Review Article: Shakespeare and Perception

Abstract

This article reads some familiar speeches from key Shakespeare plays in the light of modern theories of perception, asking the Shakespeare texts for advice on such matters as “inattentional blindness,” “the distribution of the sensible,” visual perception and imagination, the “extended mind,” and “embodied cognition”. Holderness triangulates Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry with contemporary psychological and philosophical theories, and early modern works of philosophy and medicine, and asks whether these convergences are endorsements of Shakespeare’s universal wisdom, or genuinely new ways of seeing Shakespeare and the world.