Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending: Cognition, Creativity, Criticism by Michael Booth (review)

To Shakespeareans familiar with conceptual blending theory, pioneered nearly twenty years ago by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002), this book by Michael Booth offers a welcome contribution both to Shakespeare studies and to the modest-sized, interdisciplinary, and international fellowship of scholars working in the field of cognitive poetics. Cognitive poetics has frequently been deployed as a close-reading method for poetry, but its potential for more wide-ranging applications across other literary genres has long been evident to those attuned to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive linguistics, from which blending developed.

Booth is the first to take on the enormity of applying blending to the full range of Shakespeare's texts. As is to be expected, he offers readings across the traditional genres. He also crosses through what we might call thought-states that characterize key patterns of conceptual organization throughout Shakespeare's works: patterns that sometimes, but not always, correspond to genre. He titles his main chapters "Shakespeare's Stories," "Shakespeare's Wit," "Shakespeare's Poetry," and "Criticism and the Blending Mind." Recategorizing in this way allows Booth to address a broader-than-usual sample of Shakespeare's work, including twenty-eight plays, two verse narratives, and a handful of sonnets. Booth's approach also allows him to launch challenges to many critical orthodoxies, as I discuss further below.

Fauconnier and Turner developed blending using the language of "single-scope" and "double-scope" semantic framing. However, and as Booth notes, the diagrams they use to illustrate the emergent-feature "mappings" across "input" semantic domains have given some the very mistaken impression that blending theory describes a static process—a misunderstanding that Fauconnier and Turner have repeatedly attempted to correct (26). Booth has chosen not to use the trademark blending diagrams, offering in their place other kinds of images—lovely and exemplary color plates, including an intriguing London Underground map blended to form a map of "Greater Shakespeare" (16). These are effective illustrations, but they would have been enhanced and supplemented with the diagrams, which remain an indispensable tool for visualizing this complex theory of creativity.

Booth is still able to explain enough to make this study the most valuable application of blending to Shakespeare's texts to date, employing a method that narrows the gap between Shakespeare's three-hundred-year critical heritage and any approach to his works that would find its basis in science. Booth puts his arguments in dialogue with previous critics whose examinations of Shakespeare's composition processes have focused on specific mental efforts or effects and whose work arguably has some overlap with conceptual blending theory. Booth's scope is generous, and his regard for those earlier critics is warmly respectful. Among those he highlights are William Empson, Jean Howard, Hardin Craig, M. M. Mahood, Richard Moulton, A. D. Nuttall, Anne Barton, and Helen Vendler. With dialogue as his method, Booth revisits Shakespeare's plot-weaving and intersubjective, character-to-character mind-reading; his varieties of humor beyond bawdry and puns; his tendency toward the rampant semantic reframing that characterizes the prose as well as the verse of his plays; his experiments with rhetoric and with the English language that became his factory; and finally his game-driven approach to the Sonnets.

Regarding the last: according to Booth, the fundamental rules of Shakespeare's favorite linguistic-puzzle game are determined not by the ideas cascading in some apparently logical order through the fourteen lines but by the rhymes with which the poet, challenging himself, kick-starts each playful attempt at mastery over the form. This claim may make or break blending theory for Shakespeare scholars; yet skeptics should note that Booth develops it in close conversation with Helen Vendler (The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1997) and Brian Boyd (Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2012), recognizing how far these critics' arguments have already advanced...