Abstract
Hamlet—dramaturg, director, theater critic—would agree with the antitheatricalists that theater makes one vulnerable, “I have heard / That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaim’d their malefactions” (2.2.588–92). Hamlet not only uses theater to expose his uncle’s guilt, but views it as more permanent than the carved marble at the grave, “Good my lord, will you see the players well bestow’d? Do you hear, let them be well us’d, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live” (2.2.522–26). In its abstraction and brevity, the players’ chronicle will live on in the language, unfolding theatrically on new stages at different times.2 Dense and abstract language, i.e., metaphors or blends, create a linguistic scaffolding that goes on to structure, constrain, and invent future ways of seeing, thinking, and speaking.
All our ideas are awakened in the same way that a gardener who knows plants recalls, at the sight of them, all the stages of their growth. These words and the objects designated by them are so connected in the brain that it is comparatively rare to imagine a thing without the name or sign that is attached to it.
—Julien Offray de la Metrie, Man a Machine (1747)1
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Notes
Excerptedin The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 207.
As Annabelle Patterson argues in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989) this definition of players and playing “admits that theatre was accountable to others. In its very brevity and abstraction the phrase mimics its own blunt suggestion, that dramatic fictions reproduce their own historical environment in condensed and densely signifying metaphors” (29).
Kathleen Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Brian Gibbons, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.
Harold Jenkins, Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1982), 437–38.
See, for example, V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard, “Synaesthesia—a Window into Perception, Thought and Language,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 12 (2001): 3–34
There does seem to be some remaining disagreement on this; one study found that because a large percentage of synaesthetic linkages (e.g., R seen as red) are consistent across synaesthetes and nonsynaesthetes, such a condition is learned and simply stronger in synaesthetes. See A. N. Rich, J. L. Bradshaw, and J. B. Mattingley, “A Systematic, Large-Scale Study of Synaesthesia: Implications for the Role of Early Experience in Lexical-Colour Associations,” Cognition 98, no. 1 (2005): 53–84.
Ramachandran and Hubbard, “Synaesthesia—a Window into Perception, Thought and Language,” 9. For more on Ramachandran’s research on phantom limbs, see Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, William, Morris, 1998).
See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503.
Philip Davis, Shakespeare Thinking (London: Continuum, 2007), 93.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 132.
Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).
Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 45.
In “English Mettle,” Mary Floyd-Wilson’s essay in Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) for example, Floyd-Wilson connects the importance of rhetoric in the period to ideas of emotional strength: “English valor is deemed unique, powerful, and sturdy because it requires the effort of such rhetoric” (145). Richard A Lanham goes further in The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1976) arguing that the self combines the rhetorical self and the serious self and that language plays a major role in identity. He attempts to reverse a discrediting of rhetoric as ancillary, viewing it as “half of man”: “If truly free of rhetoric, we would be pure essence. We would retain no social dimension,” 8.
As Reynolds and I argue in, “Comedic Law: Projective Transversality, Deceit Conceits, and the Conjuring of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus in Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass,” in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, ed. Bryan Reynolds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Cited in Chris Hassel, Jr., “Military Oratory in Richard III” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s Richard III, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 74.
Seana Coulson, Semantic Leaps: Erame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 2.
For more on the womb/tomb in Richard III, see Linda Charnes, “The Monstrous Body in King Richard III,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard III (New York: Hall, 1999): 273–78
Madonne Miner’s “‘Neither Mother, Wife, Nor England’s Queen’: The Roles of Women in Richard III” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s Richard III, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988).
For what CBT reveals about the dangers of the womb/tomb connection, see Amy Cook, “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Approach to Theatre,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 579–94.
Katy Butler, “Winning Words: George Lakoff Says Environmentalists Need to Watch Their Language,” Sierra, July/August (2004): 65.
See Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley, “Purple Persuasion: Conceptual Blending and Deliberative Rhetoric,” in Cognitive Linguistics: Investigations across Languages, Fields, and Philosophical Boundaries, ed. J. Luchenbroers, (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Press, 2006): 47–65.
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 92.
Seana Coulson and Esther Pascual, “For the Sake of Argument: Mourning the Unborn and Reviving the Dead through Conceptual Blending,” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4, (2006): 170.
Sanger, David E. “Bush Describes Kerry’s Health Care Proposal as a CE Government Takeover.” Times, September 14, 2004 and Wilgoren, Jodi. “Kerry Faults Bush for Failing to Press Weapons Ban.” New York Times, September 14, 2004.
Wilgoren, Jodi. “Kerry Faults Bush for Failing to Press Weapons Ban.” New York Times, September 14, 2004.
Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: Hall, 1995), 11.
Harold Jenkins, ed. Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1982), 547.
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© 2010 Amy Cook
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Cook, A. (2010). Linguistic Synaesthesia. In: Shakespearean Neuroplay. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113053_2
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