Abstract
In the last two chapters, I moved from the relationship between cognitive linguistics and rhetoric to the relationships between cognitive linguistics and practical issues of staging. This chapter argues that Shakespeare’s troubling of the mirror blend offers a reconceptualization of cognition and intellection: how do we know what we think we know? In the century following Hamlet, philosophers (who we refer to retrospectively as scientists) were asking and positing new answers to that question. Sir Francis Bacon, Renè Descartes, and Sir Robert Boyle changed how data were gathered and examined; they understood knowledge as mediated and thus changed the tools used for seeing and the performance of their results. From realizing he can use the play to catch the conscience of the king to instructing the players how to enact this story, Hamlet’s preoccupation with testing and exploring his own epistemology circulates around the mirror held up to nature. The research on mirror neurons in the brain provides exciting new ways to think about perspective, imitation, and the self; it also provides some evidence that our metaphoric conception of TO SEE IS TO KNOW has a literal corollary at the neural level. I believe that what we do as theater practitioners and academics—indeed as humans—is move from question to question, not focusing on the answer, but on what is the next question posed by the results of the last asking.
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Notes
Mary Thomas Crane, “The Physics of King Lear: Cognition in a Void,” In Shakespearean International Yearbook (ed. Graham Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop and Mark Turner, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 3.
Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix, edited by Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Now! (London: Continuum, 2007), 7.
See Naomi Rakotnitz, “‘It Is Required/You Do Awake Your Faith’: Learning to Trust the Body through Performing The Winter’s Tale,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. F. Elizabeth Hart and Bruce McConachie (New York: Routledge, 2006).
She argues that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale displays the uncertainty of knowledge and the necessity of empathy and faith and through this reminds us of the interdependence of body and mind. Drama, according to Rakotnitz, provides “opportunities to practice and refine the complex and subtle ways through which we may better understand one another and reach for truth(s) in our lives” (125) and “(re)creates the trust of which philosophy deprives us” (128). Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World ( Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001) posits that skepticism in the early modern period was helpful, or—as evidenced in the many paintings of the Incredulity of Thomas and in Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and Othello—not disbelief but rather a comfort with the ambiguity of knowledge. In “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff,” Substance 94/95 (2001), she sees narrative as presenting a way of understanding fact and fiction as forever together and informing each other, “The usefulness of narrative, then, is not in its production of any one moral or another; it’s in the constant possibility of drawing new inferences from the old texts” (195).
F. Elizabeth Hart connects perspective to embodied realism in her essay “Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn,” Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. F. Elizabeth Hart and Bruce McConachie (New York: Routledge, 2006).
See also: Lisa Zunshine, Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
She argues that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale displays the uncertainty of knowledge and the necessity of empathy and faith and through this reminds us of the interdependence of body and mind. Drama, according to Rakotnitz, provides “opportunities to practice and refine the complex and subtle ways through which we may better understand one another and reach for truth(s) in our lives” (125) and “(re)creates the trust of which philosophy deprives us” (128). Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World ( Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001)
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 283.
Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1982), 252.
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 128.
See my discussion in Chapter five of Bruce McConachie’s application of theories of vision in Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
For a series of optical illusions to find—and map the size and location of—your blindspot, you can go to Brynn Mawr’s Serendipity Web site http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspotl.html. Or see Eye and Brain by Richard L. Gregory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Quill, 1998), 127–57.
For V. S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran’s accessible and provocative study of this research, see “How Blind Are We? We have eyes, yet We Do Not See” Scientific American, May 18, 2005. Accessed online October 3, 2007.
Bruce Smith, “Hearing Green,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 166.
Brian MacWhinney, “How Mental Models Encode Embodied Linguistic Perspectives,” in The Grounding of Cognition, ed. D. Pecher and R. Zwaan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.
See Brian MacWhinney, “The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective Taking,” in D. Pecher and R. Zwaan, eds., Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 172.
Evelyn Tribble, “Distributing Cognition in the Globe,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2005), 135.
Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix, Edited by Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Now! (London: Continuum, 2007), 73.
Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Francois Ric, and Silvia Krauth-Gruber, “Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” in Emotion and Consciousness, ed. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal and Piotr Winkielman (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 26.
Jean Decety’s work on empathy and nocioception has been tremendously influential. See Decety, “To What Extent Is the Experience of Empathy Mediated by Shared Neural Circuits?” Emotion Review (2010): 1–4; “Dissecting the Neural Mechanisms Mediating Empathy and Sympathy,” Emotion Review (in press). Rhonda Blair incorporates his work into her cognitive interpretation of performance in “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” TDR 53, no. 4 (2009): 92–103
Perrine Ruby and Decety, “How Whould You Feel Versus How Do You Think She Would Feel? A Neuroimaging Study of Perspective-Taking with Social Emotions,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16, no. 6 (2004): 988–99.
Eve Sweetser, “Blended Spaces and Performativity,” Cognitive Linguistics 11, no. 3/4 (2000): 312.
For more on what mirror neurons are and the research suggesting the presence of a mirror neuron system in humans, see Imitation, Human Development, and Culture, vol. 2, ed. Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language ed. Maxim I. Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002). Jean Decety, among others, has cautioned against conflating the mirror neuron system with the shared neural substrate. See Decety, “Dissecting the Neural Mechanisms Mediating Empathy and Sympathy,” Emotion Review (in press).
Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language ed. Maxim I. Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002). Jean Decety, among others, has cautioned against conflating the mirror neuron system with the shared neural substrate. See Decety, “Dissecting the Neural Mechanisms Mediating Empathy and Sympathy,” Emotion Review (in press).
I explored the implications of mirror neuron research previously in “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Approach to Theatre,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007) and “Wrinkles, Wormholes, and Hamlet: The Wooster Group’s Hamlet as a Challenge to Periodicity,” TDR 53, no. 4 (2009). Both Rhonda Blair and Bruce McConachie have also written about mirror neurons. See McConachie, Engaging Audiences and Blair, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” TDR 53, no. 4 (2009).
Donald C. Freeman, “Othello and the ‘Ocular Proof,’” in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Mark Turner (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 59.
Quoted in Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13.
Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 114.
Michael Feingold, “The Wooster Group Plays Someone Else’s Hamlet … And Both Teams Lose,” The Village Voice, 30 October 2007. A version of this section on The Wooster Group Hamlet was first published in TDR.
Robert Brustein, “More Masterpieces,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 90 30, no. 3 (2008): 5.
For an exciting discussion of the application of “wormholes” to literary scholarship, see Linda Charnes, “Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-Periods from the Future,” Early Modern Culture, an Electronic Seminar; special Issue: Timely Meditations (2007) and Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “Politics and the Classics,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 8529, no. 1 (2007): 97.
Steven Leigh Morris, “Wooster Group’s Hamlet; Alex Lyras’ The Common Air: All the World’s a Remix,” LA Weekly, February 4, 2008.
Michael Feingold, “The Wooster Group Plays Someone Else’s Hamlet…And Both Teams Lose,” The Village Voice, October 30, 2007.
Ben Brantley, “Looks It Not Like the King? Well, More Like Burton,” New York Times, 2007.
Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 44.
See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969) wherein he describes the liminal nature of ritual in that it transforms someone from one place or phase to the next. Liminal people, half way between one state or social status and another, are reduced to nothing, passive, humble, and near naked (95–96); they are between two states and yet share properties with neither.
See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper, 1974), 300. Following on Edwin Hutchins theory of Material Anchors (wherein a physical object contains information regarding its history, meaning, or use), Fauconnier and Turner understand a church or grave as a blend of location with an inaccessible entity such as the divine or the dead (207). See Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Edward S. Casey, The Eate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 110.
See also Ellen Spolsky’s cognitive historical study of early modern art and theater Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001) or her earlier Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 284.
Amy Cook and Bryan Reynolds, “Comedic Law: Projective Transversality, Deceit Conceits, and the Conjuring of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus in Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass” in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, ed. Bryan Reynolds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 92.
For more on Galileo’s experiments and his attempts to make better observers out of his contemporaries, see Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Reading through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 192–221.
Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning, (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008), 119.
Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14, no. 4 (1984): 484.
Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 4.
Robert P. Crease, The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 15.
Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6. 77. Ibid., 19.
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© 2010 Amy Cook
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Cook, A. (2010). Past/Future, Microscope/Telescope, Performance/Science. In: Shakespearean Neuroplay. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113053_6
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