1.1 Mindreading in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.—Macbeth (1.4.11–12)
When King Duncan makes his claim about incomprehensible faces, he has just been betrayed by Cawdor, “a gentleman on whom [Duncan] built / An absolute trust” (1.4.13–14). Macbeth then enters in the middle of Duncan’s lines and begins to dissemble his own “black and deep desires” for Scotland’s crown (1.4.51). Duncan clearly has difficulty reading the minds of others. But Duncan is wrong. Such an art exists: Shakespeare’s art links the face and the mind through the audience’s observation of dramatic characters. The “art to find the mind’s construction in the face” is a pair of techniques for reading minds, ones that Duncan fails to use but that Shakespeare employs in his dramaturgy and displays to his audiences. Mindreading—the process of ascribing mental states to others—operates via inference and imagination, and tracking these processes in Shakespeare’s plays shows how misreading and misunderstanding drive Shakespeare’s plots.
In contemporary cognitive science, the analysis of the minds of others is known as mindreading or theory of mind. A commonplace mental task, mindreading has nothing to do with telepathy; it is the attribution of mental states to others. Mental states include sensations, emotions, beliefs, desires, and decisions. To look at another person (or character) and think, “He’s acting a little crazy” or “She wants to understand her role” is to mindread. (The accuracy of these attributions is another issue entirely.) This attribution can occur pre-consciously—and must, if one’s day-to-day social interactions are to run smoothly—but can also be performed consciously and quite meticulously. Since 1978, when David Premack and Guy Woodruff published an article entitled, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?”,1 scholars have applied theories of mindreading to such varied subjects as childhood development, autism, the philosophy of mind, mirror neuron research, and literary studies.
Humans have been mindreading one another for quite some time: according to Jonathan Haidt, about 600,000 years.2 Michael Tomasello calls our ability to read one another and to share intentions the evolutionary step that created human society.3 Mindreading is, as Haidt puts it, our “Rubicon” moment, when our species crossed over into humanity. At its core, mindreading is an evolved cognitive faculty that enables group life, laying the foundation for cooperation, altruism, and sniffing out the cheaters among us. However, as with many evolved human capacities, mindreading is not a perfect ability. Humans are only just good enough at reading one another to successfully compete against other, less social species. As Nicholas Epley argues in Mindwise, we are far more confident in our own mindreading abilities than we are proficient in the same: “the confidence we have in this sense [mindreading] far outstrips our actual ability, and the confidence we have in our judgment rarely gives us a good sense of how accurate we actually are.”4 This gap between confidence and proficiency causes much pain and confusion in the world. For Shakespeare, such misreading is the source of his dramatic energy. By experimenting with our evolved capacity for mindreading, Shakespeare crafts characters and stories that can train his spectators and readers to become better mindreaders: if not more proficient ones, at least ones more aware of humanity’s shortcomings. Those shortcomings are often a direct result of the way that inference and imagination compete and cooperate as we read human minds, both everyday and fictional ones.
Inference involves a technique of building statements about a character’s mind upon that character’s exterior, the “face” that character reveals to the world: facial expressions, gestures, statements, and actions. Imagination involves inhabiting the perspective of a character and creating a state of mind that matches that character’s actions. The goal of these two processes is identical—to match the mind to the face, in Duncan’s terms—but the orientations of the processes are distinct. Inference moves from the face to the mind. Imagination moves from the mind to the face. While inference requires the application of knowledge about the world, imagination requires empathy. Shakespeare uses both arts, both methods of construction, to produce his characters.
Duncan’s use of the word art is apt, since art can suggest both technique and creativity. In the early modern period, art primarily refers to “skill in doing something, esp. as the result of knowledge or practice.”5 Art is an acquired skill, such as swimming or warfare, capable of being used or misused.6 In Shakespeare’s work, art can refer to bodies of learning such as education,7 rhetoric,8 medicine,9 physiognomy,10 cosmetics,11 magic,12 and even the practice of courtly behavior and flattery, the art of dissembling, of veiling the true report of one’s state of mind by veiling the face.13 In King Lear , Cordelia calls it “that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not” (Lr. 1.1.225–6), comparing such falsehood with cosmetics.14 When Duncan claims that there is no art to read the mind’s construction, he is using the first sense of art, claiming that there is no valid, accurate technique for connecting the mind to the face.
In Shakespeare’s work, art is also gaining its modern usage, “the various branches of creative activity, as painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance, drama, oratory, etc.”15 In The Rape of Lucrece , Shakespeare presents Lucrece contemplating a painting of the fall of Troy, a moment of ekphrasis—art pausing to represent art—wherein Lucrece contemplates her own trauma at the hands of Tarquin: “In Ajax and Ulysses, O what art, / of physiognomy might one behold! / The face of either cipher’d either’s heart, / Their face their manners most expressly told” (1394–7). The painting is both a skilled and a creative artifact, linking mind and face in ways that Lucrece can observe and learn from. The same blend of the two types of art occurs in The Winter’s Tale , where Leontes finds the statue of Hermione to be a skilled representation of his dead wife: “The fixure of her eye has motion in it, / As we are mock’d with art” (5.3.67–68). Artistic expression may supply the type of knowledge Duncan lacks.
Inference and imagination can also be described in terms of construction. The primary sense of construction evokes a metaphor of building: “the action of framing, devising, or forming, by the putting together of parts.”16 In Duncan’s case, this metaphor is prevalent: “He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust.” Duncan observes exterior signs written upon the faces of his thanes, both the expressions upon their brows and reports concerning their lives: as he reads the bloody Captain, “So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds: / They smack of honour both” (1.2.44–45). Duncan built this trust upon his belief in Cawdor’s faith: viewing Cawdor’s face as trustworthy, Duncan reads Cawdor as an honest, faithful man. Cawdor’s betrayal is therefore a deception (1.2.65), and hearing report of Cawdor’s confession leads Duncan to denounce the inferences he builds from human faces. He does not change his habits, however. Duncan honors Macbeth, putting trust in him and shifting the metaphor from buildings to plants, “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing” (1.4.28–29). Perhaps Duncan hopes that such planted honors will be more organic, less artificial and false than the trust he built on the former thane of Cawdor. Yet, with both Cawdor and Macbeth, Duncan constructs an understanding of his thanes by building that understanding out of inferences drawn from observable behavior, speech, and expression, and out of reports of the same delivered by others.
Construction can also refer to grammar—“syntactically arranging words in a sentence”17—or translation—“analyzing the structure of a sentence and translating it word for word into another language; construing.”18 While Duncan contemplates the minds of others from the outside in, working from the face to the mind, Rosse takes the opposite tack, imagining the mind and contemplating how it might express or translate itself in the face. Rosse describes to Macbeth Duncan’s reaction to hearing the news of Macbeth’s victory:Rosse recounts his own delivery of that news to Duncan in the first scene (1.1.46–68), a brief exchange during which Duncan only inquires from where Rosse has come, cries “Great happiness!” (1.1.49), and pronounces Cawdor’s death and Macbeth’s new title (1.1.65–68). Ross...
The King hath happily receiv’d, Macbeth,
The news of thy success; and when he reads
Thy personal venture in the rebels’ fight,
His wonders and his praises do contend,
Which should be thine, or his: silenc’d with that,
In viewing o’er the rest o’th’selfsame day,
He finds thee in the stout Norweyan ranks,
Nothing afeard of what thyself did make,
Strange images of death. As thick as hail,
Came post with post; and every one did bear
Thy praises in his kingdom’s great defence,
And pour’d them down before him. (1.3.89–99)