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We can be deeply moved by certain rhythms and the way the music of a speech can build and take us with it (Berry, 2008, p.4).

RSC Director of Voice Cicely Berry describes listening to Shakespeare as ‘a collective act between the actor, the text and the audience’ (2008, p.23). The primary purpose of language can be thought of as sounds made to share feelings in a moment of time and Berry describes a ‘primal need’ in all of us for cadence and rhythm (2008, p.16). Her professional experience of the relationship between voice and body and between voice, body and rhythm is supported by recent studies of the shared evolution of music and language. She believes it is obvious that language ‘started as noises expressing a need, a

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a process which seems to engage our brains’ instinctive pleasure for sense-making (Chater and Loewenstein, 2015).

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feeling, an intent, whether of anger or frustration or desire, to another living being; and that noise, that sound, that rhythm, came from the body as a whole’ (2009, p.3). This implied belief in the evolution of language as vocalization of embodied emotion is also supported by recent scientific research.

On a neurobiological basis, emotion is now recognised to be at the core of how we think and reason in a complex relationship of response and stimulus with the world around us (Damasio, 2004; 2006; Trimble, 2007). Mark Johnson (2007, p.9) concludes, ‘There is no cognition without emotion, even though we are often unaware of the emotional aspects of our thinking.’ Shaun Gallagher (2008, p.444) reviews studies that show the innate abilities of babies to perceive expressions of emotion and intent from movements of the face and body of other humans, interacting with them through what he calls ‘contexts of shared attention – shared situations – in which they learn what things mean and what they are for’. He argues that we learn how to interpret and share meaning through pragmatic, emotionally coloured interactions with others not through passive observation of others’ behaviour; and the more varied the social contexts we are exposed to, the more we learn. This suggests that the emotions expressed by a performer in the shared situation of live performance can act as a catalyst for learning.

It seems we understand each other by unconsciously but closely observing physiological changes reflecting emotions, and mirroring them so that we effectively inhabit how another person feels.Gallagher cites Decety and Grezes in summarising how mirror neurons (Rizzolleti, 1996) are understood to contribute to our abilities for ToM:

By automatically matching the agent’s observed action onto its own motor repertoire without executing it, the firing of mirror neurons in the observer brain simulates the agent’s observed action and thereby contributes to the

understanding of the perceived action (2006, cited in Gallagher, 2008, p.447). Gallagher argues that mirror neurons create an instinctive, subconscious response to how someone else feels, rather than an assessment of their feelings based on simulation as other ToM researchers have suggested (Carrington and Bailey, 2009). He explains:

When I see the other’s action or gesture, I see (I immediately perceive) the meaning in the action or gesture; and when I am in a process of interacting with the other, my own actions and reactions help to constitute that meaning. I not only see, but I resonate with (or against), and react to the joy or the anger, or the intention that is in the face or in the posture or in the gesture or action of the other (2008, p.449, italics original).

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McGilchrist (2009, p.122) explains, ‘communication occurs because, in a necessarily limited, but nonetheless crucially important sense, we come to feel what it is like to be the person who is communicating with us’.31 Trimble (2012, p.109) reviews

neurobiological evidence supporting Damasio’s theory that ‘Viewing an emotion thus activates the neuronal core of the individual’s own experience of the emotions’ and concludes that mirror neurons are ‘an unconscious system for monitoring the intentions of others’ (2012, p.108).

There are resonances here with what we might call the in vitro and in vivo processes of studying Shakespeare, first mentioned in chapter four. In reading the text, our

perceptions of the characters are more distanced, decoding their intentions in two dimensions because we have no actions or gestures to perceive. We infer patterns through a cognitive engagement and sometimes that can stimulate affective connection but we always lack the direct sensory perception of interaction. Embodying the text through theatre-based practice provides an in vivo, four-dimensional approach as we perceive the language in the context of living flesh in time, and respond using our skilled embodied resonance capacities, whether as audience or actor.

To understand how the language in Shakespeare’s plays works to communicate meaning we need to situate it back in the body where it has evolved over tens of thousands of years of human history to make us the highly social species we are. Language has long been regarded as a unique human activity and fundamental to what makes us human. Current best guesses estimate that verbal language appeared between 40,000 – 80,000 years ago, alongside an increase in archaeological evidence of symbolic thought, demonstrated through objects revealing a sense of mortality and aesthetics (Trimble, 2007; McGilchrist, 2009). An impulse for social communication is found in other, non- verbal, mammals32 (McGilchrist, 2009, p.125) but the sophistication of our social brains suggests a drive to refine our systems of communication, adding lyrics to the score of our expression.

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A startling example of this has been shown by research findings that people injected with Botox to allay the lines caused by laughter and frowning often have impaired ability to recognise emotions in others (Neal and Chartrand, 2011). This correlation supports other findings that the subtle physical changes we make in our instinctive mirroring of someone else allow us to read and understand their emotional state.

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The drive to communicate has been located in the anterior cingulate rather than in Broca’s area where the motor speech act happens - whales and dolphins, for example have highly developed anterior cingulates.

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Theories about the shared evolution of music and language are becoming widely accepted and focus on language as an embodied process of communicating nuances of emotional response. Reviewing these studies, Trimble (2009, p.121) says: ‘Clearly, music and spoken language are both communication devices used to express emotional meaning through high register socially accepted patterned sound.’ Stephen Mithen (2005) has proposed a ‘musilanguage’ of the Neanderthals as pre-verbal communication depending on tone, pitch, and rhythm. Aniruddh Patel (2008) has explored the close relationship of music and language in human evolution, noting that both are uniquely and universally human. In considering the biological features that make us capable of speech, McGilchrist (2009, p.102) notes that ‘music and language have a shared architecture’ both in terms of how we produce and how we interpret the sounds. Patel (2008, p.411) additionally notes how synchronised rhythmic movement appears to be unique to

humans and relies on the same connections between auditory and motor areas that allow vocal learning. Of other animals, only parrots show potential for synchronised rhythm and, notably, like us they have advanced vocal capacities and, relatively, a highly social brain. McGilchrist (2009, p.123) observes: ‘Everything about human music suggests that its nature is sharing, non-competitive’ and therefore must be the result of evolutionary group selection, an activity, akin to language that benefits the group rather than the individual.’

Walking on two legs freed our hands to develop gestural language33 and our ability to transmit and perceive emotional states through our facial expressions also developed as the complexity of our facial muscles evolved. All of these elements appear to have worked in harmony to create the communicative abilities we now enjoy through physical bodily and facial expression, and musical sounds of tone and pitch. Gallagher (2005, p.128) concludes that: ‘Across evolutionary time-frames, the links between movement, language, and thought would have influenced the structure of the brain itself’,

establishing how crucial our interactions with others are in co-creating verbal and

nonverbal aspects of communication. Verbal language was the extension that brought the fine distinctions as needed that have allowed us to build the complexities of human cultures; written language came much later, about 6000 years ago, and then was not widely accessible until very recently. An experience of Shakespeare in performance

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Mithen (2005) connects freedom of arm movements to the dancing that would accompany singing. McGilchrist (2009, p.111) reviews research showing that ‘restricting hand movements produces an adverse effect on the content and fluency of speech.’

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situates the text as living language expressing emotionally coloured interactions and emphasising the musical and rhythmic qualities of how we communicate. Watching others perform, or responding in role to another’s performance means inhabiting another’s emotions by engaging our mirror neurons. This pragmatic understanding of how language evolved, however, has not always been the accepted view.