, “Making ‘Quite Anew’ Brain Modularity and Creativity” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2010), 84–102, esp. 93.
- 5.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), xviii.
- 6.
Terence Hawkes, “Telmah,” Shakespeare & the Question of Theory, eds Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 310–32.
- 7.
In Myths of Renaissance Individualism, John Jeffries Martin looks at how the Renaissance viewed the self, arguing against both Burckhardt, who saw the Renaissance as the birth of the individual from the group, and Greenblatt, who saw the self as a cultural artifact fashioned from social forces. Martin would like a more complicated view, one that sees multiple models of identity during the period. Like Hawkes, he calls attention to the perspective of the researcher: “when we think about the history of Renaissance identities, we tend to hold them up as mirrors to ourselves, and what we see depends almost entirely upon where we stand” (7). While he admits that his analysis is also situated from a perspective, he hopes to remove the teleological viewing of the Renaissance as the birth of who ever we think we are. John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Katharine (Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See also Katharine, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
- 8.
For more on consciousness studies, philosophy of mind, and different explanations, see Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind–Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1991); David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); and Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), among others. While each of these authors has slightly different theories on consciousness, all of them are attempting to place the philosophy of mind in conversation with the contemporary science of the brain.
- 9.
Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.
- 10.
Bert States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xiv.
- 11.
Ibid., 18.
- 12.
There are a few important theories on the perception of character in the theater that I will only point to here. Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001) argues that each performance is in some ways ghosted by prior performances, by the memories of its audience. Joseph Roach talks about surrogacy, effigy, and the power of “It” in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996) and It (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Bruce McConachie’s approach in Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) is similar to Amy Cook, “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” Substance 35.2 (2006), 83–99.
- 13.
Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), esp. Chapter 2.
- 14.
Theory of Mind came from attempting to understand the problem of other minds: how do we understand that others can hold false beliefs, that others can think and feel different from us? Simon Baron-Cohen argues that it is the deficit of a Theory of Mind that constitutes autism. Theory of Mind is generally studied through a number of tests, such as the “false-belief” task, wherein children are told a story about a hidden marble (or candy) and where an unknowing friend will look for the marble. See Alvin I. Goldman, “Imitation, Mind Reading, and Simulation,” eds S. Hurley and N. Chater, Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 79-94; and Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
- 15.
Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness,” Narrative 11.3 (2003), 270–91, esp. 271. See also Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
- 16.
While I find Zunshine’s reading of Woolf incredibly persuasive and I agree about the power of serially embedded mental states in the perception of fiction, I am skeptical of Theory of Mind applications in literary and theatre studies. There seems to be a divide among those of us using cognitive science research in understanding the humanities between Theory of Mind and more embodied approaches. As David Herman recently articulated at the 2nd Annual Cognitive Futures Conference in Durham, UK, Theory of Mind suggests that we generate mental representations (of some kind or another) about the mental states of others and that this can reify the Cartesian dualism that many cognitive scientists have been trying to escape. If we are generating these mental representations, where are they? Where might we find evidence of these theories of minds? Further, as Barbara Dancygier pointed out at the same conference, the idea of Theory of Mind comes from psychological “false belief” tests and do not necessarily support the kind of mental state reasoning that fiction encourages.
- 17.
Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–20, esp. 3.
- 18.
Leanore Lieblein, “Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Early Modern Character,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 117–38, esp. 118.
- 19.
Ibid., 123.
- 20.
See Michael Quinn, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly 22 (1990), 154–61, esp. 155.
- 21.
Robert Weimann, “The Actor-Character in ‘Secretly Open’ Action: Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 177–196, esp. 180. In “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” I explore the moment in Hamlet when Hamlet jokes about the “nothing” between Ophelia’s legs. I argue that such a moment unveils the boy actor who indeed did have something between his legs and that provides titillation and a cognitive work out. See Amy Cook, “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” Substance 35.2 (2006), 83–99.
- 22.
Paul Yachnin and Myrna Wyatt Selkirk, “Metatheater and the Performance of Character in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 139–57, esp. 142.
- 23.
Ibid., 151.
- 24.
Jean Paul Sartre, Sartre On Theatre (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 165-66.
- 25.
Keith Oatley, “Simulation of Substance and Shadow: Inner Emotions and Outer Behavior in Shakespeare’s Psychology of Character,” College Literature 33.1 (Winter 2006), 15–33, esp. 29-30.
- 26.
Cited in Peter Stockwell, Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 58.
- 27.
Todd Oatley, “Simulation of Substance and Shadow,” 22. While I share Oatley’s understanding of fiction as productive, I am unconvinced by the strong simulation claim that readers or spectators simulate the emotional experience of the characters.
- 28.
Mary Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 141 and 142.
- 29.
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 208.
- 30.
Richard J. Gerrig and David N. Rapp, “Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact,” Poetics Today 25:2 (Summer 2004), 265–81, esp. 272.
- 31.
Ibid., 272-273.
- 32.
Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton, “The Construction of Literary Character: A View from Cognitive Psychology,” Style 24 (Fall 1990), 380–91.
- 33.
For a brilliant discussion of Shakespeare’s theater as a site of distributed and situated cognition, see Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 34.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic, 1999), 5.
- 35.
Ibid., 271 and George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 19.
- 36.
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 267.
- 37.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16.
- 38.
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 30–1.
- 39.
Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 271.
- 40.
The container image schema is discussed by Lakoff and Johnson, Lakoff and Turner, and Johnson. For more on the projection of this image schema to an understanding of the self, see Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Text and Performance Through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 41.
Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2004), 2.
- 42.
Michael L. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” Artificial Intelligence 149 (2003), 101-102. Lawrence Barsalou’s influential article “Grounded Cognition” also uses the chair as an example of something the understanding of which is “grounded” in our experience with chair, not recalled mentally as a disembodied encyclopedia entry. See Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008), 617–45.
- 43.
Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” 102.
- 44.
Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 93.
- 45.
Ibid., 95.
- 46.
Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46.
- 47.
For an analysis of the conceptual integration network involved in Hamlet’s “mirror held up to nature,” including a discussion of the personification of Virtue at work in the text, see Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 48.
Riverside, 259.
- 49.
Louis A. Montrose, “A Kingdom of Shadows,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 224.
- 50.
Ibid., 229.
- 51.
Ibid., 234.
- 52.
Ibid., 232.
- 53.
Ibid., 236.
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Cook, A. (2016). King of Shadows: Early Modern Characters and Actors. 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_5
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