Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre

The Early Modern Body-Mind

Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, Evelyn Tribble, Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, Evelyn Tribble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134449286
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare's world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern 'body-mind' in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare's theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Re-cognising the Body-Mind in Shakespeare's Theatre
• 1 Proteus Agonistes: Shakespeare, Bacon, and the "Torture" of Nature
• 2 Plays, Playing, and Make-Believe: Thinking and Feeling in Shakespearean Drama
• 3 Warmth and Affection in 1 Henry IV: Why No One Likes Prince Hal
• [ ... First Link ... ] Subjectivity and the Mind-Body: Extending the Self on the Renaissance Stage
• 4 "Some Fury Pricks Me On": Satanic Thinking in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness
• 5 Mental Bodies in Much Ado About Nothing
• [ ... Second Link ... ] The Unbearable Permeability of Bodies and Minds
• 6 "Make Me Not Sighted Like the Basilisk": Vision and Contagion in The Winter's Tale
• 7 Singularity in The Winter's Tale
• [ ... Third Link ... ] Seeing the Spider: Cognitive Ecologies in The Winter's Tale
• 8 "There's Magic in The Web of It": Skin, Mind, and Webs of Touch in Othello
• 9 Coriolanus's Blush
• [ ... Fourth Link ... ] The Play of Time in Cognition
• 10 Altered States: Hamlet and Early Modern Head Trauma
• 11 Cogito Ergo Theatrum: Redistributing Cognition on the Early Modern Stage
• 12 The Belly-Mind Relationship in Early Modern Culture: Digestion, Ventriloquism, and the Second Brain
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index