Conceiving Ambiguity: Dynamic Mindreading in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Abstract

What cognitive process allows a spectator to experience shock and surprise at a character’s actions, yet, a moment later, to decide that the actions presented onstage are coherent and understandable? Drawing upon theories of mindreading and conceptual blending, I offer a dynamic model of character that accounts for surprise, ambiguity, and dramatic shifts of understanding. Subtle changes to one’s perceptions, empathic imagination, and social knowledge—the sort of changes that accumulate throughout the viewing of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night —can alter one’s understanding of a character in unexpected ways.

When narrative takes over: The representation of embedded mindstates in Shakespeare’s Othello

“… 5. This point is also made by Palmer (2004) and worked out for tragedy in Budelmann and Easterling (2010): inner lives and personalities of characters often remain largely unformulated in a direct sense, but the text ‘model[s] the dynamics’ of the reader’s ‘propensity to read minds’ (Budelmann and Easterling, 2010: 290–292). For case studies dealing with mindreading and tragedy see Helms (2012); Sluiter, Corthals, Van Duijn et al (2012). …”