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What Shakspeare does to your brain

By thescian on August 5, 2008.

i-7c71e08b1616bd972e8f1bd0aad188cd-davis_07_08.jpg Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality, making me feel more alive in more unpredictable mental ways when I read or see his work. I am also getting a sense of an underlying shape to experience, as though the syntax in front of my eyes were keying into mental pathways behind them, and shifting and reconfiguring them dramatically in the theatre of the brain.

Thus concludes Philip Davis in Literary Review after some studies of how the brain responds to Shakespeare's extraordinary play with the English language.

A few days back, wife was flipping through a book of quotes. She read a quote that - although I didn't actually know which play it was from - was instantly recognizable as Shakespeare (it's from Romeo and Juliet):

Was ever a book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!

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