Authorship and Cognitive Studies

Authorship and Cognitive Studies

For a little over two decades, a number of Shakespeare scholars have concerned themselves with finding ways to apply the cognitive sciences to studies of the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An excellent survey of these applications was published in 2020 by Mark Kaethler, covering all of the major works in this ‘cognitive
turn’ since Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain.1 Not wishing to replicate such a summary, I begin the present chapter instead with a brief explanation of the origins of
cognitive science in order to show how the scientific procedures that are fundamental to this field were remapped but not replaced in the establishment of a cognitive turn in
Shakespeare scholarship by Crane’s work. With reference to a small number of representative samples, I will then outline a split among contributions to this cognitive turn between the studies focusing on Shakespeare’s individual cognition as an author and those that focus on cognition as a fully distributed process. One of the challenges for the future of cognitive studies of the early modern stage will be to close this gap between the two approaches, and I shall offer several examples of traces of cognitive processes from Shakespeare’s plays that illustrate potential points of overlap between otherwise competing models. A distributed cognition model involving multiple agents can nevertheless
provide a viable framework for a theory of individual authorship for the early modern stage.

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