Cognition in the Globe

Shakespeare’s company coped with an enormous mnemonic load, performing up to six different plays a week. How did they do it? Cognition in the Globe addresses this question through the lens of Distributed Cognition. This is a dynamic model that attends to the art of ‘playing’ at a range of levels. These include the material conditions of playing space; artifacts such as parts, plots, and playbooks; the social structures of the companies, including methods of training and coordination; internal cognitive mechanisms such as attention, perception, and memory; and actor-audience dynamics, among many others. This is the first book to offer such an approach to theatrical history and performance studies.

Evelyn B. Tribble is Donald Collie Chair of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1994); Writing Matters: Reading from Plato to the Digital Age (with Anne Trubek, 2003); and Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering: Religion, Education, and Memory in Early Modern England (with Nicholas Keene, 2011).