The Undiscovered Country”: Theater and the Mind in Early
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“THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY”: THEATER AND THE MIND IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by JOSHUA MAGSAM A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2011 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Joshua Magsam Title: “The Undiscovered Country”: Theater and the Mind in Early Modern England This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Lisa Freinkel Chairperson George Rowe Member Ben Saunders Member Lara Bovilsky Member Ted Toadvine Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School Degree awarded December 2011 ii © 2011 Joshua Magsam iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Joshua Magsam Doctor of Philosophy Department of English December 2011 Title: “The Undiscovered Country”: Theater and the Mind in Early Modern England As critic Jonathan Gottschall notes, “The literary scholar’s subject is ultimately the human mind – the mind that is the creator, subject, and auditor of literary works.” The primary aim of this dissertation is to use modern cognitive science to better understand the early modern mind. I apply a framework rooted in cognitive science – the interdisciplinary study of how the human brain generates first-person consciousness and relates to external objects through that conscious framework – to reveal the role of consciousness and memory in subject formation and creative interpretation, as represented in period drama. Cognitive science enables us as scholars and critics to read literature of the period through a lens that reveals subjects in the process of being formed prior to the “self-fashioning” processes of enculturation and social discipline that have been so thoroughly diagnosed in criticism in recent decades. I begin with an overview of the field of cognitive literary theory, demonstrating that cognitive science has already begun to offer scholars of the period a vital framework for understanding literature as the result of unique minds grappling with uniquely historical problems, both biologically and socially. From there, I proceed to detailed explications of neuroscience-based theories of the relationship between the embodied brain, memory, and subject identity, via detailed close reading case studies. In the primary chapters, I focus on what I consider to be three primary elements of iv embodied subjectivity in drama of the period: basic identity reification through unique first- person memory (the Tudor interlude Jake Juggler), more complex subject-object relationships leading to alterations in behavioral modes (Hamlet), and finally, the blending of literary structures and social context in the interpretation of subject behavior (Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One). v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Josh Magsam GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Minnesota, Duluth DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2011, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2007, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, English, 2002, University of Minnesota, Duluth AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Early Modern Literature Cognitive Science PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2006-2011 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Alternate, Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship, 2011 Research Funding Grant, English Department, 2011 Commendation for Excellence in Teaching Expository Writing, Composition Department, 2010 Honorable Mention, Klaus P. Jankofsky Essay Award, English Department, University of Minnesota, Duluth, 2002 PUBLICATIONS: Magsam, Josh. “‘In true reclaimèd form I fall’: Cognitive Science, Conceptual Blending, and Prodigal Motifs in A Trick to Catch the Old One.” Early Modern Literary Studies. Under review. (23 MS pages). vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Professors Freinkel and Rowe for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript and for support throughout my graduate career. Special thanks are due to Holland Phillips, Nicholas Henson, Chelsea Henson, Eric Luttrell, Sarah Stoeckl, and Taylor Donnelly for editorial guidance and thoughtful input throughout the construction of this dissertation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 II. “SEEK NOT OUTSIDE YOURSELF”: EMBODIED COGNITION THEN AND NOW ............................................................................................................................ 28 III. “I AM I”: MEMORY, SELFHOOD, AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION IN JAKE JUGGLER .......................................................................................................... 59 IV. “THE REST IS SILENCE”: INTERIORITY, REVENGE, AND THE DISRUPTION OF EXTENDED CONSCIOUSNESS IN HAMLET .......................... 98 V. “TRUE RECLAIMÈD FORM”: NARRATIVE, PRODIGALITY, AND REDEMPTION IN MIDDLETON’S A TRICK TO CATCH THE OLD ONE ............ 141 VI. CONCLUSION...................................................................................................... 184 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 192 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. "Sir John Suckling." Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Oil on canvas. 1638. ...................... 31 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “All the world's a stage,” Jaques famously notes in Shakespeare's As You Like It, “[a]nd all the men and women merely players” (2.7.138).1 Shakespeare's original audience would have understood Jaques’ statement as both metatheatrical – in the theater, the stage represents the world – and broadly philosophical.2 All men and women live their lives as if they were actors on a stage, following a script of unknown origins and passing over the stage in a brief span of time. Even today, we have a tendency to believe that we follow Jaques's model and proceed across the stage of the world in seven sequences from birth to old age, each having various exits and entrances, playing many parts – “first the infant,” and on through the rest to “second childlessness and mere oblivion” (2.7.142-164). Yet from the perspective of cognitive science – an interdisciplinary field studying how the brain internally generates first-person consciousness and relates to external objects through that conscious framework – Jaques’s model, while compelling, is deeply flawed. In the opening pages of his provocative and pivotal book, The Feeling of What Happens (1999), neuroscientist Antonio Damasio confesses to having long taken an interest in the moment when “the door to the stage opens and a performer steps into the 1 All references to works by Shakespeare throughout are to The Norton Shakespeare, second edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2 Francis Meres’s list of plays, published September 1598, does not contain a reference to As You Like It, and given the play's entry into the Stationer's Register on August 4th, 1600, it's likely that the play was written late in 1599 or early in 1600, thereby making a first performance at the Globe all but impossible to definitively determine. In her introduction to the play in The Norton Shakespeare, Jean E. Howard suggests that Jaques's statement, “All the world's a stage,” is close enough to the motto of the Globe Theater, Totus mundus agit histrionem (All the world plays the actor) that the character is likely referring to The Globe. See The Norton Shakespeare, Greenblatt et al, 1623. 1 light; or, to take the other perspective, the moment when a performer who waits in semi- darkness sees the same door open, revealing the lights, the stage, and the audience.” He further notes that the “moving quality of this moment... comes from its embodiment of an instance of birth,” and thus, the act of stepping into the light becomes “a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental” (3). Damasio's statement provides an interesting and pivotal twist on the visual model suggested by Jaques's metaphor. We believe that we are the leading actors in the great drama of human consciousness. We believe that we are the ones who step out into the light, taking our cues from the play text of social and cultural norms that are handed to us in that moment. It is the opposite that is true: we are not the actor, but the audience; not the protagonist, but the silent spectator, watching the proceedings from the darkness, taking up the position of viewers and interpreters rather than actors and agents. And just as Jaques’s statement intimated, the world is indeed a stage – or at least, a theater – insofar as the play of life unfolds in a purely internal, mental space, in the “theater of the mind.” As Jonathan Gil Harris observes in his explication of the etymological link between the word “theater” and the Greek “theorein,” the theater “is a theoretical space inasmuch as it is a space of theorein, of viewing and contemplation. And it is all the more theoretical for being a public rather than a private space.” Noting that the theoria of ancient Athens were a class of people dedicated to watching public debates and deliberations in order to “[affirm] certain states of affairs as facts,” Harris