In recent years, scholars of theatre and performance have been drawn to the sciences, and particularly to the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science, which offer intriguing opportunities to expand our research inquiries. As with any new interdisciplinary venture, we must answer the questions of why and how we might stitch these disparate fields together. Amy Cook's Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science, and Evelyn B. Tribble's Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre offer cogent, well-researched, and well-written answers to these questions.
Cook looks to cognitive linguistics, specifically conceptual blending theory (CBT), to examine the trope of the mirror that runs through Shakespeare's Hamlet. While much of what she says could be supported with more traditional critical methodologies, she successfully demonstrates the usefulness of adding cognitive linguistics to our scholarly toolbox. Tribble's project, on the other hand, demands a cognition-based approach, as she uses the distributed cognition model to investigate how early modern acting companies managed the mental labors required by their work. Both authors go beyond simply reporting and explaining relevant scientific research—an all-too-common flaw in such endeavors—and use this material actually to shape and inform their analyses.
In Shakespearean Neuroplay, Cook is as concerned with offering a methodology as she is with proving an argument; as she puts it in her opening chapter, she hopes “to provide the reader with a method of inquiry, rather than just the results of my inquiry” (2). As a result, her book at times reads like a series of related essays, rather than a single thesis-driven monograph. Chapters 1 and 2 do most of the heavy lifting of familiarizing the reader with previous scholarship on cognitive linguistics and on the intersections between art and cognitive science; these chapters also articulate the specific theoretical models on which Cook relies throughout the rest of the book. For novice readers, Cook does a good job of communicating in accessible language the scientific concepts with which she works. She first explains George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on metaphor, and then moves on to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's CBT, which provides the basis for much of the rest of the book. If metaphor is the mapping of one concept onto another, blending is the mixing of the two concepts to form a third hybrid. In explaining the theory, Cook draws not only on examples from Shakespeare (such as her expansion of Chris Hassel Jr.'s comparison of Richard's and Richmond's speeches in Richard III), but also on examples drawn from children's literature, today's politics, and familiar expressions such as “to see is to know.”
In Chapter 3, Cook turns to Hamlet's “mirror held up to nature,” which she reads as the play's organizing structure. Here, she offers the reader a historical primer on the mirror in early modern Europe, including the use of mirrors in art and literature, in an attempt to analyze what Shakespeare's original audiences would have understood by “mirror.” Cook makes the case that mirrors were multivalent objects for the play's original audiences, appearing in a variety of forms and contexts, and that the play makes use of this through positioning Hamlet's “mirror” as a blend of several conceptions of “mirrorness.”
Chapter 4 is the book's most methodologically oriented chapter, as Cook endeavors to demonstrate how cognitive linguistics can be leveraged for both textual and performance analysis. The performance side of the chapter focuses on a prison production of Act 5 of Hamlet, as presented on This American Life. Cook's inclusion of interviews with the inmate playing Horatio nicely demonstrates the sense of self and linguistic perspective Cook found in the dramatic text. This attention to performance continues in Chapter 5, in which Cook argues that CBT can usefully inform the production, and not simply the critical analysis, of Hamlet. While I found this argument ultimately unconvincing—Cook fails to make clear how her sample productions are (even unknowingly) applying cognitive science in their staging—she does masterfully demonstrate how useful cognitive linguistics can be in discussing production in a more specific and concrete manner. In her final chapter, Cook again looks at performance, discussing the Wooster Group's Hamlet as an example of the larger point that the play destabilizes and reconceptualizes our understandings of selfhood and cognition. How we think is called into question both by the play and, increasingly, by modern science.
Cook concludes her book with a heartfelt and compelling argument for the importance of a harmonization of art and science on both sides of the disciplinary divide. Shakespearean Neuroplay has some failings, such as the aforementioned problems in Chapter 5, as well as an inconsistent integration of cognitive science and critical analysis, but I heartily agree with Cook's closing remarks. In such an inchoate field, the book's shortcomings are forgivable, particularly given Cook's successful demonstration of the potential value of such interdisciplinary projects.
Tribble's Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre is far more focused, as she addresses “a seemingly simple question” (1): given the performance conditions of early modern acting companies (the number of different plays produced each week, the frequent addition of new plays, a lack of centralized authority, and a stripped-down rehearsal process), how did the actors manage their cognitive workloads? Tribble begins by claiming that, to best answer this question, one must look at the entire production system, rather than attempt to locate the cognitive work of memorizing and staging each play entirely within the brains of the actors; to do so, she turns to the concept of distributed cognition, and to the related concepts of situated cognition and extended mind. All three of these are based on the notion “that cognition is embedded within and extended out into the world” (3), which can be thought of as an expansion of the neuroscientific revelation that our normal thinking process is not confined to the space between our ears, but involves the entire system of our bodies. Distributed cognition takes this revelation a step farther and posits that—especially in high-stakes, highly structured pursuits such as theatre—the cognitive system includes not just our brains and bodies, but also the other people around us, and our physical environments. Like Cook, Tribble also has the larger goal of facilitating “two-directional communication between the sciences and the humanities” (7), using her question of “how they did it” as a theatrically situated test case for the distributed cognition model, and thereby benefiting both fields.
Tribble neatly structures her book so that each chapter addresses one of the three constituent parts of her system: Chapter 1 discusses the physical environment and artifacts of the theatrical workplace, Chapter 2 analyses the bodies, voices, and minds of the actors themselves, and Chapter 3 deals with the theatre's social component. One of the key elements of Tribble's study, which threads through all three parts of the text, is her recognition, following Roslyn L. Knutson, that the theatrical playing space was a working space and that theatre companies were businesses.
In Chapter 1, Tribble draws on Lucy Suchman's research on the cognitive interaction between workers and workspaces, and David Kirsh's suggestion, in “The Intelligent Use of Space,” that space is arranged and used in such a way that choices are simplified, attention is effectively directed, and the need for computation is decreased. Tribble suggests that the physical structure of stage doors, as well as the standard conventions for assignment of exit and entrance locations, could have minimized the cognitive burden on actors, a strategy Tribble refers to as “cognitive thrift” (8). She moves on to analyze the plots, playbooks, and parts used by early modern theatre companies, discussing how information was distributed among them, thereby restricting and managing the information presented to company members. Part of Tribble's concern with the entire cognitive system is the context: in spreading information around in this way, the plots/playbooks/parts system provides only that information which is situationally necessary. This situational awareness is a concept to which she returns in later chapters.
In Chapter 2, Tribble discusses the actor himself—specifically, his “accent” and “action,” or his delivery of lines and the movement of his body. She points out that while the formal structure of verse aids in memorization, it also allows for “fluent forgetting” (21), or for the unobtrusive substitution of new words and lines for forgotten ones. Here, Tribble spends far more time providing examples of texts that offer opportunities for fluent forgetting than she does addressing how such substitutions are actually made. I found myself, throughout the chapter, questioning this oversight. Tribble's second chapter also includes an interesting, but oddly placed, discussion of how memory effects could have produced the variations of Hamlet's “bad quarto.” She devotes the rest of the chapter to elaborating the connections among gesture, memory, and the embedded gestures of playtexts, paying special attention to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.
Chapter 3 focuses on the training of young actors. Tribble first dissects the plays for depictions of novice and amateur actors to demonstrate that the key distinctions of early modern theatrical expertise are the recognition that verbatim line learning is not a crucial task of acting (a point also demonstrated by Chapter 2's discussion of fluent forgetting), and the ability to cope with contrary audiences. After presenting our current knowledge on theatrical apprenticeship (drawing primarily on the work of David Kathman to do so), Tribble returns to her examination of the playtext, pointing to its inclusion of devices and tactics for on-the-job training of younger actors. These include, for example, simpler cues, attaching characters to a smaller set of potential scene partners, and building in more repetition across lines, all of which reduce the cognitive load of novices, thereby freeing up mental resources to develop situational awareness. Finally, in her conclusion, Tribble turns to current “original practices” companies to test further her system-based model of “cognitive ecology.” She finds that as some parts of the early modern cognitive ecosystem cannot be recreated with twenty-first-century actors, various changes must be made to that system in order to maintain a low cognitive workload.
Minor flaws in her second chapter aside, Tribble has produced a remarkable book, one that is well written and compelling. The science she employs is well explained and absolutely integral to her project. In an interdisciplinary area where many scholars are still trying to figure out effective approaches and goals, Cognition in the Globe presents a successful model, demonstrating that such interdisciplinary work can be of profit to all its component disciplines.
