The sum of parts: collaborative performance and social cognition on the early modern stage

This dissertation explores the connections between early modern rehearsal and performance practices and cognitive science. Examining early modern performance as a technology consisting of individually memorized parts, minimal rehearsal, and improvised interaction, I analyze early modern actors' roles for speech and cue structures and character relationship patterns, arguing that Shakespeare, as well as other playwrights, wrote specific emotional and physical prompts into actors' parts so that their performance on stage relied on collaboration and partnership in performance just as much as individual preparation. Through their actions and speech, actors affectively prime one another to react to different conceptual frameworks as the plays plot progresses. Since Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights created units of plays, distributed social cognition also aided early modern actors performances: a particular unit would function as a network of memories for the actors, a shorthand code that allowed them to reconstruct traces of their previous partnerships, emotional and physical characteristics, and speeches into new plays that possessed similar structures.