Abstract
Using Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Helms describes how imagination breaks down in complex social situations where multiple individual perspectives must be imagined simultaneously. To circumvent this difficulty, characters rely on the empathic connection they have with others, and overconfidence in that empathy leads to misreading. Recent criticism has focused on the inferential errors that Claudio makes when he misinterprets Hero’s blush in act four. Drawing on theories of cognitive ecology and the embodied, embedded, and extended mind, Helms shifts the focus of the discussion from misinterpretation of facts to misreading of emotions, arguing that Claudio’s trouble is not external—social forces or erroneous impressions—but internal; Claudio follows the tide of imagination, failing to combine inferential distance with his own readings of others.
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- 1.
Clark, “Curing Cognitive Hiccups.”
- 2.
McEachern, ed., Much Ado About Nothing, 125. This feminist trend can be seen in the work of Harry Berger Jr., Carol Cook, Michael Friedman, René Girard, Janice Hays, Jean E. Howard, Claire McEachern, Carol Neely, Clara Claiborne Park, and Marta Straznicky, among others.
- 3.
Straznicky, “Shakespeare and the Government of Comedy,” 154.
- 4.
Myhill, “Spectatorship in/of Much Ado About Nothing,” 294.
- 5.
In early modern English, “nothing” was pronounced “noting.” McEachern, ed., Much Ado About Nothing, 2.
- 6.
Fleck, “The Ambivalent Blush,” 20.
- 7.
Henderson, “Mind the Gaps,” 195, 205.
- 8.
Curtis, “‘I have thrown out words,’” 1.
- 9.
Seminal studies on this anxiety include Agnew’s Worlds Apart, Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance.
- 10.
A distant stamp of Machiavelli has already left its mark upon contemporary cognitive science. Blakey Vermeule—who uses theories of mindreading in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters—employs the “Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis,” which she draws from the work of Nicholas K. Humphrey. Vermeule describes Machiavellian Intelligence as the ability “to handle the social complexity of living in groups—to outwit fellow primates, to think several moves ahead of them on a giant social chess-board, and to keep track of alliances” (30). As a description of mindreading, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis emphasizes inference. Such a view of mindreading (and of Machiavelli) is engaging, but it does not account for imagination. See Humphrey’s “The Social Function of Intellect,” 303–21. The first person to rhetorically link Machiavelli with the adaptive selection for the faculty to make social inferences is probably Frans de Waal in Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.
- 11.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, I:21, 74–75.
- 12.
Ibid., III:13. 824.
- 13.
Ibid., I:21, 68.
- 14.
Hoffman, “The Investigation of Nature,” 170.
- 15.
In this sense, emotional contagion partially enables empathy. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 109–10.
- 16.
Ibid., 111.
- 17.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, I:21, 74.
- 18.
Grady, “Shakespeare’s Links,” 121.
- 19.
Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 98.
- 20.
Grady, “Shakespeare’s Links,” 136.
- 21.
Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 173.
- 22.
Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts, 181–5.
- 23.
Hatfield, et al., Emotional Contagion, 62.
- 24.
Ibid., 18, 26, 33.
- 25.
Gallese and Goldman, “Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading,” 493.
- 26.
Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, 195.
- 27.
Ibid., 228.
- 28.
McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 73.
- 29.
Preston and Waal, “Empathy,” 12.
- 30.
McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 67.
- 31.
A 2008 experiment, one in a series of studies on mirror neurons and empathy, links male arousal proportionally to mirror neurons. In the study, H. Mouras and his team suggest a link between mirror neurons and erection, specifically a “feedback loop”: the more the mirror neurons are engaged, the more erection (and arousal) occurs, and vice versa. Mouras, et al., “Activation of mirror-neuron system,” 1148.
- 32.
Goldman, “Mirroring, Empathy, and Mindreading,” 235, emphasis mine.
- 33.
See Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia’s work on mirror neurons, Mirrors in the Brain, and Jen Boyle’s “Ghosting the Subjunctive.”
- 34.
Henderson, “Mind the Gaps,” 192–205.
- 35.
“‘Seems’, madam—nay it is, I know not ‘seems’” (Ham. 1.2.76).
- 36.
An instance of confirmation bias. For more on confirmation bias and Shakespeare’s characters, see Parvini’s Shakespeare and Cognition.
- 37.
Goldman, Simulating Minds, 19.
- 38.
Oatley, Best Laid Schemes, 198.
- 39.
Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 148.
- 40.
Oatley, Best Laid Schemes, 55.
- 41.
Ibid., 424, n37.
- 42.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, I:28, 140.
- 43.
Ibid., I:21, 69.
- 44.
Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 114.
- 45.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, I:28, 139.
- 46.
Colombetti and Thompson, “The Feeling Body,” 63.
- 47.
Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 354.
- 48.
Clark, “Curing Cognitive Hiccups,” 164.
- 49.
Ibid., 189.
- 50.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, 94–95.
- 51.
These two levels are often discussed in cognitive science as the dual process theory. See Carruthers’s “How we know our own minds,” Goldman’s Simulating Minds, 207–10, and Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- 52.
In 2011, I attended a staged reading of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and a mother was in attendance with her four small children. Much of the humor in LLL is quite esoteric, requiring a historical understanding of Elizabethan puns to understand, yet there were moments when her children laughed at such jokes. They laughed, I would suggest, not because they understood the puns, but because the audience was laughing. In such moments, the audience itself acts as one mind, a Foucauldian discourse to which one may ascribe emotions and understandings. For more on ascribing mental states to collective groups, see Huebner, et al., “What Does the Nation of China Think About Phenomenal States?”.
- 53.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, I:28, 142.
- 54.
Ibid., I:28, 138.
- 55.
Claudio may claim the same level of emotional identification with Hero.
- 56.
Epley, Mindwise, 12.
- 57.
Boose, “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare,” 326.
- 58.
Ibid., 343–4.
- 59.
Clark, “Curing Cognitive Hiccups,” 192.
- 60.
Montaigne, 1:28, The Complete Essays, 140.
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Helms, N.R. (2019). Imagining the Mind: Empathy and Misreading in Much Ado About Nothing. In: Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03565-5_4
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