Did Shakespeare have a brain? "In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need for an explanation." Readers may recognize my second sentence as a citation of the first sentence of Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?", an essay which established its redefinition of author as "a complex and variable function of discourse" so successfully that it is my question, and not Foucault's, which now seems odd. Older critics used to assume, of course, that Shakespeare had a mind: G. Wilson Knight, for instance, could argue that the "imaginative atmosphere" of Timon of Athens "seems to reflect the peculiar clarity and conscious mastery of the poet's mind." Knight's sense that Shakespeare's mind was both clear and masterful represents the kind of authorial agency that Foucault (and many critics following Foucault) have been particularly at pains to question. Psychoanalytic critics assume that Shakespeare possessed the Freudian apparatus of conscious and unconscious minds, but the centrality of the unconscious to this approach allows these critics to avoid the problematic assumptions about authorial agency that trouble other author-centered criticisms. The implications of a Shakespearean brain, however, as one (among many) material loci for the production of his plays has been almost entirely overlooked.

Using some aspects of cognitive theory, I want to try to reintroduce into serious critical discourse a consideration of Shakespeare's brain as one material site for the production of the dramatic texts attributed to him. By cognitive theory I mean the body of new insights about the workings of human cognition now beginning to emerge from the intersection of neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, psychology and philosophy. For me the most useful work (such as that by Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, and George Lakoff) is that which emphasizes the ineluctably embodied nature of the mind and traces the ways in which this embodied mind interacts with its physical and cultural environment to produce its own cognitive faculties. Cognitive theory seems congruent, in many ways, with current literary theoretical assumptions about the nature of meaning and the role of culture in shaping the subject. But it also suggests several ways to revise our account of the production of meaning and the nature of agency. I want to argue that several (perhaps most) of Shakespeare's plays experiment with different forms of polysemy and prototype effects in ways that leave traces of cognitive, as well as ideological and cultural, processes in the text. Further, I intend to show how these traces of cognitive process reveal the possibilities as well as limits of individual agency within a biological and cultural matrix.

Following Foucault (as well as Althusser and Lacan), materialist and historicist critics have tended to view authorial agency as precluded, or at least severely constrained, by the operations of culture (or ideology) through language and other discursive formations. Cognitive theory insists that we also pay attention to the operational (and ultimately physiological) constraints that determine the shapes of cognition within the embodied brain. Since cognitive theory also recognizes the powerful role of culture in shaping cognition, it might seem that it would yield a doubly constrained subject with even less possibility for meaningful agency. However, although cognitive neuroscience posits brain function working through neural networks so complex, multiplicitous, and simultaneous that unitary agency becomes in a strictly literal sense impossible, much work in this field recognizes that powerful concepts of agency emerge from the experience of living in a body and that cognition, and perhaps consciousness itself, are built up around these basic spatial and temporal concepts. That language itself encodes agency on very basic levels becomes evident whenever we attempt to talk or write about authorship without attributing agency. Cognitive linguists have identified less evident structures (such as the Silverstein hierarchy) which reveal the ways in which agency permeates language, and, by extension, thought. From a cognitive perspective, to write in the active voice that Shakespeare wrote something can mean not that he was able to act as an individual and unified subject with complete control over language, cognitive process, and ideology, but simply that physiology and culture met within Shakespeare's brain to produce an output in written language which reflects the various biological and cultural systems that produced it. Since these systems can be reflected in the language of the plays only insofar as they exist as neuronal signals within Shakespeare's brain, it isn't meaningless to assert that (for the most part) "Shakespeare" materially produced the text. And since those texts persistently thematize issues of agency in relation to cultural and physiological constraints of various kinds, I believe that the cognitive concept of agency is particularly relevant to their interpretation.

My paper will trace, briefly, some of the ways in which cognitive theory offers an alternative to Saussurean semiotics and its two central tenets: 1) that meaning is arbitrary both with respect to the relationship between signifier and signified, and also with respect to the relationship between signified and the physical world and 2) that meaning is produced by a system of differences. Cognitive theory argues that meaning is "motivated" rather than arbitrary; that is, that it is built up on the basis of physiological interactions between the embodied brain and its surroundings. It also argues that meaning is produced not by difference, but by resemblances structured in radial categories around a prototypical example of the signified. The implications for human agency are profound, since according to this view, human cognition is not shaped by a rigid, external, and arbitrary system of differences, but instead is integrally involved in building up webs of meaning (with both conscious and unconscious levels) based on its multiple lived experiences of what surrounds it.

I will offer as an example of this kind of cognitive reading the case of Shakespeare's play on the radial, polysemic category comprising the word "suit" in Twelfth Night. Like Patricia Parker in her recent book Shakespeare from the Margins, I argue that Shakespeare's play on polysemic words "exposes" something crucial about the workings of language; unlike Parker, I want to argue that it exposes not just the hegemonic discursive formations of his culture, but also the patterns which emerge as the human brain thinks those formations. I want to be more precise about the agency behind this exposure--I think it emerges as human language reflects the clash of physiological and cultural constraints--and also indicated by this exposure--I think it suggests that some common conceptions of human agency are problematized by the structures of cognition as they are reflected in language. Play on multiple kinds of "suit" in Twelfth Night suggest a web-like structure of meaning and agency that is explored as an alternative to the narrative structure of the plot. Although many critics have suggested that the narrative structure of the marriage plot in this play is significantly deflected ("nature in her bias drew to that"), Shakespeare's language here seems to insist that narrative is simply one of many ways to manifest human agency and organize human experience. A radial polysemic (as opposed to narrative) structure offers a more complex and multiple version of agency, one that is in my view closer to cognitive process than the simpler structures that critics have tended to use to conceptualize agency.

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