Abstract
The research area of conceptual integration, originally delineated by the cognitive linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, has been explored by scholars in a wide range of fields. As F. Elizabeth Hart says, conceptual integration theory, or blending theory, “outlines the mind’s apparently endless capacity to create spontaneous, discrete sets of associations…then to juggle deftly those sets of associations, folding them into one another but also—and equally important—keeping track of their boundaries.” This book uses conceptual blending theory to show how Shakespeare’s artistic excellence consists, across many domains of artistry, in occupying our minds very fully, for a span of time, with a rich intricacy of mental work. Hart is right to speak of an “apparently endless” human capacity. What is not endless, though, is the time we have for creating and juggling mental associations as we engage with any given matter. Blending theory is useful for appreciating Shakespeare because it illuminates the mind’s immense resourcefulness in dealing with the unforgiving constraints of finite human attention, memory and time. Against the forces of distraction and forgetting, the mind struggles toward an integrated understanding, marked ideally by global insight into a given subject and all its parts in their mutual interrelation. The mind tries to add new perceptions to all else it knows, to reach a more comprehensive view. Concomitant with this is compression necessitated by the limits of memory and attention. Blending becomes especially visible through frame clashes between incongruous mental objects. Examples abound in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Accession number 47.30.46.
- 2.
What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171.
- 3.
The theorists Fauconnier and Turner use the terms “integration” and “blending” somewhat interchangeably. For simplicity, I will generally use “blending” in this book to describe what they would more technically call “double-scope” blending; that is, cases where two differing mental scenarios are mutually influencing each other in our thought, and their differences create some degree of incongruity . This is as opposed, in their discussion, to “single scope” integration or blending, where one mental space is unilaterally lending structure to another.
- 4.
IIIi.168−169.
- 5.
Henry S. Turner ’s 2007 Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2007) uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream to explore, in a somewhat similar spirit, this play’s clear celebration of “the value of mixing ideas and substances that are not normally mixed together.” The differences between my approach and Henry S. Turner ’s are, first, that he pursues a comparison between Shakespeare’s work and modern biological science, and second, that he focuses on cultural history. I pursue questions that are principally phenomenological rather than historical.
- 6.
See Fauconnier and Turner’s book, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), and Seana Coulson ’s Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On blend-theory and Elizabethan culture, see Eve Sweetser , “‘The suburbs of your good pleasure ’: Cognition , Culture and the Bases of Metaphoric Structure,” in G. Bradshaw, T. Bishop and M. Turner (eds), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 4: Shakespeare Studies Today (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 24–55; For cognitive approaches to early-modern and literary studies generally, see F. Elizabeth Hart , “Matter, System and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics,” Configurations, 6 (1998): pp. 311–343, and see also Hart’s, The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Study,”’Philosophy and Literature, 25 (2001): pp. 314–334.
- 7.
“[U]nder the name ‘conceptual integration’ it [blending] has been beautifully and richly explored and described by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner and their colleagues and students. They have shown time and again that frame-blending is found throughout human thought, sometimes using marvelous examples that seem exotic, just as often using examples that are as down-to-earth as can be, but in any case, demonstrating the fundamental importance of the phenomenon.” Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 362.
- 8.
In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1175–1202.
- 9.
Hart, “The view of where we’ve been and where we’d like to go,” College Literature, Winter 2006.
- 10.
Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947) 34, 83.
- 11.
“And there we hope, to your diverse capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you,” wrote his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell in the First Folio.
- 12.
The Way We Think, 34;
[I]t may be part of the evolutionary adaptiveness of these mechanisms that they should be invisible to consciousness, just as the backstage labor involved in putting on a play works best if it is unnoticed. Whatever the reason, we ignore these common operations in everyday life and seem reluctant to investigate them even as objects of scientific inquiry. Even after training, the mind seems to have only feeble abilities to represent to itself consciously what the unconscious mind does easily. This limit presents a difficulty to professional cognitive scientists, but it may be a desirable feature in the evolution of the species. One reason for the limit is that the operations we are talking about occur at lightning speed, presumably because they involve distributed spreading activation in the nervous system, and conscious attention would interrupt that flow. 18.
- 13.
“We rarely realize the extent of background knowledge and structure that we bring into a blend unconsciously. Blends recruit great ranges of such background meaning. Pattern completion is the most basic kind of recruitment: We see some parts of a familiar frame of meaning, and much more of the frame is recruited silently but effectively to the blend.” Ibid., 48.
- 14.
The project of considering Shakespeare’s stagecraft in terms of conceptual blending has already been definitively handled by Bruce McConachie and Amy Cook . See Cook, above, and McConachie’s Engaging Audiences - a Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), in which he writes that “conceptual blending may be a more accurate way to understand the doubleness of theatre for spectators than [is] ‘suspending disbelief’.” 559.
- 15.
Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 48.
- 16.
“But love…courses as swift as thought in every power, and gives to every power a double power, above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye.” Love’s Labor’s Lost, IV.iii.327; “Haste me to know it, that I with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.” Hamlet, I.v.29–30.
- 17.
“Each composes a play as he reads and a new play on each successive reading.” Alfred Harbage , As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 102; “What each of us does is to construct a private understanding…out of materials furnished conjointly by ourselves, Shakespeare, a cloud of critics, and the actor who happens to be concrete before our eyes at the moment.” Thomas M. Kettle , “A New Way of Misunderstanding Hamlet”, (1905) in The Day’s Burden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 139.
- 18.
This distinction is perhaps adumbrated in Samuel Johnson ’s remark that “[Shakespeare’s] comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action.” Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 19; The recognition of “thoughts and language” on the one hand and “incident and action” on the other, as distinct sources of pleasure , seems to me pertinent apart from Johnson’s concern with comparing comedy and tragedy .
- 19.
Freeman, “Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1177.
- 20.
Cook, Amy, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 26.
- 21.
Empson, 239.
- 22.
“After two representations have been combined, it is still possible to extract the original information from the combined representation. The process of convolution can be reversed, using neural connections almost identical to those needed for performing the convolution in the first place….There is a loss of information in that the extracted information is only an approximation of the original. However, by increasing the number of vector values and the number of neurons per value, we can make this approximation as accurate as desired (Eliasmith & Anderson, 2003)….[T]his is not a selective process: All of the original patterns are preserved. Given the concept ‘’sound wave,’ we can always break it back down into ‘sound’ and ‘wave’….The key point here is that the process of convolution generates a new pattern given any two previous patterns, and that this process is reversible.” Thagard, Paul and Terrence Stewart, “The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks,” Cognitive Science, 35 (2011), 16.
- 23.
Cleanth Brooks , “The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition ,” The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 256.
References
Barfield, Owen. 1973. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 3rd ed. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
Brooks, Cleanth. 1947. “The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition,” The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1959. Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coulson, Seana. 2006. Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Empson, William. 1947. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2000. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Freeman, Margaret. 2011. “Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harbage, Alfred. 1947. As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality. New York: Macmillan.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 1998. “Matter, System and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics,” Configurations 6.
———. 2001. “The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Study,” Philosophy and Literature 25.
———. 2006. “The view of where we’ve been and where we’d like to go,” College Literature.
Heminges, John and Henry Condell. 1997. “To the Great Variety of Readers” (1623), reprinted in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hofstadter, Douglas and Emmanuel Sander. 2013. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York: Basic Books.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2011. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Samuel. 1908. Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh. London: Henry Frowde.
Kettle, Thomas M. 1905. “A New Way of Misunderstanding Hamlet,” in The Day’s Burden. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
McConachie, Bruce. 2008. Engaging Audiences-a Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sweetser, Eve. 2004. “‘The suburbs of your good pleasure’: Cognition, Culture and the Bases of Metaphoric Structure,” in G. Bradshaw, T. Bishop and M. Turner (eds), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 4: Shakespeare Studies Today.
Thagard, Paul and Terrence C. Stewart. 2011. “The AHA! Experience: Creativity through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks,” Cognitive Science, 35.
Turner, Henry S. 2007. Shakespeare’s Double Helix. London and New York: Continuum Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Booth, M. (2017). Introduction. In: Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62187-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62187-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62186-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62187-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)