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Lies Like Truth: Shakespear, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment. By ARTHUR F. KINNEY. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Pp. 341. Illus. $39.95 cloth.
Arthur Kinney's Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment has great ambitions: to reconstruct what he calls the "cultural moment" of 1606, the first production of Macbeth, and to put that moment in dialogue with postmodern culture, principally recent revolutions in the computer and cognitive sciences. The result is both a learned source of information about Macbeth and Shakespeare-a database, Kinney would call it-and a provocative proposal for an historicist literary criticism modeled on hypertext.
To confront the problems involved in attempting to read Macbeth as members of its original audience might have experienced it, Kinney develops a promising methodology, which he explains at length in his first chapter, "Macbeth and the Cultural Moment." "[T]o know the culture deeply and widely at the originary moment of Macbeth," Kinney describes immersing himself in the culture of the period, reading (as far as possible) everything written, printed, or circulated between 1600 and 1606 (12-13). He puts the information found there in the context of his readings in recent literary criticism and historiography, plus neuroscience and computer science. He then arranges this immense learning into "lexias" or "strings of data" (35). He imagines what one audience member, thinking about a topic such as family or medicine, might bring to his or her experience of the play: contemporary events and controversies, recent printed books, social and economic institutions, other theatrical productions, popular traditions, new innovations, and so on in a potentially endless chain of associated ideas. One model for this method is hypertext, where a single intriguing word, phrase, image, or byte of information can invite a reader to "click" and follow a chain of electronic links. The other model is neuroscience's vision of the brain as a net of neurons, where each person arranges information in different chains or strings of brain cells, responding to a stimulus like a performance of Macbeth by using different, unique synapses. Kinney in turn makes these models analogous to early modern cognitive science and the Ramist method. Kinney himself refuses to tie these lexias into a single argument or reading of the play. Instead he proposes...