Chapter 1: Overhearing Ourselves

This is Part 2 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year. Read Part 1 here.

Storytelling is invention. It should not surprise us, then, that our greatest storyteller[i] was among our greatest inventors. It is only fitting that we should invent stories about him in turn.

The most famous stories we tell about William Shakespeare probably concern whether he is himself an invention. Only slightly less famous but considerably less tiresome are those concerning his invention of thousands of new words. Some of these stories of invention are even true. Probably fewer than 1,500, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary[ii]. Many of these words, of course, were probably already in informal use among lower classes or lesser authors in England when they appeared in his plays[iii]. Whether he was first to market or not, the popularity of his works certainly brought many such words into the vernacular. Even excluding the words he merely brought out of obscurity, the true list of Shakespearean neologisms is probably several hundred strong. Borrowed and corrupted words, familiar words repurposed with prefixes or suffixes, plus a handful of nouned verbs and verbed nouns add meaningfully to this list. Embellishments and apocryphal origin stories aside, it was an extraordinary feat.

His invention does not confine itself to the extraordinary, however. My wife is a Shakespearean dramaturg by training and profession. When we are in polite company, that means that she is responsible for providing actors, set designers, directors, costumers, and other participants in a theatrical production with the historical, cultural, linguistic, and social context necessary to make informed decisions about how to practice their own crafts. When we are in less polite company, we tell the truth: she is responsible for telling everybody where all the dick jokes are.

If Shakespearean philology is a cottage industry, then Shakespearean phallology is a manufacturing empire. We could probably say this about any feature of the modern movement to strip-mine literature for every possible ounce of subtext, power differential, or latent homoeroticism. Finding something new to say about a set of texts that have remained static for four centuries is hard. Finding intelligent and resourceful 20-somethings with a passion for literature and a willingness to offer up their labor as graduate teaching assistants for ethically questionable compensation and the promise of a terminal degree, on the other hand, is trivial. The outcome of this marriage was never really in doubt. Discovering innuendo where it isn’t is what English PhD’s are for. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

Still, the comedic genre structured around the male genitalia represents a rich vein of legitimate Shakespearean invention. Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV Part 2, and Love’s Labours Lost each contain extended scenes of characters bantering about being pricked by something. In Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff sails his pinnace to golden shores. Even in the otherwise bleak Macbeth, Shakespeare invests an entire scene into a group of porters joking about impotence while Macbeth is quite literally just off-stage washing Duncan’s blood from his hands. They leave just enough time in the scene for Shakespeare and the porters to jointly invent the knock-knock joke, even if Alexander Pope wants to ruin our fun by claiming that someone else in the company must have written this scene[iv].

Lest you think him a chauvinist, Shakespeare was not only inventive when it came to the comedic value of the male genitalia. Falstaff’s golden shores – the vulva, if you’re having trouble getting into a rhythm here – earned Shakespeare’s special attentions as well. Hamlet and As You Like It both involve famous allusions to country matters, a euphemism most easily understood by saying the phrase aloud a few times. Really lean into that first syllable. Hamlet spends time exploring the term ‘nothing’ in a conversation about what lies in a woman’s lap and between her legs[v]. To achieve the effect among a modern audience that it would have produced among their Elizabethan forbears, the play Much Ado About Nothing might have to be marketed as All This Over Some Pussy?

Shakespeare equipped twenty-five consecutive generations of humans with tools to present the profound and the puerile in equal measure. It is hard for me to imagine a more powerful legacy of literary invention. But then, I am not Harold Bloom. The late long-time Yale professor and literary scholar granted the bard a loftier invention than mere words. Maybe even loftier than dick jokes, although I would not presume to tell you how high your esteem for the art form ought to reach. As described in his seminal work Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom credits the plays and person of William Shakespeare with nothing less than our modern understanding of what it means to be human. It is a bold claim. If our instinct is to assume Bloom is engaging in garden-variety bardolatry – the near-religious celebration of Shakespeare among some critics and scholars of western literature – we could be forgiven. Were Bloom still alive, we would be forgiven. The unapologetic long-time Yale professor happily wrote that bardolatry ought to be ‘even more a secular religion than it already is[vi].’

 But Bloom’s argument isn’t the grandiose claim it seems to be on the surface. It is true, for example, that one could consider the unparalleled beauty in Shakespeare’s verse and conclude that he ‘invented the human’ by reaching the apex of our uniquely human capacity for art and creation. After all, many other authors have made this point exactly[vii], and it would not be out of keeping with Bloom’s own views on Shakespeare’s aesthetic contributions[viii].

 Or else we might contend that Shakespeare ‘invented the human’ by faithfully representing the common features of human nature. That he captured the human in his characters in ways that would affect you in much the same way if your life, class, circumstances, or fate were different. This was Samuel Johnson’s principal argument in praise of Shakespeare, made by a man who did his fair share of praising Shakespeare[ix].

Alternatively, we might suggest that Shakespeare ‘invented the human’ by presenting a complete menu of the most quintessentially human stories. The long-time chair of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, David Bevington, fashioned an entire book from this material. He uses Jaques’s famous Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It as his primary device. You know the one – all the world’s a stage, etc. Perhaps, as Bevington describes like so many others have done before, Shakespeare invented the human by presenting stories of ‘infancy and childhood, early schooling, friendships, rivalry among siblings, courtship, the competitive way in which sons must learn to become their fathers’ heirs, career choices and ambitions, sceptical disillusionment and loss of traditional faith, marriage, jealousy, midlife crisis, fathers’ worries about the marriages of their daughters, old age, retirement, and the approach of death.’[x]

You would not struggle to find passages that support any of these theories littered throughout Bloom’s work. Yet not one of them is what he means by ‘inventing the human.’ Bloom’s great insight is not that Shakespeare penned the most beautiful verse that appealed to the widest audiences and told the most varied and familiar stories. His great insight is that Shakespeare was the first to permit his audiences to peer into the consciousness of his characters. Even more to the point, that Shakespeare transformed this revealed consciousness into the energy behind each play’s action and developments. His are worlds in which the inner voice of the individual forms the will to action. ‘What Shakespeare invents are ways of representing changes,’ Bloom writes, ‘alterations not only caused by flaws and by decay but effected by the will as well, and by the will’s temporal vulnerabilities.’ In short, Shakespeare invented the human because unlike his forebears, Shakespeare’s characters were human in the Cartesian sense. Cogitant ergo sunt. They think, therefore they are.

Because he was first and greatest in bringing the changes effected by the will to both to the page and to the stage, we cannot help but think of Shakespeare’s characters as the models for our own inward struggles. As Bloom himself expressed it, ‘we hardly can think about ourselves as separate selves without thinking about Hamlet, whether or not we are aware that we are recalling him.’ I think that is true not only for Hamlet but for many of Shakespeare’s manifestly human characters. Can we think about ourselves struggling with indecision over whether and how to confront a friend without thinking about Brutus? Can we think ourselves in the insecurity of doubt, jealousy, degradation, and duty without thinking about Othello? Well, of course we can. Many of us have not read these plays since high school! And yet, even if we had never read a word of the plays in the first place, we think of cultural models which have been deeply informed by those characters.

Leave aside for the moment whether this innovation really constitutes the ‘invention of the human’ or if that is just so much bardolatrous hyperbole. What we can confidently join Bloom in saying is that Shakespearean character and plot development appear to have been derived from openly explored human consciousness. We can also join him in acknowledging that this represented a radical departure from the norms of classical, medieval, and early renaissance theater. It represented a radical departure for many reasons. One, however, rises above the others: the modern concept of consciousness itself would have been utterly foreign to anyone who lived or wrote during those periods.

It certainly did not help that humans knew little about what their brains did and even less about how they worked. For more than a millennium, western physiology was built on the ideas proposed by a 2^nd century Roman physician-philosopher. Galen, as he was commonly called, pioneered medical ideas that were just as relevant to the natural scientists of Elizabethan England as they were to a medieval market town bloodletter or a legionary medicus in the late Roman Empire. Men of learning believed that human conditions, temperaments, and maladies were the results of imbalances in bodily humors.

Galenic medicine also assumed a human physiology in which the purpose of the brain was to funnel so-called animal spirits to various parts of the body to give them motion and purpose. At the very least it can be said that Galenic medicine understood the brain to be the center of certain kinds of thought and nervous control. Yet it also suggested that this control was derived from psychic pneuma that conveyed the will of the rational soul to the nervous system. Scientific-spiritual Syncretism of this kind was the norm for much of what constituted natural science in Elizabethan England.

Galenic adherents were not merely present; they were the English scientific establishment. Thomas Linacre translated Galen’s works from the Latin, was the principal founder of the Royal College of Physicians and served as personal physician to King Henry VIII. John Caius, one of Linacre’s co-founders of the Royal College of Physicians, was a Galenic acolyte too. Ditto for William Henry, who would later discover the nature of the circulatory system. As was William Turner, the father of English botany.

Brilliant as these men were, the notion that the brain performed all the sensory, memory, cognitive, reasoning, emotional, spiritual, spatial, creative, pattern-detection, and self-awareness functions on its own and synthesized them into threads of potential meaning and identity without the aid of humors, spirits or input from other organs was not a thought that crossed their livers. We could blame their lack of imagination on a black bile deficiency, of course. Yet the simple truth is that they were hundreds of years away from the science that could even hope to consolidate these ideas.

Natural scientists from the classical era through the early renaissance were only marginally better prepared to deal with the unknown implications of evolutionary biology. Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique, among the first texts to explore species change through the acquisition of hereditary traits, was still two centuries away when Hamlet was published. Charles Darwin was not yet even a fleeting notion within the vital spirits that crashed against the hull of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s pinnace. At the very least, learned Englishmen might have had access to Aristotle’s Meteorology, which promoted Anixamander’s hypothesis of a watery origin for most life[xi]. Such men of learning would also have learned about Aristotle’s contention that life spontaneously emerged from inorganic substances. If Al-Jahiz’s observations on environmental adaptations contained in The Book of Animals in the 9^th century represented an expansion of Aristotle’s musings, it was a small expansion. Like Aristotle, he too mused upon the potential for life to spring from inert slime. If Al-Jahiz’s work produced some incremental insight, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The risk that an Arabic text would have been available to English scholars of Elizabethan era in the first place was low.

No scientist for all of human history through the publishing of the first Shakespearean sonnet understood that the human brain was the product of millions of years of mutations, of a million billion random trials, some of which led to premature death and some of which led to a heritably larger brain with new capacities and qualities that proved themselves to be well-adapted to the challenges presented by the world of two, three, or four million years ago. It would have been impossible for a man of Elizabethan England to understand the origin of man’s inner voice. The evolutionary basis for many human impulses, so rich with implications for plot and character development, was well outside their grasp.

The philosophers of the classical, medieval, and early renaissance would have enjoyed no greater success than the natural scientists in bridging the gap between the past and present understanding of human consciousness. A comprehensive history of classical philosophy falls somewhat outside our scope and well within the scope of some thousands of existing books. Still, at a high level we can observe that the fundamental feature of the Platonic mind is not the integration of cognition, experience, sense, and memory; to the contrary, it is their separation into the tripartite soul[xii]. If anything, Aristotle’s ideas of perception, intellect and soul are even more conceptually divorced from modern notions of consciousness[xiii]. Medieval thinkers like Augustine of Hippo explored memory and introspection but did not have the tools or interest to connect these ideas to questions of identity or self-awareness.

The plays of these ages cannot help but reflect the limited knowledge of the mind and our own evolution as a species. That is not to say that they lack wisdom or wit or beauty or depth. Far from it! Euripides’s Medea is complex, challenging and contains some of theater’s most powerful presentations of human emotion. Plautus’s Menaechmi developed comedic and musical ideas and techniques that shaped centuries of theater and film, including several plays by Shakespeare himself. Oedipus Rex is a dramatic masterpiece, a tour de force of language and the origin of a half dozen dramatic tropes, forms, and traditions. Even more surprisingly, when Sophocles presented Oedipus to the Great Dionysia, the Athenians didn’t even vote it the winner. We know nothing about the plays that beat the finest surviving play of a period of more than 1,000 years! The Greeks have quite literally forgotten more about literary drama than we will ever know.

These earlier dramas are simply inherently limited in their capacity to explore the experience of being human because their authors were inherently limited in their capacity to correctly explain what it is that physiologically makes us human. What exacerbates this condition, however, is that these holes in understanding were not left as holes. They were inevitably filled with other things. Things like gods. Virtues. Fate.

The dramatic conceit of Oedipus, for example, is that the audience knows what awaits him. They know it because the story of Oedipus the King would have been part of their oral and written story-telling traditions. They also know it because they recognized a story governed by fate. The early scenes tell them that fate – that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. So, when Oedipus dismisses the words of the blind prophet Tiresias accusing him of the murder of Laius (his true father), the audience sees the threads of fate that the doomed character cannot. When Jocasta comforts Oedipus with the knowledge of Laius’s death at a crossroads (like the one where Oedipus killed men in self-defense), the audience sees the threads of fate that the doomed character cannot. When Oedipus feels relief at the death of his (secretly adoptive) father Polybus of natural causes, the audience sees the threads of fate that the doomed character cannot. This is the fundamental dramatic irony of the play. The Athenians did not need to hear the king agonizing over whether he ought to borrow Jocasta’s golden pins and jab them in his eye sockets. Oedipus does not have an evolving human personality and consciousness out of which his actions emerge. His motivations and psychological state are made clear by the implication of a known destiny and by the exposition of the always-helpful chorus. Oedipus does not develop. Oedipus unfolds.

This is perhaps truer for late medieval and early Renaissance theater than it is for Greek and Roman varieties that came before. Much of theater during this period consisted of brief retellings of either the miracles of the saints or the key events and mysteries of the Bible. For that reason, you will be delighted to hear, these are often referred to as the miracle plays and mystery plays. Some mystery plays, like the Second Shepherds’ Play from the Wakefield Cycle, offer at least cursory examinations of the human condition. Usually that examination takes shape through the low farce of 15^th-century peasant complaints about English weather, English food, and English women. Still, in an uncertain world it is good to know that the complaints of Englishmen never change. Some miracle plays, like the Digby Mary Magdalene, manage to implant some breadth to their setting, depth to their characters, and human universals to their themes. By and large, however, these plays are the kind of oral retellings necessary to reinforce Christian virtues and symbols for a largely illiterate audience.

A third form of medieval play emerged to do much the same while leaning more on allegorical devices instead of simply retelling a story from the Bible. These are the morality plays. In the most famous example, Everyman, God and Death conspire to send our eponymous character on a journey of discovery from life to the grave. Everyman encounters all sorts of figures on his journey, each named for the virtue their character represents. Fellowship, Kin, Goods, Knowledge, Beauty, Strength, Wits, Good Deeds, that sort of thing. Knowledge is a good friend and introduces Everyman to Confession. In the end, however, even Knowledge abandons Everyman – like Goods, Fellowship, Strength, Beauty, and all their proud friends did before him. In the end, it is only Good Deeds who joins Everyman in the grave. Morality plays as a rule are built from the kind of bang-you-on-the-head allegory that would make Aslan blush. They are largely unreadable and unwatchable. I am convinced the only reason they are ever performed is because pretending to be interested in them allowed a small number of academics to carve out a professional niche. In this case, the obvious purpose of the Everyman play (beyond providing employment to a glut of Medieval English Literature PhDs) is to reinforce the recurring Biblical concept of the fleeting things of this world.

There are no human characters in Everyman, whether literal or figurative. Even the nominally human protagonist lacks anything approaching a consciousness. The play lacks the capacity, then, to use that consciousness as a device to propel the action of the play. The result is that Everyman does not develop. Everyman unfolds.

Hamlet does not unfold.

But why? More importantly, how? It is not as if William Shakespeare had a better understanding of human physiology, evolutionary biology, or philosophy than these playwrights, much less the scholars and scientists of his time. He wrote often of humors in a Galenic sense. Lear’s madness is a symptom of a choleric temperament, a yellow bile imbalance overpowering his reason. Taming of the Shrew is structured entirely around the conceit of a woman of imbalanced humors in need of adjustment by the, ahem, brooding melancholy of her young lover. Shakespeare’s verse also references the theories of spontaneous generation long since disproved by our modern understanding of evolution and natural selection. For example, in Act 2, Scene 7 of Antony and Cleopatra, Lepidus explains to Antony: ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun. So is your crocodile.’ Belief in the spontaneous transmutation of primordial materials into living creatures is a feature of the cosmology of the era. No playwright would have been immune. Whatever invention we attribute to Shakespeare, it did not include a preternatural understanding of the physical world. 

And yet throughout his plays, the characters demonstrate what Freud called a primal ambivalence, a structural indecision that is at once both cognitive and affective. All the features of consciousness within Shakespeare’s richest characters are constantly working with and warring against one another to ‘impos[e] a Narrative line upon disparate images,’ as Joan Didion once described it.

Characters struggle between their senses and their memories. They struggle between the stories their cognitive faculties have constructed and the stories they are being told by others. They struggle between the conclusions they draw and the identity stories they have built. Then they rewrite those stories, again and again, acting in sympathy with a developing and changing version of themselves. The tales spin them, to paraphrase Daniel Dennett[xiv]. These are not the animal spirits of Galenic physiology. They are the trappings of a modern sense of the inscrutable, subjective synthesis that is human consciousness.

But again, how did he arrive at these results without the ingredients that should have been necessary? Yes, he was a student of human nature and an artist and a genius and all that. Stipulated. But my contention is this: that his practical mastery outpaced his theoretical understanding. It was not a miraculous and fundamental epiphany as to what makes a mind human that allowed Shakespeare to invent the human, but rather a dramatic device of Shakespearean design. In the same way that artisans have fashioned glass for almost as long as humans have possessed writing[xv] without a clear model to explain its molecular reorganization as it changes states, I think that the peculiar Shakespearean form of soliloquy was capable of fashioning a view of consciousness without a fundamental understanding of its physiological machinations. This form, which Bloom referred to as ‘characters overhearing themselves’, is at once expressed in the language of an inner voice and the outer voice. That is, Hamlet is both speaker and audience to his soliloquys. And in the transformation from internal voice to outer voice, the encoding of disparate inputs into a singular output, we see thought arranged as story. Believing fully that a brain with balanced humors powered his body through the transmittal of animal spirits, Shakespeare still arrived at a usable model for human consciousness by inventing a device which spoke its language.

For story is the language of human consciousness.

Each Hamlet soliloquy in which the prince overhears himself is a catalyst to change. To action. Not to the fashioning of self in the Foucauldian sense, but to the revision of self. He tells the story of that present self, a man worthy of derision, a ‘pigeon-livered,’ ‘rogue and peasant slave.’ He tells the cautionary tale of the pseudo-intellectual, paralyzed by the ‘pale cast of thought.’ He tells the story of the man with all hat and no cattle, a man whose ‘thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.’ He tells the story of a man who would distinguish himself from an animal, whose ‘chief good and market of his time’ would amount to more than ‘to sleep and feed.’ Hamlet, man of action of Act V does not unfold. He develops on every self-overhearing.

So it is with Iago from Othello, as well, though neither the characters nor the manner of their self-overhearing could be more different. Iago does not self-overhear stories about the sort of man he wishes he were. Instead, he tells a more familiar, modern style of story: a post hoc rationalization of every event into which he has poured his malice. With each such rationalization, each attempt at ‘motive-hunting of motiveless malignity,’ as Samuel Coleridge famously put it[xvi], Iago changes to become more convinced of his cleverness, more committed to his experiments, more aloof from petty notions of virtue and vice. Iago, whose motivations are only made slightly clearer to the audience by the curtain drop, does not unfold. He develops on every self-overhearing.

There is another useful thing we can learn from the examples of Hamlet and Iago. For Shakespeare’s two most human, most charismatic, most introspective, most fully developed characters not named John Falstaff, the story impulse driving each of them is related. But it is not the same.

Iago is storytelling. He acts from whatever dark, motiveless pit of malice or envy or spite or unrequited homoerotic fantasy fuels him[xvii], and thereafter tells himself old stories that might give those acts structure and meaning and purpose. Like Iago and like Joan Didion, we too tell ourselves stories to live. We tell stories about who we think we are. We tell stories that help us process information about our world. We tell stories about why it was okay for us to do something we know is wrong but wanted to do anyway. We tell ourselves stories about why those baser desires are not the reason we’re decided to do them.

Hamlet, on the other hand, doesn’t need to tell a story. He needs to hear a story. And so he seeks one, finds it, and in finding it finds, too, the impulse to act. Hamlet is storyseeking.

We humans are each and both at once, storytelling animals and storyseeking animals. Shakespeare was able to present authentic models of human consciousness not because he understood any more about it than any of us or his august contemporaries, but because our inner voice is each of us overhearing ourselves. Neither our storytelling nor storyseeking impulse arose in the last 400 years, of course. Nor in the last 4,000, for that matter. Our story instinct was what it meant to be human for millennia before Shakespeare used it as a device to show us what it meant to be human. Story was the ‘water in which we swam’ long before we invented the very word for water. Before we invented any words, for that matter.

But what is story, really?

Continue with Part 3.

[i] With apologies to Homer and the Yahwist.

[ii] Brewer, C. (2012). Shakespeare, Word-Coining and the OED. In e. Holland P, Shakespeare Survey: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pp. 345-357). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[iii] Crystal, D. (2008). Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[iv] Pope, A. (Ed.). (1725). The works of Shakespear in six volumes, carefully revised and corrected by the former editions, and adorned with sculptures designed and executed by the best hands (Vol. 1-6). Printed for J. Tonson in the Strand.

[v] There is some scholarly (and less-than-scholarly) dispute over whether ‘nothing’ would have been understood by Elizabethan audiences as a reference to the female genitalia, including claims that this is a recent invention of noted Shakespeare editor Stephen Booth. My personal opinion is that while it is silly to suspect that every such usage of ‘nothing’ or the then-homophonic ‘noting’ intended such entendre, the usage between Hamlet and Ophelia in the famous lap dialogue of Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet leaves very little room for alternative interpretation.

[vi] Bloom, H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books.

[vii] Crane, M. (2013). Shakespeare and Dramatic Prose. In Shakespeare’s Prose (pp. 1–8). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[viii] ‘I bring nothing but the aesthetic to Shakespeare in this book,’ Brook writes, to distinguish his aim from those who resent Shakespeare for being insufficiently ‘social’ for their post-modern sensibilities.

[ix] Johnson, S. (1765). Preface to Shakespeare.

[x] Bevington, D. (2005). Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

[xi] Aristotle. (1923). Meteorology (E. W. Webster, Trans.). Clarendon Press.

[xii] Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube, Trans., Revised by C. D. C. Reeve). Hackett Publishing Company.

[xiii] Aristotle. (1986). De Anima (J. A. Smith, Trans.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Vol. 1, pp. 641–692). Princeton University Press.

[xiv] Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Little, Brown and Co.

[xv] Moorey, P. R. S. (1999). Ancient Mesopotamian materials and industries: The archaeological evidence. Eisenbrauns.

[xvi] Coleridge, S. T. (1987). Lectures 1808-1819 on literature (R. A. Foakes, Ed.). Princeton University Press.

[xvii] Smith, Bruce R. (1994). Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press