Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre combines a wide range of recent research on theater history with an equally wide-ranging and contemporary body of work on human cognition, claiming in particular that emergent research on “distributed” or “situated” cognition should prove relevant to theater history studies. Evelyn B. Tribble’s new study addresses early modern theater historians’ desire to improve on existing models of the period’s theater as a workspace. Such scholarship seeks to reconstruct the details of how that work space must have operated as such, and this study contributes by asking key questions about — and insightfully positing a number of new scenarios regarding — the practices of ensemble playing companies. It represents an example of how the recent shifts of critical attention from authors to companies in early modern drama studies have fruitfully expanded some aspects of the field’s interpretive scope.

Situating her argument specifically within the rise in the 1590s of purpose-built theaters, Tribble explores the similarities between these specialized sites for theatrical proliferation and the kinds of modern-day work environments that provide today’s scientists with examples of how humans manage multiple levels of situation-specific, intense coordination: for example, a navy ship at sea or the air-traffic control room of today’s airports. Tribble cites the scientific studies of such modern workspaces to draw attention to the apparently similar world of the constant — and constantly shifting — drive toward knowledge-assembly that we find already in force by the late 1580s and early 1590s theater. She writes: “The expertise and experience in shaping and exploiting their environment were among the many crucial skills possessed by early modern players” (29).

These actors, accustomed to and apparently quite capable of rapid adaptation to the varying demands of inn yards, royal courts, great halls, Inns of Court spaces, and the public theater arenas, required little by way of fixed elements in their playing environments. The constraints represented by their famously minimal requirements — some open area for the actors’ bodies to maneuver in, at least two but perhaps three separate doors for entrances and exits — seem to have enabled them with a sufficiency of tools for integrating each specific environment with the dialogue of each specific play being performed. The more experience members of a company had together, Tribble reasons, the more they routinized their uses of the playing spaces; for instance, the more “cognitive thrift” (20) — the offloading of memory onto objects or other actors — that they gained from their familiarity with their workspace conventions, the less the written traces of their surviving plays offer signposts for guidance to minds outside the performance system (resulting, over time, in some of the many species of textual editing difficulties we wrestle with today). Add to this scenario yet another stratum of this system’s mind-extensions, that of the social structures determining master-apprentice relationships, and we begin to appreciate both the complexity of this very low-tech workspace and also the plausibility of recent narratives about its functional success.

This study contributes to the emerging body of work on cognitive historicism (represented in early modern studies by Ellen Spolsky, Mary Crane, Raphael Lyne, and others) in its analyses of the following: strategies of dialogue memorization (concurring with but also usefully refining Palfrey and Stern’s model of part learning); techniques of managing the constant flows of props, scenes, and locations; methods of accommodating line-forgetting and ad-libbing that must have been inevitable, given the sheer volume of dialogue actors had to commit to memory; and speculation about the “theatrical detritus” (83) that these practices seem to have left in the forms of actors’ written parts (single sheets of scroll containing cues for emotive expression) and the plattes (single broadsheets containing scene-by-scene plot abstractions). Such detritus may once have been ubiquitous, literally wall-papering the players’ work spaces with scrap traces of their creative processes (and surviving today in only rare, puzzling fragments).

From the perspective of early modern theater studies, Tribble considers, in various turns, research on the rehearsal process (e.g., Tiffany Stern, Simon Palfrey and Stern, Paul Menzer), the absorption and training of boy apprentice actors (e.g., David Kathman, Scott McMillin, Catherine Belsey), gesture-based acting styles (e.g., Joseph Roach, John H. Astington), and the playbook-performance nexus (e.g., Michaela Calore, W. B. Long, D. Bradley). To these she applies cognitive studies of memory, attention, and hand-gesturing, emphasizing the degree to which cognitive scientists now think of these body-and-mind-based individual phenomena as deeply embedded within material and social environments that enable the feedback dynamics individuals experience as information and learning. Two of Tribble’s scientific resources worth citing are Edward Huchins’s Cognition in the Wild (1995) and Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2009).

At some five chapters (an introduction, three main chapters, and a conclusion) covering dozens of topics within both historical and cognitive frameworks, the book sometimes seems haphazardly organized and also contains some factual inconsistencies. Its discussions are uneven, those early in the work more fully substantiated and convincingly argued than those appearing later. Additionally, the book is filled with minor claims that are intriguing on their separate merits and might be better served by separate development elsewhere. On the whole, however, and despite these problems, the study offers compelling interpretations that gather force and are worth further testing, owing, in large part, to its recasting of the issues into cognitive terms.