[lbo-talk] Shakespeare

[C. G. Estabrook]

'...Neuroscience, and the study of the activity of the brain, is 
beginning to bring its own illumination to our understanding of how art 
works, and what it is. I have come to see the delight in making 
connections – of which metaphor-making is one of the most intense – as 
perhaps the fundamental reason for art and its pleasures. Philip Davis, 
at Liverpool University, has been working with scientists on responses 
to Shakespeare’s syntax, and has found that the connecting links between 
neurones stay “live” – lit up for longer – after responding to 
Shakespeare’s words, especially his novel formations of verbs from 
nouns, than they do in the case of “ordinary” sentences. In Jean-Pierre 
Dupuy’s Aux Origines des sciences cognitives (1994; translated as The 
Mechanization of the Mind, 2000), an extraordinary account of the 1950s 
meetings of the cybernetics group which discussed minds and machines and 
what it was to be human, a neural network designer suggests that we 
delight in puns because the neurone connections become very excited by 
the double input associated with all the stored information for two 
arbitrarily connected things or ideas. It occurred to me that metaphors 
might arise from the same neuronal excitement – a double input, a 
strengthened connection (and I wrote on John Donne’s metaphorical 
excitement – a sensuality of the brain – in these pages, September 22, 
2006).'  --A. S. Byatt in the TLS, 28 November 2007

Dr. Johnson incidentally was censorious of Shakespeare's predilection 
for puns. --CGE

Carrol Cox wrote:
> Shakespeare is weird. I was just browsing in the current New Yorker and
> came across the two lines below, quoted from Cymbeline. It's been 54
> years since I read that play, and therefore the lines are without
> context for me, just two lines hanging in midair:
> 
> Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift:
> His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent.
> 
> These lines owe _nothing_ to any profundity of content; the content
> would fit a small-town weekly's report on a church bazaar. Yet they
> really are wonderful.
> 
> Like I say, Shakespeare is weird. These two lines reflect his difference
> from other poets in English: even when his words aren't saying much they
> somehow stick together so  perfectly.
> 
> Carrol
> 
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