Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle's Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (review)

Shakespeare and Cognition represents an ambitious attempt to connect culture and cognition through an examination of the objects encountered by early modern men and women in the theater and in everyday life. The book is made up of a theoretical introduction, entitled "Aristotle's Legacy," followed by four chapters, each discussing a set of objects (crowns, rings, bells, and wills), and a coda, "Shakespeare's Legacy."

The first chapter juxtaposes Aristotelian philosophy about sense formation with contemporary neuroscience, arguing that human beings selectively filter the environment to conform to preexisting habits of mind. "Knowledge begins with objects," writes Kinney, "and we learn to identify, characterize, and interpret by accumulating individual instances, by accumulation and by discernment" (3). Focusing on the primacy of sight in the sensorium, Kinney argues that much of so-called "thought" takes place outside of our conscious awareness and that we consistently confuse perception and conception: "We think we interpret consciously what we see much as anyone else would, when in fact we are experiencing the consequences, not the activities, of our brain's interpretation of selective data that reflects our own particular configurations of neurons and neural pathways" (20). To make this argument, Kinney marshals evidence from a number of areas: contemporary neuroscience, primarily drawn from John J. Ratey (not Ratney, as he is referred to throughout the book).¹ Kinney also examines evidence from the work of Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, and V. S. Ramachandran, among others; Aristotle's and Aquinas's commentary on the senses, especially vision; and early modern literature, especially Shakespeare's plays.

The range here is ambitious, but the effectiveness of these juxtapositions is undermined by Kinney's difficulty in clearly articulating the precise relationships he is positing among this diverse set of texts. For example, Kinney summarizes Ratey's account of memory formation in the brain. Ratey writes that the hippocampus operates like "'an intelligent collating machine . . . send[ing] various packets of information to other parts of the brain. It is a way station that hands out the pieces'" (23). Immediately following, Kinney asserts, "As a playwright, Shakespeare is as concerned with the pieces as with the configurations of them and the fact that such configurations may change over time" (23). He buttresses this claim with the example of changing associations of the concept of "will" in The Merchant of Venice. In what way are synaptic connections in the brain and a diverse array of cultural associations with an early modern concept the same "pieces"? It is very difficult to see how brain architecture illuminates Shakespeare's play here, except on a very broadly metaphorical level, despite Kinney's later point that props have "cognitive significance" (24). Indeed, through much of the book the word "cognitive" or "cognitively" is made to stand in for argumentation, as when Kinney writes: "Brutus cognitively transforms assassination into a holy sacrifice" (31); "Cognitively, crowns carried inescapably forceful meanings in Shakespeare's theater, whether they were seen or not" (32); "Cognitively, bells were both highly symbolic and commonplace" (84); "Leah's ring to Shylock was something special, cognitively something that produces deep pathos" (57). Ultimately, simply labeling these processes as "cognitive" sidesteps rather than elucidates the issues at hand.

To be sure, there is much that is valuable in the book. The chapters on the networks of associations evoked by crowns, bells, rings, and wills contain many valuable insights into the complex and sometimes ambiguous significance contemporaries assigned to these objects. Kinney's research yields many examples of the extraordinarily diverse range of meanings a seemingly simple object might evoke. For example, a bell might be associated with a church clock, the passing of the soul, the sacring bell in Catholic worship, festivity, changes in reign, the plague, or the Apocalypse itself. Kinney brings these associations convincingly to...