Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Early modern playing companies performed up to six different plays a week and mounted new plays frequently. This book seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: how did they do it? Drawing upon work in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, it proposes that the cognitive work of theatre is distributed across body, brain, and world. "Shakespeare's company coped with an enormous mnemonic load, performing up to six different plays a week. How did they do it? Cognition in the Globe addresses this question through the lens of distributed cognition. This is a dynamic model that attends to the art of 'playing' at a range of levels. These include the material conditions of playing space; artifacts such as parts, plots, and playbooks; the social structures of the companies, including methods of training and coordination; internal cognitive mechanisms such as attention, perception, and memory; and actor-audience dynamics, among many others. This is the first book to offer such an approach to theatrical history and performance studies"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction....Pages 1-23 The Stuff of Memory....Pages 25-68 Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind....Pages 69-110 Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre....Pages 111-150 Conclusion: Toward a Model of Cognitive Ecology....Pages 151-166 Back Matter....Pages 167-200