“The Shakespeared Brain” at the Literary Review
Written on August 3, 2008
Philip Davis, “The Shakespeared Brain,” in the Literary Review.
Excerpt:
In this way Shakespeare is stretching us, making us more alive, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by later conceptualisation; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings begin to show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.
The article refers to A Shakespearian Grammar: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences Between Elizabethan and Modern English by E.A. Abbott.
See also: Shakespeare Thinking by Philip Davis (Continuum, 2007).
Filed in: cognitive science.
