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Mary Crane
Professor, Department of English, Boston College
First speaker, Workshop on Literary History and the Brain
Abstract
Cognitive Hamlet and the Sources of Action
Hamlet's claim to have "that
within which passes show" (1.2.85) has become one of the most debated lines
in early modern literature since it seems to make a definite statement
about that most contested of topics, the nature of subjective interiority
and its relation to the existence (or non-existence) of the human "individual."
Katherine Eisaman Maus has recently summarized critical controversy over
the cultural significance of Hamlet's "contrast between an authentic personal
interior and derivative or secondary superficies" and takes issue with
those critics who have argued that such a sense of self did not exist until
the later seventeenth century. In her examination and defence of
the "epistemology of inwardness" in the period, Maus rightly insists that
the sometimes contiguous concepts of "privacy," "inwardness" and "individuality"
were not always associated nor did their contiguity add up to a fully formed
concept of modern subjectivity. However, most critics have been ready to
assume that what Hamlet has within is some version of the modern subject--either
fully formed, or still in process of formation.
I want to argue that, from a cognitive
perspective emerging from a focus on Shakespeare's mental lexicon, the
subject of Hamlet is precisely the question of what it is that Hamlet
has within and that the play imagines a number of cognitive processes which
might comprise Hamlet's "that." These processes are imagined differently
at different points in the play and various versions of the ways in which
the inner self comes into being delineate different relationships among
the self, its actions, and its environment. The words "act," "action,"
"actor"---and a coinage, "enacture," unique to this play--form the lexical
category through which Shakespeare meditates on these questions in this
play and his sense of the word "action" has been significantly inflected
by his reading of a near-contemporary psychological treatise, Timothy Bright's
A Treatise of Melancholie. Bright's treatise, I will argue, uses
the word "action" to investigate the relationships among the soul, body,
and mind and to describe the processes through which external and internal
forces give rise to the
actions which both define and express the self. Hamlet is, himself,
preoccupied with cognitive process, and it is this preoccupation with internal
chains of action which works for most of the play to prevent decisive external
action. His ultimate recognition of his ambiguous role as actor
and instrument within larger cultural and dramatic plots enables him, finally,
to act; however, from a cognitive perspective, Hamlet's acquiesence in
his own cultural construction may be the most
tragic element of the play.
Mary Crane
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