MY TITLE TAKES ITS INSPIRATION FROM Edwin Hutchins's 1995 study of maritime navigation, Cognition in the Wild. 1 At first glance, an analysis of nav-igation would seem to have little application to a study of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical practices, but Hutchins's book and the methodological assumptions on which it is predicated provide a powerful, flexible model for understanding the complexities and achievements of the early modern repertory theater. Using Hutchins's work and that of other cognitive anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers, I will argue that our understanding of the playing system, par-ticularly of the mnemonic demands that the repertory system made on its partici-pants, has been consistently distorted by a tendency to view cognition as individual rather than social, which has caused us to imagine the workings of complex group structures in mechanistic terms. In other words, we have mistakenly assumed that properties of the system as a whole must be possessed by each individual within it. Instead, as I shall argue, cognition is distributed across the entire system. This is not in any way to suggest that individual agency has no place. On the contrary, an environment as cognitively rich as the early modern theater is pre-cisely calculated to maximize individual contributions. To exemplify the difficulties that theater historians sometimes have with taking account of system, I begin with two recent books that discuss rehearsal practices in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods: Tiffany Stern's Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan and John C. Meagher's Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy. 2 In very different ways, both writers attempt to account for the cognitive demands that the repertory system imposed on early modern actors. Companies performed a stag-