Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. (Reviews).

Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. x + 265 pp. $19.95. ISBN: 0-691-06992-1.

Charles H. Frey, Making Sense of Shakespeare.

Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. 210 pp. $38. ISBN: 8386-3831-7.

These two books illustrate turns from contemporary theory. Arguably affected by the new interest in "conservative" topics (aesthetics, ethics, archival historicity), they are by no means returns to formalism, as each seeks to make genuine, progressive gains for us. Both focus on the still hot topic of the "body," but the wide divergence of their "material" approaches demonstrates just how malleable the topic is. As "correctives" both are smart and engaging, Crane's is the more cautionary and nuanced, Frey's the more radical and critical. Although both argue the need to link cognition to feeling, Crane's allegiance is ultimately more to cognition, Frey's to feeling.

Both books employ interdisciplinarity. Shakespeare's Brain specifically imports ideas from cognitive psychology for its play interpretations. An introductory essay critiques Foucault's "author-function," an abstraction "denying the presence of a material human body as a central participant in the in the 'complex social practices' shaping the text" (5). Redeeming agency and artistic choice without refusing Foucauldian "discursivity," Crane focuses on the progressive, nonpositivistic elements of cognitive psychology, emphasizing the ways that concepts such as mental "schemas" and "prototypes," preverbal and nonverbal, organize categories of thought. Crane's cautionary stance denies deconstruction's radical arbitrariness by showing how sense is "not entirely arbitrary" (13): a measurable "prototype" of the color "red," for instance, has been scientifically shown to organize color perception categories. Shakespeare's literary language, metaphoric rather than arbitrary, is made up of "choice of individual words (m y main concern in this book) ... shaped and constrained by stored prototypes (based on cultural knowledge), by the coordinate and collocational links within stored semantic fields, and by innate structures of syntax, sound, and lemmatization" (15). Crane briefly suggests how Shakespeare's actual brain constructs a sentence, moving from the "occipital" and elsewhere to the "perisylvian cortex," from where mental images are generated to where words and grammatical associations are made. Such rather dispensible scientific exegesis rarely carries clearly into Crane's typically complex analysis of word and imagery associations. Conceding that both biology and culture determine "selfhood" in some "complex" way as yet to be "worked out fully" (23), Crane nevertheless brackets fundamental questions with this conventional "further-research-to-be-done" topos. Culture invariably slips into the "material" analysis of cognition, although Crane does not acknowledge biologists who have evidence of culture sometimes determin ing brain chemistry.

What Crane seems ultimately to seek is a more commonsensical groundwork for interpretating Shakespeare's polysemy. While the science seems less essential than we expect, Crane's readings impressively tease out a wide field of associative meanings, from gender issues to Elizabethan staging practice to historical context -- the theory's strength in not limiting the kinds of materials marshalled. Her reading of Comedy of Errors, "No Space Like Home," deftly links historical semantic shifts in the key terms "house" and "home," drawing parallels to theatrical space and playhouse, and ultimately argues for "complex and contradictory" representation (64). Along the way, she thoughtfully challenges the more radical poststructuralist position of de Graxia and Stallybrass about character fragmentation, asserting that "cognitive theory" allows for uncertainty on linguistic grounds but not as a fundamental instability. Her reading of social status in As You Like It, with its unpacking of the semantic networks around the terms clown and villain, again moderates theory, particularly Marxist and new historicist. Her reading of Twelfth Night links meanings of suit, producing some destabilization of identities, the difference from Lacanian destabilization more a matter of degree. The cognitive argument in the Hamlet chapter is less rigorously tracked, partly because cognition itself is seen as thematic along with action, as Hamlet moves from inner concerns to finally accepting an already scripted character role. The Measure for Measure chapter builds on Paster's work, arguing for the "terrifying permeability of the human body and the embodied brain" (158), focusing on the semantic network for the word pregnant, darkly presenting a cognitive system where neither rationality nor emotion remain pure. The concluding chapter on The Tempest, addressing the more conventional question of whether Prospero's power is good or bad, treats the play's representation of sound and the semantic fields of pinching and confinement, arguing against reducing the play's representation of power to mere exploitation and control. Again moderating potentially radical approaches, Crane humanistically finds the play revealing "the fragile and pain-ridden human self" as it makes sense and survives (180).

Making sense is actually Frey's title, but here referring not to cognition, as it does for Crane, but rather to a criticism more fully aware of all the senses. The place for imagination and radical change, for experimental alterity and becoming, is far greater in this more manifesto-like book. The far-ranging polemical agenda argues that in both "classrooms and in critical writings" the abstract defeats the concrete (10). The extreme case, theory, impoverishes the ability to appreciate sensory effects both in Shakespeare's own language and in what is represented by the language, privileging the ideational over the more primary affect. Not engaging the very recent critical scholarship on affect and emotion, Frey, like Crane, regards most theoretical consideration of the "body" as problematic or "overrationalized." Recovered here is a Shakespearean "materializing imagination and . . . paralinguistic energy . . . [which] resists the emptyings out of discursive criticism in its tendency to convert embodied emotio n to heady meaning" (14). Frey's lush prose style, as one can see, unabashedly urges its own reader response as a physical and physiological experience, promoting what Frey terms "sense-reading" of the text, or, in alertness to one's physical and emotional responses, "body-reading." Traditional literary technique is not entirely jettisoned, as Frey's close-reading carefully treats relevant matters such as historical pronunciation and intertextuality.

Part I, "Sense-Reading and Resistance" outlines ways that dominant literary and theoretical strategies, generally suspicious of affect, often obscure Shakespeare's acoustic effects and other nonvisual sensory images. While not naively proposing some "direct" experience of the text, Frey concedes that "conceptualizing, interpreting, and theorizing" are in fact indispensable (34). Frey does make a convincing case that such bias extends from New Criticism into contemporary theory, noting the symptom of the new Norton edition's lack of any mention of versification. Part II gives practical classroom-oriented examples of overcoming resistance through "sense-reading," with advice about reading aloud, finding "patterns of excitement," and looking for "kinetic signs" or indices of the physical ways an actor might show the emotion of the text -- ways of acquiring readerly "skills" of appreciation, not abstract knowledge. Frey more often than not seeks productive questions, urging "rumination" (a charged sensory word) o ver answers ("Should Hector sound disdainful? . . . genuinely curious? . . . Does he seek eye contact with Achilles?" 141).

Extradisciplinarity is sought here too, but in Frey's case from more academically suspect areas, the "body workers, the physical and psychic therapists" (107), Frey praises as a "diverse and courageous band of body-reverencers" (167). Alert to the objection that all this wide-eyedness is overly Californiaesque, Frey anticipates likely dismissal by asserting that the purpose here is to "know Shakespeare better, not to use Shakespeare as a self-help agency" (164). And yet, growing as it does from such movements, it is difficult not to see both implicit and occasionally explicit liberatory claims of self-help, when he writes about these bodyworkers' "bringing [people's] sense to Shakespeare" by means of bringing "human beings, (including those who study Shakespeare) to their senses" (167), the goal being "joyful reading" (100) and "creative freedom" (162). Perhaps more of a question is the ultimate allegiance here to the narrowly private personal experience, presumed to be prior to the social, in what Frey more unnervingly terms the reader's "circling back" from "meaning" to "me-ing...[letting] the text speak to me personally... in its way even as I speak to it in mine" (92). While Frey maintains that the individual physical "heartbeat" is foundational, the Greenblatt quote he uses as support speaks of "social energy" as "arousing" this beat, that is, not what makes it beat at all but beat faster (99).

While they share both a "body" thematics and also critiques of contemporary theorization, these books are remarkably far apart with respect to audience. This reviewer's own temperament, in fact, is bifurcated between the more scientific-rationalist temper of the first and the more experimental and revolutionary temper of the latter, perhaps daydreaming of a revolutionary science between them. In fact, using the commercial standard of considering other books "purchased by those who have purchased this book," one might safely bet that whoever reads one of them is unlikely to read the other -- the present reviewer excepted. Cognition vs. feeling -- opponents of old -- may constitute a binary continuing to determine differences between literary theorizations, between teaching styles, and even between market segmentations of academic publishing itself. Yet perhaps the shorter, less theoretically credentialized, and more maverick study is what we need more.