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 Shakespeare and
Consciousness

Edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Series Editors
Bruce McConachie
Department of Theatre Arts
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Blakey Vermeule
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford, California, USA
This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception, emo-
tions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities that
constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and embod-
ied performances.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14903
 Paul Budra • Clifford Werier
Editors

Shakespeare
and Consciousness
Editors
Paul Budra Clifford Werier
Simon Fraser University Mount Royal University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

ISBN 978-1-137-59671-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59541-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936411

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: Robert Taylor Photography / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
For my brother, David Budra
PB
For my wife, Sabrina Reed
CW
 SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Noam Chomsky started a revolution in human self-understanding and

reshaped the intellectual landscape to this day by showing how all lan-
guages have deep features in common. Gone—or least retreating—is the
idea that the mind is a blank slate. In its wake, fierce debates have broken
out about what the mind is and how it works. At stake are some of the
most urgent questions facing researchers today: questions about the rela-
tionship between brain, mind, and culture; about how human universals
express themselves in individual minds and lives; about reason, conscious-
ness, and the emotion; about where cultures get their values and how
those values fit our underlying predispositions.
It is no secret that most humanists have held fast to the idea that the
mind is a blank slate. Not only has this metaphor been an article of intel-
lectual faith, it has also underwritten a passionate moral agenda. If human
beings have no inherent qualities, our political and social systems are con-
tingent rather than fixed. Intellectuals might be able to play an important
role in exposing the byways of power and bringing about a fairer world.
But evidence is rapidly piling up that humans are born with an elaborate
cognitive architecture. The number of our innate qualities is staggering;
human cognition is heavily constrained by genes and by our evolution-
ary past. It is now know that we are born with several core concepts and
a capacity for developing a much larger number of cognitive capabilities
under ecological pressure.
Beyond that bold headline, however, the story gets murkier. Each of
the mind sciences is filled with dissonant debates of their own. In her

vii
viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

magisterial investigation into the origin of concepts, Susan Carey writes

that her goal “is to demonstrate that the disciplines of cognitive science
now have the empirical and theoretical tools to turn age-old philo-
sophical dilemmas into relatively straightforward problems.”1 Notice
her sense of being on the verge rather than on some well-marked path.
The terrain ahead is still unmapped. But notice, too, her sense that
scientific methods will eventually transform fuzzy questions into test-
able ones.
How brave, then, are language and performance scholars who, driven
by their passion to understand how the mind works, seek to explore
this new terrain? Brave, but increasingly in good company. The Modern
Language Association discussion group on cognitive approaches to
literature has grown exponentially in the last decade.2 And the work-
ing session in cognition and performance at the American Society for
Theatre Research is flourishing. Many scholars are fascinated by what
cognitive approaches might have to say about the arts. They recognize
that this orientation to literature and performance promises more than
just another “ism.” Unlike the theories of the last century, the mind
sciences offer no central authority, no revered group of texts that dis-
close a pathway to the authorized truth. Indeed, cognitive approaches
to the arts barely fit under one broad tent. Language-processing, reader
and spectator-response, pragmatics, embodiment, conceptual blending,
discourse analysis, empathy, performativity, and narrative theory, not to
mention the energetic field of literary Darwinism, are all fields with lively
cognitive debates.
Cognitive approaches are unified by two ideas. The first is that to
understand the arts we need to understand psychology. Humanists have
uncontroversially embraced this idea for decades, as their ongoing fascina-
tion with the now largely discredited theory of psychoanalysis suggests.
Now that psychology has undergone its empiricist revolution, literary
and performance scholars should rejoice in the fact that our psychological
claims are on firmer footing. Second is the idea that scholarship in this field
should be generally empirical, falsifiable, and open to correction by new
evidence and better theories—as are the sciences themselves. Of course
this epistemological admission means that many of the truth claims of
the books in our series will eventually be destabilized and perhaps proven
false. But this is as it should be. As we broaden our understanding of cog-
nition and the arts, better science should produce more rigorous ideas and
 SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE ix

insights about literature and performance. In this spirit, we celebrate the

earlier books in our series that have cut a path for our emerging field and
look forward to new explorations in the future.

Blakey Vermeule
Bruce McConachie

NOTES
1. Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 4.
2. See Lisa Zunshine, “What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” Introduction to
Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press), 1.
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book evolved out of a seminar held at the Shakespeare Association

of America’s annual conference in Toronto in 2013. Our thanks to
everyone who participated in that event. We would also like to thank
Dr. Michael Quinn, Associate Vice-President of Research at Mount Royal
University, for his support and Lauren Cross for her invaluable help with
the manuscript.

xi
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1
Paul Budra and Clifford Werier

Part I Consciousness, Cognitive Science, and Character 17

2 Consciousness and Cognition in Shakespeare and Beyond 19

Clifford Werier

3 Shakespeare Studies and Consciousness 43

Edward Pechter

4 Hamlet in the Bat Cave 79

Paul Budra

Part II Consciousness and Theatrical Practice 97

5 King of Shadows: Early Modern Characters and Actors 99

Amy Cook

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

6 The Distributed Consciousness of Shakespeare’s Theatre 119

Laurie Johnson

7 Minds at Work: Writing, Acting, Watching,

Reading Hamlet 139
Ros King

Part III Consciousness and the Body 163

8 “Being Unseminared”: Pleasure, Instruction,

and Playing the Queen in Anthony and Cleopatra 165
Andrew Brown

9 Bodies and Selves: Autoscopy, Out-of-Body Experiences,

Mind-Wandering and Early Modern Consciousness 191
Jan Purnis

10 Hamlet and Time-Consciousness:

A Neurophenomenological Reading 215
Matthew Kibbee

Part IV Consciousness, Emotion, and Memory 247

11 Shylock’s Shy Conscience: Consciousness and

Conversion in The Merchant of Venice 249
Tiffany Hoffman

12 Forgetting Cleopatra 267

Elizabeth Hodgson

Notes on Contributors 293

Index 297
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Paul Budra and Clifford Werier

Consciousness as a critical category has largely been absent from the pro-
liferation of literary and historical studies that have interrogated what has
come to be known as “the early modern subject.”1 Instead, scholars have
turned to the “body-mind,” “inwardness,” “emotions,” and “selves” as
ways of approaching the messy and often confusing matrices of expe-
rience that constitute awareness, almost as if “consciousness,” a term
which captures the very immanence of life, is too unstable.2 To be fair,
this resistance to consciousness has occurred not only in the study of early
modern literatures and cultures; until recently it has been shunted to the
side in many philosophic and scientific discourses because it was per-
ceived as intractable, “the last surviving mystery.”3 Thomas Nagel sum-
marized the problem: “Without consciousness the mind-body problem
would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”4

P. Budra ( )
Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, BC, Canada
C. Werier
Mount Royal University,
Calgary, AB, Canada

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

P. Budra, C. Werier (eds), Shakespeare and Consciousness,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_1
2 P. BUDRA AND C. WERIER

Speaking of experimental protocols in the late 1980s, Stanislas Dehaene

asserted that neuroscientists “all studied consciousness in one way or
another . . . but the word itself remained taboo: no serious scientific pub-
lication ever used it.”5 Likewise, Arne Dietrich, in his brilliant attempt to
investigate the subject of consciousness in a single volume, argues that
“Consciousness has never been a topic that lends itself naturally to sober,
intellectual discourse” because “what’s at stake is nothing less than the
nature of our souls.”6
Dietrich’s central argument, that “consciousness has gone interdis-
ciplinary,”7 helps us to explain the explosion of interest in consciousness
and its cognitive subcategories. Best-selling books such as Michio Kaku’s
The Future of Mind and Daniel Bor’s The Ravenous Brain, subtitled
“How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search
for Meaning,” attest to the popularity of such inquiries into the nature of
what it means to be aware.8 All such examinations must, however, attend
to the core problems of embodied experience and the fact that without a
brain, consciousness is impossible. Whether we label it the “mind-body
problem” or “Cartesian dualism,” any approach to consciousness must
attend not only to the subjectively registered thoughts and qualia which
comprise experience but also to the physical correlates which support
and give rise to the multiplicity of sensations that constitute the present
moment as it arises and disappears, notwithstanding Christopher Koch’s
reminder that “much of what goes on in the brain bypasses conscious-
ness” altogether.9
Consciousness exists in the realms of paradox—a feature of experience
that is simultaneously embodied and disembodied, clearly experienced
but difficult to situate—and this slipperiness may partially account for
why it has rarely been mobilized as a mode of critical inquiry. Terrence
Deacon, describing the “recent flurry of interest in the problem of con-
sciousness, and the often extreme theoretical views concerning its nature
and scientific status,”10 outlines the conflict between materialist claims
that consciousness exists only in the interactions of brain and world
and the position that “consciousness is always a residual phenomenon
remaining unaccounted for after all correlated physical processes are
described.” In his monumental work Incomplete Nature, Deacon advo-
cates for a third option, defining consciousness as “a phenomenon that
is defined by its absential character.”11 Deacon’s assertion that “there
is something present [in consciousness] that marks this curious intrin-
sic relation to something absent” leads to the radical conclusion that
 INTRODUCTION 3

“that which is explicitly absent is me.”12 Deacon takes over 500 pages to
explain the mysteries of this cryptic conclusion and to explore the intrin-
sic incompleteness of self and identity before finally concluding that the
“core characteristics of conscious experience—are accurate reflections of
the fact that self is literarily sui generis, emerging each moment from
what is not there.”13
Clearly, debates about consciousness are now at the forefront of emerg-
ing disciplines that are necessarily hybrid (Deacon is a professor of biological
anthropology and neuroscience), as approaches to questions of conscious-
ness seem to promote the dissolution of traditional academic boundar-
ies. In literary studies, consciousness has been approached indirectly
through a number of cognitive biocritical lenses that examine particular
sensory, emotional, mnemonic, psychological, and evolutionary processes
and apply these discrete operations to cultural practices and problems of
interpretation.14 Although literary study’s reduction of consciousness into
its cognitive constituents was not part of a systematic critical strategy, it
makes sense that individuated theories of cognition would provide more
concentrated applications than the sometimes overwhelming ideas related
to mapping the totality of consciousness. So, for example, Distributed
Cognition, Cognitive Blends, and Theory of Mind provided focused criti-
cal models that could be easily applied to literary artifacts, practices, and
characters in Shakespeare, whereas the Global Workspace Theory and
other more generalized approaches to consciousness may be too esoteric
to yield tangible results.15
This book emerges as a response to recent scientific and cultural
preoccupations with consciousness and our curiosity about how such
a category shift could lead to new insights about Shakespeare and his
world. Because consciousness, neuroscience, the brain, mindfulness,
and other cognitive categories are ubiquitous in today’s print and elec-
tronic media—and cognitive science continues to capture the attention of
scholars across disciplines16—we hoped to harness some of this energy by
deploying Shakespeare and consciousness together, allowing scholars to
explore the synergies that emerged. We are not saying that considerations
of consciousness have been absent from critical inquiries in Shakespeare
before this collection, as the numerous works on inwardness, self, self-
consciousness, embodied self, and emotions attest to the interest that
scholars have lavished on the mind-body problem. We are suggesting,
however, that considering consciousness from multiple perspectives—as
a historically phenomenal process, a materially determined product, a
4 P. BUDRA AND C. WERIER

neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity—

can help us to understand the plays and associated cultural practices in
surprising ways.
Consciousness may also offer a way around the long-standing debate
in Shakespeare studies around the question of inwardness or essence. The
Cultural Materialist and New Historicist critics of the late twentieth cen-
tury mounted an attack on the dominant liberal humanist tradition that
assumed a stable, transhistorical human essence variously called “inward-
ness,” “interiority,” and “subjectivity.” They argued that to “ascribe sub-
jectivity to Renaissance characters is to posit an ‘imaginary interiority,’
imported into reading of the drama by modern ideological habits.”17 At
best, critics like Jonathan Goldberg argued, the perception of interior-
ity in Shakespeare’s age was derived “largely from external matrices”18
and was therefore not true interiority but a reaction to cultural forces.
It was, in Francis Barker’s famous phrase, a “promissory form”19 in the
evolution toward modern subjectivity. Against this argument stands the
indomitable Harold Bloom who argues, “The internalization of the self
is one of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions, particularly because it came
before anyone else was ready for it.”20 Bloom uses the word “conscious-
ness” in his descriptions of Falstaff and, especially, Hamlet, but at times
he seems to be using it as a synonym for some sort of self-conscious,
intelligent inwardness: “Hamlet, as a character, bewilders us because he
is so endlessly suggestive. Are there any limits to him? His inwardness is
his most radical originality; the ever-growing inner self, the dream of an
infinite consciousness, has never been more fully portrayed.”21 What is the
dividing line, in this formulation, between “inwardness,” the “inner self,”
and “consciousness”? What does it mean to dream of infinite conscious-
ness? Katharine offers a more specific rebuttal to the Cultural Materialists
and New Historicists by demonstrating that there was a deep conversation
about inwardness in the early modern period. She also identifies the ideo-
logical impetus behind their attempts to deny it: “Admitting the signifi-
cance of conceptions of personal inwardness for the English Renaissance,
they imagine, would be tantamount to embracing a naive essentialism
about human nature.”22
Consciousness, for all its philosophical and neurobiological mystery,
has the advantage of being more specific than “subjectivity” or “interior-
ity.” Most of us know what consciousness is, can recognize if something
is conscious or not, even if we cannot explain its origins and complexities.
And because consciousness is clearly tied to brain function, it is potentially
 INTRODUCTION 5

transhistorical. That is not to say that all previous generations puzzled

over consciousness—as several of the essays in this volume remind us, the
word “consciousness” did not even exist in Shakespeare’s time—but if
consciousness is “hard wired,” then it may prove a test case for how an
innate human characteristic is interpreted, exploited, or ignored by dif-
ferent historical cultures. And literature, because it represents the human
condition, individuals as well as their cultures, may be one of the most
potent sources of information about that interplay between the biological
self and the material forces that shape it.
Shakespeare is an especially appropriate place for a discussion of litera-
ture and consciousness for several reasons. He lived in a historically signifi-
cant moment in the history of consciousness: just before Descartes’ cogito,
that philosophical move that inscribed a seemingly indelible divide between
the mind and the body and “accorded consciousness a privileged position
as the proper locus of indubitable cognition.”23 Combined with William
Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood, a discovery that “represents a
radically new image of the body as a closed system—more self-contained,
less permeable than its Galenic predecessor,”24 this divide offered a new
concept of the self that privileged the mental over the somatic, conscious-
ness over flesh, and which separated both from the immediate influences
of the environment. But, as David Aers reminds us, “There is no rea-
son to think that languages and experiences on inwardness, of interiority,
of divided selves, of splits between outer realities and inner forms of
being, were unknown before the seventeenth century, before capital-
ism, before the ‘bourgeoisie,’ before Descartes, before the disciplinary
regimes addressed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.”25 Indeed, though
Shakespeare lived and wrote on the cusp of the mind-body revolution, he
is famous (to the dismay of materialist critics) for creating characters who
have been renowned for centuries because of their apparent consciousness.
The Romantics and, most significantly, Sigmund Freud have used his char-
acters to illustrate theories of the mind and consciousness. Margreta De
Grazia has argued that it was Samuel Coleridge who invented the word
“psychological” in his discussion of Hamlet because there was no term
available to discuss a philosophy of the mind,26 and “For Hamlet, the
final reality . . . is a function of the mind.”27 Freud, of course, used Prince
Hamlet to illustrate his Oedipal theory and inadvertently launch the psy-
choanalytical school of literary criticism, a hermeneutic that compels crit-
ics to think of literary characters as having consciousness (how else could
they have a subconscious?).28
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6 P. BUDRA AND C. WERIER

Consciousness poses fresh theoretical questions by the very openness of

its multiple associations, associations that are not captured by the categories
of inwardness, embodiment, or cognition. For example, a number of
authors in this volume make a distinction between the capacity for con-
scious awareness and the more specialized function of self-consciousness
or consciousness of consciousness, moments when characters and audi-
ences become hyperaware of an observational separation between a
conscious “I” and the processes of thinking, feeling, and sensing. Also
theories and taxonomies of consciousness provide a descriptive language
that helps us understand both our capacity to engage with performances
and literary artifacts and the language and gestures that structure the rep-
lication of consciousness in fictional characters. Every time we encounter
Hamlet, either on page or stage, we are actualizing the mystery of con-
sciousness as our conscious awareness encounters the seeming reality of his
being, an ontological complexity that critics return to repeatedly. In recent
years, a statement about encountering a character would require a pro-
phylactic apology because poststructuralist and cultural materialist critics
have taught us that “readings of Shakespeare that presuppose an inward,
agential personhood are certainly anachronistic and probably also politi-
cally retrograde.”29 While not denying the political and social construc-
tions of identity, we are unapologetic in embracing the complexities and
uncertainties that consciousness evokes. As Antonio Damasio suggests,
“To say that conscious minds are mysterious—and on the face of it they
are—is different from saying that the mystery is insoluble.”30 We are not,
therefore, proposing a totalizing theory of Shakespeare and consciousness
which supersedes other critical approaches. Instead, the impetus for this
collection arises out of the recent ascendency of consciousness and the
mind in both neuroscience and popular culture and our desire to investi-
gate whether a new category and body of knowledge helps us understand
Shakespeare differently.
The first section of this volume, “Consciousness, Cognitive Science, and
Character,” considers the status of consciousness criticism and its potential
to provide new theoretical approaches while recognizing its complex rela-
tionship to the established practices of cognitive and character criticism.
In “Consciousness and Cognition in Shakespeare and Beyond,” Clifford
Werier surveys the interdisciplinary discourses of cognitive literary criti-
cism, observing how the sometimes uncritical deployment of science may
promote an unwarranted empirical legitimacy which ignores the hybrid
nature of cognitive criticism’s hard and soft theoretical underpinnings and
 INTRODUCTION 7

practices. The essay examines a number of recent applications of cogni-

tive criticism to Shakespeare, including Conceptual Blends, Distributed
Cognition, and Theory of Mind, observing ways in which enthusiasm for
the scientific credibility of a particular cognitive theory may overshadow
more nuanced metaphoric applications. The second part of the essay argues
that neuroscientific and phenomenological descriptions of consciousness
offered by scientists such as Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, and
Francisco Varela may provide a flexible way of discussing experiences that
are both obvious and seemingly impossible to explain, especially as they
exist in our engagement with text and performance and in understanding
the seemingly autonomous consciousness of literary characters. Applying
current research on “conscious access,” for example, can yield fresh read-
ings of Shakespeare’s characters as they experience a series of shifting states
of consciousness based on the mind’s inherent capacity to experience and
interpret a series of singular phenomena. This emphasis on conscious
immanence is linked to the practices of historical phenomenology and
other theories which emphasize the complex interface between mind, self,
and world.
In his sweeping article, “Shakespeare Studies and Consciousness,”
Edward Pechter offers not only an overview of the history of Shakespeare
criticism but an assessment of its current condition and a prediction about
its future. He begins by suggesting that the turn toward consciousness
and cognition in literary studies is a retrenchment of the supposedly dis-
credited idea of literary character. Demonstrating that it was Shakespeare’s
characters that attracted both the neoclassical critics of the long eighteenth
century and the Romantics, he argues that “character criticism can stand as
a synecdoche for Shakespeare studies and, second, that Shakespeare stud-
ies can stand as a synecdoche for literary studies in general.” The decline
in character studies that he traces through the late nineteenth century and
into the twentieth parallels a decline in literary criticism’s focus on the lit-
erary and a rise in its concerns with the linguistic, the political, and, more
recently, the scientific. But, in his evaluation, the turn toward “cognitive
criticism may be understood as working to restore not just character but
the values generally from which Shakespeare studies developed its earliest
impetus.” The turn then is not as original and groundbreaking as it claims
to be. Many of its assertions, especially about human empathy, have been
made long before the elusive “mirror neuron” was theorized: “In extending
the focus of critical interest beyond literary texts, cognitive work looks back
beyond Romanticism to the universal human nature of a public sphere.”
8 P. BUDRA AND C. WERIER

And second, the science of the cognitivist critics is often suspect or applied
in the loosest of fashions. Like Werier, Pechter sees in literary criticism’s
eager, and sometimes sloppy, appropriation of these scientific theories a
rationalization of its methods in an attempt to reclaim its cultural author-
ity. A turn toward consciousness and/or cognition will not, in Pechter’s
view, solve the problem of the decline of the humanities, but “nothing else
will either.” Instead he turns to a book that he admires, William Flesch’s
Comeuppance, which he calls “especially successful in its conjunction of
cognitive ideas with Shakespeare study” largely because Flesch does not
claim “determining privilege” for his theoretical arguments and use of psy-
chology. Rather, he “subordinates its cutting-edge evolutionary theory to
an earlier tradition of romantic commentary.”
In “Hamlet in the Bat Cave,” Paul Budra assesses the ontological
dilemma raised by the attribution of consciousness to literary characters
using Hamlet, the poster child for the literary depictions of conscious-
ness, as a test case. He surveys the philosophical literature about literary
characters and juxtaposes it with a long-standing test for the presence of
consciousness, a conjunction that yields an enticing paradox: Hamlet, as
a literary character, has no consciousness, yet for hundreds of years critics
and theatrical practitioners have had no problem imagining and writing
about this nonexistent quality. Budra deconstructs this paradox in two
ways: first, he demonstrates that Hamlet’s consciousness exists “only in
the truth of propositions expressible in human language” and that the
language which defines Hamlet’s consciousness is not only the text of
Hamlet, but the supplementary textual, historical, or theoretical contexts
that are brought to bear on it; second, he argues that Hamlet in particu-
lar has become the nexus for consciousness studies because Hamlet does
display a self-consciousness of the type that was discussed and analyzed in
early modern England. What is not clear is whether this self-consciousness
is synonymous with self-aware consciousness, that elusive defining step in
the evolution toward modern subjectivity, or is an ahistorical attribution.
The next group of essays examines the conjunction of conscious-
ness studies and early modern theatrical practice. Amy Cook, in “King
of Shadows: Early Modern Characters and Actors,” places the scholar-
ship surrounding literary characters within the context of embodied and
distributed cognition and cognitive linguistics. She describes art as a
“cognitive artifact” that illuminates how societies deal with what Andy
Clark has called “representationally hungry” issues, and focuses on how
Shakespeare’s plays make us aware of our own experience of consciousness
 INTRODUCTION 9

and its dependence on temporal coherence. Character, she argues, is “an

attribute of a narrative that requires comprehension” if drama is to be
in any way coherent, but that comprehension comes from the genera-
tion, by audience members, of “simulations” which are dependent upon
assumed (and culturally specific) categories. We generate characters, she
argues, “as a necessary result of our need to categorize” and that need is a
product of our embodied cognition. In the end, “Consciousness . . . is the
by-product of a cognitive system that creates characters.” Her test case is
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she begins her essay by puzzling Puck’s
assertion that Oberon is the king of shadows and the actors in the play the
audience have just witnessed are themselves shadows. Shadows of what?
Cook argues that this unanswered question draws attention to the way
Shakespeare problematizes the notion of a stable character. The mechani-
cals, in their performance for Theseus, “transnature” stage representation
by oscillating between actor and character, drawing attention to the fact
that “on or off stage, there is never any not pretend.”
In “The Distributed Consciousness of Shakespeare’s Theatre,” Laurie
Johnson argues that early modern theatrical practices were “practical
expressions of consciousness manifesting through the recombination of
always fragmentary, distributed materials.” Focusing on Hamlet’s “What a
piece of work is a man” speech, Johnson dissects the differences between the
Q2 and F1 versions and what they mean to Hamlet’s assessment of human
capacity. Johnson disagrees with Harold Bloom’s often-quoted assertion
about Shakespeare’s invention of “self-consciousness” in the character of
Hamlet; rather, he argues this speech in particular demonstrates less about
inwardness than “consciousness-of.” Further, Shakespeare’s conception
of consciousness was necessarily patchy and dispersed like the cognitive
processes that circulated in early modern theatrical practice. It is no won-
der, then, that when Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters discuss the
nature of humanity, they fall into metatheatrical language.
In “Minds at Work: Writing, Acting, Watching, Reading Hamlet,”
Ros King uses the paradox inherent in the neurological definition of
ambiguity—the simultaneous “certainty of different scenarios, each one
of which has equal validity”—to triangulate the distinct creative sources
of writers, actors, readers, and spectators. She argues that Shakespeare,
perhaps most clearly in Hamlet, creates multiple contradictory meanings
that actors, readers, and audiences flip between in a process that cannot
help but draw their attention to the mysteries of their own conscious-
ness. Paying attention to the acting conditions of Elizabethan theater,
10 P. BUDRA AND C. WERIER

in which individual actors did not possess the entire play script and so
would be in a state of active anticipation, she demonstrates through
a close reading of the first two scenes of Hamlet how the “Carefully
constructed holes in knowledge combine with contradictory impres-
sions to give both characters and audience a complex phenomenological
experience.”
The next papers return to the age-old puzzle of the mind-body rela-
tionship by focusing on the somatic, the out-of-body experience and
time-consciousness. In “‘Being Unseminared’: Pleasure, Instruction, and
Playing the Queen in Anthony and Cleopatra,” Andrew Brown argues
that in Anthony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare draws upon humoral psy-
chophysiology to present characters who are defined “not by individual-
ized subjectivity but by radically expansive, fluid, and generative forms of
conscious experience.” Perhaps more than any other play, Anthony and
Cleopatra embeds its characters in networks of dramatic practice to prob-
lematize Shakespeare’s age’s increasing interest in the distinction between
inward reflection, what we may call consciousness, and the physical
world. Brown illustrates this embeddedness by focusing on the character
of Mardian the eunuch and the boy actor who must have played him.
Starting with the culturally loaded image of the eunuch’s mutilated body,
he parallels the training of boy actors in the early modern professional
theater with the understanding of the consciousness of another self and
ties both to the somatic embodiment of consciousness and the distributed
cognition required by early modern theatrical practice.
In “Bodies and Selves: Autoscopy, Out-of-Body Experiences, Mind-
wandering and Early Modern Consciousness,” Jan Purnis considers the
complex history of and contemporary theorizing about such altered states,
how they are often portrayed in literary and dramatic texts, and how they
shed light on early modern conceptions of embodiment and selfhood.
This divisibility of consciousness is expressed in autoscopic experience
through the phenomenon of the double, an experience described by
Aristotle’s story of Antipheron, and explored in a number of twin plays,
including Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, where the division of
a self is repeatedly imagined. Citing Lacan, Purnis links autoscopic illu-
sions to mirror ideas in Hamlet, and turning to out-of-body experiences,
Purnis offers historical examples linked to the early modern idea of ecstasy
and “being beside oneself” in The Winter’s Tale, Antony and Cleopatra,
and The Merchant of Venice. Finally, the phenomenon of mind wandering
is examined as a subcategory of ecstasy and daydreaming through both
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Twigs they shook, | and blood they tried:
Rich fare in Ægir’s | hall they found.

[140]

2. The mountain-dweller | sat merry as boyhood,

But soon like a blinded | man he seemed;
The son of Ygg | gazed in his eyes:
“For the gods a feast | shalt thou forthwith get.”

3. The word-wielder toil | for the giant worked,

And so revenge | on the gods he sought;
He bade Sif’s mate | the kettle bring:
“Therein for ye all | much ale shall I brew.”

4. The far-famed ones | could find it not,

And the holy gods | could get it nowhere;
Till in truthful wise | did Tyr speak forth,
And helpful counsel | to Hlorrithi gave.

5. “There dwells to the east | of Elivagar

Hymir the wise | at the end of heaven;
A kettle my father | fierce doth own,
A mighty vessel | a mile in depth.”

[141]

Thor spake:
6. “May we win, dost thou think, | this whirler of
water?”

Tyr spake:

“Aye, friend, we can, | if cunning we are.”

7. Forward that day | with speed they fared,

From Asgarth came they | to Egil’s home;
The goats with horns | bedecked he guarded;
Then they sped to the hall | where Hymir dwelt.

8. The youth found his grandam, | that greatly he

loathed, [142]
And full nine hundred | heads she had;
But the other fair | with gold came forth,
And the bright-browed one | brought beer to her
son.

9. “Kinsman of giants, | beneath the kettle

Will I set ye both, | ye heroes bold;
For many a time | my dear-loved mate
To guests is wrathful | and grim of mind.”

10. Late to his home | the misshapen Hymir,

The giant harsh, | from his hunting came;
The icicles rattled | as in he came,
For the fellow’s chin-forest | frozen was.
11. “Hail to thee, Hymir! | good thoughts mayst
thou have;
Here has thy son | to thine hall now come;
(For him have we waited, | his way was long;)
And with him fares | the foeman of Hroth,
The friend of mankind, | and Veur they call him.

[143]

12. “See where under | the gable they sit!

Behind the beam | do they hide themselves.”
The beam at the glance | of the giant broke,
And the mighty pillar | in pieces fell.

13. Eight fell from the ledge, | and one alone,

The hard-hammered kettle, | of all was whole;
Forth came they then, | and his foes he sought,
The giant old, | and held with his eyes.

14. Much sorrow his heart | foretold when he saw

The giantess’ foeman | come forth on the floor;
Then of the steers | did they bring in three;
Their flesh to boil | did the giant bid.

15. By a head was each | the shorter hewed,

And the beasts to the fire | straight they bore;
The husband of Sif, | ere to sleep he went,
Alone two oxen | of Hymir’s ate.
16. To the comrade hoary | of Hrungnir then
Did Hlorrithi’s meal | full mighty seem;
“Next time at eve | we three must eat
The food we have | as the hunting’s spoil.”

[144]

17. . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
Fain to row on the sea | was Veur, he said,
If the giant bold | would give him bait.

Hymir spake:

18. “Go to the herd, | if thou hast it in mind,

Thou slayer of giants, | thy bait to seek;
For there thou soon | mayst find, methinks,
Bait from the oxen | easy to get.”

19. Swift to the wood | the hero went,

Till before him an ox | all black he found;
From the beast the slayer | of giants broke
The fortress high | of his double horns.

Hymir spake:

20. “Thy works, methinks, | are worse by far, [145]

Thou steerer of ships, | than when still thou
sittest.”
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .

21. The lord of the goats | bade the ape-begotten

Farther to steer | the steed of the rollers;
But the giant said | that his will, forsooth,
Longer to row | was little enough.

22. Two whales on his hook | did the mighty Hymir

Soon pull up | on a single cast;
In the stern the kinsman | of Othin sat,
And Veur with cunning | his cast prepared.

23. The warder of men, | the worm’s destroyer,

Fixed on his hook | the head of the ox;
There gaped at the bait | the foe of the gods,
The girdler of all | the earth beneath.

[146]

24. The venomous serpent | swiftly up

To the boat did Thor, | the bold one, pull;
With his hammer the loathly | hill of the hair
Of the brother of Fenrir | he smote from above.

25. The monsters roared, | and the rocks

resounded,
And all the earth | so old was shaken;
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
Then sank the fish | in the sea forthwith.

26. . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
Joyless as back | they rowed was the giant;
Speechless did Hymir | sit at the oars,
With the rudder he sought | a second wind.

Hymir spake:

27. “The half of our toil | wilt thou have with me,
[147]
And now make fast | our goat of the flood;
Or home wilt thou bear | the whales to the house,
Across the gorge | of the wooded glen?”

28. Hlorrithi stood | and the stem he gripped,

And the sea-horse with water | awash he lifted;
Oars and bailer | and all he bore
With the surf-swine home | to the giant’s house.

29. His might the giant | again would match,

For stubborn he was, | with the strength of Thor;
None truly strong, | though stoutly he rowed,
Would he call save one | who could break the cup.

30. Hlorrithi then, | when the cup he held,

Struck with the glass | the pillars of stone;
As he sat the posts | in pieces he shattered,
Yet the glass to Hymir | whole they brought.

31. But the loved one fair | of the giant found

A counsel true, | and told her thought: [148]
“Smite the skull of Hymir, | heavy with food,
For harder it is | than ever was glass.”

32. The goats’ mighty ruler | then rose on his knee,

And with all the strength | of a god he struck;
Whole was the fellow’s | helmet-stem,
But shattered the wine-cup | rounded was.

Hymir spake:

33. “Fair is the treasure | that from me is gone,

Since now the cup | on my knees lies shattered;”
So spake the giant: | “No more can I say
In days to be, | ‘Thou art brewed, mine ale.’

34. “Enough shall it be | if out ye can bring

Forth from our house | the kettle here.”
Tyr then twice | to move it tried,
But before him the kettle | twice stood fast.

35. The father of Mothi | the rim seized firm,

And before it stood | on the floor below;
Up on his head | Sif’s husband raised it,
And about his heels | the handles clattered.
[149]

36. Not long had they fared, | ere backwards

looked
The son of Othin, | once more to see;
From their caves in the east | beheld he coming
With Hymir the throng | of the many-headed.

37. He stood and cast | from his back the kettle,

And Mjollnir, the lover | of murder, he wielded;
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
So all the whales | of the waste he slew.

38. Not long had they fared | ere one there lay
Of Hlorrithi’s goats | half-dead on the ground;
In his leg the pole-horse | there was lame;
The deed the evil | Loki had done.

[150]

39. But ye all have heard,— | for of them who have

The tales of the gods, | who better can tell?—
What prize he won | from the wilderness-dweller,
Who both his children | gave him to boot.

40. The mighty one came | to the council of gods,

And the kettle he had | that Hymir’s was;
So gladly their ale | the gods could drink
In Ægir’s hall | at the autumn-time.

[138]

[Contents]

NOTES
[139]

1. Twigs: Vigfusson comments at some length on “the rite practised

in the heathen age of inquiring into the future by dipping bunches of
chips or twigs into the blood (of sacrifices) and shaking them.” But
the two operations may have been separate, the twigs being simply
“divining-rods” marked with runes. In either case, the gods were
seeking information by magic as to where they could find plenty to
drink. Ægir: a giant who is also the god of the sea; little is known of
him outside of what is told here and in the introductory prose to the
Lokasenna, though Snorri has a brief account of him, giving his
home as Hlesey (Läsö, cf. Harbarthsljoth, 37). Grimnismol, 45, has a
reference to this same feast. [140]

2. Mountain-dweller: the giant (Ægir). Line 2: the principal word in

the original has defied interpretation, and any translation of the line
must be largely guesswork. Ygg: Othin; his son is Thor. Some
editors assume a gap after this stanza.

3. Word-wielder: Thor. The giant: Ægir. Sif: Thor’s wife; cf.

Harbarthsljoth, 48. The kettle: Ægir’s kettle is possibly the sea itself.
4. Tyr: the god of battle; his two great achievements were thrusting
his hand into the mouth of the wolf Fenrir so that the gods might bind
him, whereby he lost his hand (cf. Voluspo, 39, note), and his fight
with the hound Garm in the last battle, in which they kill each other.
Hlorrithi: Thor.

5. Elivagar (“Stormy Waves”): possibly the Milky Way; [141]cf.

Vafthruthnismol, 31, note. Hymir: this giant figures only in this
episode. It is not clear why Tyr, who is elsewhere spoken of as a son
of Othin, should here call Hymir his father. Finnur Jonsson, in an
attempt to get round this difficulty, deliberately changed the word
“father” to “grandfather,” but this does not help greatly.

6. Neither manuscript has any superscriptions, but most editors have

supplied them as above. From this point through stanza 11 the
editors have varied considerably in grouping the lines into stanzas.
The manuscripts indicate the third lines of stanzas 7, 8, 9, and 10 as
beginning stanzas, but this makes more complications than the
present arrangement. It is possible that, as Sijmons suggests, two
lines have been lost after stanza 6.

7. Egil: possibly, though by no means certainly, the father of Thor’s

servant, Thjalfi, for, according to Snorri, Thor’s first stop on this
journey was at the house of a peasant whose children, Thjalfi and
Roskva, he took into his service; cf. stanza 38, note. The
Arnamagnæan Codex has “Ægir” instead of “Egil,” but, aside from
the fact that Thor had just left Ægir’s house, the sea-god can hardly
have been spoken of as a goat-herd.

8. The youth: Tyr, whose extraordinary grandmother is Hymir’s

mother. We know nothing further of her, or of the other, [142]who is
Hymir’s wife and Tyr’s mother. It may be guessed, however, that she
belonged rather to the race of the gods than to that of the giants.

11. Two or three editors give this stanza a superscription (“The

concubine spake,” “The daughter spake”). Line 3 is commonly
regarded as spurious. The foeman of Hroth: of course this means
Thor, but nothing is known of any enemy of his by this name. Several
editors have sought to make a single word meaning “the famous
enemy” out of the phrase. Concerning Thor as the friend of man,
particularly of the peasant class, cf. introduction to Harbarthsljoth.
Veur: another name, of uncertain meaning, for Thor. [143]

13. Eight: the giant’s glance, besides breaking the beam, knocks
down all the kettles with such violence that all but the one under
which Thor and Tyr are hiding are broken.

14. Hymir’s wrath does not permit him to ignore the duties of a host
to his guests, always strongly insisted on.

15. Thor’s appetite figures elsewhere; cf. Thrymskvitha, 24.

16. The comrade of Hrungnir: Hymir, presumably simply because

both are giants; cf. Harbarthsljoth, 14 and note. [144]

17. The manuscripts indicate no lacuna, and many editors unite

stanza 17 with lines 1 and 2 of 18. Sijmons and Gering assume a
gap after these two lines, but it seems more probable that the
missing passage, if any, belonged before them, supplying the
connection with the previous stanza.

18. The manuscripts have no superscription. Many editors combine

lines 3 and 4 with lines 1 and 2 of stanza 19. In Snorri’s extended
paraphrase of the story, Hymir declines to go fishing with Thor on the
ground that the latter is too small a person to be worth bothering
about. “You would freeze,” he says, “if you stayed out in mid-ocean
as long as I generally do.” Bait (line 4): the word literally means
“chaff,” hence any small bits; Hymir means that Thor should collect
dung for bait.

19. Many editors combine lines 3 and 4 with stanza 20. Fortress,
etc.: the ox’s head; cf. introductory note concerning the diction of this
poem. Several editors assume a lacuna after stanza 19, but this
seems unnecessary. [145]

20. The manuscripts have no superscription. Steerer of ships:

probably merely a reference to Thor’s intention to go fishing. The
lacuna after stanza 20 is assumed by most editors.

21. Lord of the goats: Thor, because of his goat-drawn chariot. Ape-
begotten: Hymir; the word “api,” rare until relatively late times in its
literal sense, is fairly common with the meaning of “fool.” Giants were
generally assumed to be stupid. Steed of the rollers: a ship, because
boats were pulled up on shore by means of rollers.

23. Warder of men: Thor; cf. stanza 11. Worm’s destroyer: likewise
Thor, who in the last battle slays, and is slain by, Mithgarthsorm; cf.
Voluspo, 56. The foe of the gods: Mithgarthsorm, who lies in the sea,
and surrounds the whole earth. [146]

24. Hill of the hair: head,—a thoroughly characteristic skaldic phrase.

Brother of Fenrir: Mithgarthsorm was, like the wolf Fenrir and the
goddess Hel, born to Loki and the giantess Angrbotha (cf. Voluspo,
39 and note), and I have translated this line accordingly; but the
word used in the text has been guessed as meaning almost anything
from “comrade” to “enemy.”

25. No gap is indicated in the manuscripts, but that a line or more

has been lost is highly probable. In Snorri’s version, Thor pulls so
hard on the line that he drives both his feet through the flooring of
the boat, and stands on bottom. When he pulls the serpent up, Hymir
cuts the line with his bait-knife, which explains the serpent’s escape.
Thor, in a rage, knocks Hymir overboard with his hammer, and then
wades ashore. The lines of stanzas 25 and 26 have been variously
grouped.

26. No gap is indicated in the manuscripts, but line 2 begins with a

small letter. A second wind: another direction, i.e., he put about for
the shore. [147]
27. No superscription in the manuscripts. In its place Bugge supplies
a line—“These words spake Hymir, | the giant wise.” The
manuscripts reverse the order of lines 2 and 3, and in both of them
line 4 stands after stanza 28. Goat of the flood: boat.

28. Sea-horse: boat. Surf-swine: the whales.

29. Snorri says nothing of this episode of Hymir’s cup. The glass
which cannot be broken appears in the folklore of various races.

31. The loved one: Hymir’s wife and Tyr’s mother; cf. stanza 8 and
note. The idea that a giant’s skull is harder than stone or anything
else is characteristic of the later Norse folk-stories, and [148]in one of
the so-called “mythical sagas” we find a giant actually named Hard-
Skull.

32. Helmet-stem: head.

33. The manuscripts have no superscription. Line 4 in the

manuscripts is somewhat obscure, and Bugge, followed by some
editors, suggests a reading which may be rendered (beginning with
the second half of line 3): “No more can I speak / Ever again | as I
spoke of old.”

35. The father of Mothi and Sif’s husband: Thor. [149]

36. The many-headed: The giants, although rarely designated as a

race in this way, sometimes had two or more heads; cf. stanza 8,
Skirnismol, 31 and Vafthruthnismol, 33. Hymir’s mother is, however,
the only many-headed giant actually to appear in the action of the
poems, and it is safe to assume that the tradition as a whole belongs
to the period of Norse folk-tales of the märchen order.

37. No gap is indicated in the manuscripts. Some editors put the

missing line as 2, some as 3, and some, leaving the present three
lines together, add a fourth, and metrically incorrect, one from late
paper manuscripts: “Who with Hymir | followed after.” Whales of
the waste: giants.

38. According to Snorri, when Thor set out with Loki (not Tyr) for the
giants’ land, he stopped first at a peasant’s house (cf. stanza 7 and
note). There he proceeded to cook his own goats for supper. The
peasant’s son, Thjalfi, eager to get at the marrow, split one of the
leg-bones with his knife. The next morning, when Thor was ready to
proceed with his journey, he called the goats to life again, but one of
them proved irretrievably lame. His wrath led the peasant to give him
both his children as [150]servants (cf. stanza 39). Snorri does not
indicate that Loki was in any way to blame.

39. This deliberate introduction of the story-teller is exceedingly rare

in the older poetry.

40. The translation of the last two lines is mostly guesswork, as the
word rendered “gods” is uncertain, and the one rendered “at the
autumn-time” is quite obscure. [151]

[Contents]
LOKASENNA
 Loki’s Wrangling
[Contents]

Introductory Note
The Lokasenna is found only in Regius, where it follows the
Hymiskvitha; Snorri quotes four lines of it, grouped together as a
single stanza.

The poem is one of the most vigorous of the entire collection, and
seems to have been preserved in exceptionally good condition. The
exchange or contest of insults was dear to the Norse heart, and the
Lokasenna consists chiefly of Loki’s taunts to the assembled gods
and goddesses, and their largely ineffectual attempts to talk back to
him. The author was evidently well versed in mythological lore, and
the poem is full of references to incidents not elsewhere recorded.
As to its date and origin there is the usual dispute, but the latter part
of the tenth century and Iceland seem the best guesses.

The prose notes are long and of unusual interest. The introductory
one links the poem closely to the Hymiskvitha, much as the
Reginsmol, Fafnismol and Sigrdrifumol are linked together; the
others fill in the narrative gaps in the dialogue—very like stage
directions,—and provide a conclusion by relating Loki’s punishment,
which, presumably, is here connected with the wrong incident. It is
likely that often when the poem was recited during the two centuries
or so before it was committed to writing, the speaker inserted some
such explanatory comments, and the compiler of the collection
followed this example by adding such explanations as he thought
necessary. The Lokasenna is certainly much older than the
Hymiskvitha, the connection between them being purely one of
subject-matter; and the twelfth-century compiler evidently knew a
good deal less about mythology than the author whose work he was
annotating.

[Contents]

Ægir, who was also called Gymir, had prepared ale

for the gods, after he had got the mighty kettle, as
now has been told. To this feast came Othin and
Frigg, his wife. Thor came not, as he was on a
journey in the East. Sif, [152]Thor’s wife, was there,
and Bragi with Ithun, his wife. Tyr, who had but one
hand, was there; the wolf Fenrir had bitten off his
other hand when they had bound him. There were
Njorth and Skathi his wife, Freyr and Freyja, and
Vithar, the son of Othin. Loki was there, and Freyr’s
[153]servants Byggvir and Beyla. Many were there of
the gods and elves.

Ægir had two serving-men, Fimafeng and Eldir.

Glittering gold they had in place of firelight; the ale
came in of itself; and great was the peace. The
guests praised much the ability of Ægir’s serving-
men. Loki might not endure that, and he slew
Fimafeng. Then the gods shook their shields and
howled at Loki and drove him away to the forest, and
thereafter set to drinking again. Loki turned back, and
outside he met Eldir. Loki spoke to him:

1. “Speak now, Eldir, | for not one step

Farther shalt thou fare;
What ale-talk here | do they have within,
The sons of the glorious gods?”

Eldir spake:

2. “Of their weapons they talk, | and their might in

war,
The sons of the glorious gods;
From the gods and elves | who are gathered here
No friend in words shalt thou find.”

Loki spake:

3. “In shall I go | into Ægir’s hall,

For the feast I fain would see; [154]
Bale and hatred | I bring to the gods,
And their mead with venom I mix.”

Eldir spake:

4. “If in thou goest | to Ægir’s hall,

And fain the feast wouldst see,
And with slander and spite | wouldst sprinkle the
gods,
Think well lest they wipe it on thee.”

Loki spake:

5. “Bethink thee, Eldir, | if thou and I

Shall strive with spiteful speech;
Richer I grow | in ready words
If thou speakest too much to me.”

Then Loki went into the hall, but when they who were
there saw who had entered, they were all silent.

Loki spake:

6. “Thirsty I come | into this thine hall,

I, Lopt, from a journey long,
To ask of the gods | that one should give
Fair mead for a drink to me.

7. “Why sit ye silent, | swollen with pride,

Ye gods, and no answer give? [155]
At your feast a place | and a seat prepare me,
Or bid me forth to fare.”

Bragi spake:

8. “A place and a seat | will the gods prepare

 No more in their midst for thee;
For the gods know well | what men they wish
To find at their mighty feasts.”

Loki spake:

9. “Remember, Othin, | in olden days

That we both our blood have mixed;
Then didst thou promise | no ale to pour,
Unless it were brought for us both.”

Othin spake:

10. “Stand forth then, Vithar, | and let the wolf’s

father
Find a seat at our feast; [156]
Lest evil should Loki | speak aloud
Here within Ægir’s hall.”

Then Vithar arose and poured drink for Loki; but

before he drank he spoke to the gods:

11. “Hail to you, gods! | ye goddesses, hail!

Hail to the holy throng!
Save for the god | who yonder sits,
Bragi there on the bench.”

Bragi spake: