Brain. By old anatomists the brain was divided into three ventricles, in the hindermost of which they placed the memory. That this division was not unknown to Shakespeare is apparent from “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 2), where Holofernes says: “A foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory.” Again, Lady Macbeth (i. 7), speaking of Duncan’s two chamberlains, says:
“Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only.”
The “third ventricle is the cerebellum, by which the brain is connected with the spinal marrow and the rest of the body; the memory is posted in the cerebellum, like a warder or sentinel, to warn the reason against attack. Thus, when the memory is converted by intoxication into a mere fume,[902] then it fills the brain itself—the receipt or receptacle of reason, which thus becomes like an alembic, or cap of a still.”[903]
A popular nickname, in former times, for the skull, was “brain-pan;” to which Cade, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10) refers: “many a time, but for a sallet, my brain-pan had been cleft with a brown bill.” The phrase “to beat out the brains” is used by Shakespeare metaphorically in the sense of defeat or destroy; just as nowadays we popularly speak of knocking a scheme on the head. In “Measure for Measure” (v. 1), the Duke, addressing Isabella, tells her:
“O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death,
Which I did think with slower foot came on,
That brain’d my purpose.”
The expression “to bear a brain,” which is used by the Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3),
denoted “much mental capacity either of attention, ingenuity, or remembrance.”[904] Thus, in Marston’s “Dutch Courtezan” (1605), we read:
“My silly husband, alas! knows nothing of it, ’tis
I that must beare a braine for all.”
The notion of the brain as the seat of the soul is mentioned by Prince Henry, who, referring to King John (v. 7), says: