This is a belated tribute to the bard on his 445th birthday, April 23, St. George's Day, St. George being the patron saint of England. And what has Shakespeare to do with neuroscience, my beat?
The date and the topic remind me of a book I have had on my shelves for three or four years now. The Bard on the Brain, ambitiously subtitled, Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging. The book is by Paul M. Matthews, M.D. and Jeffrey McQuain, Ph.D. and carries a forward by Diane Ackerman. Matthews is Professor of Neurology at Oxford, and Jeffrey McQuain is a language researcher.
This is a gorgeous book, much handosmer than the First Folio with the one authentic if awkward picture of Shakespeare. The pictures of various famous and not-so-famous actors doing this or that scene are stunning. Stacy Keach as Macbeth, hallucinating the bloody dagger. Helen Carey as Lady Macbeth, Martin Sheen as Brutus, JOrdan Baker as Desdemona, Harry Hamlin as Henry V, Kevin Kline as Hamlet, Anthony Hopkins as Lear. The pictures are full page and beautifully reproduced. Shakespeare would have liked them, although he might have found a Love's Labour's Lost in evening clothes a bit puzzling.
Less gorgeous are the pictures of the brain, PET and MRI scans, quarter-page, hard to read, and not very well captioned. And what have they to do with Shakespeare?
The bard mentions the brain a lot, more than I care to count. He treats it as the source of thought, and also something to be knocked out or about. "O, there has been much throwing about of brains," says Hamlet memorably. And there were puns on brain-barren. Interestingly, he referred to the pia mater three times, positing a cognitive function for it.
But there is no way that Shakespeare could have known anything about the workings of the brain. William Harvey did not even discover the circulation of the blood until twelve years after Shakespeare's death. And Thomas Willis, of "the crcle of Willis" fame, did not publish his great Cerebri Anatome until 1664, long after Shakespeare had shuffled off this mortal coil
Yet these authors praise Shakespeare for "his uncanny insight into the human mind and brain." Mind, yes. Emotions, yes. Personality, yes. But brain? No. Nothing could he say about treatments for epilepsy, the amygdala and emotion, or the frontal lobe and moral behavior, all topics broached by these authors as somehow adumbrated by Shakespeare.
All right, I'll blush and confess to making the same mistake. I recorded with the great Morris Carnovsky (one of the finest Lears I have ever seen) an LP record suggesting that Shakespeare, in the figure of Falstaff, gave us insights into alcoholism. I did it for the money. I blush.
And I'm embarassed to criticze this book. I love the Dana Press, for their Cerebrum magazine, free online, for their Dana Guide to Brain Health, also free, if I remember right, and all kinds of classroom aids in print and online, to say nothing of the research the Dana Foundaiton sponsors. They are a wonderful outfit. But this book is not wonderful.
I thought when I made that LP, and I think now, that it is nonsensical to claim that Shakespeare or any other pre-twentieth century character had any worthwhile insights into the biological and physiological things that neurologists know today.
And, you know, Shakespeare doesn't need this kind of hype. He's okay just on his own, not pumped up into a brain expert.
