Abstract
Johnson argues that early modern conceptions of self-consciousness were expressions of identity manifesting through the recombination of always fragmentary, distributed materials. Focusing on Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” speech, Johnson dissects the differences between the Q2 and F1 versions and what they mean to Hamlet’s assessment of human capacity. Johnson disagrees with Harold Bloom’s often-quoted assertion about Shakespeare’s invention of self-consciousness in the character of Hamlet. Further, Shakespeare’s conception of consciousness was necessarily patchy and dispersed like the cognitive processes that circulated in early modern theatrical practice. Johnson, citing the relationship between theatrum mundi as a metaphor and as an internalized state, observes the importance of metatheatrical language to constructions of consciousness in Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters.
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Notes
- 1.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998).
- 2.
See especially Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
- 3.
Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 4.
Bloom, 287.
- 5.
Bloom, 398–400; see also Laurie Johnson, The Tain of Hamlet (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
- 6.
Bloom, 402.
- 7.
Bloom, 411.
- 8.
Bloom, 388.
- 9.
Bloom, 404.
- 10.
Bloom, 405.
- 11.
Bloom, 411.
- 12.
Bloom, 416.
- 13.
Lingui Yang, “Cognition and Recognition: Hamlet’s Power of Knowledge,” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 73–84.
- 14.
Yang, 74. For examinations of the way that Hamlet has served as a mirror for modern critical interpretation, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Johnson, Tain, 6–27.
- 15.
Yang, 74.
- 16.
Comparative text is based on the transcriptions in Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman, ed., The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio (New York: AMS Press, 1991), 100-1. All other quotations from Shakespeare plays will be from John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
- 17.
Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man. Lowell Lectures, 1942. Sixth Printing (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), 100.
- 18.
Walter N. King, Hamlet’s Search for Meaning (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 55-6.
- 19.
King, 56.
- 20.
King, 59, 51.
- 21.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 3. Originally published in the same year as Spencer’s Lowell Lectures on Shakespeare, Tillyard’s book is a more detailed examination of the extent to which the Elizabethan psychology to which Spencer refers was bound up in the ancient belief in a great chain of being.
- 22.
Hugh Grady, “Renewing Modernity: Changing Contexts and Contents of a Nearly Invisible Concept,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50.3 (1999), 268–84, esp. 271.
- 23.
See, for example, Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 167; Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare and the Reason: A Study of the Tragedies and Problem Plays (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), 55–8; George C. Herndl, The High Design: English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 29-30; Maynard Mack, Killing the King: Three Studies in Shakespeare’s Tragic Structure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 76–80; King, 51–7; Ronald Knowles, “Hamlet and Counter-Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.4 (1999), 1046–69, esp. 1048–52; Jan H. Blits, Deadly Thought: Hamlet and the Human Soul (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001), 152–4; and John E. Curran, Jr., Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 11–3.
- 24.
Isidore Joseph Semper, Hamlet Without Tears (Dubuque, Iowa: Loras College Press, 1946), 80–91.
- 25.
Susan Letzer Cole, The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University, 1985), 48–50.
- 26.
D. Douglas Waters, Christian Settings in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 1994), 35-6.
- 27.
For a detailed description of the theories of the relationships between Q2 and F1, see Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s summary—“Appendix 2,” in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare edition, ed. Thompson and Taylor (London: Cengage Learning, 2006), 474–532.
- 28.
OED, “piece of work, n.”
- 29.
Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8.
- 30.
OED, “consciousness, n. 1a.”
- 31.
Thiel, 8-9.
- 32.
Thiel, 8-9.
- 33.
See Johnson, 247–9.
- 34.
Shapiro devotes two chapters of his remarkable book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), to this suggestion that Hamlet was among the plays developed for The Globe’s initial run of plays in the second half of 1599.
- 35.
While the “wooden O” prologue to Henry V and the speech by Jaques are often cited as examples of the plays promoting the new theater, Steve Sohmer offers compelling evidence to view Julius Caesar as the play planned for the new playhouse’s first production: Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre, 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). For an expansion on Sohmer’s arguments, based on additional links between Julius Caesar and Hamlet, see Johnson, 238–41.
- 36.
Darryl Chalk, ‘ “A nature but infected”: Plague and Embodied Transformation in Timon of Athens,’ Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 19 (2009), 9.1–28, esp. 3-4.
- 37.
Lynda G. Christian, Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea (New York and London: Garland Publishing Company, 1987), 63–8.
- 38.
Cited in translation in Christian, 67.
- 39.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors. Containing Three Briefe Treatises. 1 Their Antiquity. 2 Their Ancient Dignity. 3 The True Vse of Their Quality (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. A4v.
- 40.
See, for example, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008); Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 41.
Menzer, 15.
- 42.
Palfrey and Stern, 200–3.
- 43.
Menzer, 45.
- 44.
David Kathman, “Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins,” Early Theatre 7.1 (2004), 13–44.
- 45.
Tribble, 50. For a detailed account of the use of plots, which Tribble cites and critiques, see David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Stage: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
- 46.
Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 47.
Tim Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).
- 48.
Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 169; cited in Tribble, 5.
- 49.
Tribble, 50.
- 50.
OED, “artifact, n. 1a.”
- 51.
For additional discussion of the distributed cognition model, including further suggested adjustments, see Laurie Johnson, “Cogito Ergo Theatrum: Redistributing Cognition on the Early Modern Stage,” Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, ed. Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (New York: Routledge, 2014), 216–33.
- 52.
Christian, 63-4.
- 53.
Knowles, 1052-3. For early book-length treatments of this debt, see, for example, Jacob Feis, Shakspere and Montaigne (London: K. Paul, Trench, & Co, 1884); John M. Robertson, Montaigne and Shakespeare (New York: Haskell House, 1897); and George Coffin Taylor, Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925).
- 54.
Knowles, 1053.
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Johnson, L. (2016). The Distributed Consciousness of Shakespeare’s Theatre. In: Budra, P., Werier, C. (eds) Shakespeare and Consciousness. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_6
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