Shakespeare’s company coped with an enormous mnemonic load, performing up to six different plays a week. How did they do it? Cognition in the Globe addresses this question through the lens of Distributed Cognition. This is a dynamic model that attends to the art of ‘playing’ at a range of levels. These include the material conditions of playing space; artifacts such as parts, plots, and playbooks; the social structures of the companies, including methods of training and coordination; internal cognitive mechanisms such as attention, perception, and memory; and actor-audience dynamics, among many others. This is the first book to offer such an approach to theatrical history and performance studies.
