Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne (review)

Raphael Lyne’s Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition is invested in efforts to regenerate a critical discourse of characterization in Shakespeare studies. To this end, it applies close-reading methods to an array of plays and sonnets: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, Othello, and Sonnets 126 through 130 (among others). Lyne’s readings emphasize Shakespeare’s uses of rhetoric as a means through which characters express moments of problem-solving and self-actualization, linking figuration, verse form, and sometimes even a self-conscious awareness of rhetoric itself to the copiously orating fictional minds of Helena, Imogen, Iago, Othello, and the speaking personae of the Sonnets. Appealing to early modern manuals of rhetoric for an understanding of how Shakespeare conceived of the relationships between figuration and thought-processing, Lyne highlights some of the contradictions inherent in Renaissance rhetoricians’ discussions of figuration.

These explorations constitute two out of the study’s three sets of major claims. The third targets problems of classification, especially the difficulty of placing and giving due priority to the rhetorical figure of synecdoche in today’s metaphor-driven discussions of rhetoric, cognition, and literature. Lyne’s interest in the psychological dimensions of character has led him to cognitive science and to cognitive linguistics in particular. From them, he finds that synecdoche “proves surprisingly suggestive given its undervaluation in rhetoric and literary criticism” (33). This is because “the part / whole dynamic is basic to how memory is seen to work by contemporary psychology. . . . Intuitively we know that our images of the world are sometimes generated from fragments—misrecognitions, for example, result when wholes are generated incorrectly from suggestive parts” (33). The book’s subsequent chapters move away from the case for the importance of synecdoche in developing a model of Shakespeare’s representation of fictional minds at work, but the linkage Lyne asserts here between rhetorical tropes and the reader’s/spectator’s experience of Shakespeare’s characters as cogitating, problem-solving, and expressing simulacra of human psychologies is sustained throughout.

Lyne begins his introduction with a consideration of the “‘pity, like a naked newborn babe’” passage from Macbeth (1.7.16–28), finding in this speech evidence for evaluating its simile as “a dazzling achievement from one angle, a tangled problem from another” (1, 3). Such moments of difficulty when characters grapple with concepts “deemed inherently and ultimately opaque” (3) require the work of rhetoric—here a term Lyne uses synonymously with “cognition” (3)—to enact the process of a psychologically realistic character arriving at new insight. The second chapter surveys some developments in metaphor studies, including aspects of the hybrid disciplinary field of cognitive linguistics. The third chapter offers a nearly stand-alone review of early modern rhetoric theory in the context of late Elizabethan literary praxis. The next four chapters return to character analysis based on the three plays and cluster of sonnets. (Along the way, the initial arguments pertaining to character analysis become somewhat subordinated to other problems, such as Lyne’s diagnosis of an over-reliance on metaphor in cognitive poetics at the expense of other tropes.) Lyne’s close readings investigate how characters’ dialogue and soliloquies “feature attempts to solve cognitive problems through rhetorical tropes” (131). These discussions are occasionally framed in terms of the characters displaying awareness that they themselves are deploying rhetoric in their thought-processing and are producing “dazzling poetry” (136) that sometimes violates the classificatory rule system of rhetoric (137). Sonnets 126, 127, 128, 129, and 130 are considered as a “sub-sequence” that “suggests the ways in which Shakespeare’s lyric poetry can, like his plays, bring poetic expression and intense, troubled thought into conjunction” (214).

Lyne’s conclusions at times seem broad given the expectation he creates earlier in the study that his focus on the mechanisms of metaphor within rhetoric will illuminate figurative characterization. Lyne’s analysis works best in its application to Iago’s temptation of Othello in Act 3, scene 3—a scene that indeed draws explicit...