Early modern extended minds and the Shakespearean subject of the mirror

Abstract

The use of the mirror in Shakespeare's works, both as a stage prop and as a literary motif, opens a view for us into early modern concepts about cognition and subjectivity and enables the examination of their relation to current embodied, embedded and extended mind ideas. This closing chapter again shows Shakespeare adopting and transforming conventional mirror-motifs. The mirror-motifs provide evidence that characters who attempt to situate their subjectivity entirely within, as a transcendent, autonomous and centralised inwardness, are portrayed as failing to take into account the fundamental role of forms of extendedness and the intersubjective make up of their intrasubjectivity. Third-person perspectives, visual perception and introspection are compared in terms of performing similar functions and the body and passions are shown to be part ofthe loop of reason. Characters are depicted as both intentionally and unintentionally acting as a subjective prop for another character; either as a model for imitation or through providing a supplementary perspective. The intentions ofthe subject holding up the mirror do not necessarily affect the accuracy of the image they reflect, although like a character's introspective reflections they are not certainly reliable either. Since both third-person and first-person perspectives vary in reliability a combination of outward and inward mirrors appears the only way forward for a human subject. The Shakespearean character, like the early modern subject, is depicted as existing in a biological, sociocultural, technological and spiritual universe, in which all factors are at once variably divisible and dynamically in play.