This article was downloaded by: [Macquarie University] On: 03 September 2012, At: 18:40 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Textual Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance Evelyn B. Tribble a & John Sutton b a University of Otago b Macquarie University Version of record first published: 03 Aug 2012 To cite this article: Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton (2012): Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance, Textual Practice, 26:4, 587-607 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2012.696485 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare's King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life. Keywords Memory; polytemporality; embodied skill; distributed cognition; cognitive ecology; Janet Cardiff; soundscapes; Shakespeare; performance; theatrical history; King Lear Textual Practice 26(4), 2012, 587–607 Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2012.696485 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 Anachronism, memory studies, and cognitive theory If anachronism is the mixing of times, it is not inevitably error. In certain respects, anachronism is intrinsic to human experience in time. Even where our memory operates against a background of lived temporal asymmetry, in which actions and events are irrevocable given the causal structure of the world, it is also animated by plural temporalities and by rhythms other than those of linear succession.1 The idea that human memory is a machine of anachronism figures in much contemporary theory, as this special issue demonstrates. Bruno Latour argues, for example, that things and actions are 'polytemporal' in combining ingredients from several times: both events and matter 'collate many different moments' in a variety of 'untimely' and wayward temporal modes.2 In this paper, building on the constructive revivification of anachronism in recent memory studies, literary theory, and early modern studies, we analyse forms of polytemporality both in contemporary art and theory, and in early modern performance: in the second half of the paper, we consider one of Shakespeare's most audacious anachronisms in an extended case study. Unusually, however, our framework for studying anachronism in memory and embodied skill draws on the cognitive sciences as well as the humanities and the arts. Although bodies are widely theorized as culturally embedded and deeply shaped by contingent practices, critical suspicion of treating the 'mind' as equally accommodating such dynamic exchanges has led to widespread neglect of the psychological realm. Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Whether projecting an originary interiority behind the text, or gesturing towards a transhistorical human nature, cognitive criticism is often rejected as both universalizing and essentialist. In a recent paper, David Hawkes exemplifies such distrust of cognitive accounts, writing that 'Like evolutionary critics, cognitive theorists are committed to the reduction of subjectivity to the functions of the brain [and] consider subjectivity an epiphenomenon produced by patterns of information'.3 Hawkes here mistakenly equates cognitive theory with evolutionary psychology, such as that espoused by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Such approaches are indeed susceptible to the charge of uncritical universalizing. Cosmides and Tooby argue that 'the past explains the present'; in such views, our minds are inherently anachronistic, trapped in an alien temporality. According to this line of argument, human beings evolved in the Pleistocene, and 'our modern skulls house a Stoneage mind'.4 This is to take minds out of historical time, constructing them as a fixed set of brain-bound modules. Textual Practice 588 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 Yet such crude anachronisms are by no means a necessary result of engaging with the mind and cognition, and Hawkes is misguided to see all such invocations as inherently reductive. The reduction of the mind to the brain is not an inevitable consequence of cognitive approaches to literature and culture. Allowing the mind to go missing from literary and cultural history is dramatically to over-react to certain restricted ahistorical trends in the sciences. We argue, in contrast, that integrative accounts of the mind and mental processes can be historically and theoretically nuanced, and can contribute to a productive account of anachronism. We can put the mind back into time and history, by theorizing cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal.5 'Cognition' does not exclude either social or affective dimensions of flexible, more or less intelligent activity, and 'mind' is skilful activity rather than a stock of knowledge. Therefore, the analysis of the mind must be fundamentally historical in character, because changing cultural artefacts, norms, and institutions are not external supplements or cues to cognition, but partly constitute it.6 The dramatic recent boom in memory studies, from cultural theory and the arts through to the cognitive neurosciences is also a form of reevaluating anachronism. To focus on memory is to address the complex bridges between the embodied sensory-affective realm of individual experience and the social and material constituents of our activities of remembering. Such memory practices have neural, phenomenological, technological, and interpersonal dimensions, with their own distinctive histories and dynamics. If no automatic priority can be granted to any single aspect of such hybrid ecologies of memory, the analytic challenge is to find techniques and tools to study the interaction between them all.7 The cognitive and psychological sciences therefore, like literature and the arts, must address the sedimentation and interanimating coexistence of many time periods in body and mind. The activities of remembering which attract our attention often occur in a heightened, affectively saturated present. Yet whether effortful or involuntary, whether explicit or tacit, memory also refers to, enlivens, or otherwise renders salient many other moments. Remembering, imagining, feeling, and acting are not always in practice distinct: in its content and flavour, the memory of a particular experience is often laced or shot through with perspectives and emotions from other or later sources.8 So the remembering mind is both in its own firmly located time and place, participating in the complex allure of the moment, and always also slipping into what is absent, or merging with other times and places which are already seeping through.9 The past animates the present both by way of explicit access to particular significant episodes, and simultaneously in tacit routines, embodied habits and skills with no specific reference to the repeated Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 589 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 'traceless practices' by which they have been incorporated.10 So the polytemporality of anachronism is at the heart of memory studies, since autobiographical, bodily, and social memories alike operate by mixing times.11 In particular, certain forms of embodied memory like gesture, kinaesthesis, and bodily skill are arguably the primary domains of polytemporality. The effective presence of the past, as bodily sedimentation on a number of timescales, animates ongoing movement possibilities: as Jonathan Gil Harris argues, 'a time out of joint can reside in living organic matter'.12 The phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke identifies a class or stratum of micro-movements as 'ghost gestures', the inner vectors or tendencies towards movement which persist as active residues in the wake of some entrenched temporary or long-term movement pattern: ghost gestures really colour the enacting of habitual movements and bodily style, and can sometimes be reinhabited or reworked into new kinaesthetic patterns.13 Skilful activities such as stage performance, like sporting or musical performance, are notoriously difficult both to learn and to describe in part because we have limited access through explicit and conscious memory to the flowing dynamics of grooved and multi-level embodied movements. To bring to life this picture of the rich relationships between autobiographical memory, kinaesthetic and bodily memory, and anachronism, we examine a contemporary artwork that directly produces strikingly polytemporal forms of remembering in place. In a series of site-specific audio walks, the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff deliberately inter-animates multiple, diverse pasts and various possible present experiences as we are taken through familiar or novel environments by the artist's footsteps, voices, and layered stories within an enthralling and disturbing sound-world.14 Cardiff says: I try to echo the way our brain shifts attention. Like the way you overhear something that makes you remember something else, or how when you're out walking you invent scenarios around the things you see. Or the way we've become conduits for all these media images, which we're unable to filter from our memories.15 In Cardiff's 1999 piece The Missing Voice: Case Study B, a 45-minute walk with Discman from the crime section of Whitechapel Library through the East End of London, we hear the artist's descriptions and memories of the streets, churchyards, bus shelters, and park benches we are inhabiting now, mixed with fragments of noir narrative, and with striking or frightening surrounding sounds (an imaginary car screeching past our ears, footsteps behind us on the church steps, explosions from an alien war zone erupting Textual Practice 590 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 in these quiet morning streets). Further, by coupling our present walk with her own past walks on the same route, Cardiff heightens our emotional sensitivity to the terrible momentariness of events, making the objects and people we encounter afresh already in a sense mnemonic. As sounds seep through from other times and places, we lose a firm grip on the source of objects, experiences, and feelings. It is no longer clear if what we are experiencing now – an abandoned yellow car, banana skins, the homeless guy in the corner, an aching embrace at Liverpool Street station, the businessman with his collar too tight – is accident or design, for so many objects and events in this present tense have already been remembered for us. Cardiff's walk can be situated in what is now an extensive international array of forms of locative art, urban gaming, and documentary involving mixed or alternate realities.16 But her binaural recording technique unusually heightens the sensuousness of the strange experience of walking alone along with companion voices: rhythms, pace, and breath go in and out of step, in collusion with our absent guide and the other collaborative or competing characters on the soundtrack. Cardiff aims to blur our perceptions, memories, and fantasies: Just as our dreams sometimes infiltrate our waking reality, I think the walking pieces break down the barriers of what the listeners think of as their singular self. My surrogate body starts to infiltrate their consciousness while in reverse their remembered dreams, triggered by phrases and sounds, invade and add to the artwork.17 This is not just a dual experience of physical and virtual worlds mixed, but an enhancement of what is already a highly augmented urban reality, in which physical space is always overlaid with other, dynamic sensory-affective-cognitive data.18 Anachronism, early modern studies, and the cognitive life of things If such intrinsically untimely interactive art accentuates the mixing of times in a contemporary context, what forms of polytemporality can we identify in quite different historical settings? The context of early modern theatre affords further opportunity to bring cultural–historical and cognitive theory together, in exemplifying these themes of anachronism and polytemporality, themes on which the new English drama of around 1600 offers intriguing perspectives. Early modern theatre was engaged in memory work across multiple dimensions. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's plays are anachronistic, in that they seem pointedly to Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 591 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 display the gulf between the plays' settings and their moment of performance. Shakespeare's Romans call for their cloaks and hats and listen to striking clocks. Shakespeare's Trojans quote Aristotle. Of such 'errors' Samuel Johnson remarks: He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expence [sic] not only of likelihood, but of possibility . . . We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies.19 Such moments, however, should not be seen as error, indifference, or ignorance on Shakespeare's part, nor indeed as peculiar to him, but instead as symptomatic of the promiscuous array of memory work afforded by a new form of theatrical enterprise dependent on a loosely affiliated and polytemporal world of actors, spaces, material texts and objects, and audiences. Historical study of acting in the English theatre, indeed, can bring cultural, literary, material, and psychological dynamics together, rather than treating them as the dissociated domains of antagonistic disciplines. Embodied skills, such as those on display on stage, are embedded in rich and diverse cognitive ecologies. A cognitive ecology is a distributed but interconnected system or assemblage of social, material, bodily, and psychological resources and mechanisms which work together in mutually dependent, context-sensitive ways to enact some shared, flexible practice or activity. As we have argued elsewhere, this ecologically oriented model of memory and cognition does not specify the boundaries of cognition in advance. Rather, it predicts a substantial historical and cultural diversity in the ways that different groups in distinctive contexts find unique balances and solutions to the challenges of joint remembering, coordinated decision-making, or successful performance.20 The theatre itself, as site and institution, was a cognitive ecology of extraordinary complexity, enacting multiple forms of temporal play and coordination.21 Within this system, particular actors' embodied performances exemplified rich polytemporal interactions distributed across bodily, affective, poetic, social, and cultural resources. Early modern theatre both displayed and enacted forms of memory work – forms of engagement with the past on multiple simultaneous levels, involving changing assemblages of heterogeneous resources – which are, as we have suggested, characteristic of embodied experience in time more generally. Early modern English drama is a particularly apt context for addressing anachronism for a number of reasons beyond Shakespeare's slippery Textual Practice 592 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 temporalities. There is, of course, a history to the stigma of anachronism, to our sensitivity to 'errors' in the temporal misplacing of objects, words, or people. In a rich study of the concept of anachronism before and after the first appearance of the word in English in the mid-seventeenth century, Margreta de Grazia has recently challenged standard accounts of the emergence of such chronological sensitivity to the illegitimate fusion of events or periods that ought to be kept distinct. Where scholars like Peter Burke attribute the consistently negative assessment of anachronism to a nascent Renaissance and early modern historical consciousness, de Grazia argues that it is a much later development, requiring a sense of cognitive distance that is the 'basis of our disciplinary knowledge'.22 We rely on a chronologically based form of cognitive distance that may not have been so easily available before 'the formation of the disciplinary divisions under whose aegis we still work'. Suggesting that anachronism's stigma can now be turned to advantage, de Grazia reminds us that 'chronology is only one way in which the past can be related to the present'. De Grazia's essay is situated within a wealth of recent studies of Renaissance literature and drama that have engaged wayward and skewed forms of temporality. In a survey of recent work on Shakespeare, Lucy Munro pinpoints five approaches which foreground the multiplicity of uses of the past: rereadings of relations between medieval and early modern periods, work focussing on memory and trauma, new materialist or object-centred criticism, theorizing of 'queer temporalities', and a range of 'presentist' critical responses to historicism.23 While we draw on some of these frameworks ourselves, it is notable and surprising that none of them feature any sustained theorizing of mind or cognition. The 'presentist' critique of over-zealous historicism, of the fantasy of speaking to the dead, for example, couples the revivification of anachronism with a suspicion of cognition, memory, and history alike. In celebrating historical incorrectness, the joyous flouting of chronology or sequence, Marjorie Garber defends 'playing fast and loose with history' where it helps us access less chronologically blinkered modes of reading the texts beyond their contexts: she points 'toward the usefulness of anachronism, play, and all the other ways in which literature shocks us into awareness, and preserves something that cannot be reduced to a ground'.24 For Catherine Belsey, new historicism sometimes failed to treat fiction as a full constituent of culture that can nonetheless be 'genuinely at odds with its own chronological moment', thereby revealing itself to be 'capable . . . of anachronism'.25 Attention to temporal dislocation in literary sources, to their capacity to be out of step with their moment, can indeed help us resist any tendency to freeze a singular and strange historical moment. But some recent presentist work entrenches an overly sharp dichotomy between historicism and Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 593 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 presentism as mutually exclusive scholarly strategies. This issue arises most strongly in debates about 'object-centred criticism' or the 'new materialism' in early modern studies, a movement based on the study of material culture – things, stuff, or artefacts such as clothes, props, furniture, or writing technologies – which we have discussed elsewhere.26 In a recent paper 'exploring presentism as a way out of the theoretical thickets of recent years', Evelyn Gajowski, for example, claims that 'in opposition to "new materialist", or antiquarian, studies that drain politics out of Shakespeare's texts, presentism (re)politicizes Shakespeare'.27 We argue, in contrast, that theorizing the full distributed ecology of a historical setting like early modern English theatre requires us to hold political, psychological, and material dimensions simultaneously in view. Affects and objects alike are parts of integrated, uniquely balanced cognitive systems that are bodily, social, and technological all at once. Histories are always sedimented into the objects, properties, and costumes used on the stage.28 As Carol Chillington Rutter argues, the theatre has long 'used objects to remember in ways that exceed actorly remembering, for objects put in play on the stage remember more and remember differently than characters do'.29 Rutter adapts Arjun Appadurai's account of the social life of things to argue that theatrical objects too accumulate biographies, not acting on their own, but enmeshed in complex webs of transmission. Because of the directly mnemonic and affective roles of artefacts in certain contexts, we too want to historicize an approach to the cognitive life of things.30 The cognitive life of things, indeed, is inherently anachronistic. As Harris cautions, to invoke an object's biography across sequential time is not a sufficient departure from a merely synchronic treatment of the exotic, frozen thing, entire to itself at its own historical moment: we need also to account for 'the multiple traces of time embedded in things' all at once, where these distinctive and often disruptive traces 'play an active role in the present object'.31 But the approach to distributed cognitive ecologies which we have sketched has the resources to address these interactive, assembled, and polytemporal aspects of untimely matter. Within a coupled system involving internal processes, social interaction, and cognitive artefacts, all changing at different rates and in webs of continuous reciprocal causation, the traces of these interactions are not erased as the system moves into new states, or as some of its elements migrate.32 One of Rutter's examples is Yorick's skull. First appearing among the detritus ejected from the grave, the skull, which 'had a tongue in it, and could sing once', is animated by memory. First, the gravedigger remarks that 'mad rogue . . . poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!'. Then Textual Practice 594 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 in dizzying mental time travel Hamlet recalls the jester, with childhood stories and feelings flooding back, this 'memory opening up a past literally unearthed from the grave'. As Rutter suggests, 'Remembering backward, Yorick's skull simultaneously remembers forward'.33 Even before the skull is considered specifically as a prop, it is clearly a thing that crosses temporal borders, combining several times. So as Rutter suggests, objects on stage are intimately connected to the bodies that grasp, exchange, attend to, and discard them within a shifting mnemonic economy encompassing environment, audience, player, and play-text. History and embodied skill in early modern theatre For contemporary commentators, the new theatre of Elizabethan London was especially notable in affording productive technologies for manipulating the temporality of memory and fantasy. In Pierce Pennilesse (1592), Thomas Nashe defends playing against its detractors, especially those who see it as a waste of time, an unauthorized holiday during working hours. Nashe argues that the 'afternoone [is] the idlest time of the day' during which 'men that are their owne masters' seek pleasurable pastimes in gaming, whoring, drinking, or seeing plays. In contrast to the first three pursuits, Nashe argues, playgoing can be seen as 'a rare exercise of virtue', in that it resurrects the past: First, for the subject of them (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant acts (that haue line long buried in rustie brasse, and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the Graue of obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours.34 Writing in 1592, Nashe had witnessed the enormous vogue for chronicle history that dominated the stage in the late 1580s and early 1590s. For Nashe, books and monuments literally came to life in those early years of the professional site-based theatre, as the past circulated through material artefacts such as monuments and books, the bodies of actors, and the affective identities of spectators: How would it haue ioyed [joyed/made joyeful] braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 595 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least, (at seuerall times) who in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.35 In this famous passage, which almost certainly refers to Shakespeare's play 2 Henry VI, Nashe attests both to the polytemporality of the theatre and its affective presence. Liberated from 'worm-eaten bookes' and neglected brass monuments, the theatre stages both Talbot's 'triumphe' and his death. The complex operation of temporality here shuttles from the subjects of chronicle history released from the 'grave of oblivion' to the 'severall' (or separate) moments of staging before the spectators, who paradoxically both reinter and bring to life the historical figure. Yet, Nashe remains acutely aware of the 'Tragedian', the actor who 'represents his person', whose pathos is a function both of his skill and of the willingness of the spectators to 'imagine' they behold him fresh bleeding. Descriptions such as these point to the material, social, technological, and temporal webs of social cognition. The skill of the player knits audience and players together through lines of force generated by the ability of actors to embody and communicate passion in a 'lively' portrayal, as described by Thomas Heywood: A Description is only a shadow receiued by the eare but not perceuied by the eye: so liuely portraiture is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration: so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.36 Action is in essence embodiment, and its successful performance is a result of the skill of the actor in the twin arts of pronunciation and movement, especially gesture. So the body of the actor most insistently holds and reveals the polytemporalities of theatre. This level of embodiment is notable not for its containment within the boundary of the skin, but for its contagious qualities, its ability to 'move', to 'bewitch', to 'mold', and to 'fashion' spectators. These passages point towards the complex cognitive ecology that constitutes the early modern theatre. As we have argued, cognitive ecologies are multi-dimensional environments of remembering, communicating, acting, and imagining, in ongoing dense interaction with our environments. If intelligent embodied action is a hybrid process of coordinating disparate inner and outer resources, then bodies, minds, things, and texts too are inherently temporally open, both backwards in containing Textual Practice 596 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 polytemporal traces, and forwards in requiring ongoing use and interpretation. King Lear, temporality, and early modern clowning In this light, we re-examine perhaps Shakespeare's strangest manipulation of temporalities. In the Folio text of King Lear, at the height of the storm (3.2), as Lear recognizes that 'his wits begin to turn', he is led off-stage by Kent to a 'hovel'. Before he exits, the Fool sings: He that has and a little-tyne wit With heigh-ho, the wind and the raine Must make content with his Fortunes fit Though the rain it raineth everyday. As Lear departs, the Fool, alone on stage, addresses the audience: This is a brave night to cool a courtesan. I'll speak a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water; When nobles are their tailors' tutors; No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors; When every case in law is right; No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues; Nor cutpurses come not to throngs; When usurers tell their gold i' the field; And bawds and whores do churches build; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see't, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.37 This passage was long stigmatized as spurious, or as an actor's interpolation, an embarrassing break with the tragic grandeur of Lear's disintegration. One eighteenth-century editor blamed the actor: 'This prophecy is clearly a scrap of ribaldry tacked on, by the actor who played the Fool, to please "the barren spectators"'.38 Others attempted to cast blame on an editor. Noting the temporal confusions, Thomas Warburton suggested that 'each of these prophecies has its proper inference or Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 597 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 deduction; yet by an unaccountable stupidity, the first editors took the whole to be one prophecy, and so jumbled the two contrary inferences together'.39 As Stephen Booth notes, the 'prophecy' indeed moves in dizzying fashion across time. The first two 'prophecies' seem to be 'not future but present evils' and the third and fourth could similarly blur the categories of 'present and future, desirable or undesirable'.40 The second half of the passage lists several apparently desirable future events (e.g. [when] cutpurses come not to throngs') and concludes with a series of 'then' clauses that have become unmoored from temporality: 'then going [walking] shall be used with [done by] feet'. In this stunning anticlimax, 'the generic givens of prophecy are obliterated absolutely: we can imagine no time past, present, or future when walking will be done other than with feet'.41 The prophecy itself thus confounds temporality, but as it ends, we enter into an entirely different temporal register: 'This prophecy Merlin shall make: for I live before his time'. As Booth writes, the Fool 'blows apart the chronological limits of the fiction and, indeed, all divisions between character and actor, character and audience, past and present, present and future, future and present'.42 This is daring polytemporality, looking backward, ahead, and at the immediately constituted present on the stage. Set in pagan Britain, the story of Lear is taken from the worm-eaten books of the chronicles of English history. This Fool lives before Merlin and proleptically speaks his prophecy; he is present simultaneously in multiple temporal registers on the stage of the Globe, or performed before James I on St Stephen's Night (26 December). The 'I' is simultaneously Fool-as-character and performer, almost certainly Robert Armin, the actor who joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men upon the departure of the famous Will Kemp, who in 1599 left the company in search of greater celebrity.43 Fools and clowns were among the first celebrities in the early modern culture, far better known than writers, and eclipsing even the best known of tragic actors, including Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage. The very qualities that made this speech seem spurious or embarrassing to earlier critics are those that link it most insistently to the tradition of clowning. In the 'I' that opens and closes the passage, the character asserts his presence as clown, breaks the narrative grid of the play, and, in stepping onto the stage and addressing the audience, links himself to the embodied past of the early modern theatre. More than simply invoking past performances, the Fool's prophecy links Armin to the tradition of clowning and physical presence that did more than any other phenomena to shape the early modern theatre. Commanding the stage, addressing the audience, a Textual Practice 598 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 witty riddling style, delivering a powerful exit line: these were the hallmarks of the clown. In addition to marking out Armin as a performer, thus catapulting the audience into the present, this moment would have irresistibly called to mind the immediate theatrical past in its invocation of the most famous of Elizabethan clowns: Richard Tarlton. Tarlton had been dead for years by the time King Lear was written, but more than any other actor he haunted the English stage. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes, 'no other Elizabethan actor was so much spoken and written about after his death'.44 Posthumous references included a famous fighting cock named Tarlton 'because he alwayes came to the fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges . . . which cocke fought many battels, with mighty and fierce aduersaries'; the equation of improvization and 'Tarlton-izing' by Robert Greene; his ability to set an audience laughing simply by poking his head through the curtains; and the StageKeeper in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair who tells the audience that he 'kept the stage in Tarlton's time'.45 He was 'so beloved that men use his picture for their signs'; that is, his image was used to advertise inns and shops.46 The history of early modern clowning is often told in teleological style. On this view, the comic energy of the clown is gradually contained by the writer, as exemplified by Hamlet's advice to the players to control the extemporizing of the fool: 'let those that play your clowns say no more than is set down for them, for there be of them some that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too'.47 In such a linear view, the clown evolves into the wise fool and from thence to sardonic commentary; thus he is gradually brought within the ambit of the dramatic fiction, as audiences eschew the broader presentational styles of the earlier days of the theatre. Andrew Gurr suggests that Tarlton's style quickly became dated: 'Tarlton's kind of audience, drawn by his fame and united by comedy into intimacy with the players, did not long outlast the 1580s'.48 Yet performance and memory do not move along such linear trajectories. Gurr's pronouncement neglects the continuing wide popularity of the so-called 'old' plays through the seventeenth century, the affective hold that 'Tarltonizing' had on playgoers, and, most importantly, Armin's capacity to reconstitute 'Tarlton's kind of audience' through the sudden 'anachronistic' shift in the performance mode, moving the play through multiple temporalities at once. Indeed, both Will Kemp and Robert Armin were explicitly cast by contemporaries as Tarlton's heirs: Thomas Nashe referred to Kemp as the 'Jestmonger and Vice-regent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton' while Armin is referred to as Tarlton's 'adopted sonne'.49 Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 599 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 The connection of Armin and Tarlton is especially relevant for considering the relationship of anachronism, performance, and embodied skill. Jeremy Lopez suggests that: one of the most important attractions of the theatre for an early modern audience was the chance to see the bodies of actors on display, in motion, and in improbable positions . . . some of the most significant imaginative energy of the early modern repertory theatre would have flowed from the way in which it allowed an actor's body to participate in the elaborate systems of punning and mirroring that we understand to be characteristic of early modern dramatic structure, language, and form.50 Similarly, Paul Yachnin has argued that 'meaning was produced on the early modern stage through personation'.51 The bodies and gestures of past actors may then be sedimented into the present, at least temporarily. This alchemy is effected in Lear by the Fool's invocation of the clowning tradition in which he participates, invoking the culturally current tale of Armin's 'adoption' by Tarlton. The story is related to the anonymous Tarlton's Jests, a collection of tales of Tarlton first entered in the Stationer's Register in 1600 (the first extant copy is from 1608, but the tales clearly had circulated much earlier). The story goes: Tarlton keeping a Tauerne in Gracious street, hee let it to another, who indebted to Armins Master, a Gold smith in Lambard street: yet he himself had a chamber in the same house. And this Armin being then a way came often thither to demaund his Masters money, which hee sometimes had and sometimes had not: in the end the man growing poore, told the boy he had no money for his Master, and he must beare with him. The mans name being Charles, Armin made this verse, writing it with chalke on a waine-scot. O world how wilt thou lie, is this Charles the great? That I denie Indeed Charles the great before But now Charles the lesse, being poore. Tarlton coming into the rome reading it and partly acquainted with the boyes humor, coming often thither for his M[aster's] money, tooke a piece of chalk, & writ this rime by it: A wag thou art, none can preuent thee And thy desert shall content thee Let me diuine, as I am, so in time thou lt be the same My adopted sonne therefore be To enjoy my Clownes suit after me Textual Practice 600 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 And see how it fell out: the Boy reading this, so loued Tarlton after, that regarding him with more respect, vsed to his playes, and fell in a league with his humour, and private practice brought him to present playing, and at this houre performs the same, where at the Globe on the Bancke-side men may see him52. Like many accounts of skill in the early modern period, this anecdote operates through a narrative of rivalry and over-going, in which the extemporaneous verses of the young 'wag' Armin are countered by Tarlton's own. Tarlton's rhyme is a prophecy of succession: 'Let me diuine, as I am, so in time thou'lt be the same'. The prophecy comes true, but only through the dedicated study ('private practice') of the older man. Armin 'fell in a league with his humour'; as Astington suggests, 'given the right bent for rhythm and verbal inventiveness, the young apprentice would "absorb" his style'.53 The jest-book invites its readers to see Armin 'at this houre' at the Globe, deftly illustrating the multiple temporalities at play in performance. What this moment of memory work may have looked like we cannot say, of course. The salient point about any performance, of course, is its evanescence: even in the very 'houre' of performance, the present slips into the past. Did Armin's costume resemble Tarlton's 'clowne suit' (a russet coat), or did he carry a pipe and tabor, as did his predecessor? Did his gestures recall those of Tarlton, a result of the careful absorption of his 'humour', thus allowing the audience to see a distinctive style displayed despite the very different physique of the younger actor? Memories of movements or physical signatures can be remarkably enduring; we can vividly recall the peculiar batting stances and bodily twitches of dozens of baseball players and cricketers of the 1980s. And 'ghost gestures', as Behnke suggested, can be inter-corporeal, transmitted across bodies and across longer timeframes, as the somatic residues of the long-dead clown are resurrected, a residue of the past irresistibly recalling a past performance. Moreover, the Fool's structural position, as it teeters between fictional and presentational, is profoundly indebted to Tarlton. The only role we can with certainty ascribe to Tarlton is that of Derick in the anonymous Queen's Men play The Famous Victories of Henry V (c.1587). Shakespeare knew this play intimately and followed its structure minutely when writing 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V. The Fool's speech at this moment recalls the function that Dericke–Tarlton performed in the earlier play: Tarlton straddles the English past and the performative present. As Brian Walsh argues, through the tension between character and persona, Tarlton's mediation 'between the imagined past and the performative present emblematizes the phenomenology of theatre as an expenditure of time, a physical process under constant temporal pressure'.54 Moreover, the fooling within Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 601 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 the fiction of the play also recalls the many stories in circulation about Tarlton. Although known as a professional comedian with the Queen's Men, Tarlton was also famous for his ability to delight the late Queen; the first anecdote in Tarlton's Jests related how 'Tarlton plaid the Drunkard before the Queene: the Queene being discontent, which Tarlton perceiving, tooke upon him to delight her with some quaint Jest'.55 A similar story is related by Thomas Fuller in 1652: 'When Queen Elizabeth was serious, I dare not say sullen, and out of good humour, he would undumpish her at his pleasure. . . . In a word, he told the Queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better that her physicians'.56 The adept combination of amusing, chiding, pleasing, instructing, and distracting attested to in this story of course recalls the similarly structured, yet much more fraught, relationship between the fictional Fool and the fictional Lear. This brief passage from the Folio text of King Lear, then, demonstrates the multiple timescales and inherent polytemporality layered within one tiny forceful early modern theatrical moment. The Fool's prophecy is entire and strangely captivating in itself, even while it incorporates and gestures to an intrinsically indefinite assemblage of other moments, performances, and meanings, of which we have here highlighted just one by reading back across the history of early modern clowning. In this historical cognitive ecology, theatrical traces, like other objects, memories, and events, are often 'shrouded in anachronism', as Harris argues, 'saturated with the unmistakable if frequently faint imprints of many times'.57 In one sense, this reading might seem hopelessly historicist, mired in the particularities of one obscure moment in theatrical history. Are we simply 'fine-tuning our estrangement from Shakespeare's era?', as Linda Charnes asks, and thus 'fetishiz[ing] our ability to imagine ourselves into Shakespeare's past'?58 We argue, in contrast, that because of the intrinsically anachronistic nature of memory and cognition, there is no forced choice between being yoked to the present and being transported to or shackled in the past. As writers, literary critics, historians, and philosophers, we too move in and out of time: we are not moored in either past or present exclusively, but shuttle across the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life, of our shared memories and imaginings. University of Otago and Macquarie University Textual Practice 602 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 Notes 1 John Campbell, 'The structure of time in autobiographical memory' European Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1997), pp. 105–118; Christoph Hoerl, 'Memory, amnesia, and the past' Mind and Language, 14 (1999), pp. 227–251; John Sutton, 'Between individual and collective memory: interaction, coordination, distribution' Social Research, 75 (2008), pp. 23–48. While we can't here discuss in detail theories of time-consciousness and temporal experience across philosophical traditions, we believe that phenomenological and cognitive approaches can be allied in integrative projects, rather than set against each other as glaring antagonists. For distinctive examples of comparative and integrative cross-tradition work on time and embodied skills, see for example Tim van Gelder, 'Wooden Iron: Husserlian Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science' in J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, J.-M. Roy, and B. Pachoud (eds), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 245–265; Mike Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Jack Reynolds, 'Time out of joint: between phenomenology and post-structuralism' Parrhesia, 9 (2010), pp. 55–64. 2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 75, quoted and discussed by Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 3–4 and passim. 3 David Hawkes, 'Against Materialism in Literary Theory' in P. Cefalu and B. Reynolds (eds), The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive (London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 237–257, p. 250. We respond to Hawkes in Sutton and Tribble, 'Materialists are not Merchants of Vanishing', Early Modern Culture 9 (2012), URL: http://emc.eserver.org/1-9/ sutton_tribble.html 4 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, 'Evolutionary psychology: a primer' (1997), http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (accessed September 3, 2011). By no means all evolutionary literary theorists accept this view; for a powerful critique of literary adaptations of the Tooby-Cosmides approach, see Jonathan Kramnick, 'Against literary Darwinism' Critical Inquiry, 37 (Winter 2011), pp. 315–347. 5 Retaining a psychological level of analysis, but one in which mind and cognition, memory and emotion, decision-making and imagining, are treated in non-individualist ways, offers an effective response to Catherine Belsey's call to escape the dualism of biology and culture. See Belsey, 'Biology and Imagination: The Role of Culture' in R.H. Wells and J. McFadden (eds), Human Nature: Fact and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 111–127. Likewise, the contested yet robust methods and debates of cognitive-psychological and cognitive-ecological studies of memory and action offer rich and useful middle grounds between neuroscience and linguistics, two fields which – especially in theories of mirror neurons, on the one hand, and conceptual blending, on the other –have established a mutually interdependent and Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 603 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 curiously unproductive relationship in some areas of the cognitive study of literature and performance. 6 Evelyn B. Tribble, 'Distributing cognition in the globe' Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005), pp. 135–155; John Sutton, 'Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process' in R. Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 189–225. 7 Steven D. Brown, 'The quotation marks have a certain importance: prospects for "Memory Studies"' Memory Studies, 1 (2008), pp. 261–271; John Sutton, 'Looking beyond memory studies: comparisons and integrations' Memory Studies, 2 (2009), pp. 299–302; Sutton, 'Remembering' in P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 217–235; Susannah Radstone, 'What place is this?: Transcultural memory and the locations of memory studies' Parallax, 17 (2011), pp. 109–123. 8 Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9 Compare Ross Gibson, 'Extractive realism' Australian Humanities Review, 47 (2009), pp. 43–53. 10 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102. 11 John Sutton, 'The Feel of the World: Exograms, Habits, and the Confusion of Types of Memory' in Andrew Kania (ed.), Memento: Philosophers on Film (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 65–86; Sutton, 'Batting, habit, and memory: the embodied mind and the nature of skill' Sport in Society, 10 (2007), pp. 763–786. 12 Harris, Untimely Matter, p. 12. 13 Elizabeth Behnke, 'Ghost gestures: phenomenological investigations of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal implications' Human Studies, 20 (1997), pp. 181–201; John Sutton, Doris J.F. McIlwain, Wayne Christensen, and Andrew Geeves, 'Applying intelligence to the reflexes: embodied skills and habits between Dreyfus and Descartes' JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42 (2011), pp. 78–103. Doris J.F. McIlwain and John Sutton, 'Yoga from the mat up: how words alight on bodies' Educational Philosophy and Theory, forthcoming. 14 Mirjam Schaub, Janet Cardiff: The Walk Book (Vienna: Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2005). 15 Janet Cardiff, quoted in David Pinder, 'Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories, and walks in the city' Cultural Geographies, 8 (2001), pp. 1–19, p. 7. 16 Joan Gibbons, 'Enactments, Re-enactments, and Episodic Memory' in her Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 96–117. 17 Cardiff, quoted in Kitty Scott, 'I Want You to Walk with Me' in Janet Cardiff (ed.), The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (London: Artangel, 1999), pp. 3–17, p. 15. 18 Lev Manovich, 'The poetics of augmented space' Visual Communication, 5 (2006), pp. 219–240, with discussion of Cardiff's work at p. 226ff. Textual Practice 604 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 19 Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, Arther Sherbo (ed.) (New Haven: 1968), p. 72. 20 Evelyn B. Tribble and Nicholas Keene, Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering: Religion, Education, and Memory in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2011); Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton, 'Cognitive ecology as a framework for Shakespearean studies' Shakespeare Studies, 39 (2011), pp. 94–103. We aim to historicise Edwin Hutchins' anthropological framework: see Hutchins 'Cognitive ecology' Topics in Cognitive Science, 2 (2010), pp. 705–715. Compare Bruno Latour, 'Cogito ergo sumus! Or psychology swept inside out by the fresh air of the upper deck . . . : a review of Ed Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild', Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3 (1996), pp. 54–63. 21 Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre (London: Palgrave, 2011). 22 Margreta de Grazia, 'Anachronism' in B. Cummings and J. Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 13–32; Peter Burke, 'The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin' in C. Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 157– 173. 23 Lucy Munro, 'Shakespeare and the uses of the past: Critical approaches and current debates' Shakespeare, 7 (2011), pp. 102–125. 24 Marjorie Garber, 'Shakespeare's Laundry List' in her Profiling Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 195–213. 25 Catherine Belsey, 'The Poverty of (New) Historicism' in S. Barker and J. Gill (eds), Literature as History (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 7–16, pp. 9–10; also Belsey, 'The death of the reader' Textual Practice, 23 (2009), pp. 201–214. 26 John Sutton, 'Spongy Brains and Material Memories' in M. Floyd-Wilson and G. Sullivan (eds), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 14–34. For rich examples of the new materialism, see Peter Stallybrass, 'Worn worlds: clothes, mourning, and the life of things' Yale Review, 81 (1993), pp. 183–207; P. Stallybrass, R. Chartier, J.F. Mowery, and H. Wolfe, 'Hamlet's tables and the technologies of writing in renaissance England' Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004), pp. 379– 419. For critical discussion and further development see Jonathan Gil Harris, 'Shakespeare's hair: staging the object of material culture' Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), pp. 479–491, and Harris, Untimely Matter. 27 Evelyn Gajowski, 'Beyond historicism: presentism, subjectivity, politics' Literature Compass, 7.8 (2010), pp. 674–691. Other so-called presentist theory for the early modern period includes Linda Charnes, 'Anticipating Nostalgia: finding temporal logic in a textual anomaly' Textual Cultures, 4 (2009), pp. 72–83; Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007); Evelyn Gajowski (ed.), Presentism, Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 605 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 28 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 29 Carol Chillington Rutter, '"Her First Remembrance from the Moor": Actors and the Materials of Memory' in P. Holland (ed.), Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 168–206, p. 181. 30 John Sutton, 'Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things' in D. Tofts, A. Jonson, and A. Cavallero (eds), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA and Sydney: MIT Press and Power Publications, 2002), pp. 130–141; Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (eds), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010). 31 Harris, Untimely Matter, p. 9. 32 John Sutton, 'Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory' in C. Knappett and L. Malafouris (eds), Material Agency (Berlin: Springer, 2008), pp. 37–55. For other historical work on embodied skill and tacit epistemologies, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004); Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007). 33 Rutter, p. 183. 34 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (London, 1592), sig. H2r; in Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and other Works, J.B. Steane (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 112–113. 35 Nashe, Pierce Penniless, sig. H2r, p. 113 of the Penguin edition. 36 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. B3v. 37 William Shakespeare, King Lear, Alfred Harbage (ed.) (London: Pelican, 1969), pp. 3.2.74–3.2.96. 38 Cowden Clarke, reprinted in Horace Howard Furness, King Lear: The New Variorum Edition, 1908; rpt. (New York: Dover, 2000), p. 179. 39 Thomas Warburton, reprinted in Furness, King Lear: The New Variorum Edition, p. 179. 40 Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 42. 41 Booth, King Lear, p. 43. 42 Ibid. 43 See Peter Thomson, 'Clowns, Fools, and Knaves: Stages in the Evolution of Acting' in Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (eds), Cambridge History of British Theatre Vol. 1: Origins to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 407–423; M. Eccles, 'Elizabethan actors, IV: S to end' Textual Practice 606 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20 12 Notes and Queries, 238 (1993), pp. 165–176; John H. Astington, 'The succession of sots: fools and their fathers' Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 20 (2007), pp. 225–235; E. Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors (London: Oxford University Press, 1929); David Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Thomson notes that a minority of scholars argue that Armin may have played Edgar rather than the fool. 44 Peter Thomson, 'Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588)' in Lawrence Goldman (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26971 (accessed September 3, 2011). 45 Nunzeger, A Dictionary of Actors, p. 336. 46 See Alexandra Halasz, '"So beloved that men use his pictures for their signs": Richard Tarlton and the uses of sixteenth-century celebrity' Shakespeare Studies, 23 (1995), pp. 19–38. 47 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Arden, 3rd series, 2006), pp. 3.2.39– 3.2.42. 48 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 157; see also Robert Weimann, Author's Pen and Actor's Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 18–28; Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 49 Thomas Nashe, An Almond for a Parrot (London, 1589), A2r; Anon, Tarlton's Jests (London 1613), sig. C2r. 50 Jeremy Lopez, 'Imagining the actor's body on the early modern stage' Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 20 (2007), pp. 187–203, p. 191. 51 Paul Yachnin, 'Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the limits of theoretical criticism' EMLS: Early Modern Literary Studies, 2.1 (1996), pp. 1–31. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-1/yachshak.html (accessed September 3, 2011). 52 Tarlton's Jests, sig. C2r. 53 Astington, 'Sots', p. 231. 54 Brian Walsh, 'Theatrical emporality and historical consciousness' The Famous Victories of Henry V' Theatre Journal, 59 (2007), pp. 57–73. 55 Tarlton's Jests, sig. A2r. 56 Quoted by Halasz, 'So beloved . . . ', p. 22. 57 Harris, Untimely Matter, p. 7. 58 Charnes, 'Shakespeare, Belief and the Future' in Presentist Shakespeares, p. 65. Charnes also notes, in terms closer to ours, that 'past, present and future are tangled together in ways that will always complicate and even confound our best efforts to "always historicise"', p. 66. Evelyn B. Tribble & John Sutton Minds in and out of time 607 D ow nl oa de d by [ M ac qu ar ie U ni ve rs ity ] at 1 8: 40 0 3 Se pt em be r 20