Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (review)

In Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory, Mary Thomas Crane undertakes an ambitious, multifaceted project. First, she attempts to show that "just as surely as discourse shapes bodily experience and social interactions shape the material structures of the brain, the embodied brain shapes discourse" (7). The insights of recent cognitive research allow her to offer a different kind of materialist criticism, one that discovers in the language of Shakespeare's plays "the complex and reciprocal processes by which culture and body form the self" (32). In her view, cognitive theory "may provide some help in getting around the current critical impasse between those who assume an author with conscious control over the text he produces and those who assume that cultural construction leaves little or no room for authorial agency" (16). By allowing for "more informed speculation about the role of the author within culture and the role of culture within the author's brain" (16), cognitive theory allows us, in a sense, to get inside Shakespeare's head. The difficulty of such an enterprise is obvious, but Crane notes that she does not seek "the impossible goal of reading Shakespeare's mind rather than his plays" (35). Instead she attempts to find, in the linguistic patterns of his drama and particularly in his spatial motifs and structures, "traces of a mind at work in the text" (35), so that his plays can be read "as products of a thinking author engaged with a physical environment and a culture" (4).

The innovative nature and theoretical possibilities of Crane's approach lead her to address a wide range of critical perspectives. Indeed, one of this book's great virtues is the breadth of learning that Crane brings to her subject as she carefully distinguishes the merits of cognitive reading from the strengths and weaknesses of other critical practices. In her opening chapter, "Shakespeare's Brain: Embodying the Author-Function," for example, she points out that current materialist criticism, in its zeal to "'deconstruct the Shakespeare myth,'" renders the author immaterial by attending only to cultural and discursive forces, and never to his individual physical existence (4-5). Cognitive science has shown in a number of ways that the structure of language reflects an individual body's interaction with its environment. Analysis of the use of color terms across cultures, for example, has overturned the assumption that meaning is entirely arbitrary and differential. A cognitive subject consequently looks very different from a subject constructed by a Lacanian, Derridean, or Foucauldian critic, all of whom rely on Ferdinand de Saussure's view of language as arbitrary and differential: "Cognitive subjects are not simply determined by the symbolic order in which they exist; instead, they shape (and are also shaped by) meanings that are determined by an interaction of the physical world, culture, and human cognitive systems" (12). Crane further differentiates her cognitive analysis of Shakespearean keywords from the work of critics ranging from C. S. Lewis and William Empson to Raymond Williams and, most recently, Patricia Parker.¹

Attention to keywords, in fact, represents the book's central organizing principle. After the opening chapter, the remaining six chapters each discuss a play and keywords in it, the network of historical changes and institutions that brought those keywords to Shakespeare's attention, and germane issues of theatrical practice that may have influenced Shakespeare's linguistic choices. The overarching trajectory that these chapters follow runs from Shakespeare's "depicting the body as it is contained within a cultural space" to his "representing the ways in which the self inhabits the body" (26), with Hamlet representing a transition point between these two constitutive elements of subjectivity.

In all of these chapters, Crane not only demonstrates an admirable command of each play's critical history but also maps out how cognitive theory can help refine psychoanalytic, new-historicist, and materialist readings...