The ways in which Shakespearean texts create affective experiences have been explored by Peter Brooks, Mary Crane, Gail Kern Paster, and Arthur Kinney, who have done much to link the material, conceptual, linguistic, and embodied in terms of Shakespearean criticism. 1 Cognitive science, especially concepts such as embodied cognition and social neuroscience, could continue to produce intriguing inroads and models to better understand the ways in which meaning and experience are linguistically, conceptually, and socially embodied in individual members of the textual or physical audience and for the audience as a whole at a performance of a Shakespearean play.

William Shakespeare’s compelling, rich, and perhaps even unsettling words carry a compelling conceptual weight, which can, in turn, trigger strong affective responses. The words that represent emotions such as anger or joy  “serve as the glue” in our brains, which adhere various physical and emotional understandings of emotions. 2 The comprehension of linguistic terms, like the comprehension of all language, “activates experiential representations of words (lexical, grammatical, phonological, motoric, tactile) as well as associated experiential representations, and often combinations of these.” 3 Embodied Cognition suggests that the body enriches the conceptual meaning provided by language through “perceptual symbols” which are somatovisceral4 networks of previously embodied experiences of pain, pleasure, confusion, or regret. In tapping into these perceptual symbols, members of the audience use their own past experiences to feel what is happening to the characters on stage.  For example, Hamlet’s angry rant about his Mother’s nauseating sexual hunger, “Why, she would hang on him /As if increase of appetite had grown/ By what it fed on,” stands markedly different from Enobarbus’ proclamation that Antony will not leave Cleopatra because “Age cannot wither her,/ nor custom stale / Her infinite variety. Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies.” Both texts align female sexuality with desire, albeit, from very different conceptual framework where the reading of that desire is necessarily going to be as personal and visceral for each member of the audience as it was for Hamlet or for Antony.

Emotional priming and affective coherence enrich this kind of affective response. An audience may expect to have a certain kind of affective experience at a comedy or tragedy; joy, sorry, pleasure, and pain all unfold within a narrative and audiences expect to be carried along on an emotional ride. However, despite welcoming twists and turns, audiences anticipate affective coherence: the state where one’s embodied experience aligns expectations. Although not divided down generic lines, this state is toyed with, but maintained, in plays such as As You Like It  where a madcap, gender bending dance into the magic woods is breezily realigned with marriage and a return to order provided by a hierarchical court system. Alternately, audiences might unexpectedly experience affective incoherence – a state where one’s affect does not agree with their evaluative thoughts.5 Affective incoherence is believed to produce considerable and visceral negative feelings; this might be seen in critical and experiential reactions to Othello’s murder of Desdemona. The murder is cruel and meaningless and the audience has to negotiate a new way of seeing Othello. Reactions from our students range from rage to pity, but the consensus is that they are unsettled by the play; it does not make sense to them. It is the incoherence, which gives Othello a disturbing and powerful emotional resonance.

Meaning is not passed from actor to audience; rather, it is created as part of a multilayered and dynamic network of conceptual, physical, and social elements. With their own nerves and neurons firing and muscles twitching, audiences gasp, shout, and weep as action happens onstage, the role of the audience is not one of passive observer, but of co-participant in the theater, affectively feeding meaning back to the players and to the other members of the audience. Work done on behavioral response and mimicry, 6 suggests that we are socially and neurologically hardwired to be willing and able to share emotional states. Perhaps most intriguingly, meaning might then be understood to be created within a social network, which makes it is possible to see the Shakespearean audience as creating meaning together with the author, the actors, and one another.

--Kirsten C. Uszkalo. 
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
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1 See Peter Brooks. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993). Gail Kern Paster. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), Mary Thomas Crane. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 16.

2 Lisa Feldman Barrett and Kristen A. Lindquist. “The Embodiment of Emotion” Embodied Grounding: Social, Cognitive, Affective, and Neuroscientific Approaches. Gün R. Semin and Eliot R. Smith, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 237-262, esp 253. Also see Kristen A. Lindquist, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, and James A. Russell “Language and the Perception of Emotion” Emotion American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 6(1), 125–138

3 Rolf A. Zwann. “The Immersed Experiencer: Toward an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension.” The Psychology of Leaning and Motivation. Brian H. Ross ed. (San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004) 35-58. esp. 38

4 The somatic system represents the muscles, tendons, and nerves. Somatovisceral networks connect the organs of the body to the somatic system.

5 The results of Centerbar et al’s study suggests that those “experiencing incoherence rated the events as getting worse, and themselves as less happy, more sad, more depressed, more angry, and more upset.” See Centerbar, David B., Simone Schnall; Gerald L. Clore, and Erika D. Garvin. “Affective incoherence: When affective concepts and embodied reactions clash.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 94(4), Apr 2008, 560-578.

6 Pablo Briol and Richard E. Petty. “Embodied Persuasion: Fundamental Processes by which Bodily Responses Can Impact Attitudes” Embodied Grounding: Social, Cognitive, Affective, and Neuroscientific Approaches. Gün R. Semin and Eliot R. Smith, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 184-207.