The best books on how Shakespeare thought about the mind

A brilliantly researched and argued book that transformed the intellectual landscape.

In the 1980s and 1990s many writers on Shakespeare and his contemporaries asserted that when reading their works we had to put aside modern concepts of selfhood as anachronistic. To some extent they were right: Elizabethan and Jacobean ideas about the self were different from ours; but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Maus shows that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were obsessed with what they called ‘the inward self’ or ‘the inner man’, and that their drama was shaped by this preoccupation with disparities between a performed public self and a concealed inner self. There’s also a fascinating chapter, wittily called "A Womb of his Own", on how male writers appropriated childbirth metaphors to represent their intellectual creativity.

The most seismic cultural shift of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly the Protestant Reformation.

It affected everything: not only religion and politics, but also, profoundly, how each individual thought about themselves. Ryrie uses many sources from the period to show how private prayer, meditation, and self-examination became central to everybody’s life.

Spending time in contemplation was not just an anticipation of modern mindfulness practices: it was a matter of eternal life or death. In looking within, you were searching for certainty that you had received God’s saving grace, destining you for bliss in heaven, not endless torment in hell.

Inevitably this created turbulent states of doubt and anxiety, and Ryrie shows how Protestants came to value the passions (what we call emotions) as a necessary part of inward spiritual struggle.

Elizabethan ideas about the mind were based on the ancient medical theory of humours: fluids whose proportions in the body dictated character, and whose circulation and fluctuation triggered fleeting moods.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries were particularly obsessed with black bile, or melancholy, whose long list of symptoms included sadness, bad dreams, seeking darkness and solitude, and suicidal thoughts. It also enhanced intellectual and creative powers, so had a certain glamour.

Understanding melancholy is essential to understanding Hamlet and many other works from its period. Gowland traces the sources of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a compendious work published shortly after Shakespeare’s death, and thereby illuminates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understanding of what we would call psychology.

A startling finding when I was researching Elizabethan ideas about the mind was how far their attitudes to the imagination differed from ours.

We see it as a creative force to be encouraged and liberated, but for them it was dangerous, deceptive, and unruly, leading towards sinfulness and madness. Roychoudhury explains how early scientific thinking was starting to unsettle this traditional view of the imagination as reprehensible, and traces the effects of this in works including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Sonnets, and Macbeth.

I would add that the new commercial playhouses for which Shakespeare wrote became experimental crucibles: these were spaces where the combined imaginations of playwright, actors, and audiences created virtual realities, unleashing an exhilarating and magical sense of the powers of imagination.

Renaissance writers were trained in rhetoric: how to use language to work through a problem or convey a state of mind.

Today, theories of cognition explore how linguistic devices relate to processes in the brain; for example, metaphor replicates how the mind understands something by associating or comparing it with something else. Lyne’s radical innovation is to bring together these historical and contemporary frameworks for understanding thought and language.

He explores points of contact between Renaissance rhetorical theories and present-day cognitive theories, then applies his insights to analyse works by Shakespeare. This offers a wholly fresh approach to understanding how Shakespeare translates thoughts – his own and those of his characters – into words; and how those words in turn work on our minds as readers or listeners.