Raphael Lyne cogently and clearly explains and connects theories of rhetoric and contemporary cognitive science in order to explore how the two may be harnessed together to depict Shakespeare’s characters thinking with and through their language. Providing a brief discussion of the rhetorical theory popular during the sixteenth century (from Cicero and Quintillian to Henry Peacham and George Puttenham) and the cognitive linguistic theory currently changing ideas of language and persuasion (such as George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and Raymond Gibbs), Lyne then moves to an analysis of how, in moments of crisis and confusion, Shakespeare’s characters (particularly in Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, and Othello) use language as a cognitive and heuristic tool. He ends by turning to the Sonnets, testing and stretching his methodology.

Lyne is interested in the way language creates and exposes character, and he nicely finds a way between a complete disavowal of character (Hamlet without Hamlet) and an invigoration of the words into a real person (Hamlet without Hamlet); he is interested in “characters as the sites of represented cognition” (27), as opposed to Mary Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain (2001), which reads the language of the plays as symptomatic of cognitive processes within the author, while others — Philip Davis (2007) for example — are interested in the reader’s brain or in the auditor-spectator (Bruce McConachie [2008], Amy Cook [2010]). Chapter 2 focuses on the close relationship between metaphor and synecdoche in cognition, seeing how, for example, “Synecdoche maps onto the tree-like diagrams of neural networks trying to capture the associative work of the brain. Metaphor can be a way of capturing shifts and capabilities that cannot feasibly be mapped out by means of binary logic or two-dimensional diagrams” (34). His investigation and use of cognitive theories are less fluent than his work with rhetorical theory, and I often felt that this was an exciting first date rather than a fully explored translation from rhetoric to cognitive science and back again. Nonetheless, his book is a great addition to the growing number of books trying to create a language of interdisciplinarity.

In his chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the languages at work in the play are so different — from the clichés of the lovers, the proclamations of the royals, the magic of the fairies, and the practicalities-literalness of the mechanicals — with Lyne analyzing how the conceptual structures of the characters are exposed in their different uses of rhetoric. For example, in attempting to figure out the unfairness of Demetrius’s love for Hermia and not for her, Helena lands on the idea of being “translated” into Hermia, an idea echoed later in Bottom’s “translation” into an ass. Translation, Lyne reminds us, is really a kind of metaphor, since it suggests a shift in form, not essence. Quince could have said that Bottom had been “transformed,” but that would not have suggested the metaphoric shift that has occurred between Bottom who is like an ass and Bottom who is now figured as an ass.

For Lyne, moments of rhetorical failure are often the most exciting; his beautiful discussion of Macbeth’s “pity, like a naked new-born babe” simile shows how Macbeth is unable to find the words to compel restraint as evidenced by the conflicted and arresting image of this striding, vulnerable infant. Othello’s heuristic process is one that has been infiltrated by Iago, who “removes his capacity to think productively in tropes. The result is extraordinary compression, where words, like black holes, draw everything in with enormous expulsions of energy” (197). Although I might have wished for more cognitive science deployed to assess where we can see the implications of the conceptual challenges of the characters in the rest of the play — What does it mean, for example, that the fairies’ language creates agency in the wind and the mechanicals’ language does not offer a method of understanding representation? How do these two worlds, at play on the same stage, impact the conceptual structure of the spectator? — Lyne’s articulated goal is to provide an analysis of the characters’ use of language and this he does with surprising and exciting results, offering the field a strong example of what can come from an interdisciplinary engagement with language and how it works.