Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (review)

Arthur Kinney's Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment has great ambitions: to reconstruct what he calls the "cultural moment" of 1606, the first production of Macbeth, and to put that moment in dialogue with postmodern culture, principally recent revolutions in the computer and cognitive sciences. The result is both a learned source of information about Macbeth and Shakespeare—a database, Kinney would call it—and a provocative proposal for an historicist literary criticism modeled on hypertext.

To confront the problems involved in attempting to read Macbeth as members of its original audience might have experienced it, Kinney develops a promising methodology, which he explains at length in his first chapter, "Macbeth and the Cultural Moment." "[T]o know the culture deeply and widely at the originary moment of Macbeth," Kinney describes immersing himself in the culture of the period, reading (as far as possible) everything written, printed, or circulated between 1600 and 1606 (12-13). He puts the information found there in the context of his readings in recent literary criticism and historiography, plus neuroscience and computer science. He then arranges this immense learning into "lexias" or "strings of data" (35). He imagines what one audience member, thinking about a topic such as family or medicine, might bring to his or her experience of the play: contemporary events and controversies, recent printed books, social and economic institutions, other theatrical productions, popular traditions, new innovations, and so on in a potentially endless chain of associated ideas. One model for this method is hypertext, where a single intriguing word, phrase, image, or byte of information can invite a reader to "click" and follow a chain of electronic links. The other model is neuroscience's vision of the brain as a net of neurons, where each person arranges information in different chains or strings of brain cells, responding to a stimulus like a performance of Macbeth by using different, unique synapses. Kinney in turn makes these models analogous to early modern cognitive science and the Ramist method. Kinney himself refuses to tie these lexias into a single argument or reading of the play. Instead he proposes "a newly realized hermeneutics of indeterminacy" that is nonetheless firmly grounded in the varied perspectives available to the members of the original audience in its cultural moment (24). Kinney thus does not offer the chimera of original intent but rather the pleasures of discovering possible responses to the play in its original cultural moment.

The second chapter, "Cultural Practices," follows eighteen of these lexias, ranging from the Jacobean theater to James's royal politics, from Catholic and Protestant religious beliefs and practices to fears of witchcraft and social disorder. Reading each of these lexias leads to fascinating discoveries. For example, Kinney returns repeatedly to the Porter, giving a variety of responses that a member of the audience might have to this cultural figure and his speech. In one lexia, he presents the Porter as a figure taken from popular stereotypes of the alehouse, a place associated with "plots of treason and sedition," and then placed in Macbeth's "dysfunctional" household as the only servant who succeeds at his job (175 and 174). By using the Porter to link the politics and social structure of the household with that of the nation, Kinney suggests the rich associations that a single person's mind might have made as he or she experienced the play in the cultural moment of 1606. Each of these lexias gets its own section, jumping off from the previous one in some way: "Economic Lexias" to "Social Lexias" to "Lexias of Lineage and Honor" to "Military Lexias" to "Lexias of Family." At around two hundred pages, this chapter makes up the bulk of the book, far outweighing the rest. In this section, nonetheless, Kinney has intentionally kept his commentary to a minimum. He leaves it...