For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre

Spring 2011 71 For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre Amy Cook It is true that I am a proselytizer for the work being done at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and the humanities; I can be found on college campuses shaking a copy of The Way We Think (2002) or How the Body Shapes the Mind (2006) and spreading the good word about the importance of deploying research from across the cognitive sciences to previously held beliefs about language and bodies onstage. My aims are not small and my opinions are not meek. There are questions about the great impact that language and performance has on an audience to which I still do not have the answer and yet find more exciting given research in the cognitive sciences. This essay, however, will not be a manifesto, nor will it present clear answers or bold claims. Working in an intersection requires a degree of caution. I know better than to let that metaphor go unquestioned: interdisciplinary inquiry need not be work and it need not be perilous. If, instead, I describe my project here as playing on the beachfront of theatre and performance studies, watching how the waves of research from the cognitive sciences come in and alter the shoreline, I may open up the field of play, rather than advancing an argument for a kind of work. This is not to suggest that the scholarship is lazy and noncommittal, rather that what I seek to do here is imagine the kinds of sandcastles that could be made on this beach here and now. What if, for example, research on emotions could show us how to rethink our moat building? What if the science of empathy changed how we understood the properties of sand? Research on emotions and empathy, the stock and trade of theatre, poses exciting new questions for the theory and practice of theatre and will shape, dissolve, and reconstitute how we understand what is staged. The Player blows Hamlet’s mind because he can cry and feel emotions for someone he doesn’t know as someone he isn’t: O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Amy Cook is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in the intersection of cognitive science (particularly cognitive linguistics, theories of embodied and embedded cognition, and empathy), and theories of performance and early modern drama. She has published Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and essays in Theatre Journal, TDR, SubStance, and several edited volumes. She was a Mellon Fellow in dramaturgy, directing, and dramatic literature at Emory University inAtlanta and received her Ph.D. at University of California, San Diego. 72 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That, from her working, all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?1 Who are we if our bodies, minds, and emotions can change, Proteus-like, so easily? For Hecuba. Further, who is it that is feeling and for whom? Hamlet’s almost chiasmatic formulation (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba”) creates this relational loop—Hecuba to Player and back again—that seems to Hamlet to contain no source for emotion. But the spectator of Shakespeare’s play—and Hamlet himself—is struck by the performance of emotion in Hamlet. Hamlet keeps commenting on the seeming of others, with the Player just being the most professional, drawing the spectator’s attention to the complicated performance of emotion by Hamlet in Hamlet. The plot, in fact, depends on an understanding of the emotion that does and does not cause action and delay in the play. There is a triangular relationship that is always in effect in performance: the character...