Mavzu: The image of the state of mind in the works of W. Shakespeare

MAVZU:The image of the state of mind in the works of W. Shakespeare
The great American novelist, Marilynne Robinson, who is also a lifelong Shakespeare scholar, enjoys speculating about ‘the profound complexity of the brain’ (cf. The Givenness of Things, pp. 10–11). In one of her more playful and suggestive recent asides, she writes:
‘The old humanists took the work of the human mind—literature, music, philosophy, art, and languages—as proof of what the mind is and might be. Out of this has come the great aura of brilliance and exceptionalism around our species that neuroscience would dispel’.
But, she goes on, there are tangible limits to that ‘aura of brilliance’:
‘If Shakespeare had undergone an MRI there is no reason to believe that there would be any more evidence of extraordinary brilliance in him than there would be of a self or a soul. He left a formidable body of evidence that he was both brilliant and singular, but it has fallen under the rubric of Renaissance drama …’
It will come as no surprise to neurologists that the same humiliation probably awaits Mozart and Einstein, but this is not just a failure to be laid at the door of either contemporary neuroscience or human evolution.
More deeply, the image of our greatest English writer, strapped in for an MRI examination, brings us up against what Francis Crick called ‘the Hard Problem’, the baffling dichotomy between our physical brain on the one hand (∼1.4 kg of ‘grey matter’), and our human consciousness (an infinity of imagination, thought and feeling), in all its astounding and fathomless complexity on the other.
Alternatively, however, if we move from Robinson’s thought experiment to actual neurological research, and direct the MRI towards Shakespeare’s modern audience today, the results become extraordinary, especially when we analyse the interplay of the 21st century brain with Shakespeare’s 16th century language.


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The magic that Shakespeare works with words and phrases is a commonplace of literary commentary, which turns out to have a measurable cerebral outcome. Professor Philip Davis, of Liverpool University, has discovered that the poet’s style also answers to neurological analysis. Since 2006, Davis has been studying the effects of Shakespeare on the human brain.
Using EEG and functional MRI scanning techniques, Davis has been testing individual responses to some of the playwright’s most daring innovations. ‘I had an intuition’, he told me, when I first heard about his research, ‘that functional shifts of syntax in Shakespeare might have an impact on the pathways of the brain, which is of course an extraordinary internal theatre’, a nice reference to the playwright’s inward preoccupations.
Davis will take a sentence, for example Albany’s charge to Goneril in King Lear: ‘A father, and a gracious aged man … have you madded’. This is an ungrammatical, highly energized compression, and functional MRI scans suggest that it evokes a powerful neurological response. In the words of Davis’ collaborator Dr Guillaume Thierry: ‘The Shakespearean functional shift appears to prompt activation in the visual association cortex, i.e. in regions normally activated by visualization; that is, the mind’s eye’.
In studying ‘functional shifts’, Davis and his colleagues demonstrate how Shakespeare’s creative mistakes ‘shift mental pathways and open possibilities’ for what the brain can do. It is Shakespeare’s inventions—particularly his deliberate syntactic errors like changing the part of speech of an individual word—that really excite us.
With the aid of brain imaging scientists, Davis has conducted neurolinguistic experiments that investigate the ways in which the human brain processes individual sentences. These experiments show that when people are wired they have different reactions to hearing different types of sentences. Moreover, they have very different reactions to some of Shakespeare’s sentences.
So how is Shakespeare’s language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:
An adjective made into a verb: ‘thick my blood’ (The Winter’s Tale)
A pronoun made into a noun: ‘the cruellest she alive’ (Twelfth Night)
A noun made into a verb: ‘He childed as I fathered’ (King Lear)
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans loved to use language in new ways. Shakespeare’s literary career, which spanned a quarter century roughly between the years 1587 and 1612, came at a time when the English language was at an extraordinary stage of development. The great flexibility and fluidity of Elizabethan and Jacobean English gave the playwright an enormous amount of room to innovate. Linguistically, the world was his oyster.
Estimates vary—some scholars suggest a vocabulary of ∼30 000 words—but Davis says that in his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare regularly used ∼18 000 words. Of these, he invented ∼10%, some 1700 new words. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, connecting words together, borrowing from a foreign language, or by simply inventing them, the way a rapper like Snoop Dogg does today, freely borrowing from, and adapting the contemporary vernacular.
Davis shows that this brilliance has a cerebral dividend. Lines such as Albany’s, he says, are ‘a way of upping the audiences’ attention level, what we might call the ‘wow factor’. Subjecting Shakespeare’s work to an MRI scan might seem an abstruse piece of scientific reduction, but it’s an apt reminder that our response to Shakespeare’s language, as with all great literature, is partly about neural excitement.
Davis’ work illustrates that, with Shakespeare, it’s his language, especially, that never fails to enthral. Partly, it’s the precision of his observation, drawn from ordinary life. As the son of a leather merchant, he can have Feste joke that ‘a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward’. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ostensibly set in a wood outside Athens, could only have been written by a country boy from the Midlands. For instance, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows’ is also about Warwickshire.
However, Shakespeare was not just a country boy. He was also a writer of genius, for whom the human brain is the complex seat of all the emotions that drive the plots of his greatest plays. From Julius Caesar, and Othello to Coriolanus and The Tempest, the playwright is acutely aware of the ways in which the performance of our ‘grey matter’ can have multi-coloured theatrical consequences. There are four plays, in particular, three tragedies and a comedy, that illustrate Shakespeare’s deep awareness of ‘states of mind’: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and King Lear.
Each of these plays, successively, illustrates a darkening and deepening of the poet’s neurological understanding. Each, moreover, has something quite specific to teach the 21st century mind. It’s often said that Shakespeare was a psychoanalyst 300 years before Freud. We might also suggest, similarly, that the poet from provincial Stratford was a proto-neurologist for whom states of mind in theatrical conflict contained the essence of his approach to drama.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a young man’s play, probably first written and performed during 1595/96, about the intoxicating lunacies of love. It’s one of those very rare Shakespeare plays that has no obvious literary source, and in which the playwright wants to explore the conscious and unconscious promptings of love and its associated sexuality. Shakespeare links love and fantasy to the workings of the mind in Theseus’ famous speech at the beginning of Act V (scene i, lines 4–17)
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
This, the brain’s transformation of ‘airy nothing’, becomes Shakespeare’s interpretation of the ‘hard problem’, the alchemy of the mind in conjunction with the body. Soon, this would become one of his most obsessive themes. Three or 4 years later, in Hamlet, Shakespeare would return to lovers and lunatics in a more viscerally tragic and universal drama, in which, quite explicitly, he addresses the condition of Hamlet’s cerebral economy.
Hamlet’s first expression of self-consciousness occurs in Act I, scene 5, in response to the Ghost’s notorious injunction, ‘Remember me’. In his first great soliloquy, the grieving son describes his state of mind by comparing it explicitly to the drama of the Globe Theatre to which the London audience has flocked for entertainment.
Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. (1. v. 100–109)