Actions that a (Hu)man Might Play: a Cognitive Study of Gesture in Shakespeare’s Plays Thesis submitted by Laura Seymour for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. 1 Declaration The work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed: 2 Acknowledgements In the seventeenth century, the word ‘cognition’ could mean ‘acknowledgement of gratitude’. In the words of John Evelyn in 1655, ‘I must justifie...with infinite cognition, the benefit I have received’ most of all from my incredibly wise and generous supervisors Laura Salisbury and Gillian Woods; there is no way I could have written this thesis without their encouragement and the way that they illuminated Shakespeare’s plays and ideas of representation and cognition. I am hugely grateful to Adam Smyth and Michael Dobson for their supervision in the earlier stages of the thesis, to Isabel Davis and Susan Wiseman and everyone else who helped me at Birkbeck, to Sarah Cain for encouraging me in my studies before I arrived here, and to Amy Cook, Rhonda Blair, Raphael Lyne, Peter Garratt, Guillemette Bolens, Tim Chesters and Kathryn Banks, and the other members of the Cognitive Futures in the Humanities network. Also I would like to say thanks a million to all of my friends and loved ones for their help and support, especially Sandy Steel for his constant kindness and for keeping my motivation and morale up, Sophie Zadeh for chatting to me about violence and society, Amrita Dhar for filling my times in the RSC archives with her clever ideas and laughter, and my family for supporting me throughout the whole of my studies. 3 Abstract This thesis uses cognitive theory to examine gesture in William Shakespeare’s plays. Cognition involves both thoughts and emotions, and cognitive theory examines thought which is rooted both in the body and its gestures and in the gesturer’s environment. Based on recent neuroscientific findings and laboratory studies into gesture and speech, cognitive theory is a developing discipline that tends to focus on the relationship between gesture, speech, and thought. This was also a preoccupation of early modern writers: theologians, philosophers, and both opponents and defenders of the theatre attempted to understand how gestures could shape as well as be shaped by thought. This thesis examines the similarities and differences between the ways in which Shakespeare and cognitive theory approached these issues. It establishes the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays suggest new ideas for cognitive theorists to study, as well as the ways in which cognitive theory can generate new readings of Shakespeare’s plays. The research for this thesis is based on a database that I made of all the gestures mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, from the earliest quartos to the fourth folio. From this database, I selected the five most common types of gesture and devoted a chapter to each. The chapters examine handclasps, kneeling, kissing, refusals to gesture (or stillness) and striking. Examining these four gestures and the refusal to gesture shows that being performed on stage gives gesture a particularly complex and rich cognitive quality. Gestures acted out on stage are deliberately performed by an actor, but are often designed to be seen as involuntary or unconscious acts on the character’s part. Gestures performed on the Shakespearean stage are thus sites where the thoughts and feelings of the actor and those of the character are intriguingly blurred, making Shakespearean gestures a rich topic for cognitive analysis. 4 Contents Introduction 7 Why cognitive theory? 12 The database: defining Shakespearean gestures 16 Why Shakespeare? 20 Structure of the thesis 23 Chapter 1: ‘Lend me thy hand’: Taking hands in Titus Andronicus Introduction 25 Cognising with hands 32 The destruction of the handclasp and the non-human 47 Cognition and exchange 52 The severed hand as a phantom of cognition 57 Performance and cognition 61 Conclusions 66 Chapter 2: ‘Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?’ Kneeling in Julius Caesar Introduction 68 Kneeling in Shakespeare’s works 90 Kneeling in Julius Caesar 95 Performance, plasticity, and hypocrisy 103 Conclusions 113 Chapter 3: I’ll smell it on the tree’: Kissing in Othello Introduction 115 Renaissance and Shakespearean kisses: affecting souls through olfaction 129 Disgust and enjoyment as moral and olfactory qualities 138 Performance 148 Conclusions 151 Chapter 4: ‘Her silence flouts me’: restraint, and the refusal to gesture in The Taming of the Shrew Introduction 153 Findings from the database: Shakespearea’s wider interest in stillness 154 Performing stillness: what does this mean cognitively? 170 5 Staging audience attention: cognitive theories of fascination 185 Conclusions 192 Chapter 5: ‘Actions that a man might play’: Hamlet and simulated stage violence Introduction 194 Striking in Shakespeare’s plays 207 Violence in Hamlet as an experiment 212 Conclusions 226 Conclusion 228 Bibliography 233 6 Introduction What does it mean to enact gesture on stage? When Hamlet acknowledges that his mournful behaviours are ‘actions that a man might play’ (Hamlet 1.2.84), he draws on an early modern anxiety about, and interest in, the fraught and often blurred boundary between representation and reality.1 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antitheatricalist writers, theologians, and defenders of the theatre all gravitated towards the question: what does acting out a gesture, representing it, do to a person’s thoughts and emotions? The bishop of Winchester Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) argued that, of itself, ‘our outward gesture may stir up our souls to their duty’, claiming that gestures like kneeling and bowing are enough to shape a person’s thoughts to devotion and humility.2 Meanwhile, the clergyman Stephen Gosson (1554-1624), a hotter Protestant than Andrewes, took up the debate from a different perspective. In Gosson’s view of performing gestures, actors ‘reape no profit’ from repeatedly performing the gestures of noble or honest people; actors’ minds remain particularly impervious to chaste, honest thoughts, he emphasises.3 Cognitive theorists are currently working on the same questions, typically using neuroscience to examine how gesture shapes, as well as being shaped by, thought in everyday life. When gestures are performed on stage, a further dimension is added to the cognitive picture. On stage, gestures are consciously represented by actors as part of a scripted story rather than arising spontaneously during conversation as they often do in ‘real life’. Gestures performed on stage can challenge the boundary between representation and reality. On the one hand, stage weddings, for instance, dislocate the entrenched, normative meanings of handclasps and kisses as performative gestures that bring about as well as represent a loving union. A couple who ‘marry’, kiss and take hands, on stage are not ‘really’ married; the context of the theatre prevents the performative language of marriage from having effect in the real world. At the same time, however, the inherently powerful and significant gestures of kissing and taking 1 The Riverside edition is cited from throughout the thesis unless another edition is specified. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Herschel Baker, Harry Levin, and Ann Barton, 2nd edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2 Lancelot Andrewes, The Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine at Large (London: Roger Norton, 1650), r Ee1 . 3 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: for Thomas Gosson, 1582), C7v. 7 hands, even on stage, can be assumed to change the thoughts and emotions of the person performing them. Shakespeare often thematises the inherent power of certain gestures by depicting characters who attempt to perform a meaningful and culturally- significant gesture ironically or jokingly, and who end up profoundly altered by the gestures they have performed. For example, in Julius Caesar, the conspirators kneel in a gesture of submission to Caesar before they murder him. Some of the conspirators (like Cassius, whose acerbic remarks about having to ‘bend his body’ (1.2.116-8) to Caesar are discussed in chapter 2) may perform this gesture ironically, mocking the tyrant they plan to kill and submissive gestures he demanded of them. Others (such as Brutus, who states as he kneels, ‘I kiss thy hand, but not in flattery Caesar’ (3.1.52)) may kneel in what is to some extent genuine deference. However, by the end of the play the conspirators are all utterly vanquished by Caesar’s ghost. It is as if their kneeling gesture, no matter how hypocritically performed, has had a real effect on their minds, their characters, and their positions within society. Kneeling of course is not the sole reason for the conspirators’ downfall, but it connects with a pattern of language in the play that relates a person’s social position to the vertical position of their body. Deploying neuroscientific research in conjunction with close readings of Shakespeare’s texts and the analysis of the material conditions of performance provides a new scientifically-led understanding of the mechanisms behind performed gestures. As well as supplying a rigorous body of evidence about the relationship between gesture and thought, neuroscience provides new metaphors and frameworks for describing cognition. These help to generate illuminating readings of Shakespeare’s plays, such as one which places the conspirators’ kneeling gesture at the heart of Julius Caesar and understands this gesture as a significant force that shapes the later action of the play. Based on recent—and ongoing—neuroscientific findings about the workings of the embodied brain, cognitive theory has a wide remit. The notion of ‘cognition’ employed in cognitive literary studies covers conscious thought, sensation, perception, affect, emotion, and unconscious and involuntary thought processes. These concerns are present at the roots of cognitive studies, in works like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) or their Metaphors We Live By (1980).