In an earlier post I wrote briefly about research that suggests music helps us deal with cognitive dissonance. It seems to allow us to exist more comfortably in a (more or less inevitable) contradictory state. I was interested in how one use of music in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale worked in a very subtle way. It seemed pretty obvious, not subtle at all actually, that it was offering to harmonize someone’s thinking at a fraught moment, but it was less obvious whose thinking it was, and what problem it was solving.
      Studies of cognitive dissonance probably could add something to accounts of music in Shakespeare. I don’t think I am the person to do it at any length, because I don’t know enough about music in theory or in renaissance practice. But I do find myself with a few more things to say.

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The revival scene in The Winter’s Tale is not the only one that includes music. Comparable moments of coming-back-to-life in Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, and Pericles all have their accompaniments. Shakespeare’s most magical plays, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are both full of more and less harmonious tunes. There is clearly a relationship between music and wonder in which cognitive dissonance might be a thought-provoking psychological component. Scientific accounts of it could help us understand why the plays do what they do, but the scenes in turn provide richly developed instances of cognitive dissonance in action.

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I would like to say something about two passages from very different plays where music seems to align with contradictory thinking. In Richard II, the king, in the process of being deposed, hears a mysterious melody (source unknown), and recognises that harmony and proportion are things he has lost. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia wants music to play while Bassanio chooses a casket. Perhaps the music will help him make the cognitively dissonant choice that he needs to make; perhaps the music helps her hold together the strange situation with its two extremely divergent outcomes.

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Whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. Music do I hear?
[Music]
Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the .
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder’d string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. (Richard II, 5.5)

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Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music: that the comparison
May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream
And watery death-bed for him. He may win;
Then music is
Even as the flourish when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch: such it is
As are those dulcet sounds in break of day
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear,
And summon him to marriage. (Merchant of Venice, 3.2)

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What would be good music to play while Bassanio makes his choice? My previous post on music reveals the answer: Sigur Rós again. However, after listening to this Bassanio would go straight to the casket made of ice and lava.

Gordon G. Gallup Jr, Steven M. Platek, and Kristina N. Spaulding, ‘The Nature Of Visual Self-Recognition Revisited’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 57-8.

Thomas Suddendorf and David L. Butler, ‘Response to Gallup et al.: Are Rich Interpretations Of Visual Recognition A Bit Too Rich?’, Trends of Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 58-9.

These are two interventions in an ongoing discussion (Gallup et al. are responding to an earlier Trends piece by Suddendorf and Butler). The latest ‘Response’ urges caution in developing too ‘rich’ a theory of ‘self-recognition’ (i.e., knowing that it’s you in the mirror). This is prompted by Gallup et al. arguing that self-recognition is linked to various aspects of social cognition (especially the crucial ability to attribute mental states to others).
      They argue that in the experimental data ‘deficits and decays in self-recognition (e.g. autism) covary with mental state attribution deficits’. They develop an intriguing picture of schizophrenia, of which sufferers (it appears) are able to adjust distorting mirrors to create undistorted images of objects, but unable to do the same when the images are of themselves. It was interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, to read that self-awareness is ‘multi-modal’: hearing or seeing your name facilitates visual self-recognition. It was also interesting to read that it has been proposed that the evolution of self-conception ‘is an adaptation to the risk of falling in ’.
      For Gallup et al., the important thing is the interconnection of self-recognition and the ability to understand others. They don’t think the ‘adaptive value’ is really the point, not least because ‘mirrors were rare in the ’. This made me think about Shakespeare, partly because of some very vivid moments of self-recognition (or rather, failures of self-recognition and problems of self-contemplation), and partly because, not least thanks to the work of , I know that mirror technology had taken great leaps in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare’s interest in self-recognition had an emerging technological correlative; what do his representations of this relationship seem to know about it?

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Twelfth Night

Viola thinks her brother is dead. She has dressed as a young man to help her make her way through a strange land, and as a result resembles her brother enough that his friend Antonio mixes them up, and enough that when she looks in the mirror, he appears there:

He named Sebastian: I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate: O, if it prove,
Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love.

I take this to be describing, within the fiction, a genuine response to the mirror-image rather than a witty play on the idea of resemblance. In this scenario Viola’s need to believe in her brother being alive – a delusion of grief so far as she knows – overpowers self-recognition, and she sees someone else in the glass. The need to know another, an extension of the capacity to know another discussed by Gallup et al., is linked to the mirror moment. Shakespeare vividly depicts the ‘covariance’ of knowing oneself and knowing another.

Richard II

Richard, once deposed, finds that recognising oneself is not a single thing. His multiple selves, man and King, no longer hold together, despite the mirror still showing a face that used to unite them:

Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me!
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;
[Dashes the glass against the ground]
For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.

The reflection seems like a lie, because despite all his pain the face is unchanged. Shakespeare seems to be showing that ‘self-recognition’ as imagined by Gallup et al. is working with a basic and stable idea of ‘self’. Richard realises that knowing himself in the mirror isn’t helping him know himself as an other.

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Of course, scientific experiments have to limit the number of factors they engage with in order to test precise and demarcated theories. Merging knowing oneself and knowing an other, as these plays do, would compromise the clarity of the things being tested. Richard and Viola – the former perhaps more grimly and recognisably, the latter more uncannily – both have claims to psychological truthfulness.

Richard J.S. Wise and Rodrigo M. Braga, ‘Default Mode Network: The Seat of Literary Creativity?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (2014), 116-17.

If they’re going to mention Shakespeare in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, then the chances are I am going to write about it. Here is what Wise and Braga say:

There is a longstanding and often ill-tempered debate about whether Shakespeare actually wrote, singly or as a co-author, the 37 plays attributed to him. It is argued that only a well-travelled Tudor aristocrat, versed in the ways of courtly love, would have had the experiences to write the histories, tragedies, and romantic comedies attributed to Shakespeare. Now we can speculate that some background reading and curiosity about the motivations of others, coupled with a spectacularly well-connected DMN, made the bard immortal despite his humble origins.

Some people doubt that the Stratford-born actor wrote the works that carry his name. I have never found the reasons for that doubt, let alone the suggestions for an alternative author, at all convincing. Wise and Braga argue that if doubters understood the brain properly they would find it easier to believe that Shakespeare could have exhibited such extraordinary intellectual resourcefulness.

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The ‘Default Mode Network’ in the brain (DMN) appears to develop over the course of childhood. It is a group of regions in the brain that are most active when the brain is not engaged in the outside world. They help with memory, introspection, mind-reading, daydreaming (‘mind-wandering’, a former topic on this blog), imagining the future, and other hypotheticals. It is involved in creating as well as understanding narratives.

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Wise and Braga bring together evidence for the rich, dynamic interconnectedness of the DMN. They argue that such a system in the brain, receptive to a wide variety of sensory information and liable to rethink and reprocess it over time, is just the sort of mechanism that could explain creativity. Not all DMNs are equal, and a particularly good one could make up for any deficit in education or experience. Although their findings won’t make a decisive intervention into the authorship debate, they do make sense to me. I like the idea of artistic genius as a kind of network, where making and processing the connections between things is a defining characteristic.

* Leonid Perlovsky, ‘Musical Emotions: Functions, Origin, Evolution’, Physics of Life Reviews, 7 (2010), 2-27.
* Nobuo Masataka and Leonid Perlovsky, ‘The Efficacy of Musical Emotions Provoked by Mozart’s Music for the Reconciliation of Cognitive Dissonance’, Nature Scientific Reports, 2, 694: DOI:10.1038/srep00694 (2012).
* Leonid Perlovsky, Arnaud Cabanac, Marie-Claude Bonniot-Cabanac, Michel Cabanac, ‘Mozart Effect, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Pleasure of Music’, Behavioural Brain Research, 244 (2013), 9-14.
* Nobuo Masataka and Leonid Perlovsky, ‘Cognitive Interference Can Be Mitigated by Consonant Music and Facilitated by Dissonant Music’, Nature Scientific Reports, 3, 2028: DOI:10.1038/srep02028 (2013).

I gave a paper in Edinburgh last week about social cognition in renaissance plays. I was interested in how characters cooperate (with the collaboration of the audience, and of course the actors) to see the world in new and strange ways. I didn’t have time to bring in one little strand of reading I’d been doing about , so I thought I’d post about it.
      In the articles listed above Perlovsky and his collaborators assemble an intriguing set of results and hypotheses about the role of music in human cognition and evolution. They suggest that music helps with cognitive dissonance, and the universality of music in human cultures is explained by its role in . Once our thoughts became complex, we needed to evolve ways of handling the contradictions which inevitably arose from complexity: music, they say, is one of these ways.

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The suggestiveness of music as a way of limiting the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance in literature, and especially drama, is pretty obvious. Incidental tunes are not incidental. In The Winter’s Tale Paulina says ‘Music, awake her, strike!’ when Hermione’s statue is supposed to come to life. The interesting thing to me is not that this might help the audience or any of the characters through the . The interesting thing is that the music is transparently doing this, but as a member of the audience I am not sure who is being deceived or mollified. Is it Leontes, or is it me? If both, are we being helped through the same problem, and what is the significance of any differences?

To be, or not to be, :
Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe
No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end
The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes
That Flesh is heyre too? ‘Tis a consummation
Deuoutly to be wish’d. To dye to sleepe,
To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; ,
For in that sleepe of death, what may come,
When we haue shufflel’d off this mortall coile,
Must giue vs ; the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would beare the Whips and Scornes of time,
The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d Loue, the Lawes delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurnes
That patient merit of the vnworthy takes,
When he himselfe might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardles beare
To grunt and sweat vnder a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne
No Traueller returnes, Puzels the will,
And makes vs rather beare those illes we haue,
Then flye to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of vs all,
And thus the Natiue hew of Resolution
Is sicklied o’re, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprizes of great pith and moment,
With this regard their turne away,
And loose the name of Action. ,
The faire Ophelia? Nimph, in thy Orizons
Be all my sinnes remembred.

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To be, or not to be, I ,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, ,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscouered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
But for this, ,
Whol’d beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong’d,
The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life,
When that he may his full Quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which , and doth confound the sence,
Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue,
Than flie to others that we know not of.
I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all,
in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred. (Q1)