There is much to praise in this book, which springs from current cognitive-scientific work, with special attention paid to the work of Andy Clark on extended-mind theory, to a consideration of the rise of new modes of subjectivity during the European Renaissance. In the first five chapters, Anderson moves deftly between engaging with modern philosophical problems and identifying the applicability of extended-mind theory as a frame for thinking about the philosophical, spiritual, and scientific dilemmas presented by the immense cultural shift that swept through Europe in the Renaissance. Subjectivity was being reconfigured with the soul retained as capable of “God-like extendedness” (115), while new textual forms and disciplines of memory threatened to create “information overload” (128). What emerged was a more positive approach to “textual artefacts as supplementary cognitive resources” (128), or augmentations of human memory, and the human subject was understood to be a product of its engagements with other texts (other people’s cognitive resources). Chapter 5 brings this study of Renaissance ways of being to a momentous observation: in Donne, Machiavelli, Raleigh, Spenser, and others, we find evidence that modern notions of extended mind would have sat well with the early moderns, for whom intersubjectivity was always grounded in reflexivity or intrasubjectivity.

All of this gestures toward matters of great import for the cultural and intellectual history of the Renaissance, which is why the final two chapters strike this reader as taking a retrograde step. As Anderson writes in the preface, chapters 1 to 5 come down at the end to being the “backdrop” to critical readings of how Renaissance extendedness is “revealed and exploited imaginatively in Shakespeare’s works” (xiv). Were this book badged as a contribution to new critical approaches to Shakespeare, such a focus on the one writer across almost one-third of the book might seem appropriate; but in a book on the Renaissance in the New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science series, the myopic return to Shakespeare as a surrogate for epochal shifts in thought and cultural practice throughout Europe appears misguided.

Readers should also be forewarned that the critical readings in these last two chapters do not seem particularly well matched to the arguments put forward in the preceding five chapters. A book that begins with Clark’s observations on the role played by “the tools of pen, paper and computer” in the formation of secondary thoughts in academic writing appears by the end to have forgotten the importance of such cognitive artifacts when discussing Shakespeare’s writing. On offer here are readings of looking glasses and perspectival vision in several of the plays and Sonnet 77 as emblematic of Shakespeare’s championing of reflexivity. Anderson’s debt to Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (1986) comes to the fore in this latter part of the book, and is duly acknowledged. Yet in a book that devotes much space to discussing the work of Andy Clark, when the focus shifts in the final two chapters to vision and optics, it is another Clark, Stuart, whose monumental Vanities of the Eye (2007) would have been a useful point of reference, but is altogether absent.

Even then, the readings offered here focus on how the characters in the plays are depicted “as both intentionally and unintentionally acting as a cognitive prop for another character” (243). In other words, the critical last third of the book concerns itself with how Shakespeare depicts a distributed cognitive field at work within the storylines, but no thought is given to the tools through which these plays and this poem were brought into the world. Far more interesting, to me at least, would have been a study of how the plays were products of modes of writing, acting, stagecraft, and even printing that were themselves practical expressions of extended minds at work. That Anderson uses modern editions of the texts rather than referring to the works in their earliest extant forms only serves to increase this sense that they are taken at a remove from the intellectual and cultural contexts established in the first five chapters, but which become at last nothing more than mise-en-scène to Shakespearean literary criticism.