Lies like Truth: Shakespeare, 'Macbeth' and the Cultural Moment by Arthur F. Kinney (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1,2003 167 Similarly tenuous, along with the mapping of Claudius onto Jaggers, is the notion that as 'so much resentment tends to vioient death' in Great Expectations, it seems 'to bear some relation to revenge tragedy' (p. 110). Such flourishes abound in a book where the merits of some of its detail are marred by logical infelicities and a dubious infrastructure. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Lies like Truth: Shakespeare, 'Macbeth' and the Cultural Moment. By Arthur F. Kinney. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 2001. 341pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8143-2965-9. In this book Arthur Kinney adds to the growing number of recent studies concerned with drawing historical and cultural parallels between the print-based technological revolution in early modern Europe and the no less remarkable modern advancements in the physical sciences. By looking in particular at developments in neuroscience and computer technology, Kinney offers in his firstchapter a methodological paradigm that enables him to posit a number of connections between postmodern critical prac? tice and the cultural moment ofMacbeth. This is an ambitious undertakingand, while not without its difficulties,the author's critical standpoint is generally illuminating. First, he notes that, according to contemporary neuroscience, synapses and neurons create essentially associative and relational meanings in the brain, This is because 'sensory data is widely scattered, and messages picked up from the outside world as images or neural codes are subjected to a wide variety of hierarchies of neural analyzers ' (p. 30). Such a structure also informs computer science. In effect,observes Kinney, computational hypertext with its relational and nodal structures of meaning is predicated upon a modern understanding of neural function. All of this may seem very farfrom the cultural moment oiMacbeth. But Kinney also demonstrates striking analogues between modern cognitive science and Aristotelian and Galenic physiology. He further argues that sixteenth-century rhetoric?especially Ramist Method with its 'sense of sequentiality as necessary to meaning' (p. 39)?can also be understood as operating according to a hypertextual model. In this way, Kinney is able to provide striking cultural precursors to his own methodological aims. In Chapter 2, by far the longest of the three chapters that comprise the book, the author goes on to offera variety of relational 'lexias' that may have been available to a playgoer around 1606. The purpose of such an approach is to provide the reader with a 'web of meaningful interrelations that are mutually enhancing at any nodal point in the play' (p. 41). Because Macbeth is a text structured around the uncertainty generated by whether something or someone 'seems' or in fact 'is', an approach that brings together a range of disparate early modern discourses must inevitably force us to question not only how the play made meaning in 1606, but how it might signify in the present moment. For example, in a section entitled 'Lexias of Resistance', Kinney draws together the somewhat disparate strands of Scottish, English, and Continental resistance theory,and by putting them in the context of major political events involving James I, such as the Ruthven and Gunpowder plots, he offersa subtle account of the ways in which Macbeth pits 'regicide against conscience' (p. 124). The author is similarly convincing on the economic problems of the period that inform the play. He notes that 'Persistent economic diversity, coupled with a tight market and an excess workforce' (p. 135) resulted in mass unemployment, riots, and widespread social unrest . Each of these factors is reflected in the highly dense language of the Porter, a fig? ure who occupies a number of competing locations for both Shakespeare and Kinney. In addition to these iexias', readers will find fine readings of, for example, the militaristic, familial, medical, religious, and magical discourses that inform the play's 168 Reviews signifying practices. My only serious reservation is that, despite the author's best intentions, the book occasionally reads like two separate studies, the one broadly the? oretical and the other largely historicist in focus. This is undoubtedly a scholarly and challenging book that anyone concerned with Macbeth will have to read. However, I suspect that it will be for its exemplary accounts of the cultural...