Consciousness as a critical category has largely been absent from the proliferation of literary and historical studies that have interrogated what has come to be known as “the early modern subject.”1 Instead, scholars have turned to the “body-mind,” “inwardness,” “emotions,” and “selves” as ways of approaching the messy and often confusing matrices of experience that constitute awareness, almost as if “consciousness,” a term which captures the very immanence of life, is too unstable.2 To be fair, this resistance to consciousness has occurred not only in the study of early modern literatures and cultures; until recently it has been shunted to the side in many philosophic and scientific discourses because it was perceived as intractable, “the last surviving mystery.”3 Thomas Nagel summarized the problem: “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”4 Speaking of experimental protocols in the late 1980s, Stanislas Dehaene asserted that neuroscientists “all studied consciousness in one way or another . . . but the word itself remained taboo: no serious scientific publication ever used it.”5 Likewise, Arne Dietrich, in his brilliant attempt to investigate the subject of consciousness in a single volume, argues that “Consciousness has never been a topic that lends itself naturally to sober, intellectual discourse” because “what’s at stake is nothing less than the nature of our souls.”6
Dietrich’s central argument, that “consciousness has gone interdisciplinary,”7 helps us to explain the explosion of interest in consciousness and its cognitive subcategories. Best-selling books such as Michio Kaku’s The Future of Mind and Daniel Bor’s The Ravenous Brain, subtitled “How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning,” attest to the popularity of such inquiries into the nature of what it means to be aware.8 All such examinations must, however, attend to the core problems of embodied experience and the fact that without a brain, consciousness is impossible. Whether we label it the “mind-body problem” or “Cartesian dualism,” any approach to consciousness must attend not only to the subjectively registered thoughts and qualia which comprise experience but also to the physical correlates which support and give rise to the multiplicity of sensations that constitute the present moment as it arises and disappears, notwithstanding Christopher Koch’s reminder that “much of what goes on in the brain bypasses consciousness” altogether.9
Consciousness exists in the realms of paradox—a feature of experience that is simultaneously embodied and disembodied, clearly experienced but difficult to situate—and this slipperiness may partially account for why it has rarely been mobilized as a mode of critical inquiry. Terrence Deacon, describing the “recent flurry of interest in the problem of consciousness, and the often extreme theoretical views concerning its nature and scientific status,”10 outlines the conflict between materialist claims that consciousness exists only in the interactions of brain and world and the position that “consciousness is always a residual phenomenon remaining unaccounted for after all correlated physical processes are described.” In his monumental work Incomplete Nature, Deacon advocates for a third option, defining consciousness as “a phenomenon that is defined by its absential character.”11 Deacon’s assertion that “there is something present [in consciousness] that marks this curious intrinsic relation to something absent” leads to the radical conclusion that “that which is explicitly absent is me.”12 Deacon takes over 500 pages to explain the mysteries of this cryptic conclusion and to explore the intrinsic incompleteness of self and identity before finally concluding that the “core characteristics of conscious experience—are accurate reflections of the fact that self is literarily sui generis, emerging each moment from what is not there.”13
Clearly, debates about consciousness are now at the forefront of emerging disciplines that are necessarily hybrid (Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience), as approaches to questions of consciousness seem to promote the dissolution of traditional academic boundaries. In literary studies, consciousness has been approached indirectly through a number of cognitive biocritical lenses that examine particular sensory, emotional, mnemonic, psychological, and evolutionary processes and apply these discrete operations to cultural practices and problems of interpretation.14 Although literary study’s reduction of consciousness into its cognitive constituents was not part of a systematic critical strategy, it makes sense that individuated theories of cognition would provide more concentrated applications than the sometimes overwhelming ideas related to mapping the totality of consciousness. So, for example, Distributed Cognition, Cognitive Blends, and Theory of Mind provided focused critical models that could be easily applied to literary artifacts, practices, and characters in Shakespeare, whereas the Global Workspace Theory and other more generalized approaches to consciousness may be too esoteric to yield tangible results.15
This book emerges as a response to recent scientific and cultural preoccupations with consciousness and our curiosity about how such a category shift could lead to new insights about Shakespeare and his world. Because consciousness, neuroscience, the brain, mindfulness, and other cognitive categories are ubiquitous in today’s print and electronic media—and cognitive science continues to capture the attention of scholars across disciplines16—we hoped to harness some of this energy by deploying Shakespeare and consciousness together, allowing scholars to explore the synergies that emerged. We are not saying that considerations of consciousness have been absent from critical inquiries in Shakespeare before this collection, as the numerous works on inwardness, self, self-consciousness, embodied self, and emotions attest to the interest that scholars have lavished on the mind-body problem. We are suggesting, however, that considering consciousness from multiple perspectives—as a historically phenomenal process, a materially determined product, a neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity—can help us to understand the plays and associated cultural practices in surprising ways.
Consciousness may also offer a way around the long-standing debate in Shakespeare studies around the question of inwardness or essence. The Cultural Materialist and New Historicist critics of the late twentieth century mounted an attack on the dominant liberal humanist tradition that assumed a stable, transhistorical human essence variously called “inwardness,” “interiority,” and “subjectivity.” They argued that to “ascribe subjectivity to Renaissance characters is to posit an ‘imaginary interiority,’ imported into reading of the drama by modern ideological habits.”17 At best, critics like Jonathan Goldberg argued, the perception of interiority in Shakespeare’s age was derived “largely from external matrices”18 and was therefore not true interiority but a reaction to cultural forces. It was, in Francis Barker’s famous phrase, a “promissory form”19 in the evolution toward modern subjectivity. Against this argument stands the indomitable Harold Bloom who argues, “The internalization of the self is one of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions, particularly because it came before anyone else was ready for it.”20 Bloom uses the word “consciousness” in his descriptions of Falstaff and, especially, Hamlet, but at times he seems to be using it as a synonym for some sort of self-conscious, intelligent inwardness: “Hamlet, as a character, bewilders us because he is so endlessly suggestive. Are there any limits to him? His inwardness is his most radical originality; the ever-growing inner self, the dream of an infinite consciousness, has never been more fully portrayed.”21 What is the dividing line, in this formulation, between “inwardness,” the “inner self,” and “consciousness”? What does it mean to dream of infinite consciousness? Katharine offers a more specific rebuttal to the Cultural Materialists and New Historicists by demonstrating that there was a deep conversation about inwardness in the early modern period. She also identifies the ideological impetus behind their attempts to deny it: “Admitting the significance of conceptions of personal inwardness for the English Renaissance, they imagine, would be tantamount to embracing a naive essentialism about human nature.”22
Consciousness, for all its philosophical and neurobiological mystery, has the advantage of being more specific than “subjectivity” or “interiority.” Most of us know what consciousness is, can recognize if something is conscious or not, even if we cannot explain its origins and complexities. And because consciousness is clearly tied to brain function, it is potentially transhistorical. That is not to say that all previous generations puzzled over consciousness—as several of the essays in this volume remind us, the word “consciousness” did not even exist in Shakespeare’s time—but if consciousness is “hard wired,” then it may prove a test case for how an innate human characteristic is interpreted, exploited, or ignored by different historical cultures. And literature, because it represents the human condition, individuals as well as their cultures, may be one of the most potent sources of information about that interplay between the biological self and the material forces that shape it.
Shakespeare is an especially appropriate place for a discussion of literature and consciousness for several reasons. He lived in a historically significant moment in the history of consciousness: just before Descartes’ cogito, that philosophical move that inscribed a seemingly indelible divide between the mind and the body and “accorded consciousness a privileged position as the proper locus of indubitable cognition.”23 Combined with William Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood, a discovery that “represents a radically new image of the body as a closed system—more self-contained, less permeable than its Galenic predecessor,”24 this divide offered a new concept of the self that privileged the mental over the somatic, consciousness over flesh, and which separated both from the immediate influences of the environment. But, as David Aers reminds us, “There is no reason to think that languages and experiences on inwardness, of interiority, of divided selves, of splits between outer realities and inner forms of being, were unknown before the seventeenth century, before capitalism, before the ‘bourgeoisie,’ before Descartes, before the disciplinary regimes addressed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.”25 Indeed, though Shakespeare lived and wrote on the cusp of the mind-body revolution, he is famous (to the dismay of materialist critics) for creating characters who have been renowned for centuries because of their apparent consciousness. The Romantics and, most significantly, Sigmund Freud have used his characters to illustrate theories of the mind and consciousness. Margreta De Grazia has argued that it was Samuel Coleridge who invented the word “psychological” in his discussion of Hamlet because there was no term available to discuss a philosophy of the mind,26 and “For Hamlet, the final reality . . . is a function of the mind.”27 Freud, of course, used Prince Hamlet to illustrate his Oedipal theory and inadvertently launch the psychoanalytical school of literary criticism, a hermeneutic that compels critics to think of literary characters as having consciousness (how else could they have a subconscious?).28
Consciousness poses fresh theoretical questions by the very openness of its multiple associations, associations that are not captured by the categories of inwardness, embodiment, or cognition. For example, a number of authors in this volume make a distinction between the capacity for conscious awareness and the more specialized function of self-consciousness or consciousness of consciousness, moments when characters and audiences become hyperaware of an observational separation between a conscious “I” and the processes of thinking, feeling, and sensing. Also theories and taxonomies of consciousness provide a descriptive language that helps us understand both our capacity to engage with performances and literary artifacts and the language and gestures that structure the replication of consciousness i...