Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England (review)

Ellen Spolsky is on the side of the Image. Her epigraph cites Ben Jonson: 'Whosoever loves not Picture, is injurious to Truth: and all the wisdome of Poetry.' In Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England she explores the consequences of Reformation iconclasm from the perspective of cognitive literary and cultural theory. For Spolsky, the destruction of Catholic images and statues in England could not be compensated for by learning to read the Bible. The resulting 'cognitive hunger' was finally alleviated in the theatre by Shakespeare's intuitive understanding of how people think and feel. This was especially evident in the late tragicomedies, which adapt the mode of the Italian 'grotesque', offering spectacle, wonder, and the acceptance of 'unknowing'.

This brief summary is perhaps misleading. Spolsky's argument is complex and wide-ranging, drawing upon post-structuralist theory, research in physiology and psychology, new historicist insights, social and art history. She analyses Luther and Calvin's writings, Raphael's paintings, and Michelangelo's sculpture. In her model, cognition is 'embodied' or material. The brain has evolved structures which function in certain ways and together with environmental and social influences. Spolsky is most concerned with the role of vision and with 'natural human iconotropism – that is, the ability and even eagerness to learn from pictures and other visual representations' (p. 8). Her model has similarities with Arthur Kinney's neural networks and cultural webs in Shakespeare's Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaisssance Drama (2004).

Spolsky explains the impact of the English Reformation in terms of cognition, as 'a massive assault' (p. 26) on established brain networks of knowing and understanding (visual, aural, and kinetic) which had constructed religious experience and answered individual and communal needs. Learning previously was 'pictorial and analogical rather than verbal or syllogistic' (p. 36) so that reading was cognitively very different. The promotion of a 'text-based spirituality' (p.104) thus left many people with an enduring 'cognitive hunger'. The nature of the human cognitive system with its 'pragmatic, dynamic, and responsive … [rather than] platonic understanding of truth' (p. 116) also caused problems for the Reformers as they attempted to categorise images, define the eucharist, and establish 'an invariant literal meaning' for the Bible (p. 114).

Spolsky contends that the drama compensated to some degree for the Reformation. This is not an unusual claim; Louis Adrian Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt come to mind, although in contrast Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (1997), argues for the alignment of drama with the Reformers and the development of a new, Protestant way of seeing. The means of compensation identified by Spolsky is Shakespeare's adaptation of the Italian 'grotesque'. This style refers to images that break conventional rules by combining and flaunting heterogenous elements, evoking disorientation and delight. In Rome, the grotesque merged pagan/classical images and values with Christian ones – until the Council of Trent (1545) imposed boundaries between sacred and secular.

The grotesque, Spolsky suggests, appeals to the 'cognitive restlessness' of the brain (p. 150): the dynamic between the processes of 'categorization' and 'analogy, transformation, or blending' (p. 149) which underpins adaptability and creativity. The effect of the grotesque, as employed by Shakespeare in his late tragicomedies (Spolsky focuses on Cymbeline) was to feed the hunger for the divine left unsatisfied by the new religion (p. 129). In their 'extreme theatricality', improbable action, and providential resolutions, these plays offered their audiences something to see, feel, and marvel at: God's providence, visible and embodied. They set aside rational explanation to inspire an exercise of faith.

For Spolsky, culture has biological foundations. 'Cognitive cultural history' looks to 'the embodied structures and processes' of the brain behind artistic creativity and audience receptivity (p. 186). Like sacred imagery, secular art prepares minds for understanding and change through emotion. Art offers repeated, provisional solutions ('re-representations') to problems that are 'representationally hungry' (p. 172). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture these...