2001 Annual Grant Issue
Michael Torrey: Kast Grant Report
Shakespeare Study

What's in a brain? I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about this question, but not in the ways that I had originally anticipated. When I applied for a Kast grant this past January, I envisioned three months devoted to work on two essays, both of which began, a long time ago, as chapters in my dissertation. The first essay is on Shakespeare's Macbeth, the second one is on Othello, and each represents an attempt to place its respective play within a historical context that helps explain why Shakespeare wrote the play in the way that he did. (In Macbeth, the issue that interests me is the dangerous nature of the human imagination; with Othello, the issue is paranoia about the perils of male friendship.) After l learned that I had received a Kast grant, however, an unexpected thing happened: the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, Gail Kern Paster, asked me to write a book review for her journal. Although I know Professor Paster personally, having first met her when I was in graduate school and having more recently participated in a seminar that she ran at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., I was surprised by her request: reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly are often written by senior scholars in Shakespearean and early modern studies, and I don't fit this profile. I decided to write the review, however, partly because I didn't think I should say no (it was Shakespeare Quarterly, after all!), and partly because the subject of the book interested me, but also because I thought the experience of writing a book review would be worthwhile. Little did I know how this task would alter the course of my summer.

My work took a different shape than I had anticipated for another reason as well: on June 1, my wife, Beth Shapiro, gave birth to our first child, Zoe. Of course, I knew that Beth was pregnant when I applied for the grant in January and thus knew that we would have a baby to take care of during the summer. I also knew—or thought that I knew—that having your first child is a life-altering event, one that forces you to restructure radically your day-to-day routines and work habits. Like many first-time parents, however, "knowing" such truths, in the sense of having them in my brain, and actually experiencing them proved to be two very different things. I am happy to report that Beth and I managed to balance the demands of parenting with the demands of scholarship relatively well, but I also have to confess that cloistering myself in research libraries and our third-floor study proved to be more difficult than I had imagined!

The book that I reviewed is Mary Thomas Crane's Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Until recently an English professor at Boston College, Crane now teaches at the University of Virginia. Critiquing her work was a somewhat daunting task, not only because she is a Harvard Ph.D. and a well-established scholar (she has published numerous articles and a previous book), but also because in this book she takes an innovative and potentially groundbreaking approach to Shakespearean drama. As her subtitle indicates, she applies recent findings in cognitive theory—a discipline that attempts to define the actual workings of the human brain by combining neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy of mind—to Shakespeare's plays, in an effort to discern in them, as she puts it, "traces of a mind at work" (35). While this description may not make her project sound particularly groundbreaking—after all, don't all literary scholars attempt to discover authors' thoughts in the texts that they wrote?—her use of cognitive theory is actually quite unusual. For roughly the first three quarters of the twentieth century, most literary critics took for granted the assumption that authors controlled the language that they used and carefully shaped the meanings of their texts; debate sometimes focused on the extent to which one could uncover an author's intentions (hence the coining of the phrase "the intentional fallacy"), but criticism generally viewed authors as the undisputed masters of their own creations. Over the last thirty or so years, however, various theoretical schools of thought have challenged this assumption. Psychoanalytic critics have illuminated the shaping force that unconscious drives have over texts, deconstructionists have argued that language is inevitably unstable, while historicist and materialist critics have emphasized the formative power wielded by culture and ideology in the production of texts. The common thread in these developments is the stress on the author's lack of control, and most critics today try to show how various cultural forces determine what an author writes. Crane, however, wants to return to the notion of authorial agency, and she sees cognitive theory as the path to doing so. She does not ignore recent developments in literary scholarship; in fact, she is extremely well versed in them. But as she points out, no current theoretical approach focuses direct attention on the human brain, the physical organ that processes language and thus allows an author to write in the first place. Just as cognitive theory continually teaches us new things about how the brain apparently works, Crane claims, so can it show us how Shakespeare went about putting some of his plays together.

As one might expect, Crane's book occasionally includes some fairly dense accounts of cognitive theory's tenets, and since I knew virtually nothing about this discipline before reading her book, I sometimes found myself struggling to follow her discussion. Luckily, however, she does not restrict herself to cognitive analysis alone; instead, she combines it with historical and linguistic analysis, methods much more familiar to readers like me. To give just one example of how she works in the book, in her chapter on As You Like It, she explains how the words villain and clown, which are used throughout the play, were undergoing significant changes in meaning at the time that Shakespeare wrote. Initially villain was simply a status term denoting a person's place in the social hierarchy, but during the sixteenth century, a time of unprecedented social mobility, it became an ethical term used to describe an unprincipled or depraved person, regardless of social status. When the word clown first appeared in the sixteenth century, it had both status and ethical meanings (it described both a peasant and an uncouth, ignorant person), but it began to acquire the more technical, theatrical meaning of a comic actor within a dramatic company. The fact that Shakespeare uses villain and clown so often in As You Like It is no mistake, Crane argues, for two basic reasons. First, the play's plot deals directly with issues of social status and mobility and the tensions that they create. Second, Shakespeare's own company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, experienced its own version of upward mobility when it replaced its popular but unruly clown, Will Kemp, with a more subtle and sophisticated comic actor, Robert Armin, who became the first to play the role of Touchstone. Applying cognitive theory to these linguistic and historical elements of the play, Crane argues that Shakespeare expresses in As You Like It his ambivalence about social class and upward mobility. Most critics have viewed the play as either reproducing upper-class interests or as siding with its lower-class characters, but Crane takes a different approach. Following cognitive theorists who have shown that emotions constitute an integral part of human thought, rather than a hindrance to it, she analyzes the play's linguistic patterns and ideological dynamics in order to uncover its emotional subtexts. As You Like It, she demonstrates, reflects the "coexistence of competing interests" (71) in Shakespeare's mind as well as the regret that he felt over the exclusion of Will Kemp from the Chamberlain's Men for the sake of greater theatrical success.

I found the chapter that I just described one of the most convincing in the book because in it Crane delivers on her promise to show us, at least partially, Shakespeare's brain at work. I did not find all the chapters quite so persuasive, however, and this situation presented my own brain with the distinct challenge of writing a mixed review. In fact, I found the task of trying to separate the strong points from the weak far more difficult than I had expected, in part because the very act of writing a review at all proved to be much more taxing than I thought it would be. A reviewer has to maintain a careful balance between accurately summarizing a book's contents and judiciously identifying both its merits and failings, and criticism of a book, like all arguments, must be supported with evidence. Because Shakespeare's Brain is complex, well researched, and relies upon a body of knowledge unfamiliar to me, I discovered that the attempt to summarize its arguments in the space allotted for the review was challenging in its own right. I had to keep going back to the text, rereading significant portions of it and trying to figure out how I could encapsulate in a few sentences an interpretation that required thirty or more pages to present. Trying to decide what seemed persuasive and what didn't, moreover, meant more rereading and more careful thought, particularly because Crane sometimes discusses plays that I have not studied closely in quite a while. Consequently, throughout the writing of the review, I spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with my brain, asking why what seemed like such a simple task was taking me so long to accomplish. In the end, I finished the review—before my deadline, no less!—but when I did finish, I found that most of the summer was gone.

I did manage, however, to do some work on my Macbeth essay. As I mentioned above, I have long been interested in how Macbeth represents the imagination as a dangerous, seductive force within the human mind. When I first began research for this essay, I found, early on, a quotation that has stuck with me ever since. It comes from a treatise on the human emotions and their effect on the body and soul called The Passions of the Mind in General, written by Thomas Wright and published in 1604. In an otherwise unextraordinary description of how a nobleman might be overcome by his passions, Wright comments that

a man had need of an Astrolabe always, to see in what height or elevation his affections [passions] are, lest, by casting forth a spark of fire, his gunpowdered mind of a sudden be inflamed.

The humoral physiology that Wright and his contemporaries were familiar with viewed the mind as being highly susceptible to the effects of an unhealthy body, but rarely did they describe either in such volatile terms. Wright's phrasing here also has an uncanny ring to it, because "gunpowdered mind" inevitably conjures up the Gunpowder Plot, the conspiracy, discovered in 1605, to assassinate King James I by blowing up kegs of gunpowder hidden under Parliament while the king was delivering a speech to its members. Macbeth was written not long after the Gunpowder Plot was discovered and contains some unmistakable allusions to it, so when I first came upon Wright's quotation, I was struck by the vividness of his language, made a note of the strange coincidence of his using a phrase like "gunpowdered mind" before the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, and left it at that. Some friends who read an earlier version of my Macbeth essay, however, encouraged me to explore the possible connections between Wright's phrase, Macbeth, and early modern thinking about the imagination further, so my research goal this summer was to try to do so.

When I went to the Folger Shakespeare Library and began reading various texts related to the Gunpowder Plot, I discovered that commentaries on the Plot frequently stress the unimaginable nature of the crime. Just as we are currently struggling to understand how people could conceive of using airplanes as suicide weapons against civilian buildings, so in the early seventeenth century did the English struggle to fathom how a group of men could think up a plot to destroy the entire English government in one fell swoop. As Edward Coke, the Attorney General of England who tried the Gunpowder conspirators, said at the beginning of the trial, "when these things shall be related to posterity, they will be reputed matters feigned, not done." Despite Coke's stress on the incomprehensibility of the crime, however, it was clear that such acts could be imagined, that the human brain could produce such monstrous plans, and like an audience witnessing a performance of Macbeth, English citizens were left to ponder how the human mind is led to dream up, and then act upon, savagely violent crimes. Coke also described one of the indicted conspirators, Sir Everard Digby, as having "wander[ed] in the Labyrinth of your own idle conceits," a formulation that stresses the self-deluding action of Digby's imagination; later, he concluded that Digby had been "justly surprised by the rage and revenge of your own rash humors," a statement that defines Digby's crime as the byproduct of his disordered bodily fluids, the humors that were thought to determine the health of a person's body and mind. By reading further into the Gunpowder Plot, then, I discovered that commentators spoke about this crime in ways quite similar to the way Shakespeare writes about Macbeth's crimes: they see the crime as originating in a distempered body and a distorted, misleading imagination. Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of language about the body and its humors, and while innumerable critics have commented on the allusions to the Gunpowder Plot in the play, none have examined how early modern assumptions about the mind and body shaped both the contemporary understanding of the treasonous plan and Shakespeare's construction of his play. Now that I have had the time, thanks to the Kast grant program, to read further into this fascinating intersection of history and literature, I hope to work out the connection further. It's there in my brain, waiting to be written out in detail.