Mama who bore me, Mama who gave me no way to handle things...

[Title: 'Mama Who Bore Me' from Spring Awakening, performed by Lea Michele (before Glee) in one of my favorite musicals*]

Note: I shouldn't blog after my classes because my brain is too stuffed with academic discourse...But that is exactly what I am doing today. Sorry. Boring academic ramblings follow. Be warned.

I love Shakespeare.

I am taking a Cognitive Shakespeare class, which is the explanation for the excessive Shakespeare references in this blog. Cognitive literary theory is a relatively new approach. In the course, we are studying Shakespeare's plays through the lense of early modern science and philosophy. For example, in early modern Europe, to view a play was believed to be an active and potentially dangerous experience. Historical scientific beliefs about perception held that a human's eyes (and ears) actually sent out "grabbers" or "agents" that went into the world and collected images (sounds), then brought them back to the brain where they stayed and lived on their own. Within this view of cognition, to "perceive" is to "receive" and to "mistake" is to actually, physically "take" an idea wrongly. Images and sounds and other sensory effects were believed to be physical commodities.

When you consider this view of human cognition in relation to the theater's history in early modern society, Jacobean and Elizabethan plays take on great theological and philosophical significance. Theater in the modern sense originated from religious rituals and the closing of the theaters in 1642 was a direct result of the Protestant Reformation, which rejected Catholic visual imagery and ritual as indulgent and dangerous. Shakespeare's plays are highly conscious of their relevance in this discourse. In my classroom this semester, we have been tracing Shakespeare's language of free will and agency, thinking and perceiving, morality and judgment. It's fascinating.

Today, for example, we discussed King Lear's narcissism and its significance when considered alongside Christian doctrines of compassion. Last week, we discussed Ophelia's suicide as a result of falling into the abyss of "nothing" that is a woman's agency in early modern society, even as suicide itself is the ultimate act of personal agency (to deny/despair in God and take life into one's own hands). Before that we read Othello and considered how ocular, tangible proof is weaker than poisonous ideas, which can be "planted" in one's mind (an interesting metaphor to portray human thoughts as vegetation, mirroring the language in Hamlet of weeds and the rank, overgrown vegetative state of Denmark and Hamlet's mind**).

Fascinating stuff for an English major but obviously a dry, dense topic for most people.

---------------------

Back to real life now. I did in fact live a little outside of my Shakespeare class. I walked through the rain to get to class. I straightened my hair. I ate a bowl of Captain Crunch. I listened to the Spring Awakening soundtrack. I watched too many episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I attempted to heal a broken frienship at the risk of bringing up old pain. And I did the NYT crossword puzzle.

I do the NYT daily crossword puzzle every Monday - Thursday. And I use pen. I used to be a pencil puzzler but then my Uncle Steve set me right. "The only difference between doing the crossword in pen or doing it in pencil is confidence," he said. "If you're going to do something, do it with confidence at least."



*In case you're confused by my irrelevant titles...I don't give a fuck. I title each blog post whatever random thought is in my mind when I sit down to write.

**An overgrown garden is one without an attentive gardener...just as an overgrown mind is one without direction, purpose, sense of interior self, and definition of personal agency. Iago, unlike Hamlet, is a masterful gardener.