Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture 9781474273237, 9781474273268, 9781474273251

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Shakespeare / Sense

Arden Shakespeare Intersections Published in association with the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, this series sets the future agenda for Shakespeare research and criticism. Each edited volume examines a Shakespearean intersection that has been chosen to encourage inventive reflections, suggestions for future directions for the field, and engagements of a broad, interdisciplinary nature. Series Editors: Farah Karim-Cooper, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro and Sonia Massai Shakespeare / Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality Edited by Jennifer Drouin ISBN 978-1-3503-2881-5 Shakespeare / Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance Edited by Claire M. L. Bourne ISBN 978-1-3501-2814-9

Forthcoming: Shakespeare / Nature Edited by Charlotte Scott ISBN: 978-1-3502-5983-6 Shakespeare / Skin: Contemporary Readings in Skin Studies and Theoretical Discourse Edited by Ruben Espinosa ISBN: 978-1-3502-6160-0 Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance Edited by Emma Whipday ISBN: 978-1-3503-04437 Shakespeare / Space Edited by Isabel Karrem ISBN: 978-1-3502-8297-1

Shakespeare / Sense Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture Edited by Simon Smith

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This paperback edition published 2022 Copyright © Simon Smith and contributors, 2020, 2022 Simon Smith and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7323-7   PB: 978-1-3503-3326-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-7325-1 eBook: 978-1-4742-7324-4 Series: Arden Shakespeare Intersections Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Series preface Acknowledgements A note on the text Introduction  Simon Smith

vii ix xiii xv xvi 1

Part One  Theorizing sensation 1 2 3

Framing Shakespeare’s senses  Bruce R. Smith Admiring the nothing of it: Shakespeare and the senseless  Steven Connor The classical tradition  Tanya Pollard

15 40 62

Part Two  The early modern sensorium 4

5 6 7 8

‘Sweet above compare’? Disputing about taste in Venus and Adonis, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida  Elizabeth L. Swann Hamlet’s visual stagecraft and early modern cultures of sight  Simon Smith The smell of a king: Olfaction in King Lear  Holly Dugan ‘Amorous pinches’: Keeping (in)tact in Antony and Cleopatra  Jennifer Edwards Hearing at the surface in The Comedy of Errors  Katherine Hunt

85 110 133 157 178

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Part Three  Entangled senses   9 Sense, reason, and the animal–human boundary in A Midsummer Night’s Dream  Natalie K. Eschenbaum 10 Sense and community: Twelfth Night and early modern playgoing  Jackie Watson 11 Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline  Darryl Chalk 12 Pinching Caliban: Race, husbandry, and the working body in The Tempest  Patricia Akhimie

203 224 245 269

Part Four  Sensing Shakespeare 13 Shakespeare and the seven senses: Scenes from the twenty-first-century stage  Erin Sullivan 293 14 Parted eyes and generation gaps in twenty-first-century perceptions of screen Shakespeare  Diana E. Henderson 319 15 The senses and material texts  Adam Smyth 352 Further reading Index

369 371

Figures  1.1 Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), sig. Y3 (detail). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library  1.2 Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), sig. Y3. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library   1.3 Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Oppenheim: Johan-Theodor de Bry, 1617–24). Wikimedia Commons   1.4 Isaac Oliver, Portrait of Edward Herbert, 1st Lord of Cherbury (1603–40), watercolour on vellum. Wikimedia Commons   1.5 John Dowland, ‘Flow, my tears’ (detail), from Second Book of Songs or Airs (London: Thomas Este, 1600). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library   1.6 Spectrograph of ‘If music be the food of love’. © Bruce R. Smith 12.1 Gervase Markham’s design for a pair of ‘Nyppers,’ for pulling weeds without damaging corn stalks, Markhams Farwell to Husbandry (London: Roger Jackson, 1620). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 13.1 Lavinia (Hitomi Manaka) in Titus Andronicus, dir. Yukio Ninagawa, at the Royal Shakespeare Company (2006). Photograph by Ellie Kurttz © Royal Shakespeare Company 13.2 Puck (Katy Owen) with her banana, seconds before she fed it to a groundling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Emma Rice, for the Globe (2016). Screenshot 13.3 Helen (Jade Croot) embraces Faustus (Sandy Grierson) as Mephistopheles (Oliver Ryan) looks on. Dr Faustus, dir. Maria Aberg, for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2016). Photograph by Helen Maybanks © RSC

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13.4 Faustus (Oliver Ryan), Helen (Jade Croot) and Mephistopheles (Sandy Grierson). Dr Faustus, dir. Maria Aberg, for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2016). Photograph by Helen Maybanks © RSC 13.5 The mechanicals assemble on the muddy, mirrored set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins, for the Young Vic (2017). Photograph by Geraint Lewis 14.1 Hotspur (Sean Connery) at the council meeting, An Age of Kings (18:46ff), adapting 1 Henry IV, Act 3, Scene 1. © British Broadcasting Corporation, 1960; 2009 14.2 (Top) Hamnet (Ollie West) live projected on the screen, with Shakespeare (Bush Moukarzel) green-screened but not on the ‘live’ stage; (bottom) Hamnet (Ollie West) throwing his ball against the wall attempting quantum tunnelling. Hamnet, Dead Centre (2017). Photograph by Gianmarco Bresadola. By permission of Dead Centre 15.1 St John devouring the book, from Albrecht Dürer’s The Apocalypse (1498). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 15.2 Vox piscis: or, The book-fish contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish (1627), Folger STC 11395 copy 1. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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Notes on contributors Patricia Akhimie is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers ­University– Newark. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018), and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Ford Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. Darryl Chalk is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia and Treasurer on the Executive Committee of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. He researches medicine, disease, magic, and emotion in Shakespearean drama and early modern theatre. His most recent book is Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage (2019), a volume of essays co-edited with Mary Floyd-Wilson. A monograph, with the working title Pathological Shakespeare: Contagion, Embodiment, and the Early Modern Scientific Imaginary, is currently in preparation. Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019). Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (2011), and co-editor with Lara Farina

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(West Virginia University) of Intimate Senses, a special issue of Postmedieval (2012). She has written numerous articles on the role of smell in early modern literature and culture; she is currently working on Shakespeare and the Senses, a book that explores the sensory realms of early modern English theatres. Jennifer Edwards is an Early Career Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, where she works on emotions and embodiment in early modern literature and culture. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, The Lancet, and in edited collections. She is currently completing a monograph on ecstatic experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and commencing work on a project exploring altered states of consciousness. Natalie K. Eschenbaum is Professor of English and Division Chair of Arts and Humanities at St. Catherine University. Her research focuses on disgust and the bodily senses in early modern literature, including Shakespeare. She is coeditor with Barbara Correll of Disgust in Early Modern English Literature (2016) and recently contributed “Modernizing Misogyny in Shakespeare’s Shrew” to Critical Survey 33.2 (2021). Diana E. Henderson, the Arthur J. Conner Professor of Literature at MIT, is author of  Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media  (2006)  and  Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (1995). She edited Alternative Shakespeares 3 (2008) and the Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006), and co-edits the annual Shakespeare Studies. She recently co-edited Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy and the Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation (both 2022). Henderson works as a dramaturg and theatrical consultant; her online and performance projects include collaborations with director Karin Coonrod, documentary production, and the MITx course Global Shakespeares: Re-Creating ‘The Merchant of Venice’. Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work is published or forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and The Journal of the Northern Renaissance. She is writing a book about bronze, brass, and processes of making in English Renaissance writing.

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Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, at the City University of New York. Her recent books include Reader in Tragedy (2019), co-edited with Marcus Nevitt, and Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017). She is currently editing Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist for Arden Early Modern Drama. Bruce R. Smith is Dean’s Professor of English and Theatre at the University of Southern California and has pursued multiple topics, including classics, sexuality, gender, sound studies, and historical phenomenology. He is the author of seven books on Shakespeare, including The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), The Key of Green (2009), and Shakespeare | Cut (2016). His chapter on ‘Renaissance Color across Media’ appears in the Renaissance volume of A Cultural History of Color (Bloomsbury, 2019). Simon Smith is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. He researches early modern drama, music and sensory culture. He is co-editor with Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny of The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558– 1660 (2015), and his monograph, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603– 1625 (2017), won the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award and the University English Book Prize. His current book project examines playgoing, pleasure, and judgement in early modern England. Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His most recent books are 13 March 1911 (2019) and Material Texts in Early Modern England (2018), and he is co-editor with Dennis Duncan of Book Parts (2019). He is currently editing Pericles, and writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Erin Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, where she works on the experience of emotion in and through Shakespeare’s plays. She is the author of Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (2016), and the co-editor of The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015) and Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic

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Year (2015). She is currently working on a book about digital technology and Shakespearean performance. Elizabeth L. Swann is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. Her research explores the relations between the senses, affect, and knowledge in the literature and culture of early modern England, with an emphasis on Reformation theology and experimental philosophy. With Robin Macdonald and Emilie Murphy, she is co-editor of Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2018). Her monograph, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England, is forthcoming. She is currently working on a new project titled Error and Ecstasy: The Ends of Knowledge in Renaissance England. Jackie Watson holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, where she has also worked as an Associate Tutor in the Department of English and Humanities. She has published widely on the Inns of Court, epistolary culture, and on Shakespeare and early modern drama, and her monograph, Epistolary Courtiership and Dramatic Letters: Thomas Overbury and the Jacobean Playhouse, is forthcoming. She is co-editor with Simon Smith and Amy Kenny of The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (2015).

Series preface Arden Shakespeare Intersections seeks to prompt questions about the future shape of Shakespeare studies and to initiate new and innovative critical approaches. Our aim is not only to summarize and shed light on aspects of the critical field as it stands, but actively to question received critical formations and offer exciting new directions for critical analysis by addressing a series of ‘intersections’ – developing lines of thought both cognate and disparate from a key word that invites contributors to leave the tracks and find out what happens when critical formations overlap in generative ways. This innovative series of substantive collections of new essays is edited by leading and emerging scholars working at the cutting edge of the field of Shakespeare studies. The volumes will contain fifteen or so chapters by acknowledged experts in the field who have been invited to consider a given Shakespearean intersection – Shakespeare/text, say, or Shakespeare/sex, or Shakespeare/skin – and bring to bear their own particular perspective on that intersection in the context of those of others in the volume. The intersections – and thus the titles of the volume – have been chosen to encourage genuinely inventive reflections on the field created by the juxtaposition of the word ‘Shakespeare’ with the particular terms, suggestions for future directions for the field, and engagements of a broader, more intra- and/or inter-disciplinary nature than is usual for ‘Shakespeare companion’ or ‘Shakespeare topics’ series. The overarching aim of Arden Shakespeare Intersections is to propose and populate alternative configurations for the field of Shakespeare criticism that move beyond the standard categories, such as gender, race, class, language, performance. This is pursued not so as to reject or denigrate the value of these valuable concepts as ways to approach the Shakespearean text, but to rethink and reinvigorate their significance for the study of Shakespeare by seeking productive new ways to bring them into play and by juxtaposing concepts that are not only usually kept separate but may well be considered either irreconcilable or irrelevant. So, for instance, the intersection Shakespeare/

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Space (were we to commission it) might juxtapose city/country, playhouse/ street, theory/practice, centre/periphery, private/public, state/subject, pageant stage/indoor playhouse, inside/outside, locus/plataea, global north/global south in ways that offer substantially to enlarge what we might think we mean by the study of Shakespeare and space. Such juxtapositions are designed to create productive friction, to provoke contributors to stretch boundaries, to go beyond their comfort zones, and thus – we believe – to begin to outline genuine new directions for criticism in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama, both building on and reimagining our critical criteria. Farah Karim-Cooper, Sonia Massai, Gordon McMullan, and Lucy Munro

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Intersections series editors, Farah Karim-Cooper, Sonia Massai, Gordon McMullan, and Lucy Munro, as well as Margaret Bartley at Arden, for the invitation to propose Shakespeare/Sense and become part of an exciting and forward-looking new series. I’m likewise very grateful to Lara Bateman and Mark Dudgeon at Arden for their help, support, and encouragement as the project has progressed, as well as to Farah who, as series editor with particular responsibility for this volume, provided characteristically generous and acute advice and guidance at all stages from initial conception through to final edits. Between 2014 and 2017, the Leverhulme Trust supported me with an Early Career Fellowship; this enabled me to begin editorial work on the volume and to complete the research for my own contribution. I am extremely grateful for their generosity. Short portions of Chapter 12, ‘Pinching Caliban: Race, husbandry, and the working body in The Tempest’, are reused or adapted from previously published material: © 2018 from Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World by Patricia Akhimie. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc. Finally, I wish to thank all the contributors – some long-standing colleagues, collaborators, and correspondents of mine; others whom I am delighted to have had this opportunity to work with for the first time – for their enthusiasm, commitment, and patience, and for producing the wonderful chapters that make up this volume. s. c. s. Bicester Village, November 2019

A note on the text Quotations from historical sources preserve the original spelling and punctuation, other than i/j and u/v usage, which we silently modernize. All Shakespearean quotations follow the relevant edition in The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. References to the Oxford English Dictionary follow OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), www.oed.com (accessed 31 July 2019).

Introduction Simon Smith

This volume brings together contributors from sensory studies and beyond to consider how Shakespeare and the senses intersect in contemporary scholarship, and to suggest and model ways in which they might intersect anew in future work. In the pages that follow, we make the case for the necessity and timeliness of sensory approaches: through new and sensate readings of Shakespeare’s work; with contributions to current debates and discussions about sensory methods, histories, and cultures; and by turning with the senses in mind to some Shakespearean subfields that have traditionally fallen beyond the purview of sensory studies. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, inspired by seminal publications including Bruce R. Smith’s Acoustic World of Early Modern England and Elizabeth D. Harvey’s Sensible Flesh,1 the study of Shakespeare and the senses has developed from a vibrant but somewhat marginal scholarly pursuit into a core area of inquiry for certain branches of Shakespeare studies: work on early modern theatres and performance culture, or on literature and epistemology, for instance, now takes account of the methods, approaches, and insights of sensory studies almost as a matter of routine.2 Rare is the international Shakespeare conference without at least one session explicitly dedicated to the senses. Such work has given us a Shakespeare whose tragic plots are driven as much by sensory failure and related epistemological anxieties as they are by hamartia; whose stagecraft is understood not just in linguistic but also richly sensory terms, revitalizing the study of historical performance; and, perhaps most memorably of all, whose roses do not look pretty (as one might expect today) but rather smell sweet (RJ 2.2.43–4), befitting an early modern culture in which olfactory sensitivities had yet to give way to the ocularcentrism of later

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centuries.3 That such a version of Shakespeare would have been unrecognizable to many scholars as little as two decades ago indicates both the contribution of sensory studies to the contemporary Shakespearean landscape, and the radical capacity of sensory methods to reorganize knowledge and generate new insights, even in a field as long-established and crowded as Shakespeare studies. Part of this volume’s intent, then, is to acknowledge, chart, and perhaps even to justify the place of sensory scholarship at the heart of contemporary Shakespeare studies. Indeed, it is hoped that, alongside readers already concerned with Shakespearean sensations, those less familiar with such approaches will find the volume an effective guide to the territory, and an encouragement to engage the senses in their own encounters with Shakespeare (to this end, brief suggestions for further reading are supplied at the end of the book). Sensory studies has never been – and must not become – a static discipline, however, even as it approaches maturity (both in its own right and as an approach for Shakespeareans). This volume’s engagements with the senses therefore look forward rather than back: modelling new approaches; identifying areas requiring further investigation; offering fresh readings of particular works; and, perhaps most significantly, forging new sensory intersections with fields such as historical bibliography and material text studies, early modern race studies, contemporary performance studies, new media studies, and the longstanding but newly energized field of animal studies. Thus, carefully historicized accounts of early modern sensation sit alongside readings of contemporary sense experiences; the insights of early modern race studies and cognitive neuroscience each combine with sensory approaches in generative ways; the sense-scapes of books and screens receive dedicated attention alongside work that continues sensory studies’ long-standing and productive habit of investigating early modern cultures of performance.4 Notably, the volume seeks to showcase the varied perspectives of its contributors rather than to reduce all that follows to a single, polemic conception of Shakespeare/Sense. There are of course many shared concerns, common suggestions, and recurrent points of consideration, reflecting core interests and ongoing conversations in the field. But beyond these continuities – and the shared conviction that the meeting of Shakespeare studies and sensory studies is in various ways generative – those who write in these pages have been

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encouraged to follow their own path: taking a varied range of foci; utilizing a multiplicity of approaches; even, in some cases, envisaging different routes forward. It is hoped that this goes some way towards capturing the breadth and diversity of current work on Shakespeare and the senses, as well as the spirit of debate and exchange towards a shared purpose that is necessary to animate any field of scholarly inquiry. Even where chapters share common concerns, then, contributors often offer alternative responses. For instance, those answering the recent call to make multisensory approaches habitual, and to attend to the full sensorium,5 proceed in a variety of ways. Erin Sullivan attends to each sense in turn, ensuring full coverage, whilst Holly Dugan foregrounds the sense perhaps most marginalized – smell – as a conscious and necessary prompt to habitual multisensory thinking; Darryl Chalk considers the sensory overload of synaesthetic excess, whilst Steven Connor asks whether the dissolution of individuate sensation may be found in the sensing of senselessness itself. Likewise, whilst both Katherine Hunt and Simon Smith seek to move beyond ‘zero-sum’, hierarchized sensory thinking, in which, for instance, hearing is axiomatically held to be the ‘deepest’ sense in order to displace ocularcentrism,6 Hunt proceeds by tracing the radically alternative concept of ‘surface hearing’ in writings of the period, whilst Smith challenges the supposed opposition of ‘deep’ judicious hearing and passive gazing in the early modern playhouse through evidence of a theatrical culture in which sight and sound were inextricably entangled, and both equally capable of depth and shallowness. The chapters that follow are grouped into four sections, each with a slightly different focus. The first, ‘Theorizing sensation’, considers the methods and approaches through which Shakespeare and the senses might intersect, furthering wider debates about methodology in sensory studies, and reexamining the traditions and sources underpinning sensory understandings of the period that Shakespeare himself would have recognized. The second explores ‘The early modern sensorium’ by offering dedicated chapters on each of the five traditional senses, rethinking each sense’s early modern cultural life and reconsidering how it might be accounted for in Shakespeare studies through close readings of particular works. Chapters in the third section, ‘Entangled senses’, take a more collective approach to sensation, focusing on a chosen method or topic in order to illuminate a particular play; those in

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the final part, ‘Sensing Shakespeare’, examine contemporary encounters with Shakespeare on stages, screens, and pages, consciously extending the reach of sensory approaches beyond the early modern cultural contexts that are often the principal sites of Shakespearean sensory investigation.7 Of course, these divisions are not rigid: contributors to the section that focuses on each sense in turn often engage centrally with moments of intersensorial entanglement; chapters offering readings of particular plays also make methodological suggestions, just as those ‘theorizing sensation’ often build their case through close engagement with Shakespeare’s text; investigations concerned with sensing Shakespeare today offer comparative glances towards historical sensory encounters, just as those focused on ‘the early modern sensorium’ reflect on contemporary performance where useful. Whilst the organization is intended to help readers navigate the volume, then, it should not be taken to demarcate siloed investigations, and readers are encouraged to find additional routes where appropriate, to which end numerous crossreferences between chapters are provided. The first section opens with Bruce R. Smith’s reflections on ‘Framing Shakespeare’s senses’, taking Orsino’s opening speech in Twelfth Night as an extended case study. Considering five ‘frames’ – philosophical, historical, mimetic, mediational, phenomenological – Smith traces and evaluates the diversity of approaches deployed, issues considered, and evidence interrogated, under the broad banner of sensory studies. (Readers less familiar with such work may find the outline of the field and its recent history that this encompasses especially helpful, particularly in conjunction with the aforementioned suggestions for further reading at the end of the book.) The first four frames, Smith proposes, can themselves be framed by the last: the approach that he has termed ‘historical phenomenology’8 provides meeting points, or perhaps facilitates conversations, between the embodied sensory experiences of contemporary subjectivities and historical sense-scapes; between the ephemeral sensations of past lived experience and intellectual histories of sense theory; between representational art forms such as drama and poetry, and the sensate world that such art, in one way or another, sets out to mediate. Steven Connor’s chapter addresses a topic of much current interest, ‘the communicability of and communication between the senses’, but from the

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rather less familiar standpoint of senselessness. To be insensible, Connor argues, is not to be insensate, taking up the Aristotelian notion of the ‘common sense’ as the site at which lack of sensation is itself experienced: ‘[c]ommon sense allows also for the sensing of insensibility’. Tracing insensible moments across Shakespeare’s works, Connor makes the case for senselessness (and indeed for sensory magnitude more generally) as a hitherto overlooked aspect of sensation – and even as a fruitful alternative route towards understanding and theorizing intersensoriality, departing from the sensory excess that is typically the locus of multisensory discussion. Tanya Pollard turns to the classical tradition of writing and thinking about the senses, re-examining the specific forms and routes through which this tradition shaped the culture of Shakespeare’s theatres and thus set paradigms within which he wrote. Returning to familiar writers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, Pollard traces in precise detail exactly how classical theories of sensation, art, and performance underpin much early modern debate about the merits and demerits of the commercial theatre. The chapter also gives sustained attention to writers of late antiquity and/or the early Christian church whose role in transmitting and shaping the classical tradition as it was understood in early modern England is often overlooked. As Pollard demonstrates, Shakespeare wrote in a context of thought about theatre and the senses that owed as much to the particular form of Augustine’s warnings about the addictiveness of drama’s sensory appeal as it did to Plato’s earlier fears about the pleasurable sensations of performance. The second section seeks not to replicate the sensory hierarchies – or indeed the hierarchizing instinct – found in some early modern theoretical writings but rather to consider how the full sensorium was discussed, debated, understood, and experienced in early modern life and culture by giving equal coverage to each of the five traditional senses. First, Elizabeth L. Swann’s chapter takes up the nexus of relationships amongst taste, knowledge, experience, and judgement in early modern literary and intellectual culture, tracing a prehistory of censorious tasting that stretches back long before its more familiar eighteenth-century instantiations.9 Problematizing scholarly assumptions about gustation’s marginality in early modern England, and tracing multitudinous forms of epistemic ‘tasting’ with currency in the period, Swann offers extended readings of less-discussed Shakespearean works such

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as Venus and Adonis, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Troilus and Cressida, as well as shedding fresh light on familiar passages from Othello. Simon Smith’s chapter on sight revisits the question of how sight and hearing interrelated in the early modern playhouse, making the case for widespread visual dramaturgy in a theatrical culture that habitually asked playgoers to engage both eye and ear. Challenging long-standing theatrehistorical narratives in which the judicious ear (and thus verbal dramaturgy) was considered both superior and preferable to the eye’s passivity (associated in turn with ‘cheap’ stage spectacle), Smith returns to the textual record for evidence of a culture that expected eyes to be as censorious as ears, both in the playhouse and beyond. Smith re-reads Hamlet in this context, tracing the play’s repeated demands that audiences engage critically with difficult sights, asserting the centrality of visual dramaturgy to its dramatic design, and challenging the suggestion that Hamlet might be of most interest to those concerned with Shakespeare as a literary dramatist. Holly Dugan reflects upon the perils of overlooking olfaction’s constitutive role in early modern life, art, and playhouse culture, taking the smell ‘of mortality’ that King Lear seeks to wipe from his hand as her chapter’s pungent point of origin (4.6.129). Examining bodily stench, the ‘rank’ weeds that frame Lear’s wandering on the heath, and the mortal funk of putrefying bodies that would have been a familiar component of early modern urban smellscapes, the chapter uncovers the play’s olfactory resonances organized around Lear’s mortal body. In so doing, Dugan’s contribution makes a renewed call for sensory histories to acknowledge the full sensorium, and reflects upon the challenges presented to sensory scholars, theatre historians, and literary critics by the undisciplined, ephemeral, yet powerful capacities of olfaction in theatrical performance. In her chapter on tactility, Jennifer Edwards takes up the notion of ‘individuate’ touch to read Antony and Cleopatra’s preoccupation with blows, beats, strokes, and other tactile exchanges that have the capacity to evoke both pain and pleasure. In this reading, skin is not just the threshold of the body but the very locus of identity negotiation, in turn making touch the sense that senses the individuation of the self. Taking the stroke of oars from Cleopatra’s barge upon the River Cydnus as a starting point, Edwards further reflects upon the overlap of hearing and touch made possible by the period’s strikingly

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tactile understanding of the process of hearing itself, looking across a number of plays to recover Shakespeare’s persistent interest in ‘touching sounds’, or ‘tactile audibility’, that, Edwards argues, take on a particularly significant role in Antony and Cleopatra. Closing the section, Katherine Hunt’s investigation of hearing in The Comedy of Errors challenges assumptions about the ‘shallowness’ of Shakespeare’s play on one hand, and the ‘deep’ nature of aural experience on the other. Responding to the common insistence in sound studies upon hearing’s ‘depth’, Hunt instead argues for a persistent early modern interest in ‘surface hearing’ that is yet to be fully acknowledged and accounted for. This in turn facilitates a reading of Errors which acknowledges and celebrates the play’s drama ‘at the surface’ – a dramatic design that is no less sophisticated for its disinterest in the ‘deep’ characterization and psychological interiority that later criticism has come to value, but rather requires investigation on something closer to its own terms. Opening the ‘Entangled Senses’ section, Natalie K. Eschenbaum contributes the first of several chapters that explicitly seek intersections between sensory approaches and other methods animating contemporary Shakespeare studies. Eschenbaum considers the place of sense and reason in early modern distinctions between animal and human, taking the ass-headed Bottom as her site of investigation. Forging new links between animal studies and sensory scholarship, Eschenbaum argues for the centrality of sensation to early modern constructions of both human and animal identities, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s complex engagements with contemporary understandings of the animal–human boundary with an explicitly sensory focus. Engaging sustainedly with recent work in cognitive neuroscience, Jackie Watson next asks how scientific models of the mirror neuron system might help us think about early playgoers and their sensory engagements with drama. Unlike most early performances of Shakespearean drama, the theatrical context of Twelfth Night’s first documented showing on 2 February 1602 can be reconstructed in some detail, thanks to the sustained individual response recorded in eyewitness John Manningham’s diary, and the community of playgoers at Middle Temple Hall whose shared lives, ambitions, and status as law students can be traced with far more precision than the more complex and varied social environments of public performance venues. Challenging easy assumptions about the exclusivity of an Inns of Court audience, Watson

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foregrounds the insecure and liminal social status – and often humble origins – of Elizabethan Middle Templars, arguing that in Malvolio, such playgoers might just have seen fragmentary reflections of their own unrealized ambition and precarious social standing, inviting potential identification and even sympathy as much as distanced mockery or derision. Darryl Chalk continues the intersensorial approach of Eschenbaum and Watson, examining synaesthetic overload and sensory excess in Cymbeline. Returning in detail to early modern medical texts that seek to account for mind, body, and sense, Chalk investigates sensation pushed to – and beyond – its limits  in Shakespeare’s complex and challenging play. Significantly, the understanding of the senses – and sensory failure in particular – that Chalk traces in early modern thought profoundly recontextualizes moments in Cymbeline that later critics have dismissed as quite simply preposterous. To an early modern audience, as Chalk shows, the play’s representations of misrecognition and sensory failure would have been rather more in keeping with contemporary thought – and thus a little further within the horizons of plausibility – than may be the case for later readers and playgoers embedded in more confident sensory cultures with fewer expectations that sensing might go awry. Bringing the burgeoning field of early modern race studies into conversation with sensory approaches, Patricia Akhimie’s chapter reads The Tempest through the lens of the ‘pinch’: as discipline, stigmatized bodily mark, and sensate exchange. Drawing on early modern husbandry manuals that, Akhimie demonstrates, underpin many of Prospero’s mechanisms for discipline and control, and continuing Connor’s and Edwards’s interest in the skin as simultaneously liminal boundary, sense organ, and inscribable surface, the chapter rethinks Caliban and the ways in which ‘the discursive production of race through the stigmatization of somatic marks’ might intersect with sensory discourses. The volume’s three concluding chapters shift emphasis from historical sense-scapes, from intellectual, medical, and other histories of the senses, and from the sensory culture of the early modern playhouse, to consider instead contemporary Shakespearean sensations. Erin Sullivan brings such an approach to bear upon twenty-first-century stage performances of Shakespeare, a field of inquiry that is richly sensate yet can fall beyond the remit of explicit sensory scholarship. In tracing the dramatic vitality and

Introduction

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experiential centrality of the full sensorium, Sullivan both articulates the relevance of contemporary performance to scholars perhaps more accustomed to considering historical sense-scapes, and traces a development of great importance to the recent history of Shakespeare in performance. Whilst the dramaturgy of the senses that Sullivan outlines may be a return in spirit to the multimodality of sixteenth-century playhouses, it also represents a significant and deliberate turn away from the text-dominated thinking that characterized twentieth-century Anglophone classical theatre. Sullivan thus describes an important step in contemporary perceptions of what ‘counts’ as Shakespeare in performance, as well as an augmentation of the horizons of Shakespearean sensory inquiry. Diana E. Henderson draws eclectically on contemporary performance studies, new media studies, adaptation studies, and sensory approaches in her consideration of screen Shakespeares. Theorizing the screen both as mediating visual technology and, potentially, as a sensory obstruction or barrier (Henderson notes the term’s etymological origin in panels used to block, shield, or moderate a domestic fire), the chapter traces the long history of screen technologies and their shifting deployment as a Shakespearean performance medium, from black-and-white BBC television serialization, through technological experimentations of the  1990s and  2000s, to Dead Centre’s radical making-strange of screen technology itself in Hamnet (2017). Throughout, Henderson emphasizes the culturally situated nature of sense experience, illustrated by the rapid pace of change in screen usage, and the resultant, starkly divergent responses of those born mere decades apart when faced with new – or, for that matter, past – screen technologies. Adam Smyth concludes the volume with a call to engage material text studies and historical bibliography more explicitly with the senses. Noting various sensory blind spots in conventional attempts to account for books’ material forms and readers’ engagements therewith, Smyth imagines what a fully sensate book history might entail and how such scholarship might proceed. Taking museum studies’ enthusiastic ‘sensory turn’ of recent years as a reference point, and highlighting the often richly sensuous descriptions of book encounters in Shakespeare and amongst other early modern writers and book collectors, Smyth maps new directions at the intersection of sensory and material text studies, even taking steps towards a culture of sensational

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bibliographic description by imagining an alternative, more sensate catalogue entry for a copy of the 1611 Hamlet quarto. Where next for Shakespeare and the senses? As noted above, this collection sets out to be forward-looking, and it is hoped that the directions proposed and practised here will stimulate future work. As the essays in Part Two demonstrate, there is much still to be uncovered about each sense’s place in early modern art, life, and culture, not to mention far more to be said about their mutual entanglement in practice. Likewise, there are many individual Shakespearean texts yet to be fully accounted for in sustainedly sensory terms, despite this volume’s conscious effort to attend to marginalized works. And, as already outlined, it is hoped that some of the newer intersections modelled here between sensory studies and other approaches will indicate areas with particular scope for further sensate investigation. Perhaps most ambitiously, we might imagine a future in which sensory approaches become habitual tools across the various branches of Shakespeare studies rather than facilitating self-contained – albeit important  – conversations. Just as the late twentieth-century insights of textual studies have made questions of text a discipline-wide concern, and just as gender is now a routine consideration for all who investigate cultures past and present, so we move closer, perhaps, to a world in which scholars across the discipline engage with the cultural specificity of sense experience and the sensory vitality of Shakespeare’s work as a matter of habit. This volume envisages a future, then, in which the first step of any Shakespearean investigation may be to ‘call all your senses to you’ (MW 3.3.108–9).

Notes 1

Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

2

See, for instance, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 169–252; The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 513–606; Knowing

Introduction

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Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), passim. 3

Constance Classen is one of the many sensory scholars who reflect on Juliet’s olfactory priorities, in a text foundational to the broader field of sensory studies: Worlds of Sense: ­Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993), 25.

4

From foundational work to the most recent extended studies, the playhouse remains the most common site of Shakespearean sensory investigation. See, for instance, Smith, Acoustic World, 133–284; Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); John Astington, Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

5

See, for instance, David Howes, ‘Hearing Scents, Tasting Sights: Toward a CrossCultural Multimodal Theory of Aesthetics’, in Art and the Senses, ed. Francesca Bacci and David Melcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 161–81; Holly Dugan, ‘Shakespeare and the Senses’, Literature Compass 6 (2009): 726–40.

6

See Jonathan Sterne’s critique of such approaches in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 15–17, discussed at length in Hunt’s chapter (184–5).

7

This is not, of course, to suggest that sensory methods have never previously been brought to bear upon contemporary Shakespearean encounters (see, for instance, Diana E. Henderson’s influential sensory consideration of film adaptation in ‘Mind the Gaps: The Ear, the Eye, and the Senses of a Woman in Much Ado about Nothing’, in Gallagher and Raman, Knowing Shakespeare, 192–215).

8

See Bruce R. Smith, ‘Theories and Methodologies: Premodern Sexualities’, PMLA 115, no. 3 (2000): 318–29.

9

See Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 3–18.

12

Part One

Theorizing sensation

14

1

Framing Shakespeare’s senses Bruce R. Smith

The opening lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night give us an especially suggestive subject for framing the senses. For a start, all five of the traditional five senses are engaged: taste, hearing, smell, vision, and touch: orsino If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that surfeiting The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet [sound]1 That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more, ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before. [Music ceases.]  O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou  That, notwithstanding thy capacity  Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there  Of what validity and pitch soe’er  But falls into abatement and low price  Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy  That it alone is high fantastical. curio Will you go hunt, my lord? orsino What, Curio? curio The hart. orsino Why so I do, the noblest that I have. (1.1.1–17)

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The attendant’s name is ‘Curio’. No less curious than the number of senses alluded to in the fifteen lines of Orsino’s opening speech is their concatenation – or rather their tide: in quick succession, heard music is metamorphosed into tasted food, music into the touch of breath upon violets, the breath’s touch into the violets’ smell. As with the sea, fluidity is all. Even diction and syntax are fluid, as /s/ sounds dissolve one word into another and the sounds of /hart/ become alternately a hunter’s deer and a lover’s dear. The situation becomes more complicated still when we encounter this passage in the first printed text of the play in Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (aka ‘the First Folio’,  1623). It appears on signature Y3r, the first page of the play (Figure 1.1). To us in the twenty-first century, the exoticism of the medium – an antiquated typeface realized as inked depressions on wavy rag paper – makes it difficult simply to see through the printed text into an imagined fiction, as we might in a modern printed edition of the text. Instead, we are apt to stop at the surface. If we are fortunate enough to encounter a physical exemplar of the folio first-hand, we can touch and even smell the text. In effect, we find ourselves pausing at the door of Twelfth Night and looking through the doorframe. From that vantage point, we confront not only representations of senses within the fiction but the physical means of those representations and our own situatedness in the act of perception.2 Moving back from the printed surface of Orsino’s speech, we encounter, quite literally, a series of frames (Figure  1.2). The text is surrounded on all four sides by rule-lines. A horizontal rule separates the title and another rule separates the text into two columns. Within these larger frames further rulelines frame the play’s title, the indication of Act 1, Scene 1 (‘Actus Primus, Scaena Prima’), the text of Act 1, Scene 1, and the indication and text of Act 1, Scene 2 (‘Scena Secunda’). Gerard Ginette has demonstrated that these ‘paratexts’, these indicators before and alongside the text, are not the incidental design features we might assume but cues as to how the text is to be apprehended. Paratexts serve, in Ginette’s view, as ‘a threshold, […] a zone not only of transition but also of transaction’.3 In the case of the First Folio, readers are guided by the paratext to frame the text along the lines of classical comedy and tragedy. Lukas Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist has argued that Shakespeare conceived of his plays as to be read as well as acted, and Charlton Hinman has demonstrated that the printers of the 1623 First Folio,

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Figure  1.1  Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), sig. Y3 (detail). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, grandly began each play with some version of ‘Actus Primus, Scaena Prima’ as if Shakespeare were Plautus, Terence, or Seneca – or Ben Jonson, whose 1616 Works had marked such divisions. (In the case of most plays Jaggard and Blount failed to follow through.4)

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Figure 1.2  Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), sig. Y3. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Five successive critical frames suggest themselves as ways of getting our bearings vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s senses: (1) philosophical, (2) historical, (3) mimetic, (4) mediational, and (5) phenomenological. Let us take Orsino’s speech as a test case. This will involve some potentially dizzying shifts between big ideas on the one hand and the particularities of Orsino’s speech on the other. The result should be an estrangement of this familiar text.

Philosophical The first frame turns attention to what has been thought through systematically about the senses. Scholars in disciplines such as history and English are apt to treat philosophers’ arguments as historical and cultural artefacts, but the object of philosophy as an academic discipline is the truth about things, irrespective of historical and cultural differences. It matters, of course, which philosophies of the senses seemed most pertinent to early modern Europeans, but it matters even more what range of philosophies were available to choose among. I would distinguish four such possibilities: (1) suspicion of sense experience vis-à-vis rational thought, as exemplified in Plato’s Timaeus and Phaedrus and in writings by Plato’s medieval and Renaissance followers, (2) acceptance, even celebration of sense experience in materialist philosophies such as that espoused by Epicurus and redacted and disseminated in Lucretius and later writers, (3) non-judgemental investigation of sensation as an object of study, as exemplified in Aristotle’s De Sensu et Sensibilibus and De Anima and in early modern medical treatises, and (4) considerations of the ethics of sense experience, as exemplified in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics and in the writings of Cicero and his Renaissance successors. The fourth group of philosophical framings of the senses have to do with the core meaning of the Greek word ethos as custom, habit, and character.5 Aristotle in Poetics 39.b.3 limits the term to the utterances of tragic protagonists: ‘character’ [ethos] is that kind of utterance which clearly reveals the bent of a man’s moral choice (hence there is no character in that class of utterances in which there is nothing at all that the speaker is choosing or rejecting), while ‘thought’ is the passages in which they try to prove that something is so or not so, or state some general principle.6

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In Aristotle’s account, character and thought are more heard than seen. Beyond the individual, the term ethos can also be applied to groups of people and the social institutions they inhabit. Different ethoi cultivate different regimes of sensation. With respect to sense experience, what a playgoer experienced at a Globe production of Twelfth Night was different from what the gentlemen of the Middle Temple experienced in the play’s first known performance in Middle Temple Hall on 2 February 1602, as Jackie Watson investigates in this volume (224–44). Differences in the physical surround and social custom in each place fostered different configurations of vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The sensuous materialism of Orsino’s speech – its unapologetic delight in sense experience – illustrates perfectly the Epicurean strand in Western philosophy. Condemnation of that impulse from a Platonic standpoint seems largely absent from Twelfth Night. Instead, the emphasis falls on ethos, on Illyria as a place for indulgence of the senses – an indulgence that ends, however, in an uneasy reconciliation with strictures of ideal forms and social hierarchy in the play’s concluding scene.

Historical Included within the second critical frame is not just social history but what early modern Europeans understood as ‘natural history’: literally, the historiae or ‘stories’ that explain living things, including the human body and its senses. The images of air and fluids in Orsino’s speech – the sound of music ‘breathing’ upon violets, the ebbs and flows of the sea, above all the reference to love as a ‘spirit’ – gesture towards the hydraulic conception of the human body in Galenic physiology and psychology.7 When Orsino apostrophizes the ‘spirit of love’, he is referring not only to a mythological deity (Love-with-a-capital-L) but to a mundane body fluid. The body’s communication system was imagined to be an aerated fluid called spiritus. When Orsino declares ‘So full of shapes is fancy, / That it alone is high fantastical,’ he is again being quite physical with respect to the early modern natural history of the senses. In the Galenic scheme cognition was imagined to be a process that began with excitations of the body’s external sense organs, which were communicated internally to the brain by spiritus, where they

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were fused into synaesthetic imagines through a faculty called ‘the common sense’, into which memories were added to produce phantasmata (or ‘fancies’), which were then communicated by spiritus to the heart, where a wholebody experience of approach or avoidance was decided and communicated, again by spiritus, to the brain, which directed the sensing subject’s response. The ‘shapes’ that Orsino mentions are phantasmata. Robert Fludd in his encyclopaedic Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (1617–24) offers a diagram that illustrates this process of fusion (Figure 1.3). Particular organs of the head are associated with particular domains of knowledge. Hand, nose, eyes, and ears are connected to Mundus Sensibilis (or ‘the world that can be sensed’), the fore part of the brain to Mundus Imaginabilis (or ‘the world that can be apprehended in images’), the mid part of the brain to Mundus Intellectualis (or ‘the world knowable through ratio, through reason’), and the rear of the brain to memory. Faculty psychology has long ago been discarded as a concept that explains the workings of the brain, but Fludd’s image seems prescient with respect to cognitive mapping via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the context of this volume of essays, one pertinent feature of the image is its insistence that different senses produce different kinds of knowledge. Perhaps the most suggestive, however, is Fludd’s charting the interior workings of the brain as three Venn diagrams in which two or more of the image’s external worlds are merged. Orsino’s ‘high fantastical’ is as much a physiological state as a poetic posture. Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream describes what happens when sensation overwhelms reason: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.

(5.1.4–8) In terms of early modern psychology, Orsino suffers from an imbalance among the body’s four basic fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of these humours could be seen externally in the colours of a person’s complexion (rosy in the case of blood, ruddy in the case of yellow bile, sallow

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Figure 1.3  Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Oppenheim: Johan-Theodor de Bry,  1617–24). Wikimedia Commons.

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in the case of black bile, and pallid in the case of phlegm) and felt internally by the person through body temperature and skin texture (hot and wet, hot and dry, cold and dry, cold and wet, respectively).8 Climate was a factor, too, and southern climes such as Italy and Illyria on the Croatian coast were thought to produce swarthier and hotter complexions. Orsino is an example. Pietro Bembo in his famous oration on love in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano makes us realize that Orsino is a type. The cause of the ‘wretchedness’ experienced by lovers, Bembo explains, is principally sense, which in youthful age beareth most sway, because the lustiness of the flesh and of the blood, in that season addeth unto him even so much force, as it withdraweth from reason: therefore doth it easily train the soul to follow appetite or longing. […] Whereupon most commonly it happeneth, that young men be wrapped in this sensual love, which is a very rebel against reason, & therefore they make themselves unworthy to enjoy the favours and benefits, which love bestoweth upon his true subjectes, neither in love feel they any other pleasures, than what beasts without reason do, but much more grevious afflictions.9

The humours could not only be seen and felt but also heard in the logic and syntax of the subject’s speech, as Orsino’s prolixity and polysensuousness so amply demonstrate. In medical terms, Orsino suffers from a superflux of blood (red, hot, moist, ‘sanguine’ in the sense of being possessed of ‘a courageous, hopeful, and amorous disposition’, brought on by his love for Olivia.10 Joseph Roach has argued that actors in Shakespeare’s theatre thought it their business to assume in themselves the body chemistry of the characters they were playing and to induce that chemistry in the spectator/listeners through voice and gesture.11 If Roach is correct, the actor playing Orsino in the original production (presumably Richard Burbage) would have attempted in his opening speech to arouse ‘bloody-mindedness’, both in himself and among his spectator/listeners. Orsino’s surfeit is cured in the play’s last scene, when how things have seemed are corrected by a declaration of how things are. ‘Cesario’, a boy actor disguised as a girl disguised as a boy, comes face to face with her fraternal twin Sebastian, much to the consternation of their respective lovers, Olivia, who has betrothed herself to Sebastian, thinking him to be ‘Cesario’, and Orsino, thinking that ‘Cesario’ is betrothed to the woman he himself loves. In reconciling the lovers, Sebastian makes an ultimate appeal to the natural history of sex: ‘So comes it,

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lady, you have been mistook; / But nature to her bias drew in that. / You would have been contracted to a maid’ (5.1.255–7). Orsino’s ‘fancy’ is, however, given the last word: Cesario, come – For so you shall be while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.

(5.1.378–81) Where such verbal play leaves the body chemistry of the spectator/listeners in the house is a nice question. The social history of the senses in Shakespeare’s England follows from the natural history. The priority given by Plato’s disciples to sight (because of its objectifying power) and by Bacon to hearing (because it is the least material of the senses) are attributes to be cultivated by well-born persons. Bembo in The Courtier advises a courtier who is struck by a lady’s beauty to shun th[o]roughly all filthiness of common love, and so enter into the holy way of love with the guide of reason. […] And as a man heareth not with his mouth, nor smelleth with his ears: no more can he also in any manner wise enjoy beauty, nor satisfy the desire that she stirrith up in our minds, with feeling, but with the sense, unto whom beauty is the very butt to level at: namely, the vertue of seeing.

If the lady is possessed of a sweet and ‘tunable’ voice and sings and plays musical instruments, so much the better.12 Orsino in his first speech creates for himself a rarefied world in which vision and hearing predominate even as taste, smell, and touch have been acculturated as aesthetic pleasures. In Middle Temple Hall in February 1602 that luxurious world of the senses embraced the gentlemen and their guests. At the Globe, vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch were configured in less harmonious ways. Numerous testimonials to the stench and noisiness of audiences crowded into London’s amphitheatres suggest that hearing mouths and smelling ears were not limited to lovestruck Orsino.13 The actor who has played Rosalind in As You Like It invokes multiple senses in the play’s epilogue: taste (‘If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good

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play needs no epilogue’), hearing (‘I charge you, O women […] I charge you, O men’), touch, sight, and smell (‘I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not’) (Epi. 3–19). References to the spectator/listeners’ noisiness and body odours by other playwrights are less gracious. Marston in his indoor play Jack Drum’s Entertainment says of the indoor playhouses: I like the Audience that frequenteth there With much applause: a man shall not be choakte With the stench of Garlicke, nor be pasted To the barmy Jacket of a Beer-brewer.14

Thomas Dekker’s satirical Gull’s Hornbook notes of contemporary playgoers that ‘your Stinkard has the selfe same libertie to be there in his TobaccoFumes, which your sweet Courtier hath’.15 Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, the publishers of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, had such pretensions of exclusivity in mind when they claimed that the play had never been ‘staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’, nor ‘sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude’.16 ‘Filthy’ is the adjective used by many Puritan objectors to public stage plays, most famously by Phillip Stubbes, who in The Anatomy of Abuses … in a Very Famous Island Called Ailgna (1583) fulminates against ‘filthy plays and enterludes on stages & scaffolds … mixed and interlaced with bawdry, wanton shows & uncomely gestures’.17 Filth in Stubbes’s imagination can be seen, smelled, heard, touched, and tasted (if not on the tongue, in the obsolete sense of to taste as ‘to try, examine, or explore by touch; to feel; to handle’18).

Mimetic If all art is a form of mimesis, as both Plato and Aristotle assume, we might well ask, with respect to the senses, just which senses or sensations are being represented. Orsino is, of course, an obvious object of mimesis and so is the story of his infatuations with Olivia and Viola, as that story unfolds from the opening scene. To students of the senses, however, these familiar objects of representation are of less interest than the senses and sensations that attend

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that dramatic character and his story. In an academic play such as Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (roughly contemporary, in publication date at least, with Twelfth Night), the senses are personified and appear onstage as speaking characters.19 In Orsino’s opening speech the senses are represented through oblique verbal gestures: (1) gestures towards external sources of sensation (‘music’, ‘food’, ‘sweet sound’, breath, ‘odour’), (2) gestures towards sensory organs (‘my ear’), and (3) gestures towards internal sensations (‘appetite’, ‘dying fall’, ‘’Tis not so sweet now’). For representing sense experience words may not be necessary. Isaac Oliver’s brightly coloured cabinet portrait of Edward Herbert (Figure 1.4) is a brilliant reminder – ‘brilliant’ in more ways than one – that senses and sensations can be represented without recourse to language. Implicit in the portrait of Herbert is vision (green hues associated with love-longing), hearing (a stream runs by the reclining figure), touch (the shade and the lying figure’s pale complexion convey coolness and wetness despite the blazing red heart on his shield), and

Figure 1.4  Isaac Oliver, Portrait of Edward Herbert, 1st Lord of Cherbury (1603–40), watercolour on vellum. Wikimedia Commons.

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even smell (there are faded-pink blossoms on the plant nearest Herbert’s nose, the green pigment having turned brownish over time). The usual disciplinary frameworks brought to bear on Oliver’s portrait of Herbert – history and art history – are notably uninterested in smell, largely because there is no ready vocabulary to connect vision and smell. A musical version of Orsino’s sensuosity can be heard in the most famous composition of the lutenist, singer, and poet John Dowland, ‘Lachrimae’ (Tears), which was first published for solo lute in 1596, then acquired words (‘Flow, my tears’) in Dowland’s Second Book of Songs or Airs of  2,  4 and  5 parts: with Tablature for the Lute or Orpherian, with the Viol de Gamba (1600), before assuming yet other guises in Dowland’s ‘Galliard to Lachrimae’ for lute, ‘Lachrimae antiquae’ (1604) for consort, and an instrumental cycle of seven pavans based on the Lachrimae motif (1604). The survival of versions of the motif in more than a hundred manuscripts testifies to the tune’s social currency. Publication of the song version just two years before the first known performance of Twelfth Night suggests that the ‘strain’ with ‘a dying fall’ that accompanied Orsino’s speech might have been ‘Lachrimae’, either played on a lute or sung with lute accompaniment.20 Skill in reading musical notation is not required to appreciate the relentlessly downward cadences of ‘Flow, my tears’ from Dowland’s Second Book of Songs or Airs (Figure 1.5). The upper staff cues the singer of the melody (Cantus); the lower staff shows the fingering for lute accompaniment. (Not shown in the detail in Figure 1.5 is the facing page, which cues an optional second voice, an accompanying bass.) A downward cadence on ‘Flow, my tears’ is intensified by the downward cadence on ‘fall from your springs’, which begins a tone higher and then is intensified even more by the greater drop on ‘ex-iled’ to the depths of ‘forever let me mourn’. Three rising cadences on the phrases ‘Where night’s’, ‘black bird’, ‘her sad in-’ leave the singer poised at the melody’s height on ‘There’ – only to be plunged back. As representations of sense experience, Orsino’s speech, Herbert’s portrait, and Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae’ motif now have a term to describe them. They are all versions of the same meme, that is to say, an idea, behaviour, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture – and in this case from one medium to another. (The derivation of meme seems to be a cross between gene and imitation.21) In our own terms at least, the heat, the coolness, the teariness,

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Figure 1.5  John Dowland, ‘Flow, my tears’ (detail), from Second Book of Songs or Airs (London: Thomas Este, 1600). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

the heard and spoken declinations, the breathiness of Orsino’s speech, Herbert’s portrait, and Dowland’s music all play upon the same memes of love-longing and in curiously similar ways represent the same sense experiences of touch, of coolness and wetness. If proprioception be considered a sense – the body’s sense of itself in space – they all three represent a sensation of downwardness.

Mediational Today these memes of love-longing might be represented in other ways: in the symbols of digital algorithms, in the coloured neural pathways of PET brain scans, or in spectrographs that convert sound signals into visible graphs. If the mimetic frame brings into focus the what of representation, the mediational frame highlights the how. In early modern English, ‘picture’ was a term that covered all three of the memes we’ve just considered, but ‘picture’ was realized in each case in a different medium: in air, as sound waves and light rays and, in the case of Oliver’s portrait of Herbert, as watercolour pigments on vellum.

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Figure 1.6  Spectrograph of ‘If music be the food of love’. © Bruce R. Smith.

The image in Figure 1.6 is a spectrograph of the frequencies of a voice (mine, in fact) saying ‘If music be the food of love’. A spectrograph translates speech and the sounds of music from one medium (air) to another medium (coloured lines grafted onto a two-dimensional surface). The process is an example of transduction: the conversion of one form of energy into another form of energy.22 In this case, the conversion is from sound waves to light waves. Seeing sound invites us, paradoxically, to listen to sound more acutely and to attend to all that is present in speech beyond semantic meaning. In the spectrograph of ‘If music be the food of love’ we can see the amplitude of the speaker’s vowels, the liquidity or the abruptness of the consonants, the pauses made by the speaker, and even the timbre of the speaker’s voice in the form of frequency overtones. The brain may direct the hearing to phonemes, but the sound in its plenitude permeates the listener’s body, stimulating a conscious or unconscious feel for the ‘grain’ and ‘colour’ of the speaker’s voice. ‘Grain’ is Roland Barthes’s coinage for ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’.23 ‘Colour’ is the early modern term for unexpected harmonic intervals, the idiosyncrasies that make one musical setting different from another.24 Thomas Morley in his Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597) has unorthodox chordal harmonies in mind when he quotes with approval Gioseffo Zarlino’s advice about musical colour:

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even as a picture painted with diverse colors doth more delight the eye to behold it than if it were done but with one color alone, so the ear is more delighted and taketh more pleasure of the consonants by the diligent musician placed in his compositions with variety than of the simple concords put together without any variety at all.25

An example of Morley’s harmonic method is his setting of Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae’ pavan for a so-called ‘broken consort’ (six instruments with different timbres or tonal colours) in his First Book of Consort Lessons (1599). Research summarized in Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves suggests that most readers hear voices in their head as they read.26 In the case of Orsino’s opening speech, that voice might be the reader’s own, or it might be the voice of an actor the reader remembers hearing in the role, or it might be the reader’s imagining of Shakespeare’s voice, or it might be an amalgam of the three voices. (In the case of Orsino in Twelfth Night, my own inner voice is coloured by the voice of the actor I first heard in the role, Alan Howard in Clifford Williams’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production in  1966. I have to confess that, in the plays at least, I never ‘hear’ Shakespeare’s voice as author.) What does this polyvocality imply about the reader’s experience of sensations other than sound? The odour of those violets – is that not the reader’s remembered smells more than Orsino’s or Shakespeare’s? The tide’s pitch – is that not the reader’s remembered sight or perhaps the reader’s remembered feeling of immersion amid swells and ebbs? (Orsino and Shakespeare are unlikely ever to have gone sea-bathing, but most modern readers have, and they bring that experience to the image.) With respect to sensation, the distinction between object and subject dissolves in the act of reading. The original medium in which Orsino’s opening speech reached ears, eyes, noses, palate, and skin was air, a medium that embraced actors and spectator/ listeners within the same physical space and put them into close contact. In terms of classical physics, two things vibrated in that ambient air and provided the material means of contact: light waves (at 4×1014 to 8×1014 cycles per second) and sound waves (at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second). The new field of ‘Vibration Studies’ invites us to consider that more than light and sound were vibrating within the virtual space of the Globe. Steve Goodman draws on Spinoza’s ecology of movement to argue for a ‘vibrational ontology’, which begins with the

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premise ‘everything moves’. Stasis is something human perception attributes to objects: ‘At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating. […] All entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by another entity. This is a realism, albeit a weird, agitated, and nervous one.’27 Whether these vibrations are felt intensely or faintly, they are all species of touch. And so were transactions in Shakespeare’s theatre. It is usual to dismiss Stubbes’s remarks on stage plays in The Anatomy of Abuses as the ravings of a religious fanatic, but with respect to the senses he may be on to something. In Stubbes’s imagination theatre is all about touching.28 The result of ‘such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches: such laughing and fleering: such kissing and bussing: such clipping and culling: such winking and glancing of wanton eyes’, are the sexual encounters that the spectator/ listeners enjoy outside the theatre: ‘in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomites, or worse’.29 Secret conclaves are not necessary for spectator/ listeners to feel a visceral connection with actors onstage. Recent experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated how so-called ‘mirror neurons’ cause spectators to feel in their own bodies what they are witnessing in a virtual space, namely a space that presents itself as reality, and functions as reality, but is not itself real.30 Theatre stages are signal examples of such spaces. Shakespeare and his contemporaries seem to have realized this effect in their curious use of the word tickle, verb, noun, adjective, and adverb. Tickling could, in fact, be regarded as the stock-in-trade of playwrights and actors in the original, now long-obsolete sense of word as ‘to be affected or excited by a pleasantly tingling or thrilling sensation; to be stirred or moved with a thrill of pleasure: said of the heart, lungs, blood, “spirits”, etc., also of the person’.31 A famous instance is the Wife of Bath’s declaration, ‘But – Lord Crist – when that it remembreth me / Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, / It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.’32 As the OED notes in its etymology, the internal sense of tickle long preceded the external sense as a tick or light touch.33 A witness from 1618 (either the Catholic archpriest of England William Harrison, or his assistant, John Colleton) connects this sense of ‘tickle’ explicitly with theatre when he observes ‘there are, and must bee, at least some passages in the playes, which may relish, and tickle the humor’ of playgoers, ‘or else good night to the players’.34 ‘Humour’, as early modern natural history has it, is not just a psychological whim but a physiological state in which the senses are fused.

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The change in the denotations of tickle was happening during the course of Shakespeare’s career. Most of Shakespeare’s tickles are external – ‘If you tickle us do we not laugh?’ (MV  3.1.58–9) – but often, in ways not immediately apparent to us, Shakespeare’s tickles connote the original, internal meaning. Take, for example, Hamlet’s response to Rosencrantz’s news that the players are coming to court. Hamlet’s response seems on first reading (or first hearing) to be no more than a list of stock characters, but he evokes each character from a double outside/inside perspective, in terms of movements and sensations that involve both actors and spectator/listeners. ‘He that plays the King shall be welcome – his majesty shall have tribute on me’: that is, I shall pay him for his efforts, but he will also hold dramatic sway over me. Next an actor in motion commands attention: ‘the Adventurous Knight shall use his foil and target’. Hearing and respiration come into play with ‘the Lover shall not sigh gratis’: that is, without being paid in coin and also in sympathy. Next ‘the Humorous Man shall end his part in peace’: if sanguine or choleric or melancholy or phlegmatic, he shall end in equilibrium, and the spectator/listeners shall end so along with him. Next, in the folio and first quarto texts only, ‘the Clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o’th’ sear’ – roughly, ‘triggerhappy’, ready to laugh. Finally touched upon in all three early texts is the heard motion of the verse: ‘the Lady shall say her mind freely or the blank verse shall halt for’t’ (Ham Q2 2.2.285–90; F 2.2.322–3). ‘Tickle’ in Hamlet’s speech catches a double sense, both inner sensation (specifically in the lungs) and an obsolete sense of what the OED describes as ‘easily moved to feeling or action; easily affected in any way; not firm or steadfast; loose’.35 It is this latter sense that Falstaff has in mind when he tries to silence Mistress Quickly in 1 Henry IV: ‘Peace, good pint-pot; peace, good tickle-brain’ (2.4.387). Spectator/ listeners in Shakespeare’s theatre were themselves ‘tickle’, not only in their susceptibility to sensation but in their fickleness. John Davies satirizes this quality in Epigram 225, ‘Of the best playmakers’ dear-bought praise,’ in Wit’s Bedlam (1617): Playwrights your trade is tickle, full of toil; For, you are bound to please the thwartest minds Who (like cross-seas, that rough winds still turmoil) Tossle up & down your praise, with various winds!36

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The sound of applause dies away and so, according to Davies, does a playwright’s reputation. The mediational frame invites us to appreciate the different configurations of the senses engaged by different media: light waves in the case of spectrographs and pigments painted on vellum, hearing and proprioception in the case of music, synaesthesia-through-hearing in the case of reading, internal sensation (‘full-body tickling’, perhaps) in the case of live dramatic performance. At bottom, all of these media involve touch. Even vision, praised by Plato for its objectifying properties, feels like projections from one’s eyes onto objects, even as just the reverse is true in terms of physics. Shakespeare’s ‘tickle’ presents itself as a particular example of the sense of sensing – a phenomenon that Daniel Heller-Roazen in The Inner Touch: The Archeology of a Sensation has traced back to Aristotle and forward across the centuries to Merleau-Ponty. Aristotle in De Anima isolates touch as the sense in which humans excel all other animals: ‘man possesses touch as the most acute of the senses … ; whereas in other senses man lags behind many other animals, in touch he distinguishes himself from the others. […] That is why he is the most intelligent of living beings.’37

Phenomenological If Aristotle is right that there is a relationship between touch and intelligence, we face a challenge in finding a critical frame that can account for both. Moving from the philosophical frame to the historical to the mimetic to the mediational, we move by stages from sense(s) to sensation – that is, from the senses considered objectively to the senses experienced subjectively. This shift in focus has parallels in other domains: in the moves from ‘sex’ to ‘sexuality’, from ‘class’ to ‘class-consciousness’, from gender categories to lived transgender identities. If we are to consider Shakespeare’s senses comprehensively, we need to set in place an additional frame that will contain the other frames and allow us to move freely among them. This outer frame, I propose, can be found in phenomenology. The difference between ‘hearing’ (the sense) and ‘listening’ (the experience) can help us get our bearings. The French composer and film theorist Michel

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Chion provides a useful distinction among three ‘modes of listening’. In the first mode, ‘causal listening’, the person experiencing sound directs attention to the source of the sound. In the case of Orsino’s speech in a performance of Twelfth Night, the source would probably be identified as the actor speaking the lines. In the case of reading, it might be the internal voice or voices that the reader hears. In Chion’s second mode, ‘semantic listening’, the person experiencing sound trains the mind to pick out meaningful patterns. In the case of Orsino’s speech, such patterns would be provided by the diction and syntax of early modern English. Chion’s third mode, ‘reduced listening’, is a coinage borrowed from the composer, musicologist, and acoustician Pierre Schaeffer. What is being ‘reduced’ is attention to the very things that dominate the other two modes: cause and semantic meaning. In Chion’s words, ‘Reduced listening takes the sound – verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever – as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.’38 In the case of Orsino’s speech that would mean listening for the alternating fluidity and abrupt stops of the rhythm, to the repetitions of /s/, /u:/, /oʊ/, /b/, etc. – but without making the New Critical move of explaining why these particular rhythms and these particular phonemes underscore the ‘meaning’ of the speech. The ultimate source of Schaeffer’s term ‘reduced’ is phenomenology as a philosophical discipline. Phenomenology as practised by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty begins with the ‘bracketing’ of a given sensation, followed by an attempt to make that sensation strange, to set aside all preconceptions, to regard the sensation as if it were being experienced for the first time. The thinker maintains touch with the sensation even as the thinker attempts to understand the transaction that is happening between the attended-to object and the feeling/thinking subject. A classic example is provided by Husserl in Part Two of Ideas (1913) where he takes stock of what he can sense – what he can know directly – as he sits in his study in Gőttingen.39 Husserl’s census of sensations turns out, unsurprisingly, to be limited to sight and sound. He hears his children playing in the garden outside, but he does not smell the flowers or feel the breeze. He can think of objects that are not visible to him, but he does not actually touch them – he knows such objects ‘only partially and for the most part imperfectly’.40 A phenomenology

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of Shakespeare’s senses would need to include not only the violets’ odour to which Orsino alludes but the remembered tickle of such smells in the nostrils of readers and spectator/listeners, not only the sweetness that Orsino finds in the music he hears but the consumers’ memories of sweetness on the tongue, not only the ‘dying fall’ that leads Orsino’s fancy to the sea but the consumers’ remembered sensations of falling, giving over, finding themselves in a state of suspension. As a critical frame for considering Shakespeare’s senses, phenomenology would seem to present formidable challenges. The other four frames – philosophy, history, mimesis, mediation – are examples of the preconceptions that phenomenologists try to set aside. As modes of ‘semantic’ inquiry, they would seem to preclude direct contact with any entity purporting to be ‘Shakespeare’s senses’. The very act of framing puts sense and sensation at a critical distance. An additional problem is posed by the universalist assumptions of phenomenology as practised by twentieth-century philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. What Husserl can see and hear in his study is presumed to be what any human subject could see and hear under similar circumstances, regardless of historical and cultural differences, including gender, class, race, and education. Since Foucault, it has been impossible for most of us to accept such an assumption. There is, however, a way to practise phenomenology by attending to such differences, in what I and others have called ‘historical phenomenology’.41 In such a practice the inquirer assembles knowledge from a variety of historical sources – philosophical treatises, medical books, architectural history, geography, theatrical conventions, reading habits, first-person testimony – and puts that knowledge into dialogue with twenty-first-century knowledge about physiology, neuroscience, psychology, and media. At the centre of it all is the inquirer. With respect to Shakespeare’s senses, we can discern within the phenomenological frame a series of smaller frames: (1) the universalist frame assumed by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and most practitioners of phenomenological psychology, (2) an historicist frame that takes into account period and cultural differences, and (3) a critical/aesthetic frame that attends to the affordances of different media and different genres within and across those media even as it puts the here-and-now inquirer at the centre of attention.

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What would it mean to frame Orsino’s speech phenomenologically? That would depend on the frame-within-the-frame, particularly the critical/aesthetic frame. If the speech is read off the page, the phenomenological frame directs attention to the ‘inner voices’ that Fernyhough has prompted us to hear, and, if we are especially attentive, to the visual interspace between the surface of the page and the position of the reader’s eyes, eighteen to twenty-four inches away, and to the dynamics of engagement that that situation creates. If performed on stage, it directs attention to the four elements involved in all dramatic performance: to bodies, space, time, and sound, each of which engages a different congeries of senses. Bodies, for example, are apprehended not only visually but aurally and haptically. In my experience at least, live performance touches off a special kind of tactility, as I feel my body in the actor’s place. If the performance is recorded on film or video, the relationship among the senses shifts, giving primacy to vision and, in my own case at least, causing a diminution of tactility. If the speech is heard on a recording, over the radio, or in an aural podcast, the phenomenological frame would direct attention primarily to hearing. Above all, the phenomenological frame reveals the interconnectivity of the traditional five senses. In its fluid shifts among hearing, taste, smell, sight, and touch, Orsino’s speech defines an ethos, plays out a story of perception specific to early modern European culture, represents sense experience in sounded words, exploits the affordances of dramatic performance as a medium, and invites a whole-body experience in which the senses lose their distinctiveness. Platonic philosophy would regard the sense-state of Orsino’s speech as reprehensible, early modern natural history as pathological, mimetic theory as an artistic tour-de-force, media studies as a deployment of air as a medium for both sound and light. From its beginning phenomenology has been, unapologetically, a firstperson endeavour. Husserl in his study sets the example. I attend to evocations of the senses in Orsino’s speech by attending to my sensations as well as those Orsino reports. And I do so with an awareness of the differences that separate me from Orsino’s evocations of the senses – historical and cultural differences in philosophy, psychology, performance conventions, modes of perception, political commitments – even as I try, quite literally, to incorporate those differences in my own sensations. My responses can be charted as an ebb and flow between past and present, something like Orsino’s fluid ways with the senses, but returning to a place of critical stasis. In addressing Shakespeare’s senses, what is required above all is fluency.

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Notes   1 The Arden 3 text emends the copy-text reading, ‘sound’, to ‘south’, following Alexander Pope’s 1725 suggestion. I here restore the folio text (in accordance with many modern editions), as it is significant to my reading of this passage.   2 Adam Smyth takes up the topic of the sensory apprehension of books as objects – and the relative paucity of sensory attention in historical bibliography and material text studies – in his contribution to this volume (352–68).   3 Gerard Ginette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. Applications of Ginette’s concept to Shakespeare can be found in Harry Newman, ‘Paratexts and Canonical Thresholds’, Shakespeare 13, no. 4 (2017): 313–17; Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, ed. Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, with Tania Demetriou, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Roger Chartier, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, trans. Lydia D. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).   4 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proofreading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 1:178–79; Bruce R. Smith, ‘Scene’, in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93–112.   5 OED, s.v. ‘ethos, n.’, 2.a.   6 Aristotle, Poetics 39.b.3, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 22–3.   7 Katharine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84.   8 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art, 1575–1700 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997).   9 Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby as The Courtier (London, 1588), U3r–v. 10 OED, s.v. ‘sanguine, adj. and n.’, A.3.a. 11 Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 23–57. 12 Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, U3r. 13 See Holly Dugan’s contribution to this volume (133–56), and her Shakespeare and the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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14 John Marston, Jacke Drums Entertainment: Or the Comedie of Pasquill and Katherine (London, 1601), H3v. 15 Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London, 1609), E2v. 16 Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, ‘A Never Writer, to an Ever Reader, News’, in William Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida (London, 1609), 2r. 17 Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses … in a Very Famous Island Called Ailgna (London, 1583), L5v. 18 OED, s.v. ‘touch, v.,’ I.1†.a. 19 Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or The combat of the tongue, and the five senses for superiority (London, 1607). Martin Wiggins specifies a date limit of 1602–1607 for its first production at Trinity College, Cambridge, in British Drama: A Catalogue, 1533–1642, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012–), 5:349–55. Steven Connor discusses the play further in this volume (42). 20 The solo lute version can be heard in a performance by Nigel North on the album Dowland’s Tears: Lute Music, Vol. 2 (Naxos, 2006, ASIN: B000SFZO12); the song version, in a performance by Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley on the album Honey from the Hive: Songs by John Dowland (BIS, 2006, ASIN: B002WP3G8O). 21 Examples of memes provided by the term’s coiner, Richard Dawkins, include ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’ (cited in OED, s.v. ‘meme, n.’). 22 Stefan Helmreich, ‘Transduction’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–31. 23 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 88. 24 Jörg Jewanski, ‘Colour and Music’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.06156. 25 Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. R. Alec Harman (New York: Norton, 1962), 255. 26 Charles Fernyhough, ‘Voices on the Page’, in The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 75–90. 27 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 83–4. 28 Tanya Pollard’s chapter in this volume further considers early modern discussions of theatrical sensation, particularly regarding the classical texts and theories that shaped the discourse (62–81). 29 Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, L8r–v.

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30 Some of these experiments are surveyed in Bruce R. Smith, ‘Touching Moments’, in Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 132–76. The topic is also taken up in this collection by Jackie Watson (224–44). 31 OED, s.v. ‘tickle, v1’, †1.a, obsolete since the mid-seventeenth century. 32 Wife of Bath’s Prologue 469–71, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111. 33 OED, s.v. ‘tickle, v.1’, etymology. 34 ‘Prohibition of William Harrison, archpriest, forbidding secular priests to attend the theaters, March 9, 1617, with Thomas Leke’s Letter to the archpriest, April 25, 1618, and the Answer to this letter’, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, MS 4787, fol. 13r. For the debate over the authorship of the ‘Answer’ quoted here, see: I. J. Semper, ‘The Jacobean Theater through the Eyes of Catholic Clerics’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1952): 45–51. 35 OED, s.v. ‘tickle, adj. (and adv.)’, †3.A. 36 John Davies, Wit’s Bedlam (London, 1617), F7r. 37 Aristotle, De Anima, Book Beta, Chapter Nine, quoted in Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: The Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 293. 38 Michel Chion, ‘The Three Listening Modes’ (1994), in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 50. 39 The occasion is discussed more largely in Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 20–4. 40 Quoted in ibid., 20. 41 My coinage of the term ‘historical phenomenology’ in an article on ‘Theories and Methodologies: Premodern Sexualities’, PMLA 115, no. 3 (2000): 318–29, was taken up by a range of scholars in a special issue of Criticism 54, no. 3 (2012) on ‘Shakespeare and Phenomenology’, ed. Kevin Curran and James Kearney, and remains a reference point in current Shakespeare scholarship.

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Admiring the nothing of it: Shakespeare and the senseless Steven Connor

Much of the discussion of the senses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is concerned with the question of the common sense mooted by Aristotle, that internal metasense that not only receives sensation from particular organs of sense but discerns the fact of the sensing itself. As Michael Witmore crisply notes, the importance of common sense is that ‘it doesn’t just sense a what, it senses that’.1 Witmore develops from this a persuasive argument about the role of theatre as an ‘embodied form of conceptual analysis’, a kind of laboratory of reflexive and therefore transmissible sensation.2 This view allows not just for a sense that is common to all the five senses (sometimes conceived as a kind of touch, which can be thought of as at work in all the senses) but a having in common of sensory experience in general. The notion of a common sense helps to explain the affluently productive swivel of the term ‘sensible’ in English, which means not just perceivability through the senses but also the exercise of sound judgement. The common sense – or the idea of it – forms a bridge between sensation and ideation, providing a way not just of knowing what you are feeling but also of feeling what you know. We deploy this ghostly sense of a sense that both is and is not corporeal when we say that we ‘sense’ something, through intuition, instinct, or something other than sensory perception. This swivel is operative in the development of Aristotelian ‘common sense’ into a very different kind of notion, that of ordinary or native powers of judgement (I remember as a child being enjoined exasperatedly to ‘have a bit of common’). I have to say that I have very strong sympathy with David Hume, who could wring no kind of sense from the notion of an integrating faculty that might be regarded as standing between our feelings and us and enabling us to

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feel them, an idea that leads inevitably and almost immediately to troubling recursion (if some faculty is needed to sense the input from our senses, with what faculty might we in turn sense the output from that faculty?). Indeed, in his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume never uses the phrase ‘common sense’ to mean anything like the mediating Aristotelian sensus communis. For Hume, what we feel through our senses, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, not only have distinct qualities, we might even say that they just are these qualities; but the seeing, hearing, gusting, or snuffing of them are not. In Hume’s famous formulation, there is no perceiving self beneath or behind its perceptions: when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.3

Nevertheless, sensory experience does not merely happen to us and so is not, therefore, simply experience, meaning that the experience includes an experiencing, or relation to the experience. It is not sensory experience as such, but this reflexivity, and the economies of value that arise from it, focusing in particular on the powers and qualities accorded to the different senses relative to each other, the sense, in short, that we make of the senses, that is usually the object of sensory history. And that sense includes a relation to the condition of not sensing – being sensible of being, in Hume’s terms, ‘insensible of myself’. Common sense is what allows us to have the sense of, and therefore to make sense of our sensations. But in mediating between our senses and our sense of our selves as selves of feeling, the common sense also mediates between our self-sensing and the self-sensing of others – common sense forming our access, so to speak, to the senses in common. The theatre, even the imaginary theatre into which we may project ourselves as we read a play-text, is a venue for this sensory commons. It is the place where we may potently sense the sensations that we sense we can never in fact feel for ourselves. I am going to try here to follow out two conjoined implications of the idea of common sense that may illuminate the sensory economies of Shakespeare’s drama. The first is that language must be closely implicated in making sense

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of the senses, given that language itself forms a bridge between the logical and the physiological. Language mediates between, and allows its users to mediate between, form, understood as materiality, and form in the sense of information, or logical arrangement. It does this largely because it has its own kinds of sensory embodiment, as sound, image, touch, and somewhat more remotely, taste and odour, in common with the sensory information it may impart. It is this which gives the figure of Lingua in Thomas Tomkis’s allegorical play of 1607 her capacity to create dissension among the senses, all of whom contend for superiority. More than this, Lingua herself claims the right ‘to make the Senses sixe; / And have both name and power with the rest.’4 She complains that ‘these senses mufftle common sense: / And more, and more with pleasing objects strive, / To dull his judgement and prevert [“pervert” in editions from  1615 onwards] his will / To their be-hests.’5 Her strategy for gaining the ear, so to speak, of Common Sense, has been to counterfeit the other senses: Oft have I seasoned savorie periods, With sugred words, to delude Gustus taste, And oft embelisht my entreative phrase With smelling flowres of vernant Rhetorique, Limming and flashing it with various Dyes, To draw proud Visus to me by the eyes.6

At the end of the play Common Sense detects Lingua’s plot and refuses her claim, even though the entire play has in fact demonstrated and depended on her powers of ‘sugred words’, ‘Civet-speech’ and ‘Silken Eloquence’, that is, on the language of sense, and sense languaged.7 Shakespeare often mingles the sensory reference and the sensory form of language, whether spoken or visual, with what it figures, as for example in Innogen’s regret at having to part from Posthumus: ‘or ere I could / Give him that parting kiss which I had set / Betwixt two charming words’ (Cym 1.3.33–5). There is one particular function of language that links with the common sense, which underwrites my second preoccupation in this essay. Daniel Heller-Roazen points to this in the discussion in his book The Inner Touch of the failures or disturbances of coenaesthesia or self-feeling that became of particular interest to psychologists from the late nineteenth century onwards: the ‘men and women who felt themselves to be where they were not, and all

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those who failed to feel themselves to be where they nevertheless did seem to be’ suggested not just that one could lose the reflexive sensation of feeling that, and what, one feels but also that one could feel this lack, flatness, or numbness itself.8 Common sense allows also for the sensing of insensibility. The absence of sense can furnish a powerful sense of absence, the inclusion in sense of the sense of what is occluded from it. In the phantom limb experience, the brain appears haunted by, or may in fact be regarded as supplying itself with, a sensation which is detectibly missing. The sensing of insensibility is a negative of this, for in it, we sense what is missing from sensation. The anosognosias considered by Heller-Roazen point to this weird but compelling capacity to feel the absence of feeling, though it need not take these exotically pathological forms: the gaps in the fabric of self-perception are a perfectly familiar part of that fabric, apparent whenever we haggle at the jagged gap where a lost tooth was, experience freezing cold, feel pins and needles, sense that a drowsy numbness pains our sense, or in the many similar dimmings or diminishments of sensory stimulus. Much of the attention that has been paid to the sensory self-attentions of the early modern period focuses on efforts to regulate and discipline the senses, considered as in themselves a potentially delinquent kind of excess.9 But the distracting eruptions or surfeits of sensory experience are not the only kind of problem, and therefore literary opportunity, encountered in the early modern world, which was also exercised by dramatic deficits of sensory experience. To be insensible was not to be insensate, making insensibility as potent a preoccupation as sensuality. It represented more than the simple negative or minority of sense: it could prompt a distempering or perturbation of the finely configured economy of the senses, at times threatening (thus also promising) a veritable Rimbaudian dérèglement de tous les sens. Insensibility had an important part to play in the dynamic conception of the senses, which were characterized not just by interactions and antagonisms between eye, ear, nose, tongue, and hand, but also by variations of intensity within each sense. Indeed, one may say that the idea that the senses may come and go was a crucial part of the conception of the senses as an economy. This in turn aided and was aided by the humoral theory, with its mistaken but interpretatively versatile stress on homeostatic variations. For the existence of forms of depleted sense implied the possibility of surfeit, both dangerous

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and therefore delightful. As we will see shortly, the understanding of apoplexy inherited from Galen and others provides the most obvious example of this economy, depending as it did on an idea of a deficit of sensation caused by a congestive surplus of various kinds of sluggish matter in the brain – hence the long reliance on traditional procedures of purgation and evacuation, such as emetics, sternutatories, and blood-lettings.10 Diminished and vanished sensation testified to the possibility of a quantitative dimension to sensory perception, adding to the qualia of the different senses something like that quality of the quantitative that I have somewhere else called ‘quantality’.11 As such, the early modern preoccupation with states of withdrawn or reduced sensibility anticipated the idea of sensory thresholds that would be central to the psychophysics inaugurated in 1860 by Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik, with its use of the Weber-Fechner measure of the variable intensities of stimulus required for perception, as well as for the passage between perception and pain, with Fechner declaring that ‘the most general and more fundamental basis for psychic measurement is […] in those methods by which the relation between increase in stimulus and increase in sensation may be ascertained’.12 The thermodynamic model which predominated in thinking about the senses in the early modern period allowed for a sense of the energetic interchange of levels of sensibility, in which the coldness of insensibility could in fact exert irritant traction over the other senses. Strangely, perhaps, it is the possibility of commutability represented by non-feeling that allows for the communicability of and communication between the senses, allowing for notable Shakespearean sensory crossovers such as Bottom’s Dream, with its deafened eye, sightless ear, and untasting hand (MND  4.1.209–11), or Gloucester’s capacity for seeing ‘feelingly’ (KL 4.6.145). Can we sense the senseless? It certainly seems to make some kind of sense to say that we ‘feel numb’, or feel the unfeelingness of others as a rasp or serpent’s tooth. Whether or not there is a sensible answer to this question, it certainly seems to be to the fore in the work of Shakespeare, which is greatly given to observation of and reflection on the idea and condition of being senseless, and the strangely turbid feelings released by the condition or prospect of not-feeling, both in oneself and in others. The final act of Jacques’s seven ages of man speech in As You Like It is rendered in one of Shakespeare’s characteristically drained lines, which seems to act out its paradoxically climactic ebbing of impetus in its

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flat, single-syllabled repetitions: ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ (2.7.167). In the phrase ‘mere oblivion’ (2.7.166) that this list of listless lessnesses particularizes, the word ‘mere’ hints at the flickering of value between all and nothing, the sense of the sans that subsists in the sans of sense. By the late sixteenth century, ‘mere’ had its contemporary sense of ‘simply’, or ‘no more than’ – or, in the precise but somewhat contorted OED definition, ‘Having no greater extent, range, value, power, or importance than the designation implies; that is barely or only what it is said to be.’ In this, ‘mere oblivion’ answers ‘merely players’ at the beginning of the speech. But mere also retained the earlier sense of ‘pure’, ‘absolute’, or ‘unmixed’ that Henry VIII gave it when writing of his desire that his subjects ‘be brought to a perfection & knowledg of the mere verity & truth; and no lenger to be seduced, nor blinded with any such superstitious & false doctrin’, or that Yeats revived in ‘The Second Coming’ in the phrase ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,’ a use which is close to the modern ‘sheer’.13 So in the word mere, the ideas of ‘no less than’ and ‘no more than’ vibrate together. The intensive and reductive senses of ‘mere’ come together in the idea of being ‘nothing but’ – an idea that turns on itself strangely in the phrase ‘mere oblivion’, which then signifies ‘nothing but nothingness’. Not only does the idea of insensibility recur in Shakespeare’s work, it seems to exert an amplifying pull on sensory perception. The sense of absent or departed sensation prompts vividly embodied reflections, for example, when Henry VI contemplates the body of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: Fain would I go to chafe his paly lips With twenty thousand kisses, and to drain Upon his face an ocean of salt tears, To tell my love unto his dumb deaf trunk, And with my fingers feel his hand unfeeling: But all in vain are these mean obsequies; And to survey his dead and earthly image, What were it but to make my sorrow greater?

(2H6 3.2.141–8) ‘With my fingers feel his hand unfeeling’ makes perfect and straightforward sense, telling us simply that Henry’s hand will feel the unfeelingness of Gloucester’s hand, but the doubling of terms puts feeling and unfeelingness in a peculiarly

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generative hand-in-glove relation. If ‘Feel his hand unfeeling’ means ‘feel with my hand his hand that feels nothing’, it also seems to let in the meaning ‘feel with my hand his hand performing the imaginary action of “unfeeling”, or trying to feel and failing’. The clause ‘with my fingers feel’ is in apposition with the opening statement of the sequence of the things that Henry says he would fain do to give animation to Humphrey, including the impulse ‘to chafe his paly lips’, rubbing warmth and motion back into the corpse. ‘Feel his hand unfeeling’ implies the very interchange of sensibility that it also tells us is blocked, in something like an interrupted version of the chiastic crossing noted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which two touching hands both touch and feel themselves touched.14 And yet the yearning phrase seems magically to enact the current of resurrected feeling it is hoping for, as though a sufficiently impassioned naming might amount to a kind of chafing. This is one of the many contrivances through which Shakespeare mediates between physics and semiotics, sense as what Michel Serres would call ‘hard’, or physical sensation, and sense in the soft sense of making sense.15 Chafing, from chauffer to warm, was commonly recommended in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical texts, both as a kind of loosening or enlivening friction and as a means of rubbing in oils or salves. These applications were often vigorous and the word could be transferred metaphorically to actions of correction or punishment, as in Thomas Adams’s stern recommendation of the care to be taken with the idle poor ‘not to cherish the lazie blood in their vaines by abusive mercy; but rather chafe their stonied sinews by correction, relieve them with punishment, and so recover them to the life of obedience’.16 In Shakespeare, chafing often suggests the arousal of dangerous anger, as for Coriolanus who ‘being once chafed, he cannot / Be rein’d again to temperance’ (Cor  3.3.27–8). But it is also used intransitively, of natural processes that, though they have the appearance of fretting discontent, must in fact be regarded as insensible. The Poet in Timon of Athens evokes the flame that ‘Provokes itself and like the current, flies each bound / It chafes’ – if, that is, one accepts Theobald’s possibly officious emendation of ‘chases’ to ‘chafes’, as the Arden editors, after reflection, do not (Tim  1.1.25–6). Edgar evokes this subjunctive flickering between sensation and the insensate in the vision he conjures for Gloucester of the mindless restiveness of the sea: ‘The murmuring surge / That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes, / Cannot be heard so high’ (KL 4.6.20–2).

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Chafing sometimes took the intensified form of flogging or whipping. Erotic flagellation was certainly not unknown: Peter Abelard writes in his Historia Calamitatum of his seduction of Heloise that ‘love, rather than anger, tenderness, not irritation, sometimes gave blows, which outdid every balm in sweetness’ (verbera quandoque dabat amor, non furor; gratia, non ira, quae omnium unguentorum suavitatem transcenderent) (Abelard col.  128). In an epigram of 1599, Sir John Davies wrote: When Francus comes to sollace with his whoore He sends for rods and strips himselfe stark naked: For his lust sleepes, and will not rise before, by whipping of the wench it be awaked. I envie him not, but wish he had the powre, To make my selfe his wench but one halfe houre.17

The epigram seems to allow for a puzzling reversibility, both in ‘whipping of the wench’ and ‘the powre / To make my selfe his wench’. In both cases, we are meant to be clear, though only perhaps after the complicating hesitation that the verse contrives, that it is the wench who is doing the whipping. That is, the speaker looks forward to the satisfaction, not of being sexually used as a wench but of having the wench’s power to apply the rods, which one assumes would not aim to provide Francus with any pleasure, whatever that might mean exactly in this tangled case. However, there is less evidence in the early seventeenth century than one might expect of the erotics of flagellation. It is mostly encountered before the eighteenth century in pseudo-medical references in Latin works, the most compendious being Johann Heinrich Meibom’s Tractatus de usu flagrorum in re medica & veneria (1639), which was not translated into English until the following century.18 James M. Bromley takes the figure of Lepet, who seems to enjoy, or, at least, oddly not at all to resent, being roughed up in Middleton’s The Nice Valour, as an instance of ‘widespread textual manifestations of an interest in the pleasure of pain in Renaissance England’, but Lepet’s tastes seem eccentric rather than lubricious.19 The phrase ‘flogging cully’ first appears in print in Richard Head’s The Canting Academy, in the story of the wiles of a Mistress Wheedle, ‘a plump succulent Girl’ who teased and allured the highest prices from her various customers, who included ‘not only the Bleeding-Cully,

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but the Ruff-Cully, the Dark-Cully, the Flogging-Cully, and the Fencing-Cully’.20 The New Dictionary of the Canting Crew of 1699 defined ‘flogging’ as ‘a Naked Woman’s whipping (with Rods) an Old (usually) and (sometimes) a Young Lecher’.21 Ned Ward, who wonders in The London Spy (1700) why, on the arrival of ‘a Sober Citizen, in Cloke and Band, about the Age of Sixty’, a brothel keeper should ask one of her girls ‘whether they had any Rods in the House’, has what is called ‘a new Vice’ described to him.22 Ward explains that the girls ‘down with his Breeches and Scourge his Privities till they have laid his Leachery’, but it was more usual to think of whipping as inciting quiescent sexual powers, at least initially, than quieting them.23 The idea of sensory and vital transference is focused in the fact that medical and comic-lubricious representations such as Ward’s of this enterprise always seem to require the implied heat-exchange of a young woman and a jaded male senior, as in suggestions that male vigour might be restored through transfusions of the bouncy blood of young females. ‘Jaded’ enters English in 1615 as a participial adjective meaning worn out, or made dull and languid like an exhausted horse. ‘Flogging a dead horse’ perhaps does not arise until the nineteenth century, though the phrase ‘a dead horse’ signifying a futile endeavour is common from the mid-seventeenth century. Reference to jades and jading is frequent in Shakespeare, often in relation to the idea of the stimulating antagonism of cold languor and hot energy, as in the Constable of France’s urging words in Henry V: Dieu de batailles! where have they this mettle? […] Can sodden water, A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley-broth, Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat? And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine, Seem frosty?

(3.5.15–25) The exchangeability of pain and pleasure is sometimes a feature of the cooperation of sense and insensibility in Shakespeare’s work. Cleopatra’s evocation of the ‘lover’s pinch / Which hurts and is desired’ (AC 5.2.294–5) may be sauced by the furious, if also faintly ridiculous, ingenuity of the punishment she imagines for the messenger bringing news of Antony’s marriage: ‘Thou shalt be whipped with wire and stewed in brine, / Smarting

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in lingering pickle’ (2.5.65–6).24 Plutarch’s account of the Roman festival of Lupercalia in his Life of Caesar describes the practice of striking barren women with thongs in order to induce conception and ease delivery.25 This practice is alluded to at the beginning of Julius Caesar, when Caesar urges Antony: Forget not in your speed, Antonio, To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say, The barren touched in this holy chase Shake off their sterile curse.

(1.2.6–9) John Donne makes the association between love, vital warmth, and whipping in his ‘Eclogue: 1613 December 26’, in which Allophanes reproaches Idios for absenting himself in the cold countryside from the marriage of the Earl of Somerset at court: Unseasonable man, statue of ice,   What could to country’s solitude entice Thee, in this year’s cold and decrepit time? […] Whilst winds do all the trees and hedges strip   Of leafes, to furnish rods enough to whip Thy madness from thee; and all springs by frost   Have taken cold, and their sweet murmurs lost.26

Somewhat surprisingly, given the encompassing breadth of Shakespeare’s libidinous references, only a few of the many references to whipping in his work suggest arousing rather than quelling or disciplining effects. Perhaps there is just a grim hint of this possibility in the threat of the First Beadle in 2 Henry IV that Doll Tearsheet ‘shall have whipping-cheer, I warrant her’ (5.4.5), though ‘whipping-cheer’ was a commonly used ironic phrase from the late  1570s. Rosalind as Ganymede teases Orlando with her talk of a cure for his love: Love is merely a madness, and I tell you deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.

(AYL 3.2.384–8)

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In fact, her counsel consists of stimulating Orlando to a maddening-pleasing simulation of his love ‘by attorney’. The popular assumption that the mad are to be whipped both to repress their frenzy and to reawaken their slumbering sense of themselves survives in John Lacy’s  1672 adaptation of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (The Dumb Lady), a ‘dismal five-act comedy never seen or heard from again after its original (uncertainly documented) showing’.27 A pretended doctor has sent for officers from Bedlam to incarcerate his wife: doctor But do you give them no physick? first officer Something they have, but a whip is the main ingredient; for we whip ’em out of a phrenzy into stark madness, and then whip ’em on till they come round to their wits again. doctor That plainly shews the circulation of the bloud; and this may be cited a consultation.28

The dual action of tribulation was seen in similar terms in Anthony Nixon’s religious reflections on anatomy in The Dignitie of Man (1612): The vanities of this world cast the soule into such a delight-some Phrensie, and lull it so dangerously asleepe, that many in a frantick fit of licentiousnes run headlong to perdition: Therefore God holdeth over his children the rod of Tribulation, both to temper, and stay, the raging moode of the franticke, and to rowse the dead sleepers out of their Letargie; And as it can of no reasonable man bee construed, but in good part, to binde and keepe in awe, yea to whippe and beate the mad man when hee falleth into his rage: Likewise to pinch, nippe, and wring, yea, and with red hot yrons to burne, the sick of a Letargie when hee entereth into his dead sleepe: So for God to correct our former, and to prevent our future infirmities, by the scourges, or hot yrons of afflictions, cannot but be thought the part of a mercifull and provident Father.29

States of insensibility can come about, not just through the withering or blocking of sensation – ‘block’ being a favourite word in Shakespeare to indicate the condition of being both featureless and unresponsive – but also through the reduction of sensation through inundating overload, as when Autolycus describes the beguiling of a listening crowd by a song:

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My clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wenches’ song, that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words, which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears. You might have pinched a placket, it was senseless. ’Twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse. I could have filed keys off that hung in chains. No hearing, no feeling, but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it.

(WT 4.4.609–18) This kind of insensibility is in fact a crucial part of the machinery of theatrical self-sensing. Human beings not only have sensations, they actively search out, simulate and stimulate them, not least through their participation in entertainments such as theatre. Theatre may of course heighten and intensify sensation, including sensations of pain, but the doctrine of tragic purgation, along with frequent observation that the expression of pain helps to ease it, is registered in the Shakespearean sense of what Michael Schoenfeldt calls ‘the potentially anaesthetic functions of art’ and the fact that ‘language provides a kind of topical analgesic for suffering’.30 The cooperation of intensity and saturated desensitizing is suggested notably in Lear’s cry, ‘this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else, / Save what beats there’ (KL 3.4.12–14). This involves more than an internal economy of distraction for the character, for the spectator must rely on the fact of their essential immunity to what is transpiring on the stage for their capacity to project themselves sympathetically into it. For Lear, ‘when the mind’s free, / The body’s delicate’ (3.4.11–12); for the spectator, it is the inverse. It is an intensity-insensibility couplet that is redoubled for the spectator by all the many accounts of suffering conveyed in Shakespeare’s work at second hand by witnesses. Tanya Pollard proposes that the many drugs and potions for procuring death, oblivion, or altered states of perception that feature in early modern theatre are ‘an image not only in the theater, but of the theatre’.31 Drugs have often been employed to procure or heighten sensations, and alcohol in particular has been associated with sensory indulgence, but their action is often also negative, in that they work by reducing sensory stimulation. Mandragora is the principal example of a ‘drowsy syrup’ that was also thought of as an aphrodisiac, because of its associations with the mandrakes believed to be seeded by the sperm of hanged men. The rapture of trance, narcosis, or stupor

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is an apotheosis of sensory dulling or diminishment. A condition of the sensory enlivenment of the senses provided by the theatre for its audience is that they should become numbly inattentive to everything that is not in the theatre. If there is horror in the prospect of insensibility, there is also voluptuousness in it. The aesthetics of theatre, often represented by Shakespeare as a sort of stagemanaged slumber, are in part an anaesthetics. Pollard points to the increasing use of opium and other assumed stupefacients during the early seventeenth century, sometimes in the form of the laudanum believed to have been invented by Paracelsus, and tobacco, which was often assumed to be narcotic in its effects, just as alcohol was thought for centuries to be a stimulant.32 The peculiar mixture of psychoactive potency and the capacity to produce oblivion of opium meant that it seemed paradoxically to combine the virtues of the hot and the cold. Thomas Bretnor prefaces his translation of Angelus Sala’s Opiologia (1618) with a discussion of its tricksy imaginary thermics: whether it bee hot or cold it skils not much […] for, let the torments or griefe proceed from what cause soever, either hot or cold, inward or outward it worketh the same effects, so that this onely Medicine well prepared would doubtlesse save many thousand mens lives that travaile or faile, sub aequatore vel polo Arctico, into the East Indies or Northerne discoveries, under the hottest or coldest climes in the world, seeing it resembles much the oyle of Vitrioll, Vinegar, Chymicall salts and such like, which are given with good successe as well in cold as hot diseases.33

Stunning and stupefaction and agencies for their production feature frequently in Shakespeare – for example the drugs prepared by Cornelius for the Queen in Cymbeline, which: Will stupefy and dull the sense awhile; Which first, perchance, she’ll prove on cats and dogs, Then afterward up higher: but there is No danger in what show of death it makes, More than the locking up the spirits a time.

(1.5.37–41) But theatre is not just an opiate, for it can, and in Pollard’s argument playfully and systematically does, represent its own absorption as a sort of heightening stupor, thereby making us sensible of the ways in which insensibility can act

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in and act on sensation. The energetic yield of the coupling of insensibility and sensual is particularly high in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes tells Camillo that he would have to be blind, deaf, or daft not to notice what in his wife’s behaviour seems so literally (arousingly and tormentingly) palpable (paddling palms and pinching fingers) – to him: Ha’ not you seen, Camillo – But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn – or heard – For, to a vision so apparent, rumour Cannot be mute – or thought – for cogitation Resides not in that man that does not think – My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess – Or else be impudently negative To have nor eyes, nor ears. nor thought – then say My wife’s a hobby-horse.

(1.2.265–74) The very thought of Camillo’s insensibility is a source of sensory inflammation for Leontes: ‘many thousand on’s / Have the disease, and feel’t not’ (1.2.205–6). His jealousy erupts in a self-tormenting heightening of imagined sensation, as in the glide from the half-overheard whisper to the disgusted apprehension of taste in ‘They’re here with me already, whispering, rounding / “Sicilia is a soforth.” ’Tis far gone / When I shall gust it last’ (1.2.215–17). What he tastes on his tongue seems to have been wafted to him on the imagined breeze of their whispers. Leontes is similarly inflamed by the suggestion that what seems to him so hotly present might be ‘nothing’, and the very contemplation of the prospect of this blankness frigs his own jealous nothingness into a fury: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh? – A note infallible Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,

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That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.

(1.2.283–94) The ‘pin and web’ was a common term for clouding or cataract of the eye, but here works to suggest the weaving of the fabric of deception which Leontes is in fact himself forming from his imagined perceptions, mesmerized by the spectacle of what is nothing, and perhaps even for that reason ‘admiring the nothing of it’ as the crowd do listening to Autolycus’s song. Leontes’ mind and mouth are infected with his disgust, which he seems to sense with an immediacy that threatens to rend his language. But it is precisely the overload of ungrounded sensation, a kind of infection of selftaste or coenaesthesia, that constitutes the contagion. He senses the contagion, but what he thereby senses is in fact the rank contagion of sense. The tongue is particularly implicated in the cross-infection of speech and taste: indeed Paulina shares in Leontes’ sense of disgust at the taste of the words she is uttering: ‘What old or newer torture / Must I receive, whose every word deserves / To taste of thy most worst?’ (3.2.174–6). Language becomes a source of sonorous potency in itself, for example in Paulina’s apprehension of the venomous power of speech: I’ll take’t upon me. If I prove honey-mouthed let my tongue blister And never to my red-look’d anger be The trumpet any more.

(2.2.31–4) Cleomenes experiences the condition of stunned sensory overload in response to the oracle: ‘the burst / And the ear-deafening voice o’ th’ oracle, / Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised my sense / That I was nothing’ (3.1.8–11). When Paulina stages the resurrection of Hermione, the interchange of insensate stone and flesh is a gentle replaying of this pathology: ‘prepare / To see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death’ (5.3.21–3). Leontes too sees a kind of tender reproof in the fact that the stone seems to

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hold back from reproof as Hermione had: ‘Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she / In thy not chiding, for she was as tender / As infancy and grace’ (5.3.28–31), and continues the work of sensate-insensate substitution a moment later: ‘does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?’ (5.3.43–4). As Evelyn Tribble observes, in her reflection on the bilaterality of touching and being touched in The Winter’s Tale, much depends on the way in which touch is solicited precisely by being forestalled or held at a distance, which seems to encourage the transfusion of cold stone into warmable flesh.34 In early modern thinking about the senses, agitation strove against inertia, and fitful fever of various kinds against the ‘moody and dull melancholy’ evoked by Emilia in Comedy of Errors (5.1.79). Humoral theory encouraged a view of the world in which all aspects of human life, including diet, medication, and sexual life, were distributed between stimulation and calm. Inertia was more than just the reduction of motion: like lightness, it could seem to have its own quality and motive force, as in Bacon’s witty observation in Sylva Sylvarum that ‘Motion doth discusse the Torpour of Solide Bodies Which beside their Motion of Gravity, have in them a Naturall Appetite, not to move at all.’35 The torpor of motionless matter is here construed not as not-wanting but as a wilful wanting not to want. Much of medicine was concerned with the extremes of damping down fury on the one hand and stimulating sense on the other. To be numb or palsied was to approach the condition of an object, and the most frozen and lifeless kind of matter of all was stone. Insensibility is often thought of as dullness – heavy, cold, lumpish. The decline into old age is a slow wasting and abatement of sensory energy, as in Timon’s condemnation of the ingratitude of the old: Their blood is caked, ’tis cold, it seldom flows; ’Tis lack of kindly warmth they are not kind; And nature, as it grows again toward earth, Is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy.

(2.2.242–5) The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have been particularly aware of the decline of sense into insensibility, whether through the inexorable effects of ‘palsied eld’, or the sudden onset of stroke, usually called apoplexy (literally, that which strikes one down). Apoplexy was subject to just as much

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confused and approximate thinking as any other early modern illness. It was routinely associated with epilepsy, as a version of ‘falling sickness’, in the process conjoining the convulsions that may accompany an epileptic fit with the paralysis that is sometimes an effect of stroke. It was assumed that insensibility was the effect of coldness and therefore seen as a kind of congestion. William Langham’s The Garden of Health (1597) recommended the tingling herb pellitory (perhaps Anacyclus pyrethrum) in the case of ‘Barrennesse of colde cause, and for the strangling of the mother, and for the colde diseases, as the palsie, the falling sicknesse, and nummednesse.’36 Robert Burton wrote of the ‘cold’ version of melancholy that ‘it degenerates often into Epilepsie, Apoplexie, Dotage, or into Blindnesse’, and apoplexy is usually mentioned as part of a rather miscellaneous list of brain ailments: ‘Caro, Vertigo, Incubus, Apoplexie, Falling sicknesse’; obstructions of the ventricles are responsible for ‘an Apoplexie, or Epilepsie’.37 The association between apoplexy and epilepsy brought vertigo into the association, Philip Barrough warning that ‘Vertigo and scotoma will quickly be changed into pernitious diseases, for that they are verie nigh to them, specially to the falling sicknes and the Apoplexie.’38 Nevertheless, apoplexy provided a name for many forms of paralysis or loss of sensation. Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote that ‘Apoplexia is an evill, that maketh a man leese all manner feeling […] Apoplexia stoppeth all the chambers of the braine, with privation & diminution of feeling and of mooving.’39 Falstaff evokes its effects rather more gropingly in his conversation with the Lord Chief Justice: ‘This apoplexy, as I take it, is a kind of lethargy, an ’t please your lordship, a kind of sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling’ (2H4  1.2.112–14). Mocking the Lord Chief Justice’s reproach for failing to respond to his summons, Falstaff goes on to say ‘It hath it original from much grief, from study, and perturbation of the brain. I have read the cause of his effects in Galen: it is a kind of deafness’ (1.2.116–18). Falstaff is teasing in his series of seemings – ‘a kind of lethargy […] a kind of sleeping […] a kind of deafness’, even as his substitutions articulate something of the genuine difficulty of bringing the retreat of sense to sense. Seemingly alert to the game Falstaff is playing, the Lord Chief Justice responds, ‘I think you are fallen into the disease, for you hear not what I say to you’ (1.2.119–20). When the king succumbs to another apoplectic attack – ‘my sight fails, and my brain is giddy’

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(4.3.110) – Prince Thomas makes a similar assumption: ‘Th’ incessant care and labour of his mind / Hath wrought the mure that should confine it in / So thin that life looks through’ (4.3.118–20). Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helthe (1539) made the rather different suggestion that ‘immoderate slepe maketh the body apt unto palseis, apoplexis, falling siknes, reumes, & impostumes’.40 In fact, Galen attributes apoplexy to overindulgence, especially in wine, rather than to study.41 He is followed in this by Philip Barrough, who writes that ‘The Apoplexie is caused of a flegmaticke humour, that is cold, grosse and tough, which doth at one time aboundantly fill the principall ventricles of the braine, which humour overmuch crudities, and chiefly dronkennes doth engender.’42 Attempted remedies for apoplexy tended towards the vigorous induction of the powers of feeling that seemed to have been lost, as indicated in the use of apoplexy as a metaphor for the ‘dead sleep of Sin […] and Impious Stupidity’ into which the nation had fallen according to the preacher ‘A.M.’ in a pamphlet of 1693: Do the Physitians use gentle Applications, and only stroke their Apoplectic Patients? No certainly, they find Rubbing and Chafing, Pinching and Wounding, Scarrifying and Cupping little enough to make them recover of their Dead Fit. And shall the Soul in as deep an Apoplexy as ever the Body felt, have soft things said to her?43

Lethargy was used to indicate a more active and stubborn condition of insensibility – a minor form of apoplexy, but for that very reason more apt to be thought of as what Nashe calls ‘lethargy of sinne’, the result of deliberate spiritual insensitivity.44 The author of a conversion narrative of 1669 writes that ‘you snore out the evidence of it in your Apoplectick fit: you are well because you feel not your sickness, and whole because, your wound throbs not’.45 This is the kind of torpor that affects Barnadine in Measure for Measure: ‘A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’ (4.2.142–5). Lethargy could be regarded as a source of corruption, as in the complaint of the servingman in Coriolanus: ‘Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men’ (4.5.230–3). Hamlet uses the word ‘apoplexed’ to mean stilled or neutralized, when he says to Gertrude:

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Sense, sure, you have – Else could you not have motion. But, sure, that sense Is apoplexed, for madness would not err Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thrall’d But it reserved some quantity of choice To serve in such a difference.

(Ham 3.4.69–74) The interchange between sensing and the insensible sometimes operates as a benign kind of fetishism, as when Innogen, hearing of Posthumus’s parting action of kissing his handkerchief, cries ‘Senseless linen, happier therein than I!’ (Cym 1.3.7), recalling her own use of the word to Cymbeline a little earlier, in declaring ‘I am senseless of your wrath. A touch more rare / Subdues all pangs, all fears’ (1.1.136–7). Absence of desired sensation is a kind of intense numbness, operating according to the paradoxical logic of intensification-indiminution evoked in Innogen’s words imagining how she would have strained her gaze to follow Posthumus’s departure: I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them, but To look upon him, till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay, followed him, till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air, and then Have turned mine eye and wept.

(1.3.17–22) Many discussions of the senses have turned on their number and relative ranking, whether there be thought to be four, five, or the seventeen that has been attained in modern psychology. But the early modern concern with insensibility makes it clear that magnitude is as important as multiplicity. The question posed at the beginning of this essay, whether the negative of sense can be or become available to sense, is asked and answered throughout Shakespeare’s writing, generating a powerfully paradoxical economy. Representing the limit of sense, insensibility is also, in Hamlet’s terms, ‘thralled to ecstasy’, in a cold-hot being-beside-itself of sense that is at once abeyance and generative principle.

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Notes 1

Michael Witmore, ‘Shakespeare, Sensation, and Renaissance Existentialism’, Criticism 54 (2012): 419.

2 Ibid., 423. 3

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London:

4

Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or The combat of the tongue, and the five senses for

Penguin, 1985), 300. superiority. A pleasant comoedie (London, 1607), A4v. 5

Ibid., A4r.

6

Ibid., A4v.

7 Ibid. 8

Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 270.

9

Niall Atkinson, ‘The Social Life of the Senses: Architecture, Food, and Manners’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, ed. Hermann Roodenburg (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 25–8.

10 Axel Karenberg and Irmgard Hort, ‘Medieval Descriptions and Doctrines of Stroke: Preliminary Analysis of Select Sources. Part III: Multiplying Speculations – The High and Late Middle Ages (1000–1450)’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 7 (1998): 195. 11 Steven Connor, Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion, 2016), 29–32. 12 Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 2 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1860), 1:66; my translation. 13 John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials; Relating Chiefly to Religion, and the Reformation of it, and the Emergencies of the Church of England, under King Henry VIII. King Edward VI. and Queen Mary the First, 3 vols (London, 1721), I:139. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 133–4. 15 Steven Connor, ‘Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft’, 2009. Available online: http://stevenconnor.com/hardsoft.html (accessed 2 January 2020). 16 Thomas Adams, The White Devil, or The Hypocrite Uncased (London, 1623), 23. 17 Sir John Davies and Christopher Marlowe, Epigrammes and Elegies (‘Middleborugh’, 1599), C3r.

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18 Johann Heinrich Meibom, Tractatus de usu flagrorum in re medica & veneria (Lübeck, 1639); A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs: Also of the Office of the Loins and Reins (London, 1718). 19 James M. Bromley, ‘Social Relations and Masochistic Sexual Practice in The Nice Valour’, Modern Philology 107 (2010): 565. 20 Richard Head, The Canting Academy, or, The Devils Cabinet Opened (London, 1673), 148. 21 B. E., A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew in its Several Tribes of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats &c. (London, 1699), E6r. 22 Edward Ward, The London-Spy Compleat. In Eighteen Parts, 2 vols (London, 1700), 1:8–9. 23 Ibid., 1:9. 24 See Jennifer Edwards’s contribution to this volume for a sustained account of Antony and Cleopatra’s beats, strokes, and pleasures (157–77). 25 Plutarch, Lives Vol. VII: Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadette Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1919), 584–5. 26 John Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1996), 139. 27 Henry Fielding, Plays: Volume Two 1731–1734, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 406–7. 28 John Lacy, The Dumb Lady, or, The Farriar Made Physician (London, 1672), 56. 29 Anthony Nixon, The Dignitie of Man both in the Perfections of his Soule and Bodie (London, 1612), 69–70. 30 Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Shakespearean Pain’, in Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 199. 31 Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 32 Ibid., 66–7. 33 Angelus Sala, Opiologia: or, A treatise concerning the nature, properties, true preparation and safe use and administration of opium, trans. Thomas Bretnor (London, 1618), A5r. 34 Evelyn Tribble, ‘“O, she’s warm”: Touch in The Winter’s Tale’, in Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 77–8.

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35 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: or A naturall historie In ten centuries (London, 1627), 197. 36 William Langham, The Garden of Health (London, 1597), 475. 37 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), 1:120, 1:131, 1:163. 38 Philip Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke (London, 1583), 15. 39 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, trans. John Trevisa and Stephen Batman (London, 1582), 17, 90. 40 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helthe ­(London, 1539), 48. 41 Axel Karenberg, ‘Reconstructing a Doctrine: Galen on Apoplexy’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 3 (1994): 95. 42 Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, 25. 43 A. M., The Reformed Gentleman, or, The Old English Morals Rescued from the Immoralities of the Present Age (London, 1693), A3r–v. 44 Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (London, 1613), 177. 45 Anon., Conversion Exemplified in the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman Now in Glory (London, 1669), A6v–A7r.

3

The classical tradition Tanya Pollard

Writers in classical antiquity described theatrical performance as spurring audience’s senses and sensations, for better and for worse. In Plato’s Republic (c. 380 bce), the fictionalized figure of Socrates famously complains: when we listen to some hero from Homer or one of the other tragedymakers moaning over his sorrows in a long tirade, or to a chorus beating their breasts as they chant a lament, the best of us enjoy giving ourselves up to follow the performance with eager sympathy. The more a poet can move our feelings in this way, the better we think him.1

Plato’s Socrates imagines audiences as being physically mobilized by performance. In response to moaning and beating, they surrender to sympaschein (sympathy), a magnetic force operating between bodies.2 At first glance, this account of the turbulent sensations inspired by theatrical performance might sound admiring. Socrates acknowledges both the attraction of submitting to the theatre’s incantatory power, and the widespread reverence for poets who can instil this effect. He insists, however, that indulging in these pleasurable sensations is harmful to listeners’ souls. Directly after this passage, he goes on to explain that ‘when in our own lives some affliction comes to us, we pride ourselves on the opposite, on our ability to remain calm and endure, in the belief that this is the conduct of a man, and what we were praising in the theatre that of a woman’ (605d–e). By capitulating to this unfettered emotional indulgence, that is, we actively contribute to the degeneration of our rational moral instincts. Plato’s critique of the theatre’s impact on audiences is notorious, but the itinerary leading to its aftershocks in Shakespeare’s London is less familiar.

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Early modern critics of the theatre drew heavily on Plato’s authority to make the case that surrendering to tragedy’s pleasurable assault on the senses renders audiences both physically and morally weak. Referring to poets, the anti-theatrical critic Stephen Gosson wrote, ‘No marvel though Plato shut them out of his school, and banished them quite from his commonwealth, as effeminate writers, unprofitable members, and utter enemies to virtue.’3 Alongside highlighting Plato’s example, Gosson also echoed the terms of Plato’s critique in his own attacks on the theatre. ‘The beholding of troubles and miserable slaughters that are in tragedies’, he complained, ‘drive us to immoderate sorrow, heaviness, womanish weeping and mourning, whereby we become lovers of dumps and lamentation, both enemies to fortitude.’4 Like Plato’s Socrates, Gosson imagines tragedy prompting both moral and physical consequences, transforming bodies into heavy, sodden vehicles for infirm souls. Plato’s example provides him with a potent moral authority for anatomizing and condemning the theatre’s sway over audiences’ passions. Plato is only one of many classical authors whose writings shaped early modern ideas about theatre’s inflammation of the senses, but his prominence in these debates reflects the chains of transmission that carried ancient arguments into sixteenth-century playhouse politics. Although these debates might seem worlds apart from the plays themselves, their questions come vividly to life onstage when characters respond passionately and unpredictably to performances of all sorts. When Laertes experiences the visual and aural assault of Ophelia’s mad-songs, he is first reduced to tears, then steeled to murder. When Roman audiences lend their ears to Mark Antony’s rousing funeral speech in Julius Caesar, they are jolted from acquiescence to violent outrage. After Antony gazes on a perfumed and costumed Cleopatra in Cydnus, Enobarbus reports that he ‘pays his heart / For what his eyes eat only’ (AC 2.2.235–6). The potent sensory impact of these performances reshapes a kingdom, a republic, and an empire. These scenes, along with many others, imagine theatre’s effects on the senses as enormously consequential. This assumption, in turn, grows out of debates framed by lingering classical voices. Like Plato, Gosson links the theatre’s seduction of the outward senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste – to its transformation of the interior sensations identified with the emotions, mind, and soul. Tracing a diachronic, transnational, and intertextual chain of

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conversations from Plato to Gosson accordingly offers an important foundation for understanding early modern ideas about how theatrical performances engage senses and sensations.

Antiquity’s theatre of the senses Plato’s apparent condemnation of theatre’s affective consequences grows out of a broader critique of its effects on the senses. As recent scholarship has underscored, the physical senses prompted fascination and controversy in the ancient world.5 As the apertures through which we absorb and respond to our surroundings, the senses partake simultaneously of physiology, cognition, and emotion. Accordingly, they undermine the boundaries not only between the body’s interior and its external environment, but also between the somatic and the psychic. In the Athenian world from which Plato’s dialogues emerged, writers of poetry, philosophy, and medicine alike grappled with the complex relationships between bodies, souls, and selves.6 Although accounts differed, perceived overlaps between these entities suggested that phenomena that affected the soul would also affect the body, and vice versa, raising questions about the physical consequences of poetry. As the most directly embodied mode of poetry, theatrical performance became a particular magnet for these questions. Framed by this context, Plato’s critique of tragedy’s effects on the soul develops hand in hand with an exploration of how mimesis (poetic imitation) might affect the senses.7 Early in The Republic, he presents poetry as a form of harmful food that its consumers digest at their peril. ‘We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity’, his Socrates insists, ‘as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul’ (401b–c). Just as these dangerous botanicals threaten to invade consumers through the mouth, they can also enter through the ear. Socrates expounds at length on the effects of different forms of music, and describes the dangers of poets featuring terrors ‘whose very names send a shudder through all the hearers every year’, explaining that ‘they may be excellent for other purposes, but we are in fear for our guardians lest the habit of such thrills make them more sensitive and soft than we

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would have them’  (387c). His  words for sensitive and soft, thermoteroi and malakoteroi, literally refer to heat and malleability, implicitly likening these listening bodies to molten metal, and attributing physiological changes to these aural invasions. Elsewhere he reflects on the fallibility of the eyes for discerning truth, challenging the reliability of the visual realm and explaining that potential leaders should be tested ‘to see which of them is able to disregard the eyes and other senses and go on to being itself in company with truth’ (537d). In these and other examples, Plato’s Socrates turns to the language of the senses to describe consumers of poetic fictions as endangered by their vulnerability to the images, sounds, and tastes they absorb. Despite this overriding invocation of risk, Plato’s vocabulary of the senses also points to more uplifting possibilities for poetry’s sensory consequences. Reflecting on the power of beauty, his Socrates insists that ‘the influence that emanates from works of beauty may waft itself to eye or ear like a breeze that brings from wholesome places health’ (401c). As this reference to hygieia (health) suggests, even his account of grazing on dangerous herbs could be potentially ambiguous, resonating with his description of poetry as a pharmakon, an ambiguous Greek word that can mean poison, remedy, potion, and/or aphrodisiac.8 These tensions and contradictions surrounding poetry’s effects echo throughout The Republic. Even when warning of the dangers of poetry, Socrates mingles condemnation with awe, and even yearning. After observing that ‘if you grant admission to the honeyed muse in lyric or epic, pleasure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law’ (607a), he quickly goes on to point out that ‘if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell’ (607c). Whether poetry is health-giving or toxic, he presents its pleasure, sweetness, and attractiveness as inarguable. Although The Republic mingles wistful appreciation of poetry alongside attacks, this balance shifts in other Platonic dialogues. Describing types of madness, in Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates explains that ‘a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations.’9 He expands on this idea of possession and inspiration in Ion, telling a performer of Homer’s epics that,

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this is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine power, which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named a magnet […]. In the same manner also the Muse inspires men herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain. For all the good epic poets utter all those fine poems not from art, but as inspired and possessed, and the good lyric poets likewise; just as the Corybantian worshippers do not dance when in their senses, so the lyric poets do not indite those fine songs in their senses, but when they have started on the melody and rhythm they begin to be frantic, and it is under possession […] that the soul of the lyric poets does the same thing, by their own report. For the poets tell us, I believe, that the songs they bring us are the sweets they cull from honey-dropping founts in certain gardens and glades of the Muses – like the bees, and winging the air as these do.10

Socrates’ account of poetic inspiration is itself lyrical, teeming with metaphors for bodily attraction and ingestion. Beginning with an account of poetic force as a magnetic stone drawing other bodies under its sway, he goes on to imagine poets as dancers in uncontrollable thrall to musical rhythms. Shifting to figures of consumption, he imagines poets collecting songs from melirutos (honeydropping) fountains, like bees gathering honey from flowers. The repeated emphasis on sweetness calls to mind the food imagery of The Republic, but without that dialogue’s accusations of poisonous corruption. Although the claim that poetry is an inspiration or theia dynamis (divine power) rather than a technē (art) suggests a critique of poets’ claim to mastery, the ensuing description of this state suggests admiration and delight rather than hostility. Plato’s ambivalent account of poetry’s charged capacity to stir senses and sensations echoes throughout antiquity, shifting terms and emphases among different writers. In the Poetics (c.  350–330 bce), Plato’s student Aristotle agreed with his former teacher that tragedy appealed to the senses in order to arouse hearers’ passions, but diverged from Plato in describing this process as cognitively and ethically useful, and as a technē that could be mastered.11 Aristotle identified tragedy’s goal as producing pity and fear in order to bring about a catharsis of these emotions, using a technical medical term to identify the elimination of feelings with a physiological purgation or purification. In keeping with this slippage between physical and emotional sensations, he categorized some of the elements of tragedy, such as spectacle and melody,

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by their sensory appeal, but others, such as plot, by their effects on audiences’ expectations and emotions. In contrast to Plato’s passionate inquiry, Aristotle anatomized tragedy’s impact in pragmatic terms, in order to guide successful poetic practice. This hybrid approach inspired later writers, most notably the Roman poet Horace, who combined Aristotle’s model of practical advice with Plato’s theory of emotional contagion. In his Ars Poetica (c. 10 bce), Horace explains that playwrights should depict emotions onstage in order to move their audiences, since effectively expressed emotions will spread inexorably to those who watch them. ‘Not enough is it for poems to have beauty,’ he insists; ‘they must have charm, and lead the hearer’s soul where they will. As men’s faces smile on those who smile, so they respond to those who weep. If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself.’12 Like Plato, Horace understands weeping as a reflexive response to the performance of weeping onstage, but like Aristotle he praises plays that incite this response, and instructs would-be poets on how to achieve it. For most readers, Plato, Aristotle, and Horace are the most familiar representatives of classical literary theory, but later treatises on rhetoric continued their conversation about poetry’s effects in ways that shaped their evolving reputations and perceived meanings. Writing probably in the midfirst century ce, the author of the Greek treatise On the Sublime, now widely known as Longinus, echoed Plato in his account of poetry’s violent assault on audiences’ senses. Longinus focuses especially on vision, dwelling on the power of phantasia (poetic images). Describing images, Longinus writes, the word is predominantly used in cases where, carried away by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers. Further, you will be aware of the fact that an image has one purpose with the orators and another with the poets, and that the design of the poetical image is enthralment, of the rhetorical – vivid description. Both, however, seek to stir the passions and the emotions.13

Longinus insists that conveying an image vividly requires actually seeing it and ideally results in hearers seeing it as well. Citing lines from Euripides in which Orestes describes seeing Furies, he explains, ‘In these scenes the poet himself saw Furies, and the image in his mind he almost compelled his audience also to behold.’14 In contrast to Aristotle, who emphasizes the conscious craftsmanship

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involved in selecting and arranging ideas before the eyes, Longinus claims that the poet sees ‘carried away by enthusiasm’ (hyp’ enthusiasmou), literally possessing a god within, echoing Plato’s account of divine possession to imply passivity or even compulsion. The poet sees, he suggests, because he cannot help seeing rather than because of a concerted choice. Because he is compelled to see, moreover, he is similarly compelled to recreate his vision and to coerce an audience into sharing it. This claim echoes Plato’s account of literature’s inexorable and overwhelming sensory impact, but unlike Plato, Longinus praises the poet’s mastery of this sensory incitement. Even – or especially – if the poet is possessed, the very capacity for possession represents a form of artistry that can be developed. Paradoxically, this artistry is partly involuntary, but for Longinus the aptitude for experiencing and communicating this sensory overwhelm is itself an achievement. Longinus’s model of poetry’s sensory effects, like those of Aristotle and Horace, is substantially indebted to the terms established by Plato. This model, with an emphasis on Plato’s moral suspicions, went on to resonate in Christian texts from late antiquity, which exerted especially direct influences on early modern writers. When church fathers condemned the theatre on moral grounds, they turned to the language of the senses to express its risks to the soul. Tertullian, an early Christian author from Carthage, argued in On Spectacles (c. 197–202 ce) that Christians must avoid exposure to the sights and sounds of the theatre, which would corrode moral instincts. The North African theologian Lactantius similarly emphasized in his Divine Institutes (c. 303–311 ce) that the visual stimuli of performance would invade and rot viewers’ souls. Most influentially for early moderns, Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions (397–400 ce) both of his guilt over his own former love of the theatre’s sensual attractions and of the uncontrollable addiction to its sensual pleasures suffered by a close friend.15 Describing his own intoxication with the theatre, Augustine recalls, then in the theatres I sympathized with lovers when they sinfully enjoyed one another, although this was done fictitiously in the play. And when they lost one another, I grieved with them, as if pitying them, and yet had delight in both. But now-a-days I feel much more pity for him that delighteth in his wickedness, than for him who is counted as enduring hardships by failing to obtain some pernicious pleasure, and the loss of some miserable felicity.16

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Like Plato, Augustine turns to the language of sympathy (compatitur, misericordia) to account for the mysterious process of identification and vicarious sensation experienced by those who absorb fictional stories of others’ suffering. Also like Plato, he links this sympathy with the body and the senses. Characterizing his addiction to plays as a medical pathology – ‘I became infected with a foul disease’ – he identifies it with ‘empoisoned nails, […] burning, swelling, putrefaction, and horrible corruption’.17 Once seen, heard, and absorbed, alluring fictions cannot be confined to surfaces but penetrate the body with alarming spiritual results. Augustine extends his account of the theatre’s risks to sense and soul later in the Confessions, when he describes a friend who tried to avoid the theatre but ‘was carried away in an extraordinary manner with an incredible eagerness after the gladiatorial shows’. Dragged by fellow students to watch a show, the young man insisted that he could protect his soul by closing off access to his senses: ‘Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows?’ Eyes, however, are not the only portal to the body, as he discovered to his peril: he, shutting up the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to roam abroad after such naughtiness; and would that he had shut his ears also! For, upon the fall of one in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirring him strongly, he, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it were to despise and rise superior to it, no matter what it were, opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul, which was bold rather than valiant hitherto; and so much the weaker in that it presumed on itself, which ought to have depended on You. For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness; nor did he turn away, but fixed his eye, drinking in madness unconsciously, and was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime.18

Augustine imagines his friend’s seduction and fall as taking place through an assault on his senses. Although he cannot be forced to lend his eyes, his inability to shut his ears left him vulnerable to the audience’s violent noise, which served in turn to pry open the other senses. Once access to the body and mind are

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unlocked through the ears, the eyes come next, then the skin, albeit figuratively, with a wound. After this invasion of the self through hearing, vision, and touch, an assault follows on taste: he ‘imbibed’, ‘drinking in madness’, and became ‘drunken with the bloody pastime’. The language of imbibing, drinking, and drunkenness suggests a variation on Plato’s pharmakon and the experience of uncontrollable possession. By implicitly identifying the intoxicating sensation of theatregoing with the addictive effects of wine, this language also suggests a model of theatregoing as addictive, which would develop even more fully in the early modern period.19

Revisiting antiquity Augustine and other church fathers offer especially recognizable backdrops for early modern debates about the theatre, but new interest in their Greek predecessors played a crucial role in activating these debates. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, and acquiring momentum in the sixteenth century, expanded access to Greek texts prompted new interest both in classical literary genres and in the classical literary theories that responded to and accompanied them.20 Plato and Aristotle in particular attracted attention, but less conspicuous figures such as Longinus also entered into circulation, joining more familiar Latin authors such as Horace and Christian writers.21 The new visibility of Greek texts also intensified interests in Galen and Greek medicine, prompting more discussions about embodiment and the physiology of emotions.22 As conversations about classical literary genres and their effects on audiences developed in the light of these increasingly visible texts, early modern writers found themselves scrutinizing the role of the senses in constructing literary and rhetorical power. Although discussions of classical literary theory began in continental Europe, especially Italy, rising levels of Greek study in England also prompted self-conscious critiques of poetry by English writers.23 Anti-theatrical treatises offered some of the richest and most detailed accounts of the theatre’s effects on audiences’ senses and emotions, but defences of poetry, as well as plays and poems themselves, similarly turned to the language of bodily response to imagine the effects of literature.24 The involuntary physical responses of laughter and weeping prompted much

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discussion among critics of plays, as well as within plays themselves; as Matthew Steggle has argued, playwrights staged tears and laughter in order to cue these responses in audiences, as per Horace’s advice.25 Throughout these discussions of poetry’s sensory and sensational consequences, early modern writers repeatedly turned to the authority of antiquity to argue their cases. Armed with a classical education from The King’s School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stephen Gosson exemplified the effects of newly prominent Greek literary theory on contemporary literary debates. His anti-theatrical precursors, however, had already established the terms of his concern. In A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577), the preacher John Northbrooke set up the terms of attacks against the theatre by citing Plato and Church fathers as evidence for the dangers of hedonistic idleness exemplified by the theatre. Addressing his counterpart, Youth, the allegorical character Age begins by expounding on the superiority of work to idleness: ‘Plato sayeth’, he reports, ‘Each man was born and brought into this world for others’ sake, as one man to help another.’26 When he turns specifically to the evils of the theatre, Age cites church fathers to emphasize plays’ threats to the sense of sight. ‘Saint Ambrose […] called stage plays vanities’, he explains, wishing that he could call back the people which run so fast thither, and will them to turn their eyes from beholding of such plays and interludes. The like saying hath Saint Augustine. Lactantius sayeth that the eyes are diverse and variable, which are taken by the beholding of things, which are in the use of men, nature, or delectable things. Vitanda ergo spectacula omnia, all such spectacles and shows (sayeth he) are therefore to be avoided.27

Although Northbrooke’s treatise lacks Gosson’s literary verve, his insistence on the vulnerability of eyes to seductive spectacles, as well as his implicit invocation of taste in his concern about taking in ‘delectable things’, identifies his similar scepticism about the senses and their impact on the soul. His selfconsciously announced allusions to Plato and the church fathers, moreover, signal his debts to the same classically rooted conversations about literature’s sensory consequences that Gosson highlights. Despite the vast gulf in time, and the intervening influence of medieval religious and formal developments, his treatise shows a family resemblance linking him with these earlier debates.

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Writing only two years later, Gosson built on Northbrooke’s foundation, similarly citing Plato, Ambrose, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. Despite his pagan status, Plato takes on a privileged authority throughout Gosson’s writings, where his name appears especially in conjunction with condemnation of poetry’s sensual pleasures. ‘Plato’, Gosson writes, when he saw the doctrine of these Teachers neither for profit necessary, nor to be wished for pleasure, gave them all Drum’s entertainment, not suffering them once to shew their faces in a reformed common wealth. And the Tyrius that lays such a foundation for Poets, in the name of Homer, overthrows his whole building in the person of Mithecus, which was an excellent Cook among the Greeks, and as much honored for his confections, as Phidias for his carving.28

Gosson here builds on Plato’s references to poetry as food by merging the philosopher’s prohibition on poets with the story of Mithecus, taken from Greek rhetorician Maximus of Tyre (fl. second century ce). Renowned as the artistic equal of the famous sculptor Phidias, Mithecus was reportedly exiled from Sparta for encouraging luxury and decadence. Encouraging the sensations of taste and smell with extravagant and gratuitous pleasure, Gosson warns, poses the same threat as writing luxuriously pleasurable texts: ‘I may well liken Homer to Mithecus, and poets to cooks; the pleasures of the one wins the body from labor, and conquereth the sense; the allurement of the other draws the mind from virtue, and confoundeth wit.’29 His ambiguous formulation suggests that poetry’s allure draws the mind from virtue, but he offers the equal likelihood that the poet, like the cook, might also focus the medium’s seductive powers on the body and senses. In fusing a ban on Mithecus with a ban on poets, Gosson also flattens the complexity of Plato’s position on poetry by attributing to him the claim that poets were neither necessary for profit nor desirable for pleasure, despite Plato’s Socrates’ repeated descriptions of wishing, even longing, for the pleasures of poetry. This masking of Plato’s ambivalence suggests contradictions within Gosson’s own feelings towards poetry, a likelihood supported both by his early career as a playwright and his own tantalizingly poetic language throughout his treatises. Literature’s assault on the senses lies at the core of Gosson’s attack, and later in the School of Abuse he returns to the analogy of the cook to anatomize the

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physiological routes of this assault. ‘There set they abroach strange consorts of melody to tickle the ear,’ he writes of poets; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sense; and wanton speech, to whet desire to inordinate lust. Therefore of both barrels, I judge cooks and painters the better hearing, for the one extendeth his art no farther than to the tongue, palate, and nose, the other to the eye; and both are ended in outward sense, which is common to us with brute beasts. But these by the privy entries of the ear slip down into the heart, and with gunshot of affection gall the mind, where reason and virtue should rule the roost.30

Gosson seems to move methodically through the senses in this catalogue, exploring hearing, vision, touch, taste, and smell, but his language suggests synaesthetic appeals to multiple senses simultaneously. The verb ‘tickle’, linked in this period with tingling and itching, comes from roots meaning ‘to touch lightly’, implicitly assigning the tactility of skin to music’s interface with the ears.31 ‘Flatter’, similarly, has etymological links to flattening or caressing with the hand, linking the visual effects of clothing to another form of touch. Yet although these senses seem to merge and overlap in their seductive appeal to bodily pleasure, Gosson assigns them different degrees of invasive threat. Vision, taste, and smell are relatively superficial, extending only slightly beyond the body’s external orifices. Highlighting the especially charged place of music and sound in anti-theatrical concerns about the stage, hearing penetrates the most deeply into the heart and mind.32 The body’s senses merge not only with each other, then, but also with the internal sensations of intellect, emotion, and soul.33 Although Gosson was not the first early modern anti-theatrical critic, nor the first to highlight his debts to Plato and the church fathers, the wit and forcefulness of his writings lend him a special prominence in the period’s debates about the theatre. His key claims – about the theatre’s uncanny sway over the senses, and the endorsement of classical authorities – continue to resonate in later anti-theatrical writings. In A Mirror of Monsters (1587), William Rankins cites the ‘Divine Plato’ to condemn the theatre for spawning idleness that ‘besotteth the senses, and bewitcheth the minds of men’.34 Oxford scholar John Rainolds similarly refers to Plato and the church fathers in his

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The Overthrow of Stage Plays (1599), in which he insists that ‘senses are moved, affections are delighted, hearts though strong and constant are vanquished by such players’.35 In his enormous and frenzied Histriomastix (1633), William Prynne observes, ‘The unparalleled philosopher Plato, as his own works, with sundry others, testify, banished all stage plays, play-poets, and play-poems out of his commonwealth as being the chief instruments to effeminate the minds, to vitiate the manners of the people […] and to withdraw them from the study of virtue to the love of vice.’36 Many of these writers were demonstrably schooled in Greek – Gosson and Rainolds certainly were – but whether or not they drew directly on Plato’s writings, each of them found powerful leverage in his iconic status. Plato’s spectre haunted poetry’s early modern defenders, just as it buoyed critics. The complexity of his writings on this topic, however, encouraged defenders to enlist him in their cause, even while conceding his apparent opposition. In A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, in Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579), Thomas Lodge acknowledges, ‘Though Plato could wish the expulsion of poets from his well-publics, which he might do with reason, yet the wisest had not all that same opinion,’ and later exhorts, ‘God keep us from a Plato that should expel such men.’37 As his conditional verbs suggest, however, he also insinuates that Gosson has misunderstood Plato’s stance. Implicitly alluding to the account of poetic inspiration in Phaedrus, he observes, ‘I would make a long discourse unto you of Plato’s four furies, but I leave them; it pitieth me to bring a rod of your own making to beat you withal.’38 His brief but pointed allusion reminds readers that there are many versions of Plato and that all writers who invoke him create him anew in their own images. Where Lodge hinted at a challenge, others tackled Gosson’s Plato headon, reinterpreting the philosopher’s legacy towards their own ends. Most famously and influentially, Philip Sidney – to whom Gosson had optimistically but haplessly dedicated his School of Abuse – drew on his own Greek study to depict Plato as a proponent of poetry, while simultaneously revalorizing the language of the senses.39 ‘But now indeed my burden is great,’ Sidney asserts in his Apology for Poetry (1595), ‘that Plato’s name is laid upon me: whom, I must confess, of all philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence, and with good reason, since of all philosophers he is the most poetical.’40

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In order to contradict Plato’s criticism without contradicting Plato himself, Sidney focuses on a particular aspect of Plato’s critique, and explains that he was simply exposed to the wrong literature, and misattributed the source of its errors. ‘Plato found fault that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods,’ he explains, ‘making light tales of that unspotted essence; and therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.’41 Asserting that these stories did not begin with poets, he continues that ‘Plato, therefore, whose authority I had much rather justly construe then unjustly resist, meant not in general of poets […] but only meant to drive out those wrong opinions of the deity: whereof now, without further law, Christianity hath taken away all the hurtful belief, perchance as he thought nourished by then esteemed poets.’42 Like Lodge, Sidney also looks beyond the Republic to emphasize the ambiguity and admiration expressed in others of his writings. ‘And man need go no further than to Plato himself to know his meaning,’ he explains, who, in his dialogue called Ion, giveth high and rightly divine commendation unto poetry. So as Plato banishing the abuse, not the thing; not banishing it, but giving due honor to it; shall be our patron, and not our adversary. For indeed I had much rather, since truly I may do it, show their mistaking of Plato, under whose lion’s skin they would make an ass-like braying against poesy, than go about to overthrow his authority whom, the wiser a man is, the more just cause he shall find to have in admiration: especially since he attributeth unto poesy more than myself do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man’s wit, as in the forenamed dialogue is apparent.43

For all his differences with Gosson and other anti-theatricalists, Sidney makes no attempt to depart from their admiration for Plato. Instead, like Lodge, he nudges Plato’s legacy to rewrite it in a more sympathetic direction. Similarly, rather than challenging Plato’s and Gosson’s accounts of poetry’s seductive power to enter the soul through appealing to the senses, Sidney seizes on this model, while recasting it towards positive ends. In particular, Sidney turned to the language of taste and food to imagine literature’s effects, describing the poet as ‘food for the tenderest stomachs’ and poetry as ‘a cluster of grapes’ and ‘medicine of cherries’; the term ‘sweet’ recalling Plato’s references to honey and bees, recurs nineteen times throughout his Apology of Poetry (1595).44 For Sidney – as for Aristotle, whom he also cites frequently – poetry’s appeal to

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pleasure heightens its usefulness, by luring listeners into its lessons. ‘[E]ven as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste,’ he explains, ‘which if one should begin to tell them the nature of the aloe or rhubarb they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth; so is it in men.’45 By redeeming and repurposing Plato’s model of literature’s sensory effects, Sidney developed a foundation for a new line of counterarguments to anti-theatrical attacks. His positive valorization of the senses reappears in the very different defence put forward by Thomas Heywood, who revelled in Greek myths in his Ages plays, and similarly sprinkled Greek models and authorities throughout his 1612 Apology for Actors. Unlike most of his precursors in the theatre’s debates, Heywood steers clear of direct references to Plato in this treatise (although he cites him frequently in other writings), but alongside descriptions of ancient Greek theatres and Muses, he draws on the language of the senses to emphasize the theatre’s power to shape audiences in its image. ‘A description’, he asserts, is only a shadow received by the ear, but not perceived by the eye; so, lively portraiture is merely a form seen by the eye, but can neither show action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to move the spirits of the beholder to admiration.46

Forcefully conjuring the senses, Heywood argues, offers the most effective strategy for inspiring audiences to greatness. The physical immediacy of the theatre, in his account, offers the most direct and vibrant path to this simultaneous mobilizing of eye and ear. ‘But to see a soldier shaped like a soldier, walk, speak, act like a soldier,’ he imagines; to see a Hector all besmeared in blood, trampling upon the bulks of kings […] to see as, I have seen, Hercules in his own shape hunting the boar, knocking down the bull, taming the hart, fighting with Hydra, murdering Geryon, slaughtering Diomedes, wounding the Stimphalides, killing the Centaurs, pashing the lion, squeezing the dragon, dragging Cerberus in chains […] oh, these were sights to make an Alexander.47

Jammed with the violent bloodshed of fictive pagans, Heywood’s examples might seem to jar with his idealistic claims; they certainly diverge from Sidney’s

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more virtuously moralizing tone. Both writers, however, harp repeatedly on Alexander the Great – who reportedly slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his head in order to internalize the spirit of Achilles – as a triumphant example of poetry’s ability to fashion a gentleman. Both, similarly, identify soldierly courage as one of the potentially triumphant outcomes of literary inspiration. Although Heywood’s treatise does not showcase the language of food, honey, and sugar, his gleeful sense of the theatre’s mobilizing pleasures shares something of Sidney’s case for sweetness. Heywood’s arguments about the sensory delights of theatrical performances resonate in his own theatrical practice. His spectacular action-filled plays for the popular and populist Red Bull playhouse revelled in appealing to the senses. As his ‘Homer’ explains in The Brazen Age, which dramatized ancient Greek exploits such as Hercules’ labours, the play strives ‘to illustrate things not knowne to all’ and to teach those ‘whom we unlettered call’, since ‘more then sight / We seeke to please.’48 Like Sidney, Gosson, Northbrooke, Rankins, Rainolds, and Lodge, Heywood habitually looked to antiquity to authorize his claims about the theatre’s sensory effects. Unlike these writers, however, Heywood showcased his classical engagement in plays as well as polemical commentary. In crossing the divide between theory and practice, he implicitly reminds us that playwrights not only prompted debates about the senses but also responded to them. Shakespeare entered these debates as well. When sense-inflaming performances prompt his characters to adulterous passions, murder, and civil war, his plays become part of an ongoing conversation about the power of the senses to inspire, intoxicate, and undo. But what positions do they take, and how can we tell? Violent responses to spectacles might seem to echo Gosson’s darkly Platonic warnings about the moral hazards of sensory susceptibility, but other Shakespearean moments – in which faces or voices move characters to victory, love, and other kinds of redemption – suggest the optimistic possibilities imagined by Sidney and Heywood. Recognizing the complex legacies of classical writings about the senses, and their persistent importance for early modern authors, allows us to situate scenes of spectatorship in a larger set of conversations about the ethical consequences of the theatre’s appeal to the senses, and to ask new questions about what is at stake in depictions of this appeal.

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Notes 1 Plato, The Republic, 605c–d, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols 5 and 6, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1969), hereafter cited in the text. I have altered the cited translation by emending ‘Homer or one of the other poets’ to ‘Homer or one of the other tragedy-makers’, capturing the literal sense of the Greek tragoidopoion – tragedymakers, or tragedy-poets – in order to underscore Plato’s explicit identification here of Homer as a writer of tragedy. 2

On the bodily implications embedded in Greek concepts of sympathy, see especially Brooke Holmes, ‘Reflection: Galen’s Sympathy’, in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 61–9.

3

Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), A2r. On Gosson’s debts to Plato and other classical Greek authors, see especially Efterpi Mitsi, ‘Myth and Metamorphosis in Stephen Gosson’s Schoole Of Abuse’, English 60, no. 229 (2011): 108–23; ‘The “popular philosopher”: Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics’, Early Modern Literary Studies 9, no. 2 (2003): 2.1–23.

4

Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), C5v–C6r.

5 See Smell and the Ancient Senses, ed. Mark Bradley (London: Routledge, 2014); Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, ed. Shane Butler and Alex Purves (London: Routledge, 2014); Sound and the Ancient Senses, ed. Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter (London: Routledge, 2018); Sight and the Ancient Senses, ed. Michael Squire (London: Routledge, 2015). 6

On Greek models of embodiment, see Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); James Porter, Constructions of the Classical Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Brooke Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

7

Jessica Moss, ‘What Is Imitative Poetry and Why Is It Bad?’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 415–44.

8

See Plato, Republic, 389b; also Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171; Stephen Halliwell, ‘Antidotes and Incantations: Is There a Cure for Poetry in Plato’s Republic?’, in Plato and the Poets, ed. Pierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 241–66. On the early modern

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afterlife of this idea of poetry as pharmakon, see Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9 Plato, Phaedrus, 245a. 10 Plato, Ion, 533d–534b. 11 See Stephen Halliwell, ‘Pleasure, Understanding, and Emotion in Aristotle’s Poetics’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 241–60. 12 Horace, The Art of Poetry, in Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 459. 13 Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907; 1st edn 1899), 83–5. 14 Ibid., 85. 15 On Augustine and other late antique critiques of theatre’s sensory impact, see Pat Easterling and Richard Miles, ‘Dramatic Identities: Tragedy in Late Antiquity’, in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 95–111; Donnalee Dox, ‘The Idea of a Theater in Late Antiquity: Augustine’s Critique and Isidore’s History’, in The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 11–42; Jennifer Herdt, ‘The Theater of the Virtues: Augustine’s Critique of Pagan Mimesis’, in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 111–29. 16 Augustine, Confessions, trans. J. G. Pilkington (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), 3.2. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 6.8.13, details. 19 On links between addiction and theatregoing in Augustine as well as early modern English texts, see Rebecca Lemon, Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 20 On new access to Greek texts in this period, see N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London: Duckworth, 1992); L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; 1st edn 1968). 21 On sixteenth-century emergence of classical literary theories, see Daniel Javitch, ‘The Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory in the Sixteenth Century’, Modern Language Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1998): 139–69; Nicholas Cronk, ‘Aristotle, Horace,

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and Longinus: The Conception of Reader Response’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199–204; Timothy Reiss, ‘Renaissance Theatre and the Theory of Tragedy’, in Norton, Cambridge History, 229–47; and Bernard Weinberg, ‘Translations and Commentaries of Longinus, On the Sublime, to 1600: A Bibliography’, Modern Philology 47 (1950): 145–51. 22 On emerging access to Galen in this period, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Andrew Wear, ‘Galen in the Renaissance’, in Galen: Problems and Prospects, ed. Vivian Nutton (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1981), 229–62. On early modern English literary engagement with Galen, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23 See Micha Lazarus, ‘Greek Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England’, Renaissance Studies 20, no. 3 (2015): 433–58; ‘Aristotelian Criticism in Sixteenth-Century England’, Oxford Handbooks Online, September 2016. Available online: https:// www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-148 (accessed 1 November 2018). 24 On early modern English anti-theatricalism, see Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). On engagement with ideas about literary sensations in this period, see Katharine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 25 Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). On early modern theories of sympathetic response, see Ann Moyer, ‘Sympathy in the Renaissance’, in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 70–101; Mary Floyd Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 26 John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (London, 1577), 10. 27 Ibid., 62.

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28 Gosson, School of Abuse, A4r–v. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., B6v. 31 See Bruce R. Smith’s discussion of tickling (31–3) and Steven Connor’s discussion of chafing (45–7) in this volume. 32 On the privileged status of ears and hearing, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); on the special position of music in debates about the stage, see Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and ‘Early Encounters with Shakespeare Music: Experiencing Playhouse Musical Performance, 1590–1613’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Christopher R. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 33 On relations between internal and external senses, see, for instance, Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 34 William Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters (London, 1587), 8r. 35 John Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage Plays (Middleburg, 1599), 18. 36 William Prynne, Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge (London, 1633), 448. 37 Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, in Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (London, 1579), 6, 22. 38 Ibid., 14–15. 39 See Micha Lazarus, ‘Sidney’s Greek Poetics’, Studies in Philology 112, no. 3 (2015): 504–36; Donald V. Stump, ‘Sidney’s Concept of Tragedy in the Apology and in the Arcadia’, Studies in Philology 79, no. 1 (1982): 41–61; and Margaret Healy, ‘Poetic “Making” and Moving the Soul’, in Craik and Pollard, Shakespearean Sensations, 173–90. 40 Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (London, 1595). 41 Ibid., I1r. 42 Ibid., I1r–v. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., D4v, E4r, F1r; see especially Mitsi, ‘The “popular philosopher”’. 45 Sidney, Apology, E4v. 46 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), B3v. 47 Ibid., B4r. 48 Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London, 1613), L3v.

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4

‘Sweet above compare’? Disputing about taste in Venus and Adonis, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida Elizabeth L. Swann

Introduction Early in Venus and Adonis (1593), the eponymous Goddess begins wooing the reluctant Adonis by asking him to alight from his horse. ‘If thou wilt deign this favour’, she promises, ‘for thy meed / A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know’ (15–16). Venus’s description of the delights she offers as ‘honey secrets’, and her punning on ‘meed’ as reward and mead (an alcoholic drink made with fermented honey), associates erotic gratification both with the epistemological satisfaction of knowing ‘secrets’ and with the gustatory pleasures of sweetness. Later in the poem, Adonis adapts Venus’s vocabulary of tasting and knowing to emphasize her precipitousness. ‘Before I know myself ’, he pleads, ‘seek not to know me’, for ‘the mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, / Or being early plucked is sour to taste’ (525–8). Figuring his anticipated growth into sexual maturity as a form of ripening (premature ‘plucking’ will be sour), Adonis entreats Venus to refrain from attempting to ‘know’ him sexually before he ‘knows’ himself in the fuller moral and spiritual sense demanded by the nosce te ipsum maxim (a keystone of Renaissance ethics). Adonis’s plea, however, collapses what its speaker strives to hold apart: although Adonis overtly distinguishes between sexual knowledge and self-knowledge, his pun on ‘know’ conflates them.1 In Venus and Adonis, ‘honey secrets’ are illicit and transgressive, but they may also hold out the promise of self-understanding and moral transformation.

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Venus’s use of the language of taste to associate sensual pleasure with clandestine knowledge is typical of a poem that repeatedly links sweetness, sex, and secrets – but it is also characteristic of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and Renaissance culture more broadly. Shakespeare’s works are dense with the language of taste: the word and its cognates appear  111 times across his corpus, and related vocabulary is also frequent. Perhaps most strikingly, ‘sweet’ appears  873 times, and its variants and compound words are also numerous.2 Often, too, such language is associated both with sensual desire and with knowledge and understanding – sometimes simultaneously. In the Renaissance, the verb ‘taste’ could be used in a sense that is now obsolete, to mean ‘have carnal knowledge of ’.3 Thus, in Cymbeline (1611;  1623), Posthumus challenges Iachimo to test Imogen’s fidelity by daring him to ‘make’t apparent / That you have tasted her in bed’ (2.4.55–6). As we shall see, this notional and lexical association between taste and sex derives, in part, from the low status of both, their joint status as disreputable appetitive desires. As the common euphemism for intercourse – carnal knowledge – implies, however, taste and sex are also allied insofar as they are both ways of knowing. An omnipresent association between the sense of taste (especially sweetness) and sexual pleasure is also ubiquitous in the Renaissance more generally: plays, prose fiction, and poetry alike linger lasciviously on the beloved’s cherry lips and syrupy kisses. Conversely, experiences of sexual frustration, jealousy, rejection, and betrayal are commonly described as bitter. Such language is so common it can come to seem meaningless or bland. It is certainly deeply conventional, with precedents in the classical and scriptural traditions.4 Towards the end of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.  1594–5;  1598), however, we find a moment that reminds us that ‘sweet’ not only serves as a generic word for that which is pleasant or attractive, but also designates a distinctive flavour. In response to Berowne’s plea for ‘one sweet word with thee’, the masked Princess (whom Berowne believes to be his adored Rosalind) replies ‘Honey, and milk, and sugar: there is three’ (5.2.230–1). ‘Sweet’, grown insipid through reiteration, is restored to gustatory immediacy by the Princess’s witty literalism. Indeed, the sugary lexicon of Renaissance love poets and playwrights can be read as the textual residue of real sense experience. Renaissance women

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were both industrious producers and avid consumers of sweetness, serving as domestic manufacturers of marchpane, suckets, and other sweetmeats  – including ‘kissing comfits’ which served not only to counter bad breath but also to flavour the mouth. John Murrell’s A daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen (1617), for example, contains a recipe ‘to make Muscadinaes, commonly called kissing-Comfits’, by beating ‘halfe a pound of double refined Sugar’ with musk, ambergris, and iris-root powder to form a paste, which would then be rolled out and cut into ‘little Lozenges’.5 The salacious associations of these kinds of sweets are evident in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), when Falstaff imagines a thunderstorm of aphrodisiacs, including ‘hail’ of ‘kissingcomfits’ (5.5.20). Perhaps, then, the lips of Adonis’s and the Princess’s real-life counterparts really did taste sugary. Wendy Wall has observed that uses of the language of sweetness in early modern depictions of sensual pleasure are paralleled in ‘condemnations of fiction’ by ‘Puritan thinkers’, which similarly employ a saccharine vocabulary.6 Wall explains this correlation by suggesting that anti-theatricalists adopted such language because of the prior associations of sweetness with degenerate erotic pleasure. ‘Historically’, she comments, ‘sweetness had been linked to an ethically troubling sensuality’, and plays were considered ‘syrupy’, because, like sex, ‘they had the capacity to act on the body and to discourage the use of reason by drawing the mind from virtue’.7 Wall’s discussion of the symbolic complexity of syrups in the period is rich and revealing, but her analysis of the moral valence of sweetness is somewhat one-sided, for it was not only anti-theatricalists who employed syrupy analogies to describe the experience and effects of attending plays or reading poetry. Drawing on the Horatian injunction that poets should combine the utile (useful or profitable) with the dulce (sweet or pleasurable), humanist poetics associated sweetness with readerly discrimination, pleasure, and erudition.8 As such, defenders of the poetic arts also used images of sweetness for opposing ends, attributing their adversaries’ distaste for poesy to their pathologically imbalanced humours. In his Defense of Poesy, for example, Sir Philip Sidney claims of those who dislike philosophical poetry that ‘the fault is in their judgement quite out of taste, and not in the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge’.9 For aficionados of poesie, sweetness stands not for mindless sensuality but for considered literary discrimination.

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In this chapter, I want to invert and expand on Wall’s suggestion that uses of the language of sweetness to describe audiences’ responses to theatre figure those responses as akin to sexual desire – that is, as irrational and corrupt. Instead, I suggest, in some contexts uses of the language of sweetness to describe sensual pleasure intimates that desire is a form of judgement. Attending to the language of taste reveals that, for Shakespeare and for many of his contemporaries, erotic gratification is a matter not only of sordid, sensual self-indulgence but rather incorporates a crucial (and potentially morally redemptive) discriminative, cognitive, and creative aspect. When, for example, Francis Meres asserts that ‘the witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare’, offering as evidence ‘his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends’, he does more than simply pay the author a compliment on the musicality of his verse.10 Specifically, Meres associates Shakespeare’s poetic virtuosity with the eroticized sweetness of a beloved’s honeyed kisses, as both Meres’s comparison with the notoriously amorous Ovid and his subsequent specifying of Shakespeare’s most notoriously licentious works makes clear.11 As well as blending sweet sounds and sweet tastes in his pun on ‘mellifluous’ (from the Latin mel, honey), that is, Meres also affiliates sensual and literary sweetness, implicitly invoking a causal relationship between sexual experience and poetic skill. In so doing, he draws on and reduplicates an association that Shakespeare himself had drawn, in his drama and poetry, between sweetness, sensual desire, and forms of knowledge and understanding, including intersubjective judgement and self-knowledge, as well as rhetorical expertise.12 As Berowne argues in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Navarre’s Neoplatonic conviction that the intertwined sensory pleasures of feasting and female company are a menace to scholarship is misplaced: ‘love, first learned in a lady’s eyes […] gives to every power a double power, / Above their functions and their offices’ (4.3.301–6). Most pertinently here, ‘Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste’ (4.3.313); the lover is a kind of sensory superman, able to taste with an acuity that outdoes even Bacchus. Subsequently, ‘when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods / Make heaven drowsy with the harmony’ (4.3.318– 19). For Berowne, then, a side effect of love’s heightening and honing of the senses is the enhancement of oratical skill – in experiencing more intensely, the lover is also inspired to speak more compellingly. Before I expand on the

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suggestion that the erotic pleasures of taste are associated, in Shakespeare’s works, with knowledge, understanding, and with literary skill, however, it is worth considering attitudes to and ideas about taste in Renaissance culture more broadly.

The ambivalence of taste In Renaissance England, the sense of taste was radically ambivalent. On the one hand, following Adam and Eve’s disobedient tasting of the forbidden fruit and the subsequent Fall described in Genesis, it was linked to base, sinful, intemperate appetites. As the poet and moralist Richard Brathwaite laments in his essay ‘Of Tasting’ (1620): This Sence makes mee weeppe ere I speake of her; sith hence came our greefe, hence our miserie: when I represent her before my eyes, my eyes become blinded with weeping, remembring my grandame Eve, how soone she was induced to taste that shee ought not […] this one Sence […] corrupted my pristine innocencie.13

Here, taste – personified and feminized as ‘her’, and associated with ‘my granddame Eve’ – is blamed for the corruption of humankind’s ‘pristine innocencie’: it is the ultimate source of all sin and misery. These negative scriptural associations were reinforced by the classical tradition, notably the works of Plato, which preserved a hierarchy of the senses that privileged the distal senses of vision and hearing, which work remotely from their objects, from the proximity senses of taste and touch, which depend on direct contact with their objects.14 In this model, taste is associated with boorish physical gratification, as opposed to the supposedly purer, more spiritual forms of pleasure and understanding offered by sight and hearing. The sensuous pleasures of taste are imagined to distract from the reasonable pursuit of virtue: as the neo-Stoic writer Lodowick Bryskett puts it in A discourse of civill life (1606), taste and touch are the ‘two senses that make us most like unto brute beasts, if we suffer our selves to be led by them, following our delights as they do: for they corrupt mans prudence, put his mind astray, & take away from him the light of reason’.15

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In both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), the animalistic, irrational, rapacious nature of taste is established in images of hawking and hunting. Venus’s enthusiastic embrace is both aggressive and quasicannibalistic: she is ‘an empty eagle, sharp by fast’, who ‘tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone, / Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, / Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone’ (55–8). The pleasure taken in eating, such images remind us, is predicated on the consumption, hence the obliteration, of its object.16 Similarly, sexual desire can also be violent, immoderate, and ultimately self-destructive, as well as damaging to its object: overindulgence can lead to surfeit and revulsion.17 ‘Lust’, as Adonis notes, ‘like a glutton dies’ (803). Similarly, in the Rape of Lucrece, Tarquin is described, following his ravishment of Lucrece, as like ‘the full-fed hound or gorged hawk’ which ‘balk[s]’ at its usual ‘prey’: So surfeit-taking Tarquin fares this night His taste delicious, in digestion souring, Devours his will that lived by foul devouring.

(694–700) The pun on ‘fares’ as both ‘feeds, eats’ and as ‘gets on, behaves’ underscores the connection between eating and sexual conduct. Sensual satiation slides into surfeit, as the ‘delicious’ but ephemeral ‘taste’ of sensual pleasure turns sour in the stomach and the ‘will’ to devour Lucrece’s body consumes or ‘devours’ itself. Later, Lucrece rails against ‘Opportunity’, lamenting that ‘thy sugared tongue’ turns ‘to bitter wormwood taste’ (894), and determining that her husband Collatine ‘shalt not know / The stained taste of violated troth’ (1058–9) – that is, that he will not ‘know’ her sexually again. Here, the pleasures of taste are clearly associated with a vicious form of appetite which is simultaneously corrupted and corrupting. This is not, however, the whole story: the sense of taste also had a range of much more positive associations in Renaissance culture.18 For a start, following Aristotle, a number of writers and thinkers emphasized the indispensability of taste, highlighting its crucial role in motivating us to eat, and hence in sustaining the body. As the anatomist Helkiah Crooke writes, along with touch, taste is ‘absolutely and simply necessary to our life’.19 Others elaborated on the social importance of eating together as a way of cementing the bonds

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of friendship. Indeed, the imagery of uncontrolled and animalistic appetites in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece is effective partly because it is predicated on the violation of more positive, celebratory norms and attitudes. Venus, for instance, attempts to frame her desire as a natural and legitimate form of hunger, contrasting her appetite for Adonis with what she portrays as his solipsistic self-worship. Just as ‘torches are made to light’, Venus claims, so too are ‘dainties [made] to taste’ (163–4). The body that is sustained by the earth has a duty to replenish it with new inhabitants: ‘Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed, / Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?’ (169–70). Venus implies that procreative sex is a necessity, not a sinful luxury, and – however perverse her lust – the association between taste and generous reciprocity that she exploits has an undeniable appeal. Similarly, it is worth noting that, as Lucrece’s guest, Tarquin has already indulged in a literal, legitimate, convivial supper provided by her household. Shakespeare’s use of the language of eating and tasting to describe Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece is shocking and effective partly because it is a reversal of the positive role that the pleasures of taste play in establishing and sustaining social bonds: it reminds us that Tarquin transgresses the rules of hospitality as well as those regulating sexual interaction. As I hinted in the introduction to this essay, moreover, taste was also valued as an analogy for, or even as a form of, discrimination and knowledge about the external, material, and social world. Most obviously, in the Renaissance as today, the language of taste was used figuratively to indicate aesthetic and literary discrimination. As Allison Deutermann observes, quoting as evidence Hamlet’s request to the players to ‘give us a taste of your quality’, although ‘the concept of “taste” as aesthetic discernment has been assumed to be anachronistic to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England […] this abstracted sense of taste was already forming at the start of the seventeenth century’.20 Similarly, Lucy Munro notes that ‘[m]any Jacobean and, especially, Caroline playwrights employed a discourse of taste in order to shape spectators’ responses, drawing on an emergent model of aesthetic taste that is more often seen as characteristic of eighteenth-century culture’.21 At the point at which Shakespeare wrote, the ‘abstracted’, ‘aesthetic’ sense of taste as literary discrimination was well established enough to be a subject of parody – but not so well established that it had lost its connection to literal acts

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of eating and drinking. Notably, it is this form of judgement that Nathanial claims in Love’s Labour’s Lost, when he proclaims himself a man ‘of taste’. Nathanial compares himself and Holofernes to the aptly named Constable Dull. ‘Sir’, he says to Holofernes: [Dull] hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink. His intellect is not replenished. He is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. And such barren plants are set before us, that we thankful should be – Which we of taste and feeling are – for those parts that doe fructify in us more than he.

(4.2.24–9) Nathanial’s posturing is clearly supposed to be funny, and we are laughing at, not with, him: because the audience is already well acquainted with his pedantry and self-importance, his words are bathetic. In calling himself a man of ‘taste and feeling’, Nathanial inadvertently reveals his own immersion in the lower senses he claims to disdain – an implication reinforced by the way he highlights the physical underpinnings of the taste metaphor, claiming (in contradistinction to Dull) to have ‘eat paper’ and ‘drunk ink’. Nonetheless, Nathanial’s words also attest to a wider cultural sense that ‘taste’ is a marker of literary erudition and judgement, and as such a marker of the social distinction he aspires to.22 The sense of taste, however, was not only associated with aesthetic and literary judgement in Renaissance England: it also had a much wider set of associations with different forms and modes of knowing. A brief consultation of the OED elucidates some of the epistemological range of the word ‘taste’ in this period.23 Firstly, taste could indicate ‘mental perception of quality; judgement, discriminative faculty’ more broadly, in a variety of different realms, not limited to the aesthetic and literary. Other definitions of the noun ‘taste’ link gustation to the kinds of experiential and experimental knowledge that were in the period increasingly central both to religious life, and in the proto-scientific realms of medicine and natural philosophy: in the Renaissance, a ‘taste’ could indicate ‘a trying, testing; a trial, a test, an examination’. Edmund uses the word in this way in King Lear (c.  1606): ‘I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay, or taste of my virtue’ (1.2.44–5). To taste can also

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mean ‘to have experience or knowledge of ’ more broadly, as when, in Pericles (c.  1607), Cleon implores: ‘O, let those cities that of plenty’s cup / And her prosperities so largely taste […] heed these tears!’ (1.4.52–4). Here, ‘taste’ is a synonym for first-hand experience. Relatedly, ‘a taste’ can indicate – as it does today – a small sample or slight experience of something. Touchstone, for instance, uses the word in this way in As You Like It (c. 1599), when he offers Rosalind ‘a taste’ of his ability to compose bad love poetry (3.2.97). Taste also had epistemic value in a religious context – a value which provided a counterbalance to its negative associations with the Fall. Psalm 34.8, ‘O taste and see that the lord is good’ (KJV), frames taste as an intense, experiential, affectively charged means of knowing the divine characterized by sweetness (the Latin word usually translated as ‘good’, suavis, translates more literally as sweet). Reformed theologians and writers across the confessional spectrum cited it frequently, often associating it with the potentially redemptive tasting of the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine.24 It is this tradition, associating the pleasures of taste with spiritual illumination, that informs Oliver’s response, near the end of As You Like It, to Celia’s question about his fraught relationship to his brother Orlando: ‘was’t you that did so oft contrive to kill him?’ Oliver’s answer is both candid and gnomic: ’Twas I, but ’tis not I. I do not shame To tell you what I was, since my conversion So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.

(4.3.134–6) The context here is not explicitly religious: Oliver’s change in attitude is primarily a secular one, based on his gratitude to Orlando, who has recently rescued him from the attack of a lioness. In linking the language of conversion and sweetness, however, Shakespeare also implies a more wholesale spiritual transformation – one which makes him worthy of Celia’s love. In the Renaissance, then, attitudes to taste were deeply conflicted. On the one hand, taste was associated with base and sinful appetites. On the other, it was associated with positive and potentially virtuous forms of knowledge and discrimination. These positive associations of taste, moreover, frequently carried over into writing about the sweetness of sex. Guillaume Du Vair’s influential The moral philosophie of the Stoicks (1598) is revealing here.

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Whilst Du Vair sticks to his neo-Stoic guns in warning against the dangers of unlicensed desire, he also celebrates its nuptial value: Let us […] provide our selves of strong rampires and bulwarkes to warde us against this passion […] she baites us with honie, to glut us with gall: she setteth before our eyes a vaine shew of pleasure, which passeth away in a moment, and leaves us sorrow and griefe which remaineth for ever […] Let us altogether abstaine from it (if it be possible) before wee bee married: for […] it makes them lose the sweetnesse of marriage which they alone doe taste which have not used it before, a sweetnes which souldereth and knitteth together the friendship of marriage.25

Sexual desire ‘baites us with honie, to glut us with gall’; here, the sweetness of sex is dangerously deceptive. Within the legitimate bounds of marriage, however, it also serves an important and valuable role, working to forge conjugal harmony and so to consolidate moral virtue.

Sweetness in Othello The language of erotic sweetness, then, swings both ways: it can either gesture towards humankind’s fallenness and irrationality, or it can indicate the presence of a discriminative, potentially redemptive form of apprehension and affection. The ambivalence is also central to Othello (c. 1603), which dramatizes both the tension between taste as brutish, sensual appetite, and taste as a mode of judgement, and a conflict between vision and taste as alternative sources of knowledge. Early in the play, Cassio offers Desdemona an elegant (albeit conventional) compliment. Othello, he says, hath achieved a maid That paragons description and wild fame; One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens[.]

(2.1.61–3) Cassio implies that Desdemona poses a challenge: if she cannot be depicted, she also cannot be known. Indeed, Desdemona’s resistance to apprehension is translated, by various characters in the play, as a dubious secrecy. Noticing this, Stanley Cavell interprets Othello’s suspicion of his wife as an

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expression of epistemological, as well as moral, outrage: it is a response not only to the possibility that he might not possess his wife’s chastity but also to the impossibility of ever knowing, for certain, that he does so.26 Other scholars have explored the ways in which Desdemona’s body is presented as a mystery which might be understood and controlled if it can be accurately and comprehensively seen. Patricia Parker, for example, identifies in the play a ‘network of associations’ between the female genitalia and hidden knowledge, which prompts in the jealous Othello an ‘ocular impulse […] a fascination […] with exposing what lay hid to the scrutiny of the gaze’.27 This kind of reading is characteristic of new historicism’s visual and political preoccupations. The language of Othello, however, is not only permeated with visual metaphor; it also interweaves desire, sexual jealousy, and taste. Take Act 3, Scene 3, in which Othello is transformed from a loving husband to a man wild with suspicion. He laments: I had been happy if the general camp, Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known.

(3.3.348–50) Othello both draws on taste’s associations with sexual knowledge and – in his use of the epithet ‘sweet’ – retains its connection to physical sensation. Importantly, Othello’s choice of verb at this critical moment is not an isolated example: throughout the play, he consistently links sexual and gustatory appetites. Perhaps most obviously, Othello’s epithets for his wife linger on her supposed flavour: they include ‘honey’ (2.1.203), ‘sweeting’ (2.3.248), and ‘sweet’ (3.3.55–6, 5.2.50). And while Othello extensively utilizes the language of erotic tasting, Othello offers a covert but sustained reflection on the meaning and value of such language, testing its negative (lapsarian) and positive (discriminative) associations against each other. Initially, the play appears to be invested in the narrative associating both gustation and eroticism with degenerate, irrational appetite. Othello and Iago, of course, occupy very different places in Shakespeare’s Venice. Othello’s marriage to Desdemona quickly exposes his social position, as a successful and apparently well-respected soldier, as contingent on his exclusion from the inner sanctums of Venetian social and familial life, his tacit acceptance

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of a fundamental, raced ‘otherness’: Desdemona’s recourse to Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’, Brabantio accuses, can only be explained by witchcraft (1.2.70). Iago’s professional frustrations, on the other hand, grow partly from a sense of entitlement (‘I know my price’) which is itself dependent on his identity (in contrast to the ‘Florentine’ Cassio) not only as an Italian but as a Venetian (1.1.11,  1.1.20). Iago’s sense of his own difference from ‘the Moor’ Othello, however, is undermined by their sensory similarities: both Othello and Iago frame the association between sweet tastes and sensual pleasures pejoratively. Early in the play, Othello insists that his support of Desdemona’s request to join him in Cyprus is motivated not by ‘the palate of my appetite’ but rather by a wish ‘to be free and bounteous to her mind’ (1.3.263–6). Othello uses the language of ‘appetite’ to denounce sexual desire as capricious and mindless. What are we to make of this? As Mary Floyd-Wilson has pointed out, the portrayal of Othello’s ‘passionate jealousy’ not only reflects a broader ‘racial stereotype’ regarding the supposed intemperance of ‘Moors’; it also ‘has its prior origins in England’s obsession with an Italianate and urban form of dramatic jealousy’. For a Jacobean audience, Floyd-Wilson explains, jealousy could be ‘a symptom of hypercivility rather than barbarism’ and was sometimes viewed as one outcome of a pathological form of ‘neo-Stoic control’: ‘Italians came to represent over-disciplined interventionists, whose wilful self-regulation produced pathological inwardness rather than temperance.’28 In this context, Othello’s dismissal of his ‘appetite’ for his wife seems less like laudable selfcontrol than symptom of incipient suspicion: it is a sign of his assimilation to a particularly Italianate form of refinement that is, nonetheless, never more than a hairsbreadth away from extreme violence. This suggestion is buttressed by the fact that Iago takes a similar tack: anticipating the deterioration of Othello and Desdemona’s initial state of marital bliss, he reassures the lustful Roderigo that Desdemona’s ‘eye must be fed. And what delight shall she have to look on the devil? […] her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the moor’ (2.1.223–31). And if Desdemona will, as Iago predicts, come to ‘disrelish’ Othello because of his supposedly devilish appearance, Othello will be brought to feel distaste for Desdemona by Iago’s own machinations. Whilst Othello currently finds his wife ‘luscious as locusts’ (that is, sweet cassia pods), the suspicion of her fidelity that Iago himself instils will ensure that

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she ‘shall be to him shortly as acerb as coloquintida’ (the fruit also known as the bitter-apple) (1.3.349–50). Here, Iago positions himself as a corrupter of Othello’s natural tastes. Iago exploits and confirms Othello’s initial belief that sexual tastes offer a fallen, irrational form of pleasure which should be rejected: they correspond, not to the reality of the thing itself (or, rather, the woman herself) but to arbitrary, transient, and malleable predilections and revulsions. Othello’s jealousy, then, might be understood partly as a result of his assimilation – encouraged by Iago – of Italian social and cultural norms: his rejection of his ‘sweet’ Desdemona grows partly out of a form of sophistication predicated not only on the control, but on the rejection, of natural appetites. Conversely, a number of characters in the play associate vision with epistemological mastery. Most famously, Othello’s demand for ‘ocular proof ’ (3.3.363) of his wife’s alleged betrayal exemplifies his wider conflation of vision and certain knowledge (this conflation is built, for instance, into his assertion that Iago ‘sees and knows more […] than he unfolds’ (3.3.247), where the conjunctive ‘and’ suggests a presumed equivalence between seeing and knowing). For a number of critics, the disastrous consequences of this desire for ‘ocular proof ’ indicate an implicit critique of the new empirical natural philosophy.29 Notably, James Knapp argues that ‘Shakespeare presents us with an object (the handkerchief) so unstable that it becomes emblematic of the flaws endemic to empiricist (materialist) epistemologies.’30 The failure of the visual emblem of the handkerchief to materialize the reality of Desdemona’s spousal fidelity represents the failure of vision to apprehend the truth of the material world. In the context of the failure of ocular proof, taste – derided by the villainous Iago and the misguided Othello as akin to lustful appetite – takes on a new value. In particular, taste comes to stand for a form of knowledge which is experiential without being, precisely, empirical. In her speech offering a partial vindication of female adultery, Emilia points to this possibility. ‘I do think’, announces Emilia: it is their husbands’ faults If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties And pour our treasures into foreign laps; Or else break out in peevish jealousies, Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,

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Or scant our former having in despite, Why, we have galls: and though we have some grace Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell, And have their palates both for sweet and sour As husbands have. What is it that they do When they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is. And doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections? Desires for sport? and frailty, as men have?31

(5.1.85–100) Poised between her initial ascription of women’s infidelity to husbandly abuse, and her subsequent suggestion that, like men, women take lovers simply as a result of their natural ‘Desires for sport’, Emilia’s declaration that wives ‘have their palates both for sweet and sour’ is ambiguous. On the one hand, it describes female rationality: women have enough sense – in both senses – to respond negatively to mistreatment. On the other hand, it describes female corruptibility: just as men and women have their senses in common, so too do they share a yearning for sensual pleasure. For Iago, the difference between the sweetness of cassia pods and coloquintida bitterness is a matter of pure affect: of irresistible desire versus sexual disgust. For his wife, however, to have a palate ‘both for sweet and sour’ – in other words, to have taste – can mean to possess trivial appetitive desires for sexual ‘sport’, but it can also indicate possession of reasonable, universally shared, fundamentally rational preferences and aversions, guided by judgement as well as by instinct. Emilia’s speech, then, clears the way for an alternative interpretation of Othello’s preoccupation with Desdemona’s sexual sweetness. According to Iago’s association of taste with irrational, sinful sexual desire, Othello’s honeyed endearments for Desdemona might be understood (despite his own protestations to the contrary) to betray Othello’s enthralment to ‘the palate of [his] appetite’. On the other hand, they also prefigure Emilia’s ultimate vindication of Desdemona as ‘sweet Desdemona […] sweet Mistress’, and ‘the sweetest innocent’ (5.2.120,  197). The narrative trajectory of the play thus bears out Othello’s perception – disclaim it though he may – that Desdemona

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is ‘sweet’. Despite its denigration, taste – and the sexual appetites it entwines with – proves a surer route to certainty than vision, offering a kind of intuitive experiential knowledge that the play opposes to an ocularcentric empiricism. Othello indicates – if it does not wholeheartedly endorse – a conception of gustatory and erotic tastes as valuable sources of intersubjective and erotic knowledge, and of sweetness as a marker of virtue.

De gustibus non est disputandum? Taste and value in Troilus and Cressida In Venus and Adonis, Adonis’s sense of his own unripe sourness is counterparted by Venus’s insistence on his lip-smacking sweetness: he is, she tells him, ‘sweet above compare’ (8). This points to another aspect of taste: not only was the moral status of the sense in contention, so too was the basic nature of specific taste sensations. In Shakespeare’s England as today, the Latin adage de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing about tastes) was axiomatic.32 The sense of taste, this maxim implies, is so idiosyncratic, so personal and arbitrary, that there is simply no point in arguing about it. As Brathwaite comments, ‘of all others, this Sence produceth the diverst qualities […] this facultie, either by an indisposition of the bodie, or a distinct operation in the subject, showes this pleasing and acceptable to one, which is noisome and different to an other’.33 Precisely because taste is subject to such differences of opinion, one should resist contesting it. Despite this, disputes about taste raged amongst physicians, writers, and philosophers alike. Should taste be associated primarily with brutish and irrational physical appetites, or with mental discrimination and judgement? Does the subjectivity of taste make it more or less useful as a source of knowledge? Who has the authority to distinguish healthy from unwholesome tastes? According to Renaissance medical theory, discrepancies in taste could be explained as a result of a pathological imbalance of the humours: individuals with jaundice, for instance, might ‘find Honey to be bitter in taste’ because of ‘the great choler and inflammation wherewith their tongue and palate of their mouth is infected’.34 In some cases, then, the subjectivity of taste was a symptom of sickness. But in the context of humoralism, such subjectivity was

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also, simply, a basic feature of taste: the perception of flavour was understood to be affected by aspects of humoral constitution which were not necessarily pathological but simply a result of ordinary variations in physical complexion, as well as factors such as age, sex, and circumstance. As Sir Walter Raleigh puts it in his posthumously published Skeptick, or speculations (1651), a partial translation of the ancient Greek philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines, ‘divers creatures […] having tongues drier, or moister according to their several temperatures, when they tast the same thing, must needs conceit it to be according as the instrument of their tast is affected, either bitter, or sweet’.35 Variations in taste are a result of humoral disposition, as well as indisposition. Because of this inherent subjectivity, the language of taste emerges in the Renaissance as indispensable for articulating and exploring the broader questions about the nature and reliability of knowledge raised by the sixteenthcentury revival of sceptical philosophy. As Michel de Montaigne writes in ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’: The distasted impute wallowishnesse unto Wine: the healthie, good taste; and the thirstie brisknesse, rellish and delicacie. Now our condition appropriating things unto it selfe, and transforming them to it’s owne humour: we know no more how things are in sooth and truth; For, nothing comes unto us but falsified and altered by our senses.36

Here, the subjectivity of taste – which is both pathological and an innate aspect of ‘our condition’ – is archetypal of the variability and unreliability of all the senses, and hence our inability to know anything at all ‘in sooth and truth’. Variations in gustatory perceptions are typical of our broader tendency to remake the world in our own image – or more accurately here, according to our own tastes. Shakespeare, of course, was deeply engaged with sceptical thought – and nowhere more so than in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), a play that, as William Hamlin and numerous others have noted, ‘exposes human acts of valuation to relentless sceptical scrutiny’.37 In particular, it is concerned with the philosophical question of whether value itself should be taken as intrinsic to and fixed in specific objects and individuals (a position held by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, amongst others), or whether value is extrinsic and

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unstable, conferred by and in acts of subjective evaluation (a position which would later be articulated and developed by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes).38 As scholars including Caroline Spurgeon and David Hillman have observed, moreover, the play also draws extensively on culinary and gustatory language, often using such language to interrogate the ethical status of sexual desire.39 In the eat-or-be-eaten world of Troy and its environs, conventional, courtly images of eroticized sweetness are pushed to a cannibalistic extreme: women are (as Pandarus and Troilus joke of Cressida in the opening scene) consumables, cakes to be ground, kneaded, baked, and eaten (1.1.14–24).40 Less frequently explored, however, is the interweaving of these two concerns: that is, the way the play’s philosophical interrogation of the nature of ‘value’ proceeds through sensory images of sexualized tasting and consuming.41 In Troilus and Cressida, the philosophical question of whether value is objective and innate, or subjective and contingent, is articulated most pressingly in relation to Helen and Cressida’s sexual value.42 Is Helen, for example, valued (desired) because she is valuable (desirable), as Troilus implies when he claims that she is ‘a pearl / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships’ (2.2.81–2), or is she valuable (desirable) because she is valued (desired), as he suggests when he claims that she ‘must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus’ (1.1.86–7)? And because erotic desire is repeatedly described in terms of alimentary appetite, the question of value is also a question of (sexualized) taste. More specifically, I want to suggest, Troilus and Cressida proposes that if value is innate, then the subjective character of taste will inevitably compromise our ability to accurately perceive and understand the world around us – including other people. If, on the other hand, value is conferred or accrued in acts of evaluation, then the subjectivity of taste is not only a means of apprehending but a way of constituting the value of objects it apprehends. When Priam points out reprovingly although Helen is experienced as ‘honey’ by the ‘besotted’ Paris, she is ‘gall’ to his compatriots, who suffer besiegement because of her (2.2.143–4), he implies that the subjectivity of taste is aberrant and abhorrent. Hector agrees: Paris’s craving for Helen is the ‘hot passion of distempered blood’ (2.2.169), a sickness which corrupts his reason and prevents him from knowing her as she really is. Similarly, Diomedes’ answer to Paris’s question – ‘Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen most, / Myself

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or Menelaus?’ (4.1.55–6) – implies that both parties’ desire for Helen can be explained by the pathological corruption of their appetites: Both alike. He merits well to have her that doth seek her, Not making any scruple of her soilure, With such a hell of pain and world of charge; And you as well to keep her that defend her, Not palating the taste of her dishonour[.]

(4.1.56–61) Helen, asserts Diomedes, is soiled goods, and in not recognizing the true ‘taste of her dishonour’, Paris and Menelaus reveal the vitiation of their senses.43 Paris’s rejoinder, ‘you are too bitter to your countrywoman’, turns the accusation back on Diomedes himself, but Diomedes is firm: ‘she’s bitter to her county’ (4.1.69–70). According to Priam, Hector, and Diomedes, in their fidelity (or enthralment) to Helen, Menelaus and Paris have cut themselves off from the consensus of their respective countries and aligned themselves with the appetite of their bitterest opponent – each other – in an estrangement that is as much sensory as political and social. At other points in the play, however, the question is not so much who has the authority to arbitrate in matters of value or taste – the infatuated Paris or the suffering citizens and soldiers – but rather whether that arbitration itself has any role in determining value or taste. In other words, the issue is whether value is an objective quality of an object or individual, something with an independent existence which may or may not be accurately apprehended, or whether value is conferred through intersubjective acts of evaluation.44 In the case of Helen, the question becomes not whether she is sweet or bitter, honey or gall, but whether she is really either of these things all at, or only insofar as she is experienced as such. Thus, in the debate about whether to return her to the Greeks in order to end the war, Hector urges Troilus to agree: ‘She is not worth what she doth cost / The holding’ (2.2.51–2), he reasons. Hector implies that Helen’s ‘worth’ (or rather, lack thereof) is independent of her ‘cost’. Troilus, however, disagrees: ‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’ (2.2.53), he replies. For Troilus, desire itself has a role in determining value: it is a form of evaluation which confers worth on its object.

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As the debate proceeds, however, the lines between Hector’s and Troilus’s positions become blurred. Thus, whilst Hector’s reply seems firmly to refute Troilus’s constructivism, it is in fact somewhat ambiguous: ‘But value’, he admonishes Troilus: dwells not in particular will; It holds his estimate and dignity As well wherein ’tis precious of itself As in the prizer.

(2.2.53–6) Hector’s assertion that ‘value dwells not in particular will’ seems unequivocal enough, and indeed commentators on this passage have tended to take it (ironically enough) at face value.45 Hector’s position, however, is closer to Troilus’s than it initially appears: by asserting that value derives ‘as well wherein ’tis precious of itself / As in the prizer’ (my emphasis), he frames intrinsic value as supplementary to that conferred by ‘the prizer’. As such, he concedes that value is (at least partially) created, rather than simply recognized, in acts of valuation.46 Conversely, Troilus’s epistemological relativism is paired with a kind of moral absolutism, which he turns to the terms of taste to articulate. ‘How may I avoid’, he asks Hector, ‘Although my will distaste what it elected, / The wife I chose? […] [T]he remainder viands / We do not throw in unrespective sieve / Because we are now full’ (2.2.65–72). Here, Troilus uses the language of taste to anticipate and pre-emptively answer the obvious ethical objection to his insistence that ‘value’ resides partly in ‘the prizer’: namely that if this is indeed the case, such value is impossibly unstable, for (as we saw in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) the sweetness of desire has a tendency to segue, once it is satisfied, into disgust and distaste. For Troilus, the fact that Helen was once perceived to be ‘worth keeping’ (2.2.82) entails an ethical and social commitment: just as we do not thoughtlessly throw away food once we are replete, we ought not discard a woman because our appetite for her is sated.47 Taste itself may be radically subjective, but eating practices teach us that this epistemological uncertainly does not necessarily engender a state of moral nihilism. Like Othello, therefore, Troilus and Cressida interrogates both the epistemological and the ethical status of taste – especially a specifically sexualized experience of sweetness.

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Indeed, in Troilus and Cressida, the sense of taste is repeatedly linked to a form of certainty which emerges through, not in spite of, subjective differences of opinion. We can see this, for instance, in the way that the play uses the language of tasting and consuming in order to compare and contrast erotic love and what Priam calls the ‘hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.6) as allied, though ultimately distinct, testing grounds of masculine virtue. The association between love and war is, of course, conventional enough – but it gains sensuous force and ethical and epistemic specificity in the context of the play’s alimentary obsessions. Take Troilus’s reply to Cressida’s teasing assertion that ‘all lovers swear more performance than they are able’ (3.2.81–2): drawing on taste’s epistemic associations with experiential trial and testing, he asks her to ‘praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove’ (3.2.87–8).48 Troilus’s words are playful, but they also echo both Nestor’s description of the anticipated contest between Hector and Achilles as a ‘trial’ in which the Trojans will ‘taste our dear’st repute / With their finest palate’ (1.3.338–9), and Agamemnon’s subsequent warning that if he refuses to fight, Achilles’ ‘virtues’ are ‘like fair fruit in an unwholesome dish […] like to rot untasted’ (2.3.115–19). On one level, the echo implies that Troilus’s boasting is a transparent attempt to frame effeminate sensuality as martial heroism; as such, it ironically marks their incompatibility. On another, however, ‘taste’ serves in both the martial and the erotic realms to indicate a form of certainty that is forged precisely in an adversarial clash of perspectives, as differences of opinion are translated into the terms of physical contact. Both martial combat and seduction, such language implies, are scenes of self-testing, as well as of intersubjective antagonism: love and war alike are forums for the tasting/testing of a certain kind of male subjectivity that emerges when it is contested. Just as Achilles’ virtues will rot and decay if they are not tested in combat, Troilus’s true nature can only emerge in the lists of love. Troilus and Cressida never quite resolves the questions it raises about the role of personal opinion in evaluating and determining value.49 But it does suggest that – here and elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works – the language of taste is an invaluable resource for probing this question, offering a vocabulary which combines the forceful, persuasive immediacy of physical experience and intense affective response with radical uncertainty, ephemerality, and unreliability. At the end of the play, Pandarus sings, ‘sweet honey and sweet

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notes together fail’: Shakespeare’s dramatic interrogation of the nature of intersubjective knowledge and the morality of desire is inextricable from his poetics of taste.

Notes 1

Coppélia Kahn notices Adonis’s pun on ‘know’ as sexual and self-knowledge, and interprets it as evidence of his inability to recognize that he cannot ‘know what his self is by isolating it from the experiences that help to form it’, in Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 40.

2

See Martin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1253, 1328–41.

3

OED, s.v. ‘taste, v.’.

4

On the ‘classical connections’ between eating and eroticism, see Uwe Baumann, ‘Food, Famine, Appetites and Eroticism in Plays by William Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’, in The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating: The Cultural History of Eating in Anglophone Literature, ed. Marion Gymnich and Norbert Lennartz (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2010), 65–6; see also Chris Meads, Banquets Set Forth: Banqueting in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch. 2, esp. 29–32.

5

John Murrell, A daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen (London, 1617), F8v–F9r.

6

Wendy Wall, ‘Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England’, Modern Philology 104, no. 2 (2006): 168.

7 Ibid., 159, 168. 8 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, Loeb Classical Edition, trans. and ed. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 447. 9

Philip Sidney, An Apology For Poetry (Or The Defence Of Poesy), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd and R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 86.

10 Francis Meres (compiler), Palladis tamia, ed. Nicholas Ling (London, 1598), 2O1v–O2r. 11 On Shakespeare’s reputation for sweetness, see Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen’s Arden 3rd edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, 4–7, and Adam Hooks, ‘Wise Ventures: Shakespeare and Thomas Playfere at the Sign of the Angel’, in Shakespeare’s Stationers, ed. Marta Straznicky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 53–4.

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12 The association between sensual desire and rhetorical facility is often articulated via authors’ exploitation of etymological links between the words ‘sweet’ and ‘persuade’. See Jeffrey Masten, ‘Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 374. 13 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the five senses with a pithie one upon detraction (London, 1620), D3r. 14 On this hierarchy, see especially Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1975), 18, 69; Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge, 2003); and Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 55–71. 15 Lodowick Byskett, A discourse of civill life containing the ethike part of morall philosophie (1606), Bb2r. This work is ‘heavily adapted’ from Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s Tre dialoghi della vita civile, which is itself the second part of his De gli hecatommithi (1565). Richard A. McCabe, ‘Bryskett, Lodowick (c. 1546–1609)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. Available online: ­­https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3817. The passage quoted echoes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Oxford World Classics, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56. 16 On the innate aggression of eating, see Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (London: Penguin, 1992). 17 Michael Schoenfeldt explores Shakespeare’s interest in ‘the nexus at which desire is satiated, and mitigates into its opposite, disgust’, highlighting his suggestion that the tempering of bitterness serves as a ‘strategy for sustaining desire in the face of satiation’, in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–2. 18 See, for example, Charles Burnett, ‘The Superiority of Taste’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 230–8. On the ethical potential of the proximity senses, see Holly Dugan and Lara Farina, ‘Intimate Senses/Sensing Intimacy’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 3, no. 4 (2012): 374. 19 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), I1r. 20 Allison K. Deutermann, ‘“Caviare to the general”? Taste, Hearing, and Genre in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 236–7.

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21 Lucy Munro, ‘Staging Taste’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, ed. Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 28. See also Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 231–4. 22 For a highly influential theorization of the ­relations between taste and social class, based on empirical research from 1960s France, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 23 OED, s.v.v. ‘taste, n.1’, ‘taste, v.’. 24 As George Herbert urges in ‘The Agonie’, ‘Who knows not Love, let him assay / And taste that juice […] Love is that liquour / sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine’. George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge, 1633), B3r. On the psalm (33.9 in the Vulgate), see Rachel Fulton, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West’, The Journal of Religion 86, no. 2 (2006): 169–204. 25 Guillaume Du Vair, The moral philosophie of the Stoicks, trans. Thomas James (London, 1598), E8v. 26 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 137. 27 Patricia Parker, ‘Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the “Secret Place” of Woman’, Representations 44 (1993): 66. 28 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 132–3. 29 Thus, John Gronbeck-Tedesco writes that Othello’s acceptance of Desdemona’s handkerchief as the requested visual evidence, ‘teaches the shortcomings of empiricism in its early throes’. John Gronbeck-Tedesco, ‘Morality, Ethics and the Failure of Love in Othello’, in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 267. 30 James A. Knapp, ‘“Ocular Proof ”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response’, Poetics Today 24, no. 4 (2003): 716. 31 Munro also makes reference to this passage, but reads it differently, as ‘map[ping] a descent from the higher to the lower senses, as the case that Emilia makes for women’s agency becomes increasingly sexualised’. Munro, ‘Staging Taste’, 30. 32 There is no consensus about the origins of this phrase; see Steven Shapin, ‘The Sciences of Subjectivity’, Social Studies of Science 42, no. 2 (2012): 172.

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108 33 Brathwaite, Essaies, D4r.

34 Robert Basset, Curiosities: or the cabinet of nature (London, 1637), M12v. 35 Walter Raleigh, Sceptick, or speculations (London, 1651), B4v–B5v. 36 Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 2G2r. This passage is also discussed by Simon Smith in this volume (115–16). 37 William Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 167. Discussions of ‘value’ in the play include, inter alia, William R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare’s Ulysses and the Problem of Value’, Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 95–111; Gayle Greene, ‘Language and Value in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 21, no. 2 (1981): 271–85; Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘“The Enterprise Is Sick”: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida’, Renaissance Drama 28 (1998): 3–37; and Paul Yachnin, ‘“The Perfection of Ten”: Populux Art and Artisanal Value in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no.3 (2005): 306–27. 38 See Greene, ‘Language and Value’, 272. 39 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; first edition 1935), 320–4. David Hillman reads the play’s alimentary images as ‘bulimic’ and ‘cannibalistic’ in Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ch. 2. Sophie Emma Battell comments on the way the play’s gustatory language ‘exploits the imaginative potential of the association between adulteration and sexual adultery’ in ‘“[L]ike a fountain stirred”: Impure Hospitality in Troilus and Cressida’, Études Épistémè 33 (2018). Johann Gregory reads the play’s food metaphors as evidence of its links with the Inns of Court, and as a way of managing audience expectations in ‘Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets”, Troilus and Cressida and the Odcomian Banquet: An Exploration of Promising Paratexts, Expectations and Matters of Taste’, Shakespeare 6, no. 2 (2010): 198–203. 40 Troilus, too, is ‘minced’ and ‘baked’ in Cressida’s lexicon (1.2.247): this is equal-opportunity eroticized cannibalism. 41 One exception is C. C. Barfoot, ‘Troilus and Cressida: “Praise us as we are tasted”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1988): 45–57. Barfoot traces how the play’s language of tasting/testing intersects with its interest in praising, prizing, and pricing. 42 As Harris notes, the women in the play are ‘coded as public yardsticks of value’ (‘Pathologies of Value’, 13). 43 Diomedes’s fastidious moralism at this point is, of course, rendered ironic in the context of his later entanglement with Cressida.

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44 This is part of what is at stake in 3.3, when Achilles interrupts Ulysses reading an unidentified book which, Ulysses informs him, argues that ‘man […] Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection’ (3.3.91–3). 45 Harris, for instance, hears Hector’s pronouncement as a normative assertion that ‘any object’s value ought to be “precious of itself ”’ (‘Pathologies of Value’, 13). 46 Recognizing this makes Hector’s ultimate volte-face in this scene, as he resolves to keep Helen on the basis of ‘our joint and several dignities’ (2.2.193) less surprising than it is often taken to be (Frank Kermode, for instance, calls it ‘unconvincing’ in ‘Opinion in Troilus and Cressida’, Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2012): 93). 47 On the connections between eating and ethics in Renaissance literature and culture more broadly, see David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 48 On the relations between tasting and testing in this passage, see Barfoot, ‘“Praise us as we are tasted”’, 53–4. 49 As Harris observes, ‘even as the play disqualifies the possibility of fixed and intrinsic worth, it […] also literally pathologizes attributive value’ (‘Pathologies of Value’, 17).

5

Hamlet’s visual stagecraft and early modern cultures of sight Simon Smith

[W]e are sure of what we see: so the Disciples said unto Thomas, we have seene the Lord, therefore they were sure that he was risen[.] (Griffith Williams, 1636)1 [W]e know no more how things are in sooth and truth; For, nothing comes unto us but falsified and altered by our senses. (Michel de Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 1603)2 This chapter reconsiders the place of sight in early modern theatrical convention and wider English culture, in order to explore uses of visual stagecraft in Hamlet. This may seem an unexpected approach to a play that boasts possibly the most famous of all Shakespearean ears, allowing into ‘[t]he natural gates and alleys’ of Old Hamlet’s body the poison that sets the play’s events in motion (1.5.67). Perhaps more significantly, it departs from recent work approaching Hamlet on broadly page-based terms, in which the kinds of spatial, visual, and sensory stagecraft brought into focus by the ‘turn to performance’ in Shakespeare studies are not typically foregrounded.3 Whilst it is many decades since Alan C. Dessen questioned the critical habit of ‘poring over Hamlet as a dramatic poem’ rather than ‘a play on stage in performance’, Hamlet remains central to accounts of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist.4 Elsewhere, in scholarship more immediately interested in performance and theatre history, the play has been ‘the key and perhaps final text’ in differentiations between ‘distinctly Sidneian’ drama targeted

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at ‘the best-educated […] few Hamlets in Shakespearean audiences’, and ‘elaborate “shows” or stimulation for the eye’ aimed at ‘[t]he so-called vulgar or ignorant’.5 Even when they have late Elizabethan playhouses in mind, then, scholars do not always associate Hamlet with visual dramaturgy or stagecraft. Looking more widely, the idea that an early modern play would particularly seek to stimulate the eye also runs counter to one lingering scholarly narrative: that Reformation concerns about idolatry and visual worship meant that in any context, devotional or otherwise, ‘Elizabethans were extremely wary’ of ‘[s]etting up any kind of illusion’.6 Prominent visual stagecraft would seem an unlikely dramatic tool for a playwright to rely upon under such conditions of production. In fact, full consideration of Hamlet, of early modern theatrical culture  more generally, and of the many and varied influences shaping contemporary English attitudes to sight, reveals a rather different picture. As the epigraphs above suggest, vision’s status in post-Reformation England was not settled but highly contested: sensory critics now recognize that sight was a much-disputed sense, sometimes doubted or denigrated but also widely praised, and often understood quite differently from one context to another.7 Moreover, where scholars once proposed all-pervasive, iconoclastic anxiety  about visual illusion and seduction from the  1580s onward, more recent work instead emphasizes the cultural impact of multiple influences beyond reformed theology, and proposes more nuanced relationships between shifting religious doctrine and wider visual culture than previous claims of ‘severe visual anorexia’ have suggested.8 Thus, Tessa Watt, Anthony Wells-Cole, and Tara Hamling have recovered rich and complex visual regimes in Reformation England, fostering forms from printed woodcut illustrations to domestic wall decoration.9 As Matthew Milner urges, ‘[n] o longer can we stereotype Reformation sensory changes as a switch from eyes to ears’.10 This chapter suggests that, just as wider English culture of the late sixteenth century maintained complex and even contradictory attitudes towards vision and the visual, so Hamlet takes up a position of ambivalence, rather than straightforward antipathy, towards sight. It is a play that stages and invites intensive looking and engaged visual interpretation, yet characters and

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playgoers alike are niggled constantly with the possibility that things are not what they seem. By turns, Hamlet emphasizes vision’s evidentiary necessity and, paradoxically, its archetypal unreliability: this is a fictional world in which a character believes ‘rivet[ing]’ his eyes to the king’s face is an effective way to ‘censure’ the latter’s innermost thoughts and feelings, yet still claims to have ‘that within which passes show’ (3.2.81–3; 1.2.85). Furthermore, Hamlet’s stagecraft makes systematic and sustained use of sight, qualifying the recent suggestion that the play appears in some ways to endorse aural over visual experience, and despite the persistence of wider theatre-historical claims that much early modern drama, especially Shakespeare’s, was a primarily verbal rather than visual art form – that ‘the Globe […] was designed for listeners, not viewers’.11 In fact, Hamlet not only relies upon the staging of particular sights – some, like the ghost and the dumb show, long recognized as dramatically significant12 – but invites playgoers repeatedly to engage with its precise visual design through active, judicious, and critically reflective looking. This is a feature of the play less commonly noted by scholars, although Jennifer Rae McDermott’s recent  account of ‘attent’ looking and hearing within Hamlet’s dramatic world, and Mark L. Caldwell’s suggestion that even ‘a reader’ of the play is ‘always left with the haunting suspicion that what we see may not be reality, but an illusion fostered by the perceiver’s senses’, both take important steps in this  direction.13 As this chapter will explore, then, vision and visual stagecraft are rather more important to Hamlet than is typically acknowledged, just as spectacle is a more substantial, sophisticated, and conventional component of early modern dramatic craft than theatre histories centring on complaints about illusionistic spectacle and gazing spectators have tended to suggest. The first part of the chapter considers key early modern attitudes towards sight and their relationship with Hamlet. The second turns specifically to the theatres, reconsidering playmaker and playgoer understandings of sight in early modern dramatic practice and reception, in order to offer a revised account of how eyes and ears were expected to interrelate in the playhouse. The final part focuses exclusively on Hamlet’s stagecraft, examining its visualdramatic design in light of the wider suggestions.

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Looking askance: Early modern cultures of sight In the wake of influential twentieth-century accounts of ‘iconophobia’ on the one hand (suggesting widespread distrust of visual stimulation in Reformation England), and the ‘rationalization of sight’ on the other (instead proposing a renewed and thoroughgoing confidence in visual equivalency and empirical observation), recent scholarship on early modern cultures of sight has taken a more holistic view, suggesting something closer to a landscape of visual contradiction in which radically varied attitudes to and understandings of sight circulated and overlapped.14 This is not to say that concerns about idolatrous looking and misleading appearances had no place in Reformation culture – simply that other narratives about vision (theological and otherwise) also had purchase in early modern England. It is true that commentators regularly complained how Catholics ‘hope to be saved, rather by sight then by hearing’, allegedly ‘plac[ing] a greate and maine part of their superstitious worship in the eie service […] in gazing upon their dumb ceremonies’.15 Yet whilst suspicious of sight’s capacity to seduce and distract, given the potentially damning consequences of idolizing earthly representations in place of God, or of valuing rich decoration, writers generally stopped short of actually equating sound with reformed worship, and sight with Catholic practice. George Hakewill, for instance, claims ‘the popish religion co~sists’ not entirely ‘in eie service’, but merely ‘more […] then the reformed’ faith does.16 Visual appeal and ocular pleasure have a place, it follows, in reformed life and worship, if pursued appropriately, cautiously, and without superstition. Both Catholic and reformed practice must by definition involve some eye-service, if the former consists more therein. In other contexts, theological writers were quick to praise sight as a gift from God, or even the basis of faith itself. So Griffith Williams explains the scriptural use of the word behold for ‘demonstration, for the greater certainty of any thing: because we are sure of what we see: so the Disciples said unto Thomas, we have seene the Lord, therefore they were sure that he was risen’.17 Williams’s exegesis, drawing upon a long Anglican church career, reflects wider cultural expectations that the best proof of all is ocular. Accordingly, even if corruptible, sight provides the strongest claims to surety, whether of Christ’s divinity or criminal culpability. This expectation is echoed in Hamlet’s

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relentless calls to ‘look’, ‘mark’, and ‘bear a wary eye’ (1.1.39; 5.1.211; 5.2.256).18 How straightforwardly and reliably the ensuing sights can actually be interpreted and understood is a matter considered below. But regardless of the play’s potential scepticism on the subject, Hamlet’s visual demands reflect the wider convention that the surest step towards knowing is seeing. In stating, ‘we are sure of what we see’, Williams echoes another prevalent early modern view, with roots in classical sensory hierarchies proposed by Aristotle and others, that sight is first amongst the five traditionally recognized ‘external’ senses. Influential texts by André du Laurens (translated in  1599) and Robert Burton (1621) are representative in claiming that ‘the common judgement of all the Philosophers’ is that vision is ‘the most noble, perfect and admirable’ sense, ‘held to bee most pretious and the best’.19 As Thomas Frangenburg outlines, the standard arguments in this tradition for sight’s preeminence include its necessity for sustenance and movement; its supposedly instantaneous operation; its provision of ‘knowledge of the most important things’; its centrality to all ‘speculative sciences’ except music; even its physical location, ‘placed highest in the human body’.20 Yet despite centuries of arguments for vision’s dominance, sensory hierarchies were never set in stone. Every so often, hearing would be proposed as superior, usually on the basis of language and the communication of abstract concepts;21 occasionally, other commentators would even advance touch as ‘the King of sences, greater then the rest’ for its immediacy and intensity (contradicting typical characterizations of tactility as base and even animalistic).22 Whilst sight was most often ‘King of sences’, its crown was by no means undisputed, then. Vision’s ‘corruptibility’, moreover, caused much anxiety. By long convention, hallucination and visual mistaking were physiologically attributed to the excess of black bile that, according to Galenic theory, causes melancholy: as Timothy Bright explains in his 1586 Treatise of Melancholie, the overplus of bile ‘with his vapours anoyeth the harte and passing up to the brayne, counterfetteth terrible objects to the fantasie, and polluting both the substance, and spirits of the brayne, causeth it without external occasion, to forge monstrous fictions’.23 Shakespeare adopts the polluted sight of the love melancholic in sonnet 27, the wearily restless speaker lying in darkness and, through ‘imaginary sight’, seeing the ‘shadow’ of their beloved, ‘Which like a

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jewel hung in ghastly night / Makes black night beauteous and her old face new’ (27.9–12). Where religious concerns about looking warned of external visual stimuli deceiving or seducing the eye, here misleading sights reside within the eye and mind of the perceiving subject. Shakespeare thus follows humoral theory in this instance, rather than Reformation theology, to evoke claustrophobically ‘sightless view’ (27.10). Another fictional scenario – like sonnet  27, imagined in a private room at night – also explores ‘imaginary sight’ and ‘journey[s]’ in the ‘head’. In Hamlet’s so-called ‘closet scene’, Gertrude dismisses as mere ‘bend[ing]’ of the ‘eye on vacancy’ and ‘discourse’ with ‘th’incorporal air’ her son’s final ghostly encounter (3.4.113–14).24 Considered in the wider interpretive context of the play, particularly given the Ghost’s visibility to the full Elsinore watch in 1.1 and 1.4, the question has often been why Gertrude appears unable to see the ghost, not whether the visitation may indeed be ‘the very coinage of [Hamlet’s] brain’, as she suggests.25 Taking the play as a whole, the Ghost is fairly determinedly represented as a supernatural visitation rather than a hallucination.26 Yet in early performance, Hamlet’s melancholic domestic encounter with a figure imperceptible to others, his sight quite possibly polluted with the vapours of excess bile, may momentarily evoke a widespread tradition of fictional ‘journey[s]’ in the ‘head’ (Son  27.3), and ‘untrue’ eyes that could turn ‘mountain’, ‘sea’, ‘crow’, and ‘dove’ into the ‘feature[s]’ of an absent loved one (Son  113.11–14). Indeed, early responses to Shakespeare remind us that, in the moment of performance, culturally familiar tropes often guide understanding, sometimes even erroneously. John Manningham’s 1602 assumption that the noblewoman in mourning clothes is ‘his lady widdowe’, despite Twelfth Night’s clear assertion that Olivia has lost a brother, not a husband, is telling in this regard.27 In Gertrude’s closet, Hamlet’s stagecraft references a belief about vision in order to evoke local, momentary uncertainty about the reliability of Hamlet’s sight, even as the wider design of the play supports another ghostly interpretation. Whilst melancholic ocular disruption was considered diagnosable and delimited, recent accounts of early modern intellectual culture have traced other, more concerted shifts in sensory thinking, concluding that the very notion of objective perception faced new scrutiny in the period. Thus, Stuart Clark traces departures from classically derived theories of ‘correct’ and

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‘incorrect’ sight, towards the visual relativism of Montaigne’s claims that ‘the uncertaintie of our senses yeelds what ever they produce, also uncertaine’, and that ‘nothing comes unto us but falsified and altered by our senses’.28 In foregrounding such scepticism, this scholarship directly challenges earlier critical narratives of a European Renaissance ‘rationalization of sight’ towards ‘two-way, or reciprocal, correspondence’ between what the eye perceives and the external world, anticipating the empirical objectivity of the modern scientific method and reflecting technical advances in the visual arts.29 Instead, Clark traces the increasing traction of the suggestion that all visual perception is subjective, its correspondence with the external world impossible to verify categorically and, ultimately, reliable evidence of nothing more than itself: as Florio’s Montaigne announced to English speakers in 1603, ‘the senses are the beginning and end of humane knowledge’.30 How far Hamlet tracks this shift is an open question. As Colin Burrow has recently re-emphasized, Shakespeare does not demonstrate ‘incontrovertible’ knowledge of Montaigne’s work until well after he wrote Hamlet, making any claim of direct influence speculative.31 Another way of approaching the question might be to treat the Essays not as a source but simply an indication of ideas in circulation in late sixteenth-century Europe, potentially available for Shakespeare to encounter regardless of the particular text, performance, or tavern in which he did so. Certainly, some scholars of intellectual history see Hamlet as participating in contemporary debates about visual perception, Danijela Kambaskovic and Charles T. Wolfe claiming of the ‘closet scene’ (3.4) that ‘Shakespeare is asking here whether something can ever be considered “real” or “true” if only one person can see it.’ Similarly, Mark L. Caldwell sees in ‘the double representation of the murder in the mousetrap scene’ the assumption that ‘[s]ense evidence must be corroborated’.32 Yet seeking visual corroboration and distrusting single perspectives is not quite as radical as believing that ‘what ever’ the senses ‘produce’ is ‘uncertaine’.33 In sum, whilst Hamlet demonstrates Shakespeare’s familiarity with a wide range of contemporary attitudes to sight, it does so without ever categorically endorsing any one of them. The play makes the utility, efficacy, and reliability of vision a constant reference point, encouraging engaged reflection rather than advancing a particular view. Attending early performances may thus have

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entailed conscious, critical, even self-reflexive acts of viewing. With this in mind, we can turn in the remainder of the chapter first to the broader culture of early modern playhouse spectatorship, and then to the specific visual stagecraft that Hamlet offered early playgoers.

Playhouse looking reconsidered Given the critical commonplace – or even ‘cliché’ – that early modern playmakers and playgoers differentiated between the ‘common sight’ and the ‘judicious ear’,34 it may seem misguided to seek sophisticated visual stagecraft in a play such as Hamlet that was said to ‘please the wiser sort’.35 Scholarly understandings of differentiated sight and hearing often reflect Andrew Gurr’s field-defining work, in which he distinguishes ‘the learned ear’ from ‘the shows of the common stage’; asks whether early modern playgoers were ‘audiences or spectators’ (my emphasis); and, ultimately, argues that ‘Elizabethan audiences were hearers before they were spectators’, characterized by ‘alertness to the oral rather than visual features’ of performance.36 Whilst Gabriel Egan has long since dismantled the hypothesis that early modern subjects habitually spoke not of seeing but hearing a play, the propensity to characterize Shakespearean drama as primarily linguistic in design has persisted, as part of a general tendency to oppose sound and spectacle as alternative, rather than complementary, dramatic modalities; indeed, Gurr has recently reiterated his ‘inclin[ation]’ that ‘earlier writing’ for the early modern theatres was ‘for listeners’, later supplanted by a dramaturgy of ‘attractions available to the eye’.37 Such distinctions between verbal craft and judicious hearing on the one hand, and broad spectacle and illusory gazing on the other, invite a tidy but ultimately problematic sensory separation between dramatists consciously targeting the ‘judicious’, and those who, as Lukas Erne sees it, ‘knew they were producing little more than theatrical fast food’.38 There were, certainly, distinctions drawn between playhouse looking and listening. Ben Jonson is most often cited in this regard: late in his career, he claimed overtly that good playgoers ‘come to heare, not see a Play’, preferring to ‘have you wise, / Much rather by your eares, then by your eyes’.

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Similarly, in  1638, Jasper Mayne differentiates Jonsonian ‘land-Tragedies’ from the  spectacle of ‘Red-Bull wars’ laying ‘sieges to the Musique Roome’ above the stage, albeit in conscious accord with Jonson’s own latterly professed views.39 Yet stark generalizations based on such claims simply do not reflect the full evidence. A full archival survey finds a range of conflicting opinion, rather than a clear consensus that in the playhouse, ears were judicious and eyes were common. In fact, quite another opinion appears more popular, reflecting a fundamentally different understanding of plays and playgoing: early modern sources repeatedly argue that good drama should appeal to ears and eyes, and that good playgoers should therefore engage judiciously through both senses. Even Jonson himself appears somewhat sympathetic to this position in earlier years, particularly before his fall-out with Inigo Jones over the priority of text and scenic design in court masques.40 During Shakespeare’s working life, Jonson happily offered Epicœne (1609–10) as ‘the object of your eare, and sight’, and he even invited ‘Gracious, and kind Spectators’ to ‘feast your eies’ on Every Man Out of his Humour (1599) with perhaps merely partial sarcasm.41 This trope persisted in stage prologues and print paratexts alike throughout the period: as late as the mid-1630s, Joseph Rutter’s The Shepherd’s Holiday ‘present[ed] unto […] eares, and eyes’ its drama of pastoral love, whilst James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant received praise for ‘[t]he full delight of every eye and eare’ evoked by its performance in  1629, ‘grac’d with comely action’.42 Significantly, whilst positioning Shirley as proto-‘literary’, this printed paratext admires his visual and linguistic stagecraft, even recognizing skilled theatrical performers as essential partners in the realization of Shirley’s dramatic intentions. Similarly, a commendatory poem to Philip Massinger’s The Bond-Man (1623) twice claims that playgoers ‘Saw, and Heard’ as carefully as they could in the hope of ‘Understand[ing]’ the play, even whilst asserting that the play contains nothing to ‘take, by common way, the common sight’.43 Playhouse looking may encompass ‘common sight’, but, it follows, can also take other forms. Yet more telling are complaints about playgoers’ ill-judged attempts to engage through anything other than a balanced combination of ear and eye. Henry Glapthorne bemoans those who attend through ear or eye alone, or eschew both in favour of self-display:

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Some in an humorous squemishnesse will say, They only come to heare, not see the Play, Others to see it only, there have beene, And are good store, that come but to be seene: Not see nor heare the Play: How shall we then Please the so various appetites of men.44

Certainly, there are overtones of frustration here at the play-makers’ lack of control over playgoers’ engagements, emphasizing the variety, individuation, and unpredictability of playhouse response. Nonetheless, Glapthorne’s prologue echoes a widespread and, by the late 1630s, extremely longstanding playhouse expectation of careful sight as well as hearing, indicating the conventional combination of precise verbal and visual design. It is striking, too, that Glapthorne appears to regard exclusively aural engagement as recognizably Jonsonian rather than as a widespread playhouse behaviour: his satirical description of a ‘humorous’ playgoer squeamishly fixated on ‘hear[ing], not see[ing] the Play’, constitutionally imbalanced to the point of sickliness, appears to deliberately recall Jonson’s two comedies of humours and their outspoken writer. Perhaps the most suggestive evidence of all appears in J. G.’s Refutation of the Apology for Actors, responding to Thomas Heywood’s 1612 defence of his profession: [W]hat a doubtful case would the use of playes then stand, if none but fooles (as commonly they are) or none but blindmen were their auditors? the one kind could not understand, the other could not see, and consequently neither give right judgement of them[.]45

Simply to suggest that sightlessness results in partial experience of dramatic performance seems fairly uncontroversial. However, to argue that ‘blindmen’ would be as unequipped as ‘fooles’ to ‘give right judgement’ is to go considerably further. Accordingly, visual attention is not only required but must be explicitly critical and judicious in order for someone to engage with and assess a play adequately. Separations between unthinking sight and censorious hearing simply do not obtain under this model of playhouse spectatorship. Instead, the key question is whether an engagement is actively judicious, regardless of the organ of perception.

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Later critical traditions privileging page over stage have shaped a modern assumption that ‘[t]o simplify matters, performance tends to speak to the senses, while a printed text activates the intellect’.46 In early modern culture, however, this distinction between active linguistic rationality (activated by text) and passive sensory feeling (spoken to by performance) was not always so clear. Visual engagement was expected to be judicious, censorious, and thinking, shaping a theatrical culture in which playgoers were asked to bear a rational and critical eye as a matter of course. Recent, seminal work by Gillian Woods takes important steps towards recovering this culture. Taking the example of the dumb show, Woods argues that such sights were neither empty of meaning, nor reductively symbolic. Instead, like language, dumb shows required active, critical engagement; the difference was simply that eyes, rather than ears, were prioritized. This dramaturgy of suggestion, rather than didacticism, in turn fostered a playhouse culture of visually engaged interpretation and polysemous meaning: ‘[d]umb shows require understanding while simultaneously emphasizing that understanding is challenging’.47 A more engaged and censorious model of playhouse looking in turn enables a more precise understanding of complaints about the ‘common sight’ within a theatrical culture accustomed to both verbal and visual stagecraft. Such remarks are rarely criticisms of sight and spectacle per se, but rather objections to unthinking or uncritical spectatorship – thus, The Bond-Man could be praised both for what spectators ‘Saw, and Heard’, and for refusing to ‘take, by common way, the common sight’.48 A similar distinction is at work in the printer Richard Jones’s claim that certain ‘fond and frivolous Jestures’ that ‘have bene of some vaine conceited fondlings greatly gaped at’ in performance are excised from his 1 & 2 Tamburlaine edition (1590).49 Strongly implying passive, unthinking attention, such disparaging references to ‘gaping’ or ‘gazing’ spectators are common, including Stephen Gosson’s oft-cited warning that ‘the longer we gaze’ at theatrical ‘shewes’, ‘the more we crave’.50 Significantly, this terminology has specific theological connotations in an early modern context: just as George Hakewill imagines Catholics ‘gazing upon their dumb ceremonies’, so playhouse references to gaping and gazing spectators are deliberate attempts to equate visual passivity in the playhouse with idolatrous looking.51 Thus, ‘if we flocke to Theaters to gase upon playes,

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we walke in the Counsell of the ungodly’, not only lacking discretion but visibly reminiscent of a practiser of idolatry.52 It is not critically engaged scrutiny with precise visual stagecraft, then, but rather passive gazing upon an illusory, seductive sight that early modern commentators warn against in complaints about playhouse looking, and it is crucial that such strictures are not taken to pre-empt the possibility of a thoughtful, precise – even rich – visual playhouse culture. In light of the theatrical expectations of judicious looking and sophisticated visual stagecraft traced in this section, and informed by the previous section’s understanding of Hamlet as encouraging self-reflexive engagement with a range of contemporary attitudes to sight beyond iconoclasm, we can now turn to consider Shakespeare’s dramatic uses of playhouse looking.

Hamlet’s visual stagecraft There are a few long-recognized moments of spectacle in Hamlet that have dominated discussions of the play’s interest in sight – principally the dumb show to The Murder of Gonzago and the physical appearance of the Ghost.53 Whilst such discussions can be somewhat circumscribed, the mid-twentieth century saw several studies looking more widely across the play for visual stagecraft. Such work typically attends to structure or symbolic patterning: for Lee Sheridan Cox, staging that recalls dumb show conventions is used throughout Hamlet ‘for symbolic ends’, the dumb show medium itself evoking ‘evil’ and ‘unreality’; elsewhere, Alan C. Dessen sought to engage literary criticism with theatre history in a speculative, sophisticated, and fundamentally emblematic reading of Hamlet’s sword.54 More recent work has foregrounded active, interpretive models of looking, in relation both to the play’s dramatic world and its performance reception. Jennifer Rae McDermott finds in Hamlet’s play-world a hierarchy in which ‘attent seeing is never as powerful as attent hearing’, but above all ‘the best perceivers are those that use both senses as one interpenetrative instrument of full attention’. Elsewhere, Evelyn Tribble places comparable emphasis on the active and constructed nature of sight, focusing on the staging of the ghost in order to reframe looking not as a passive and transparent process but an act of cognitive assembly.55

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Building on such work, and in particular taking up the active understanding of vision articulated by Woods and others, I wish to place a slightly different emphasis on the play’s explicit foregrounding of its own visual stagecraft, and the paradoxical uncertainty about visual interpretation this creates. Central to my reading is the claim that Hamlet does not merely hope playgoers will engage with its sights (even if the previous section’s evidence suggests that unprompted, judicious visual playhouse engagements were more habitual than has been assumed). Rather, the play utilizes certain techniques to direct playgoers’ active visual attention: through explicit directions to look; through the modelling of visual scrutiny and interpretation within the dramatic world; and – especially in Q2 – through the direct and deliberate interruption of verbal digression with a visually compelling entrance. Hamlet contains innumerable directions to look, from the opening scene onwards: characters – and by extension, playgoers – are told to ‘look where’ the ghost ‘comes again’, give Claudius ‘heedful note’, ‘look here’ at the mad Ophelia, ‘couch […] awhile and mark’ Ophelia’s funeral procession, and ‘bear a wary eye’ toward Hamlet and Laertes’ duel, to take a few representative examples (1.1.39; 3.2.80; 4.5.37; 5.1.211; 5.2.256). Such moments seem fairly obviously designed to draw playgoers’ attention to particular sights, both through the imperative phrases themselves and the onstage performances of visual scrutiny that characters duly offer. The sights in question are relatively varied, some with fairly obvious potential for spectacle, such as Hamlet and Laertes’ duel (5.2.257–89), alongside rather more subtle aspects of behaviour, countenance, and physical appearance that might escape sustained visual scrutiny without specific prompts to look, such as Hamlet’s entrance ‘reading’ that Gertrude notes (2.2.165), and Claudius’s demeanour throughout 3.2, to which Hamlet explicitly directs Horatio’s attention – and with it that of the playhouse audience  – as the play-within-a-play is about to begin (3.2.81–3). Hamlet is nothing if not clear that looking is important, both at Elsinore and at the Globe. Significantly, the looking cued quite instrumentally throughout the play is not the unthinking ‘gaze’ sometimes associated with theatrical spectacle but rather an engaged, active, and interpretive spectatorship, consistent with Woods’s account of dumb show theatricality.56 This is actually modelled within the dramatic world itself, for many of the play’s prompts and directions to look are followed by characters explicitly and sustainedly attempting to comprehend

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and interpret the sight before them. These dramatizations indicate the mode of judicious, active spectatorship that Hamlet’s dramaturgy seeks from playhouse attendees, and may even have helped to shape wider cultural expectations, encouraging habitual playgoers to respond accordingly in future encounters with visual stagecraft. Unsurprisingly, the Ghost is subjected to extended ocular scrutiny and censure onstage, beginning with Barnardo’s compulsive, repeated response to its very first entrance that it is ‘like the King’ in ‘figure’ and appearance, a refrain echoed by Marcellus upon its subsequent exit (1.1.40–55). Details of clothing, facial expression, gait, and hue are discussed by Horatio, Marcellus, Barnardo, and later, Hamlet, as they attempt to ‘read’ the sight of the Ghost (1.1.57–65;  1.2.224–40). Even Hamlet’s attempts to contain the emergent situation in the aftermath of the Ghost’s next appearance indicate the significance the prince places on visual interpretation, for it is this he seeks to prevent others from participating in: the watch must ‘never make known’ what they have ‘seen tonight’ (1.5.143; my emphasis), for fear of affording others the opportunity to offer their own ocular glosses.57 Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo – and the playhouse audience who are likewise witnesses to the Ghost – are thus invited into a collective pact of secrecy, the judicious looking taking place on and off stage a privileged, private activity. Like the onstage soldiers seeking to interpret disembodied musical sound on the eve of the battle of Alexandria in Antony and Cleopatra (4.3.1–29),58 Marcellus and Barnardo are included as minor characters with whom playgoers can align their perspectives, sharing in interpretive visual acts from a liminal position that is both outside of the dramatic world and yet, through shared sensory experience and engagement, participatory. Certainly, dramatizations of visual interpretation could have practical benefits, conveying information to playgoers lacking a clear view, for instance, or clarifying stage business and visual symbolism that may not be selfexplanatory even to those who can see. Thus, upon spying Ophelia’s funeral procession, Hamlet details the participants, the nature of the ceremony, and the possible meaning of its visibly ‘maimed rites’, with impressive verbal economy: But soft, but soft awhile, here comes the King, The Queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow? And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken

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The corpse they follow did with desperate hand Fordo it[s] own life. ’Twas of some estate. Couch we awhile and mark.

(5.1.205–10) Yet even whilst verbally translating both the sight and its possible import, Hamlet’s words emphasize the difficulty and uncertainty of what he sees, and the censorious scrutiny it demands. Hamlet knows he looks upon a funeral procession but not who is dead, a state of knowledge actually inverted for any playgoers yet to see the sight, but who learned of Ophelia’s death at the end of the previous scene. Furthermore, whilst Hamlet’s suggestion that the ‘maimed rites […] betoken’ suicide is a valid interpretation, it is nonetheless interpretation rather than agreed fact, as becomes apparent when the priest suggests Ophelia’s ‘death was doubtful’ (5.1.216), indicating mere suspicion of suicide that might return an ‘open verdict’ at an inquest in England and Wales today, rather than anything more categorical. Hamlet’s precise phrase, that the deceased ‘did with desperate hand / Fordo it[s] own life’, may even deliberately recall Gertrude’s equally precise words in the previous scene, in which she contrastingly and studiously avoided describing Ophelia as actively suicidal: she simply ‘fell’ and ‘drowned’, at most passive when the ‘envious sliver’ of tree broke under her weight, and when the clothes that at first ‘bore her up’ became waterlogged and ‘[p]ulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / to muddy death’ (4.7.171–82). Playgoers must negotiate Gertrude and the Priest’s potentially superior knowledge of the situation, but also the possible tact in their suggestions (both are speaking either directly or indirectly to Ophelia’s brother); likewise, Hamlet’s more conclusive interpretation of the spectacle must be weighed against his manifest ignorance of the wider situation. Even as Hamlet re-presents visual stagecraft in verbal terms, his censorious looking is exposed as an interpretive act, capable of error and open to challenge, placing the onus on playgoers not to rely unquestioningly upon Hamlet’s visual understanding, nor gaze passively upon this ‘notable shew’, but rather to ‘view it well’, bearing their own judicious eyes upon an emphatically visual and deliberately obtuse moment of dramatic craft.59 Hamlet’s third substantial visual-dramatic technique involves the deliberate interruption of extended speech with a ‘notable shew’.60 All early texts agree that

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at the opening of the play, Barnardo’s endlessly deferred attempt to describe the Ghost’s appearance the previous night is broken off without ever reaching its main verb: Marcellus urges Barnardo to ‘look where it comes again’ as the sight of the Ghost displaces narration (1.1.34–9). Besides foregrounding the immediacy of sight, the interruption moves the burden of interpretation from the narrating character to playgoers themselves, who are invited to engage directly with a version of the sensory experience Barnardo seeks to translate into language. Q2 is alone in making this technique a notable and presumably deliberate feature of the Ghost’s early entrances, through two passages absent from the other texts. The first of these occurs in the midst of the attempts at visual scrutiny that follow the Ghost’s interruption of Barnardo (1.1.40–124). As Horatio takes a comparative approach to ocular comprehension, detailing various analogous and portentous sights that apparently preceded Julius Caesar’s murder (‘the sheeted dead’ walking the street, visible ‘stars with trains and dews of blood’, and a lunar eclipse (1.1.111–24)), the Ghost enters again. This time the speaker cuts himself off with a command to be ‘soft’, having laid out an interpretive frame through which playgoers might process the ensuing sight (1.1.111–26). Later, in  1.4, the Ghost’s appearance interrupts Hamlet’s Q2-only remarks on national stereotyping (1.4.17–39), the prince breaking off mid-sentence upon its entrance. As the Arden 3 editors note, much of Hamlet’s speech is ‘obscure’, leading to suggestions that the passage is an unfinished draft (1.4.23–38n). Yet as the text stands, it actually fits a dramaturgical pattern of increasingly tangential language giving way to a recurring spectacular sight: the first visual interruption supplants Barnardo’s deferred attempt to comment directly on the Ghost; the second disrupts Horatio’s displaced and analogized attempt to offer ghostly interpretation; the third ceases Hamlet’s full-blown and linguistically redundant digression from the very purpose of his presence – to watch for the ghostly figure that duly interrupts him. Some scholars find both Q2-only passages dramatically inexplicable, J. M. Nosworthy suggesting that Shakespeare intended to delete them, and Philip Edwards even marking them in square brackets in his edition of the play.61 Yet in light of Hamlet’s careful and thoroughgoing visual stagecraft already traced, there is actually a clear rationale for including increasingly digressive speeches in which language fails to offer conclusive interpretation, each interrupted by

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a figure both temptingly immediate in its sensory appeal, and – like so many sights in the play – resistant to the very ocular scrutiny that it invites. This clash of dramatic modes is likely, then, to be a deliberate and central feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Just as the visual stagecraft of these Q2-only passages eludes some scholarly approaches, so the critical impact of other speeches can obscure further dramatic uses of sight in Hamlet. Act 3, Scene 1 is a case in point, for whilst it is now standard for editors to note Ophelia’s implicit presence, pretending to read, throughout Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech (3.1.56–89), critics are yet to acknowledge the full dramatic implications of ‘the most famous of all soliloquies’ not being, ‘strictly speaking, a soliloquy at all’.62 This is particularly significant if we take seriously the proposition that Hamlet was written for audiences attuned to visual as well as verbal stagecraft. The scene continues the play’s habit of cueing visual attention to key moments of stagecraft, yet significantly it is not Hamlet’s contemplative body but Ophelia’s studied posture of bookish piety to which attention is explicitly and extendedly drawn, suggesting that the most interesting or important sight on stage during ‘To be, or not to be’ may not actually be the speaker himself. Before Hamlet enters, Polonius gives a very clear account both of how Ophelia should present herself to his sight – pretending to read a book – and of the visual interpretation that he expects Hamlet to arrive at – that this is an act of private, religious meditation. Shakespeare was dramaturgically fond of visual performances of piety that the audience knows full well are misleading; in Richard III, for instance, the king-to-be’s appearance ‘between two bishops’, clasping ‘a prayer book’ (3.7.45, 93.1), offers a disingenuous spectacle of pious reluctance to accept power that, like Ophelia’s devotional reading, is explicitly planned, glossed, and framed to the audience as a visual deception. Shakespeare revisits the trope in Hamlet, but with greater emphasis on the difficulty of visual interpretation and the ubiquity of ocular misdirection. Thus, Polonius’s instructions to Ophelia do not simply predict (correctly) how Hamlet is likely to read her appearance; they also make it as difficult as possible for playgoers to miss the point that Hamlet’s interpretation will be inaccurate: Polonius emphasizes that Ophelia should merely pretend to be absorbed in a devotional act, labouring the point with an aphoristic remark

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that ‘[w]e are oft too blame in this’ (3.1.45). His characteristically digressive words encourage playgoers to direct critical scrutiny towards Ophelia’s ensuing visual performance, even whilst suggesting that the sight may be rather more challenging to read and interpret than Hamlet’s glib (and erroneous) allusion to Ophelia’s ‘orisons’ might suggest (3.1.88). What emerges, then, is not a scene intended to foreground the obtuse verbal craft of Hamlet’s speech alone but rather a moment of stagecraft demanding judicious engagement from playgoers through both ears and eyes. As noted, it is well established that the scene is not strictly a soliloquy, insofar as Hamlet is not alone onstage when he speaks. It may be possible to go yet further and say that he is not even the only one ‘speaking’ during these lines, if the visual language of Ophelia’s studied appearance is acknowledged as an equally significant voice in the scene. Perhaps, then, ‘To be, or not to be’ is better understood as a colloquy of verbal and visual language, in the literal sense of ‘speaking together’ (from the Latin col and loquium).63 To make this argument is not only to acknowledge visual aspects of the scene that are all too easily elided in page-based engagements with Hamlet, but also to recognize deliberate connections between Hamlet and Ophelia in the scene’s stagecraft. It is surely no coincidence that even as Hamlet apparently articulates ‘that within which passes show’ (1.2.85), playgoers are confronted with Ophelia’s outward appearance that they have been told explicitly is not only a deliberate misdirection but performed at the behest of her father, not herself. The play thus draws attention to what the audience is not told or shown of Ophelia’s own feelings about the unfolding events, even as Hamlet is given a platform to articulate ‘that within’.64 In this moment, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy may not merely reflect the gendered myopia of early modern culture but actually interrogate it through visual stagecraft. Such an interrogation only becomes apparent, however, if Shakespearean drama is presumed to aim at both ears and eyes. Here, as elsewhere, the silent presence of a female character is all too easily overlooked when encountered on page rather than stage, Ophelia joining Jessica, Beatrice, Isabella, and others whose wordless centrality in key dramatic moments is only now beginning to be explored fully through more sensate understandings of early modern dramatic craft and playhouse response.65

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Conclusion This chapter has traced early modern attitudes to sight, from the broadest cultural expectations and influences to specific uses of visual stagecraft in a single Shakespeare play. In so doing, it has sought to model how sustained and evidence-based attention to historical sensory culture can help elucidate the artistic output of that culture, not just through broad contextual understanding of a work’s conditions of production and reception, but via sustained close reading of a text, its dramatic design, and the engagements and interpretations it appears to have sought from early audiences. In this case, what emerges is a Hamlet that is as precise, sophisticated, and challenging in its visual stagecraft as in its verbal design, anticipating and even requiring playgoers’ eyes to be as engaged and critically reflective as their ears. Indeed, this chapter’s revised account of wider playhouse attitudes to sight and hearing has implications for scholarly approaches to early modern drama more generally: given longstanding critical assumptions about ears, eyes, and dramatic sophistication, Hamlet is surely not the only early modern play whose visual stagecraft is yet to be fully recognized and explored in light of new understandings of early modern cultures of sight. This chapter may represent initial steps, then, towards a thoroughgoing and fully sensate reconsideration of exactly what a play was, and what playhouse reception entailed, in early modern England.

Notes

I am extremely grateful to Katherine Hunt, Lizzie Swann, and Emma Whipday for feedback on earlier versions of this essay, and to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the research upon which it is based.

1

Griffith Williams, The Best Religion (London, 1636), 139.

2

Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), 349.

3

Important studies include Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 160–6, 244–68; Rhodri Lewis, ‘Hamlet’ and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

4

Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 86.

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Andrew Gurr, ‘The General and the Caviar: Learned Audiences in the Early Theatre’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 26, no. 1 (1993): 15, 18; Dessen, Viewer’s Eye, 12.

6

Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare’s Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 145.

7

See, for instance, Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–7 and passim; Jackie Watson, ‘“Dove like looks” and “serpents eyes”: Staging Visual Clues and Early Modern Aspiration’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, ed. Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 39–54; John Astington, Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–24.

8

Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 119.

9

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints 1558–1625 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Protestant Britain, c.1560-c.1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

10 Matthew Milner, ‘The Senses in Religion: Towards the Reformation of the Senses’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, ed. Herman Roodenburg (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 88. 11 Jennifer Rae McDermott, ‘Perceiving Shakespeare: A Study of Sight, Sound, and Stage’, Early Modern Literary ­Studies Special Issue 19 (2009): 5.17; Andrew Gurr, ‘Why Was the Globe Round?’, in Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen, ed. Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 3. 12 Influential readings include Maurice Francis Egan, The Ghost in Hamlet and Other Essays in Comparative Literature (Chicago: McClurg, 1906), 11–47; John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 51–86, 144–63; Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965), 110–20; Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 151–204 and passim. 13 McDermott, ‘Perceiving Shakespeare’; Mark L. Caldwell, ‘Hamlet and the Senses’, Modern Language Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1979): 143. 14 See Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of

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the Second English Reformation (Reading: University of Reading, 1986); William M. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973). Note 7 details the more recent scholarship. 15 William Harrison, The Difference of Hearers (London, 1614), A3r; George Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eie (Oxford, 1608), 125–6. 16 Ibid., 125. 17 Williams, Best Religion, 139. 18 Here and throughout, Hamlet references follow Arden 3’s edition of the second quarto, unless otherwise indicated. Those marked F and Q1 follow Arden 3’s folio and first quarto editions respectively. 19 André du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, trans. Richard Surflet (London, 1599), 12–13; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 33. See Tanya Pollard’s chapter in this volume for a full account of the classical tradition in early modern English sensory thinking (62–81). 20 Thomas Frangenburg, ‘Auditus Visu Prestantior: Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de Bovelles’s Liber de Sensibus’, in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: Warburg Institute, 1991), 71–3. 21 See, for instance, Charles de Bovelles, Liber de sensibus (Paris, 1510). Frangenburg discusses Bovelles’s claims at length (‘Auditus Visu Prestantior’, 75–83). 22 Michael Drayton, ‘To the Sences’, in The Barrons Wars (London, 1603), P7v. 23 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), 103. This topic is taken up at greater length in Aurélie Griffin, ‘Love Melancholy and the Senses in Mary Wroth’s Work’, in Smith, Watson, and Kenny, The Senses, 148–64. 24 Arden 3 notes that, contrary to widespread assumption, the scene is set in ‘a private room, but not a bedroom, which would have been referred to as [Gertrude’s] “chamber”’ (3.4.0n). 25 See, for instance, Lee Sheridan Cox, Figurative Design in Hamlet: The Significance of the Dumb Show (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1973), 22–3; Dover Wilson, What Happens, 253–5. 26 As Stephen Greenblatt observes, however, it is (perhaps deliberately) difficult to assign its origin reliably to purgatory, hell, or simply pre-Christian Senecan convention (Hamlet in Purgatory, 229–37). 27 John Manningham, ‘The Diary Resumed’, 1602, British Library, Harley MS 5353, fol. 12v. My claim assumes that the 1623 play-text represents what Manningham saw, at least in the detail of Olivia’s bereavement. Jackie Watson’s contribution to this volume further explores the 1602 Candlemas performance (224–44). 28 Clark, Vanities, 1–7; Montaigne, Essayes, 349.

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29 This tradition takes its cue (and its terminology) from Ivins, Rationalization of Sight, 7–10 and passim. 30 Montaigne, Essayes, 341. 31 Colin Burrow, ‘Montaignian Moments: Shakespeare and the Essays’, in Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016), 239. 32 Danijela Kambaskovic and Charles T. Wolfe, ‘The Senses in Philosophy and Science: From the Nobility of Sight to the Materialism of Touch’, in Roodenburg, Cultural History, 113–14; Caldwell, ‘Hamlet and the Senses’, 149. 33 Montaigne, Essayes, 349. 34 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47. 35 See Gabriel Harvey’s autograph notes in British Library, Add. MS 42518, fol. 422v. 36 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–24; Gurr, Company, 47–9. 37 Gabriel Egan, ‘Hearing or Seeing a Play? Evidence of Early Modern Theatrical Terminology’, Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 327–47; Gurr, Workplace, 3. 38 Erne, Literary Dramatist, 35. 39 Ben Jonson, ‘The Staple of Newes’, in The Workes (London, 1631), 2A3r; Jasper Mayne, Jonsonus Virbius (London, 1638), E4r. 40 The rift culminated in Jonson’s sarcastic suggestion that ‘Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque’ (‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones (1631)’, ed. Colin Burrow, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6:375–80). 41 Ben Jonson, ‘Epicœne, or, the Silent Woman’, in The Workes (London, 1616), 2Y1v; Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humor (London, 1600), B1v. 42 Joseph Rutter, The Shepheards Holy-Day (London, 1635), A4r; James Shirley, The Gratefull Servant (London, 1630), A4v. 43 W. B., ‘The Authors Friend to the Reader’, in Philip Massinger, The Bond-Man (London, 1624), A4r. 44 Henry Glapthorne, The Ladies Priviledge (London, 1640), A3v. 45 J. G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615), 40. 46 Erne, Literary Dramatist, 48. 47 Gillian Woods, ‘Understanding Dumb Shows and Interpreting The White Devil’, in Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre, ed. Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), 302. 48 W. B., ‘Authors Friend’, A4r.

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49 Richard Jones, ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, in Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great (London, 1590), A2r. 50 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), F6r. 51 Hakewill, Vanitie, 125. 52 Gosson, Playes Confuted, B7r. 53 See note 12. 54 Cox, Figurative Design, 17–32; Dessen, Viewer’s Eye, 91–109. 55 McDermott, ‘Perceiving Shakespeare’, 5.17; Evelyn B. Tribble, ‘Sight and Spectacle’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 248–9. 56 Woods, ‘Dumb Shows’. 57 Whilst Q1’s Hamlet refers to what they have ‘seen’ three times, Q2 and F refer twice to sight, and once to what was ‘heard’ (1.5.159). 58 See Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 98–102. 59 Stephen Gosson, The Trumpet of Warre (London, 1598), C7v. 60 Ibid. 61 J. M. Nosworthy, Shakespeare’s Occasional Plays (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), 141; Hamlet, ed. Philip Edwards, rev. Heather Hirschfield, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 259. 62 Thompson and Taylor’s note in Arden 3 (3.1.54n). Earlier editors, such as Harold Jenkins for Arden 2 (London: Methuen, 1982) and Philip Edwards for New Cambridge Shakespeare, often disregarded Ophelia’s presence entirely, despite their own stage directions. 63 OED, s.v. ‘colloquy’. 64 Whilst Thompson and Taylor note an editorial tradition in which Hamlet is aware of his overhearers, merely pretending to soliloquize for their benefit, they argue convincingly that ­‘[i]t would be very unusual […] not to clarify the situation if Hamlet is consciously directing his soliloquy […] at listeners’, citing contemporary examples (3.1.54n). 65 See, for instance, Elisa Oh, ‘The Silences of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s Isabella’, English Literary Renaissance 45, no. 3 (2015): 351–76; Margaret Maurer, ‘Leonato and Beatrice in Act 5, Scene 4, Line 97 of Much Ado about Nothing’, in Reading What’s There: Essays on Shakespeare in Honor of Stephen Booth, ed. Michael J. Collins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 89–97; Joseph M. Ortiz, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 154–7.

6

The smell of a king: Olfaction in King Lear Holly Dugan

Late in Shakespeare’s King Lear (and well into the eponymous king’s descent into both poverty and madness), Lear describes his royal personage: he smells ‘of mortality’ (4.6.129). Or rather, his hand does. Reacting to Gloucester’s desire to kiss it (a standard gesture of courtly respect), Lear warns him: ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality’ (4.6.129).1 It is a stark moment, one that posits the fallen state of the king in embodied terms and – potentially – as a perceptible smell. Lear’s dirty hand points towards the absurdity of Gloucester’s courtly deference in an atmosphere vastly different than court. It is a stark reminder of what Gloucester may not be able to see but should be able to smell: Lear’s abjection. King Lear and its body politics are not subtle; as Rebecca Munson argues, the play foregrounds the embodied limits of sovereignty in Act  1 when the king enters and declares ‘his darker purpose’, calling for a map of his kingdom.2 The division of the territory raises questions about his embodied health: though his power as a king is ‘divinely anointed’, his decision probes its limits, leading to this moment on the heath. To put this in olfactory terms, Lear’s body betrays him, especially its smell. Smell, Dominique Laporte reminds us, refuses to yield to aesthetic and political symbolism: ‘even when marvellous, smell always carries a trace of its origin’.3 Lear’s ‘mortal’ smell is interpreted in the play in varied ways, as characters encounter and experience it as both a natural and unnatural smell. Though Lear names it as one ‘of ’ mortality, critics usually interpret it as excrement: at this point in the play, the king and his small entourage have been vagrants on the heath for at least one night and possibly quite a few more. Kicked out of both Albany and Gloucester’s castles, left to shelter in a hovel near Dover during

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at least one storm, the king’s body marks time in a play with few temporal markers. The ‘scourge’ of nature portended by Gloucester in the play’s opening act is made literal in this scene as he responds to Lear’s social demise and to his vulnerable embodied state: ‘O ruined piece of nature!’ (4.6.130). Lear’s ruined nature smells of more than just excrement. Earlier reports of his madness precede this scene; those, too, are inflected with olfactory symbolism. Cordelia, preparing to invade England, describes Lear as mad as ‘the vexed sea’, noting that he has crowned himself with ‘rank fumiter and furrow weeds’ (4.4.1–5). Her attention to detail, to the specific botanical matter mentioned in the anonymous reports of his wanderings on the heath, the ‘burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn’, emphasizes her role as both an intimate caretaker and as a leader. These, Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche have argued, are all medicinal cures; they are also, as Michael Steffes notes, weeds, adorning him with a visual symbol of a wildness that threatens the health (and food) of the nation.4 That Cordelia fixates on its floral components as ingredients and as weeds reveals both her position as a daughter and as a potential leader.5 But they also document how Lear stinks: he is both marked by his own excrement and by the smell of the weeds of the heath with which he has adorned himself. Though each of these weeds provide symbolic and medicinal importance, together they provide a noxious botanical mélange that mingles with his bodily funk. Along with ‘rank fumiter’, which is named for the visual effect of its translucent leaves and for the smoky and nitric acid-like smell of its roots, Lear adorns himself with darnel, which releases a foul scent when it corrupts cereal grass.6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, in ‘The Sensitive Plant’, describes the olfactory effect of a very similar nosegay to Lear’s: thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, And the dock, and henbane; and hemlock dank Stretched out its long and hollow shank, And stifled the air, till the dead wind stank.7

Hemlock can smell bitter, and cuckoo-flowers, if we are to believe Tennyson, have a melancholy perfume, ‘sweet and frail’.8 Itinerant, disoriented, aged, tired, wounded, cold, and vulnerable: Lear’s body (and its perfume) performs his fallen status for the audience in olfactory

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terms easy to understand, especially in 1606, when the play was first performed. With deaths from plague rising each week that summer and continuing into the autumn, the public theatres were closed, including the Globe. The smell of mortality – of life amongst death – was a palpable and constant presence in London. The smell of a mortal king would perhaps resonate in other ways, as well, given both the attempted plot on the king’s life in 1605 and the cultural anxiety that prefigured his reign about an ageing monarch with no clear successor.9 Lear’s mortality is enacted within a broader cultural environment; its symbolism and its materiality function in tandem, infusing the play with what we might term a biological urgency. Lear’s body is understood as a marker of a sharp decline; it signals embodied frailty. Gloucester’s exclamation of grief – ‘O ruined piece of nature’ (4.6.130) – is both a reaction and a cue to the audience on how to interpret the scene: what Lear names as mortality, death’s natural role in biological life, Gloucester codes as an unnatural and ‘ruined’ state of nature. His response prefigures Cordelia’s reaction: ‘O you kind gods! / Cure this great breach in his abused nature’ (4.7.14–15). How we perceive Lear’s body – as mortal, as ruined, as abused – shapes how we understand the tragedy at the heart of the play.

The smell of mortality To smell of mortality10 is to smell of death, a distinctive smell emitted when the amino acids in the biological matter of our bodies break down. Early modern people knew this smell well: before burial and cremation became the domain of professional experts, and before modern preservation practices (including refrigeration) transformed funeral practices, death – including the smells associated with it – was a part of everyday life. As historian Connie Chiang emphasizes, smells that we now consider ‘unpleasant and unavoidable’ were once ‘unavoidable and ubiquitous’.11 These accrued broader social meanings other than disgust: rituals of punishment, containment, or sanctification of corpses manipulated the smell of mortality so that it also contained important cultural cues for those who came in contact with it. Under certain circumstances, however, the smell of death could still be jarring, especially

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when it emanated from those who were not associated with human sin and mortality (such as infants or royalty).12 The human body emits over 474 volatile molecules as it decays, most only identifiable to trained animals with heightened senses of smell (such as cadaver dogs, trained by police to search for bodies). A few, however, are strong and foul enough to be noticeable by humans. These are, overwhelmingly, two organic compounds known as putrescine and cadaverine. Though they are produced in living tissue as well as decaying tissue, they have been linked with death: both were described by scientists in the nineteenth century as ptomaines, from ptoma, the Greek word for corpse.13 This stemmed from the belief that the cause of death was its effect: this particular smell was believed to be toxic and poisonous to humans.14 Cadaverine (the smell of rotting flesh) and putrescine (the smell of foul breath), along with indole (the smell of urine), spermidine (the smell of semen), and skatole (the smell of faeces), define this olfactory mélange. Though this perfume defines the biology of death, these scents are also present in biological functions of living: in excrement, ejaculation, saliva, and sweat. Cadaverine, indole, putrescine, skatole, and spermidine are the smells of living and dying; they are the smells of embodiment. It is also not an understatement to say that Lear smells differently on the heath. The presence of earth and air changes the smell of his body in scientific ways (as well as metaphoric ones).15 These organic compounds are activated and intensified in oxygen. Death (at least in terms of this olfactory mélange) smells differently in the open air: without oxygen, death smells sweeter, with higher indole, whereas the oxygen in outdoor environments creates higher levels of acetone.16 The king’s comments about his mortal body and its smell may have triggered powerful sensory memories about the smell of death in London’s urban realm even though the play links these smells with the openair realm of the heath.17 Our understanding of the science of decomposition has changed over time; though early modern audiences understood smell (including the smell of death) in vastly different ways than we do, most were aware of death as a biological process and of the smells associated with both wounds and decay. Fear about airborne contagion, and plague, heightened the associations between the smell of death and infection; even the perfumes used to defend the body against such

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threats drew attention to the air and the potentially dangerous consequences of breathing in contaminated environments. Environments, rivers, even the air itself could be said to ‘vomit’ forth ‘decay’.18 Even in times of plague, families attempted to perform burial rituals for their loved ones. Archaeological data from mass graves in Lincolnshire, and other areas of England outside of London, suggest that families transported the dying to hospitals, likely in an attempt to administer last rites (rather than medicinal cures).19 The erratic pattern of contagion in London, however, required a different approach, with the inflicted quarantined in their home with their loved ones for forty days.20 That the plague usually killed the infected within four to five days means that the smell of death was constant and present, mingling with the smell of burnt aromatics designed to protect the living until searchers and watchmen could inspect the house for signs of infection and remove the dead.21 When possible, funeral practices tended to the body; last rites tended to the soul. Smell was integral to both processes: as Matthew Milner has argued, extreme unction was the sacrament most concerned with the senses, anointing the sensory organs, loins, and feet of the dying; the oil of anointing cleansed the soul from the sensations of sin, along with prayer, preparing the anointed for a new way of being: ‘May He [Christ] guide your senses; and lead you to the supernal kingdom.’22 The cadaver was an earthly matter, though it too was linked to sensory modes of spiritual perception.23 As Milner notes, the Book of Common Prayer’s funeral services included references to Job  19: ‘I shall rise out of the earth in the last day, and shall be covered again with my skin and shall see God in my flesh,’ a prayer that emphasized seeing and sensing God. But it also emphasized returning to God in the flesh, raising questions about religion and decomposition. This was more than a question of theology; the funeral rites for kings put these practices to the test. Archaeological evidence documents that embalming practices for European royalty were not perfected until the second half of the seventeenth century; without them, even kings decomposed, requiring the use of effigies during more protracted ceremonies of state. Embalming practices were often unsuccessful. Even when perfumed, the smell of death could be noxiously present. As Ambroise Paré rhetorically asks:

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Why is it that at present our kings, princes and great nobles, even though they are disemboweled and washed with brandy and vinegar and sprinkled with aromatics, sparing nothing to embalm them, despite all this in five or six days at least smell so badly that one cannot stand to remain where they are, but it is necessary to put them in lead coffins?24

Though the ritual suggests elevation, royal bodies behave like others, decomposing rapidly after death. This could create powerful metaphoric associations when staged, both in terms of royal funerals and in terms of plague. Anne, for instance, grieves over the body of King Henry VI at the start of Richard III; when she is interrupted by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, she pulls off the funeral shroud in order to force him to confront the sight of Henry’s corpse. She notes that it ‘exhales’ blood in his presence, which she interprets as an ‘unnatural’ event (1.2.58–61) and a sign of his guilt (given the preparation of the corpse for burial). Earlier, she describes the body as a ‘bloodless remnant of that royal blood’ (1.2.7), suggesting that the king had been embalmed. The metaphor of a dead king’s body ‘exhal[ing]’ blood thus marks an unnatural violence through natural processes; though her argument does not seem to work on Richard, it may have impacted audiences witnessing the performance. Shakespeare’s plays contain a number of references to decomposition and its attending smells. Famously, Hamlet describes death as a great equalizer in the great chain of being: he explains to Claudius that ‘a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm’ and in doing so ‘a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar’ (4.3.26–30). Claudio is disturbed by the imagery; it seems to confirm Hamlet’s madness and his murder of Polonius. Hamlet soon identifies the location of Polonius’s missing body: ‘you shall nose him as you go up the stairs in the lobby’ (4.3.34–5). Such jokes about the smell of death are rife in Hamlet, so much so that literary critic Richard Altrick described the play ‘as enveloped in an atmosphere of stench’ and ‘preoccupied with the corruption of mortal flesh’.25 It is a play that stages the effects of decomposition both in the afterlife and in terms of funeral rites: the ghost of old Hamlet describes himself as horrifically disfigured from poison, even in the afterlife. The gravedigger also emphasizes this point: the state of the body matters in terms of decomposition: ‘if ’a be not rotten before

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’a die (as we have many pocky corpses that will scarce hold the laying in) ’a will last you some eight year – or nine year – a tanner will last you nine year’, for his body is ‘so tanned with his trade that ’a will keep out water a great while’ (5.1.155–62). The history plays, too, stage dying, though this time as the result of mass violence. Hotspur, dying, tries to describe himself as food for worms, but the ‘earthy and cold hand of death lies on his tongue’, and kills him before he can finish the thought (1H4  5.4.83). No longer sensible, the corpse of Hotspur is contained to ‘two paces of the vilest earth’ (5.4.90). Later, as king, Henry returns to this imagery, imagining the horrors of war as transforming the bodily remains of those ‘whose poor bodies must lie and fester’ unburied in the fields of France into an olfactory weapon of war: ‘dying like men though unburied in your dunghills, they shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them and draw their honours reeking up to heaven, leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime, the smell whereof shall breed a plague in France’ (H5 4.3.87–8, 98–103). Even living bodies could smell like death: Trinculo infamously evaluates Caliban and his body in just these terms in The Tempest, coding the visual markers of his living indigeneity (and embodied, racialized difference) with a smell associated with dead fish: ‘What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish’ (2.2.24–5).26 And Falstaff, when describing the poor, itinerant ‘slaves’ pressed into service, notes that they are ‘as ragged as Lazarus in painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores’ (1H4  4.2.24–5). Falstaff ’s image of poverty is drawn from the painted cloths that decorated Elizabethan interiors, rather than experience, defining him as someone who prefers the indoors. But he also describes poverty through religious imagery; though this is not the same Lazarus in the Bible as the one Christ famously resurrects, it is also a story about the afterlife: in this parable, the rich man, who enjoys comforts in this life, is tormented in the next. Falstaff emphasizes the ragged man’s wounds. This Lazarus, shunned by the rich man and all but dogs, looks like those pressed into service (and for that matter those who embody the second half of King Lear): they are wounded outcasts, ‘discarded unjust serving men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace’ (4.2.25–30). These men are not

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yet dead, but they may as well be: ‘a mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies’ (4.2.35–7), connecting the ramblings of a mad man with profound social critique of the conditions of life that defined the working poor (a point that resonates, at least for me, with how disability functions in King Lear). These bodies smell alike. Falstaff ’s association of Lazarus, ‘discarded’ men, and ‘gibbets’, or gallows emphasizes how living figures, too, could also be defined by the smell of death.27 Lear’s royal body is not exempt from this process. Its smell thus precipitates a crisis of perception: Gloucester, whose query prompts this exchange, narrates this for the audience: ‘the trick of that voice I do well remember: is’t not the King?’ (KL 4.6.105–6). Lear’s response, that he is still, in his words, ‘every inch a king’, is strongly contradicted by his smell (4.6.107). Disorderly smells were linked to disorderly actors in early modern political discourse: for instance, when Shakespeare’s Coriolanus describes the ‘mutable, rank-scented meinie’ of Rome (Cor 3.1.68), he defines them as an olfactory threat, a rank-scented and changeable force that permeates and threatens the city. Their bodies are not imagined as part of its polity. Their smell registers instead as the ‘body impolitic’, a phrase used by philosopher Charles W. Mill to describe all who were left out of early modern political frameworks and their structures of ‘whiteness’.28 Historian of olfaction Alain Corbin makes a similar point, analysing how discourses of public health across the seventeenth century explicitly tied political reform to sanitation.29 One seventeenth-century English physician went so far as to prescribe such remedies: more urban gardens, with sweet-smelling plants, might help to qualm political discord and London’s ‘restless citizenry’.30 Gloucester’s query emphasizes the discord between the king’s natural and royal body, an olfactory observation heightened by his vision impairment. Andrew Bozio has argued that King Lear raises questions about ‘the embodied mind’, especially how characters perceive both their environment and their ‘subjectivity’.31 The scene demonstrates Gloucester’s ability to navigate the world through affective registers, conflating, as Andrew Bozio argues, ‘sensation with sentience’. Gloucester ‘comes to know the world through the pain it inflicts on [his] body’. He also comes to know the world through the pain it inflicts on others as well.

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In this way, the scene stages smell as a complex set of social meanings, linking rituals of cleanliness to discourses about health, rank, order, norms, nature, and sovereignty. Lear’s unequivocal response leads him to interpret Gloucester’s bodily reaction as deference: ‘see how the subject quakes’ (4.6.108). Lear’s interpretation of Gloucester’s bodily state – his ‘quak[ing]’ – compresses past memories with present experience. Lear recalls Gloucester quaking in relief as he pardoned him for adultery (a transgression defined by Gloucester as an olfactory ‘fault’ associated with the taint of Edmund’s mother’s body [1.1.16], and imagined to still cling to Edmund even as an adult). This memory is conflated with Gloucester’s quaking in the present moment, a bodily response to the trauma inflicted on him, to exhaustion, or perhaps even to his relief to be reunited with Lear. Likewise, Lear remembers his own former state of being, calling for civet from an (unseen) apothecary to ‘sweeten his imagination’ (4.6.126–7). Yet this blending of present with a remembrance of things past comes to a jarring halt when Gloucester attempts to perform a former courtly gesture, offering to kiss the hand of the king. The smell of excrement trumps what we might describe as Lear’s Proustian memory of the smell of civet. The foul smell of his hand functions as a pungent reminder of the material ways in which health and hierarchy are performed and perceptible. Lear speaks plainly about his cognitive confusion: I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you and know this man, Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant What place this is and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night.

(4.7.63–8) His sensory perception remains acute; he is accurate in his assessment of his own bad odour. When Cordelia enters the scene, she immediately perceives the changes wrought in him, noting both his ‘abused nature’ and the ‘untuned and jarring senses’ of this ‘child-changed father’ (4.7.15–17). She rewards Kent for his loyalty to Lear, commanding him to ‘[b]e better suited; / These weeds are memories of those worser hours’ (4.7.6–7). Kent’s clothes are, to paraphrase Peter Stallybrass, ‘worn worlds’, connecting his ‘weeds’ with those on the

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heath.32 They bear the olfactory traces of all that he, Gloucester, and Lear have suffered as vagrants in this world. A few lines later Cordelia makes sure that her father has been ‘array’d’, and an unnamed Gentleman assures her that ‘we put fresh garments on him’ (4.7.20–2). Such a plot point emphasizes that Lear is not the only character to smell like shit in this play. Edgar, Gloucester, Kent, and the fool spend most of the second half of the play in a state much like Lear’s. That commonality is striking, raising questions about the role of smell in performance and about how audience members perceived royalty, both in person and as a staged phenomenon. Lear himself notes this in the scene, calling our attention to the fact that his hand has always smelled faecal, just a different kind of animal. As Erica Fudge has argued, the smell of mortality that Lear cites is an amalgamation of both his own excremental funk and his memory of how he used to smell, recalling previous perfume rituals involving civet perfumes that once anointed his gloves. Civet is comprised of anal secretions of exotic African cats and has a musky, animal scent; it is defined by civetone, a ketone that emerges through the breakdown of fatty acids. In concentrated form, it can smell putrid, but in smaller, diluted doses, it smells aromatic. It includes small amounts of indole and skatole, as well. It is a perfect example of what Fudge terms a Renaissance animal-made-object: ‘civet both constructs and upsets notions of being human. Like leather it is worn,’ but its perfume ‘both goes on and into’ the body, transforming the human ‘from both within and without’.33 Civet remakes the royal hand into something beyond human, performing its power through an olfactory performance of courtly presence. Civet was the smell of kingship and courtiers; as Colleen Kennedy’s research on early modern perfumes (particularly ones labelled as ‘royal’) documents, civet was a key ingredient of elaborate courtly rituals, particularly Elizabethan and Jacobean ones.34 The smell of human excrement, however, was not. Lear recalls that his hands used to smell of civet; Gloucester’s reaction to its smell in the present reminds the audience that it no longer does. Lear’s animal smell also emphasizes the jarring aspect of courtly ritual in the environment of the heath. Shakespeare makes this point in As You Like It, another play that charts how aristocrats adjust to the hazards of rural life. Corin’s confusion at Touchstone’s jokes about the same kinds of smell corroborates that the rituals of the court make little

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sense on the heath. Corin, like Lear, focuses on smell as an index of cleanliness: ‘You told me you salute not at the court but you kiss your hands. That courtesy would be uncleanly if courtiers were shepherds’ (3.2.43–8). Shepherds’ hands, Corin notes, betray rank in more ways than one: he describes them as ‘greasy’, ‘tarred’ with lanolin, or ‘the surgery of our sheep’ (3.2.59–60). Touchstone compares this to the hands of courtiers: covered in gloves perfumed with civet, courtiers’ hands smell as much of animals as shepherds’ hands. Touchstone takes this further, reducing both to biological matter and flesh: ‘Most shallow man! Thou worm’s meat in respect of a good piece of flesh indeed! Learn of the wise and perpend. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very unclean flux of a cat. Mend the instance, shepherd’ (3.2.62–6). Corin’s proposition (‘if courtiers were shepherds’) sets up Touchstone’s insistence that we ‘perpend’ a bit more on these visceral assumptions and on animal matter: why is sheep ‘tar’ believed to be baser than cat flux? Which is more ‘unclean’? How do we define what is foul and what is fragrant (to borrow Alain Corbin’s powerful framework):35 do distinctions of rank matter if we are all, in the end, made of flesh? Touchstone’s wit reveals a truth. Worm’s meat, or a good piece of flesh, both are mortal. Corin’s point emphasizes that the space of performance matters; where we encounter these smells helps us to code them as foul or fragrant. Like the king’s comments about his mortal body, these characters also distil larger philosophical questions about sovereignty, filial duty, loyalty, and friendship into a discussion about bodily smell, raising questions about how audiences may have perceived it if staged in the simulacrum of the theatre.

Staging the smell of mortality What did it mean to stage the smell of mortality? Was this achieved via staged, sensory effects or via actors’ performance? Shakespeare’s own foul papers give us some inkling of the play’s earliest performance history. The first quarto of the play, published in 1608, emphasizes that it was performed at Whitehall Palace for the king during the holiday season of 1606 (a point that is corroborated by an entry in the Stationer’s Register that next year). It is likely that this performance did not include malodorous scent effects

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(or at least, not deliberately). As Jonathan Gil Harris notes, such effects, if performed indoors at court for the king, would be stifling.36 Tiered seating in the narrow banqueting hall meant that the most important members of court were closest to the actors; to stage Lear’s foul hand (or even to use squibs to create the environmental effects of the storm) would be risky; the dungy, sulphuric smell of squibs would linger in the space. More likely the King’s Men used drums, flammable powder and candles, and wind and rain machines to simulate the storm. Performed in the banqueting hall, with its ambient light and polished floors, packed with perfumed courtiers and the scents of holiday trimmings, the play’s tragedy would have unfolded against a highly cultivated sensorium. The smell of the play during its Whitehall debut (especially those in the opening act) would have been blended seamlessly with those of court. In this setting, Gloucester’s question to Kent (and to the audience) – ‘Do you smell a fault?’ – was rhetorical: the visible and olfactory world of the play were aligned with the sumptuous sensorium of court. Botanical matter (herb rushes and elaborate flowers, even in wintertime), as well as perfumed leathers, scented textiles, and imported spices were used during masques; these smells connected royal performance with stage traditions of exotic otherness, at times even casting monarchs in these roles (Anne of Denmark’s infamous performance in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness demonstrates the fluidity between courtly staged performances and public ones, particularly around the cosmetic techniques of blackface).37 Yet they did so in ways that sought to elevate the royal body above others; these uses were deployed as strategies of political representation (even when linked to entertainment). King James’s own investment in scrofula and the healing powers of touch were mostly performed for political reasons. His aversion to the smell of the crowd and of commoners is well known, as is his own sagacity in sniffing out political revolt. But players staging the smell of a vulnerable and ageing monarch was a different practice entirely, even in 1606. Performed in this realm, Lear’s mortal body is a fiction, one signalled through metaphoric resonances and performance rather than naturalistic or even convincing performances. Burbage most likely played the part of Lear; in 1606 when the play debuted at Whitehall for the king, Burbage was at the height of his acting career (and in his early thirties); the fictional Lear of the play is much, much older – ‘fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less’

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(4.7.60–2).38 Within stage traditions such as those of the Renaissance, in which almost all aspects of identity were constructed through props of performance (including age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, ability, and sexuality), this is perhaps not significant. Burbage did what actors do: he performed the supposed facts of the elderly king’s body, including its smell. In terms of acting, this was probably easier to do at the end of the play than at its beginning, the physical demand of acting providing a kind of embodied effect of performance; it is also easier to stage the smell of a vagrant than that of a king (or it was certainly more economical). Lear’s comment about his dirty hand becomes a performed synecdoche of a fictional body, naming its frailty, old age, and vulnerability. It also underscores that the king’s royal body, the one staged in act one, offers just as many challenges. As Jennifer Hamilton notes, the play was written for performance in the Globe theatre; after its debut at Whitehall, it debuted there, and, given its success, moved into the company’s repertory, often performed in Blackfriars, where the staged scents involved in the performance (especially the dungy scent of ignited squibs) would connect Lear’s lines with the smells of the stage and the playhouse. It is hard to know exactly how smell functioned in early performances of this play.39 Depending on where it was performed, a number of smells from stage properties likely lingered in the air. These include the smell of candles and torches (beeswax, wood, and pitch) used to depict indoor and outdoor scenes during performance, of aromatic floral waters (rose or rosemary) used to simulate rain, of costumes and props (wool, silk, leather, starch, parchment, metal, and ‘filth’) used to stage both Lear’s court and his vagrancy, and of wet and dried blood (pigs’ blood) to simulate the play’s assaults on Gloucester and his servant. Lear’s comments about the smell of his hand undoubtedly resonated throughout the theatre in different ways (just as it does in the scene): the smells that defined its original performance venues (first indoors at Whitehall Palace and undoubtedly later at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres) were vastly different. The smell of civet would have been strong at court, blending with the woody aromatics strewn as part of holiday celebrations; at the Globe, Lear’s excremental funk may have been more literal, blending with the muck of the mud in the pit. Those standing in it may have laughed for very different reasons than those watching in the lords’ rooms above.

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These performance realms do not make it easy to identify a particular smell; it is also unlikely that its origins were easily discernible. Scents undoubtedly created unpredictable and redolent theatrical effects, but ones that changed over time. These effects mingled with the smell of the playhouse and its atmospheric mélange. The smell of oak planks, reed thatches, lime wash, paint, tapestries, greased rushes, tallow candles, and of animal blood, skins, and droppings all contributed to a general playhouse funk, even before the audience arrived. Theatre spaces had their own distinctly charged olfactory atmospheres, especially with audience members in attendance: smoking, perfumed gallants (who, if we are to believe Jonson, seemed ‘to sleep with a musk-cat every night’, and to smoke incessantly throughout the plays).40 Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook links such perfumes with their source, threatening to kill ‘poison’ musk cats, should ‘their civet excrement do not once play with [hi]s nose once again’.41 Their perfumes mingled with the ‘hissing’ multitudes of ‘stinkards’ (as William Fennor described the crowd at the Fortune); and all of these would have mingled with Lear’s own scent, if staged.42 In such an environment, it is hard to imagine that the smell of Lear’s hand registered in any way until Gloucester and Lear drew attention to it. Once noticed, it may have functioned in multiple ways: as a kind of universal truth; a fetid reality; and, importantly, a staged aspect of performance. To an early modern audience, unlike today, attempted royal hand-kissing would evoke both the gesture itself and its wider associations and implications, both hierarchical and sensory. Gloucester’s gesture, then, is one of courtly respect, reflecting the king’s sovereign power while also amplifying his own: as Farah Karim-Cooper notes, kissing the king’s hand was not only ‘a ritualistic gesture, but it was also a sign of the privilege and honour of the kisser’.43 Royal touch was sacred, believed to derive its medicinal power from the holy oils used to anoint the monarch during coronation and thus able to cure those afflicted with scrofula (or the ‘king’s evil’), a painful condition that included weeping, ulcerous wounds around the neck.44 Royal touch, in which a king or queen passed their hands lightly on the open wounds and presented the diseased an ‘angel’ crown, was believed to cure the affliction. Though the practice was much more widespread in Catholic France, it was also a Tudor practice, beginning with Henry VII, and increasing in frequency during Mary’s reign, and Elizabeth’s. The practice increased exponentially during Stuart reigns.45

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Indeed in one of his first acts as the restored monarch, immediately after the Declaration of Breda (even before returning to England), Charles II began to exercise royal touch, touching over 23,000 people between May 1660 and September 1664.46 Yet sanitation was part of the ritual; like the elaborate foot-washing ceremonies of Maundy, subjects were prepared for the ritual, examined first by a royal surgeon and then cleansed with a vinegar and rosewater suffumigation, the fumes from which likely overpowered any odours of the disease or subject.47 Such ritual performs the physical status of the king, while also signalling the power of smell to both cause and cure disease. Records from royal apothecaries in the sixteenth century also document the extensive use of distilled floral waters and scent ingredients at court; these ingredients, I have argued, were key to performing Tudor power. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I used rosewater as an olfactory signal of Tudor power, infusing their dynastic symbol into court through perfume; Mary, too, was known for her perfumed garters and her love of the scent of apples.48 Likewise, the coronation ceremonies of James I deployed scent as a key part of civic pageantry; theatrical performances at the city’s many gates deployed spices and aromatics in redolent ways.49 It is likely that an audience witnessing King Lear in any of its performance spaces would have experienced such processions first hand.

Perceiving the smell of mortality Invisible, unpredictable, powerful, and shifting, smell – even one as strong as the smell of death – is tricky to deploy in calculated ways, especially among heterogeneous audiences, with different sensory associations, social experiences, and neurocognitive abilities. The challenges of deploying perfume in theatre design is that it must take this into account, and for this reason few modern theatres build scent into their productions in deliberate ways. These are the realities of embodiment and they shape how we interpret our environment, including staged performance. Early modern theatres, however, were much more attuned to these aspects of production and so were their audiences: scents, as stage properties, were

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an important aspect of Renaissance stagecraft.50 But they were (and remain) difficult to deploy strategically: integral in the moment, but lingering long afterwards, the squibs, balms, perfumes, incense, flowers, herbs, and distilled waters used in early theatres emphasize that audience members had to train their nose as playgoers as well as their eyes and ears. It is also likely that playwrights considered these qualities as well: Jonson and Dekker’s mockery of the smell of the audiences’ perfumes can be interpreted not just as historical evidence but also as artistic frustration, not unlike similar complaints about crowd noise.51 King Lear’s staging of mortality as a smell isolates the role of olfaction in the playhouse (including the smell of actors’ bodies). Smells (staged or otherwise) were an important component of performance, but their meanings were illusive and varied. Even as they seem to offer a truth of the body, they waft, challenging actors and audiences alike to search for a logic or meaning. Though it is impossible to know for certain how audiences perceived this scene, critics have explored how characters’ perceptions provide some guidance. Gloucester, famously, perceives the scene differently than others; blinded by Cornwall in the previous act, and tricked through stagecraft into believing he has survived a miraculous fall from the cliffs of Dover in the previous scene, Gloucester enters severely wounded yet spiritually reformed. His blindness is initially defined through a heightened acuity of smell: his desire to see vengeance seems to inspire Cornwall and Regan’s torture (3.7.65). She calls him a ‘dog’ before blinding him, and then after Cornwall has plucked out both of his eyes, she commands her servants to ‘thrust him out at gates and let him smell / His way to Dover’ (3.7.92–3), rendering Gloucester bestial through this sensory modality. Likewise, the servant who tried to aid him, and who was killed for his revolt, is thrown ‘[u]pon the dunghill’, his body left to rot in and into excrement (3.7.95–6). Wounded, crawling, and sniffing, Gloucester is left to a similar fate. Regan’s meaning is open-ended and devastatingly clear: without eyes, he must navigate this world by his nose, a system of orientation that renders him bestial and brute. Likewise, the ‘slave’ who revolts is further defiled by Regan’s refusal to bury him; his corpse is defined as dung and added to the pile. Both characters are defined in olfactory terms, one as animal and the other as excrement.

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But in doing so the scene also asks the audience to attend to smell in the space of the theatre, drawing their attention to its presence and its role in shaping the arc of the play. Critics have interpreted Gloucester’s blindness as making literal what had previously been emblematic in the play: a profound desire not to see this tragedy unfold.52 Some audience members might have felt that desire acutely, especially after witnessing such gory violence staged in the play. But, as Simone Chess and Amrita Dhar have both noted, such a desire is specific to sighted audiences even as it asks them to confront and consider a lived experience of blindness.53 And it thus raises questions about the role of Gloucester’s blindness and its relationship to his enforced sagacity, foregrounding multisensorial ways of attending to performance even as it scripts a troubling (and flawed) experience of blindness.54 When Gloucester sniffs Lear’s hand, he is both acting as a courtier and as a wounded, blinded man. In this scene, we watch Gloucester smell the king and we listen to him describe his experience of the world to Lear, who interprets its meaning within his own prism of perception. Gloucester’s eloquent description of how sensory modes of perception other than sight allow him to process grief is framed as a kind of affective synaesthesia: his wounds famously allow him to ‘see’ the world ‘feelingly’. His grief over the smell of Lear’s hand (and perhaps at this point Lear’s feet, too, having just been commanded by Lear to pull off his boots) suggests that he can smell it feelingly, too. So, too, can Lear, who notes a profound grief at the mortal condition, again defined through an olfactory encounter, this time with air itself: ‘thou knowst, the first time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry’ (4.6.175–6). Gloucester’s experience of Lear and his decline is staged through smell, both real and imagined. The question I am left with, however, is whether or not the audience shared this. Though it is easy to imagine that this encounter between Lear, who is mad, and Gloucester, who is blind, would provide few points of connection for an audience other than sympathy, the scene suggests that these multisensorial perceptions are important within the simulacrum of the stage. Sensory confusion is part of the stagecraft scripted in the play. In the preceding scene, Edgar famously ‘verbally’ stages the ‘cliffs’ of Dover, tricking Gloucester into jumping and then believing he has been miraculously saved. It is easy to conclude that an audience sees this scene differently than Gloucester (whose eyes have been gouged out onstage), but as

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critics A. D. Nuttall and Simon Smith have both astutely noted, the dynamics of Renaissance stagecraft suggests the exact opposite: audience members were potentially aligned with Gloucester, who is asked to imagine a cliff that was not there. The scene exploits the ambiguity of performance traditions that relied on a bare stage, creating sensory confusion in the audience that resonated with characters on stage.55 Playwrights such as Shakespeare often use this effect deliberately to intensify the drama of certain scenes. To paraphrase Smith’s argument (and, in some ways, the prologue of Henry V), plays repeatedly advised Renaissance audiences to imagine that they see things that are not on stage. Did plays also advise audiences members to imagine that they smell things that are not there as well? Lear’s grammar accommodates such sensory confusion: he does not smell of mortality, ‘it’ does. But what is it, exactly? His hand, excrement, civet: the smell of mortality is a complicated amalgamation. At once signalling the royal anointed power of touch and undoing it with its smell, Lear’s hand demonstrates some of the sensory challenges latent in attempting to stage royalty. But it also signalled the materiality of actors’ bodies. Audiences would be intimately familiar with the smell of these theatre spaces, but only in use, filled with bodies. We don’t often think about the olfactory effects of performance, either in the present or in the past.56 Theatre space, like many other spaces in modern life, are imagined to be deodorized, a neutral place for other kinds of sensory zones of engagement. This is, of course, a fiction, but it is one that saturates our understanding of how performance worked in the past: against such a backdrop, we imagine Shakespeare’s London to be a far smellier place than today’s, and not for the better. Lear’s joke still works in performances today for this reason; it reveals Gloucester’s courtly performance to be absurd and replaces it instead with a shared experience of embodiment: we are all mortal. We all smell. Gloucester’s grief at this resonates all the more profoundly, preparing for Cordelia’s. But such a reading, though powerful, refuses to acknowledge that the senses have a history and that this history may have shaped the meaning of this moment in ways we cannot easily perceive today. Olfaction was a middling sense in the Renaissance; poised between the higher orders of vision and hearing but above the lower orders of taste and touch, smell

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engaged both the highest and lowest registers of humanity. So, too, does Lear in this play, making smell one of the engines of its tragedy.

Conclusion In their introduction to their groundbreaking collection on performance and the senses, critics André Lepecki and Sally Banes argue that performance is where ‘history and the body’ meet, creating ‘unsuspected sensorial-perceptual realms, alternative modes for life to be lived’.57 The perceptible field of the stage – how theatre practitioners manipulate it to create art and how audience members attend to these staged effects – is a domain of history: the political, economic, and social dynamics of acting are not unlike other corporeal acts of world-making, acts designed to foster what Foucault termed ‘a liveable life’.58 If just for a few hours, performance is where ‘the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh’.59 This includes olfaction. Even in our denatured and deodorized cultural norms, the play challenges the boundaries of the social by nosing its offence, staging instead what it means to ‘live a dying life’.60 Though its olfactory cues are rarely released in modern adaptations, King Lear and its metaphors of smell remain tethered to their origins, a perfumed and rank mélange of mortality, haunting the borders of the symbolic field. To excavate the play of its smell is to sanitize its themes and its history. As Julia Kristeva reminds us, ‘[t]hese body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death’.61 Early modern Londoners lived and died in shared, public space; the smell of mortality wafted in these realms, defining thresholds of meaning through shared, somatic experiences of life and death, pleasure and pain, sickness and health. Such smells were part of performance. King Lear reminds us of the power of olfaction to amplify drama: the play stages the king’s decline as stench, which resonated in site-specific and sharply politicized ways. Darnel, rank-fumiter, civet, or shit: Lear’s stench was redolent with meaning, provoking audience reactions in site-specific, variable, and visceral ways. Theatre was – and remains – an embodied art form, and King Lear reminds us of what is to be gained in a multisensorial approach, if we are willing to nose its offence.

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Notes 1

On hands and gestures of courtly respect (including kissing), see Farah KarimCooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 43.

2

Rebecca Munson, ‘“The Marks of Sovereignty”: The Division of the Kingdom and

3

See Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe

4

See Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca LaRoche, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory

the Division of the Mind in King Lear’, Pacific Coast Philology 46 (2011): 13. el-Khoury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 86. (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017); Michael Steffes, ‘Medieval Wildernesses and King Lear: Heath, Forest, Desert’, Exemplaria 28 (2016): 230. 5

See Jennifer Hamilton, This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 84. As Hamilton argues: ‘The tone belies the sentiment; she is compassionate despite the fact that she also clearly thinks Lear makes a mockery of the crown and sovereign authority by construction out of useless ephemeral plant life in the kingdom what should be gold and jeweled’ (84).

6

See Howard Thomas, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, and Richard Marggraf Turley, ‘Remembering Darnel, a Forgotten Plant of Literary, Religious, and Evolutionary Significance’, Journal of Ethnobiology 36, no. 1 (2016): 29–44; Howard Thomas, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, and Richard Marggraf Turley, Food and the Literary Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), ch. 3.

7

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820), in The Major Works, ed.

8

Alfred Tennyson, ‘Margaret’ (1832), in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher

Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 457. Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), 454. 9

Bills of Mortality were published intermittingly in London by the Worshipful Society of Parish Clerks between 1593 and 1595, and then from 1603 onwards; though they are not exact, they attempt to capture demographics within early modern parishes, including baptisms and deaths. For more on their history, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

10 See Danielle Nagler, ‘Towards the Smell of Mortality: Shakespeare and Ideas of Smell, 1588–1625’, Cambridge Quarterly 26 (1997): 42–58. 11 See Connie Y. Chiang, ‘The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History’, Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 405.

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12 See, for instance, Garthine Walker’s discussion of the role of smell in the discovery of infant corpses in early modern European accounts of infanticide: ‘Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern Europe’, in Death, Emotion, and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds, and Clara Rawnsley (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 161. 13 On the history of the term, see Victor Clarence Vaughan, Ptomaines and Leucomaines: or the Putrefactive and Physiological Alkaloids (Philadelphia: Lea, 1888); OED, s.v. ‘ptomaine, n.’. 14 Both can irritate skin, eyes, and other membranes; in high doses these chemicals are toxic, but in ways similar to other amines (like histamines). For more see H. Til, M. Prinsen, and M. Willems, ‘Acute and Subacute Toxicity of Tyramine, Spermidine, Spermine, Putrescine, and Cadaverine in Rats’, Food and Chemical Toxicology 35, no. 3 (1997): 337–48. 15 Oxygen levels in the air change how these ­chemicals are perceived. See also Pushpa C. Tomar, Nita Lakra, and S. N. Mishra, ‘Cadaverine: A Lysine Catabolite Involved in Plant Growth and Development’, Plant Signaling and Behavior 8, no. 10 (2013): 1–15. 16 For more on the science of decomposition and its relationship to smell, see Mika Shirasu and Kazushige Touhara, ‘The Scent of Disease: Volatile Organic Compounds of the Human Body Related to Disease and Disorder’, Journal of Biochemistry 150, no. 3 (2011): 257–66. 17 The smell of mortality is not limited to humanity: for readings of Lear’s animality, see Laurie Shannon, ‘Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 168–96; Erica Fudge, ‘Renaissance Animal Things’, in Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective, ed. Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 41–56; Nagler, ‘Mortality’. 18 Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15, 240. 19 See Harron Siddique, ‘Black Death Burial Pit Found at Site of Medieval Abbey in Lincolnshire’, The Guardian, 30 November 2016. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/30/black-death-mass-burial-pit-abbeylincolnshire-skeletons-dna-plague (accessed 6 January 2020). 20 See Dobson, Contours, 486. 21 See Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665’, Gender and History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–29.

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22 Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 143, citing the manuale text of the late medieval liturgy. 23 See Sophie Read, ‘What the Nose Knew: Renaissance Theologies of Smell’, in Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Subha Mukherji and Tim Stuart-Buttle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 175–93. 24 Ralph Glesey’s translation, in The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 27. 25 Richard Altick, ‘The Odor of Mortality’, Shakespeare Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1954): 167. 26 For more on race and smell in The Tempest, see Carol Mejia LaPerle, ‘Race, Affect, and the Olfactory’, Sundial, August 2019. Available online: h ­ ttps:// medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/race-affect-and-the-olfactory-f69659deab04 (accessed 6 January 2020). 27 Unlike Christ’s, the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany emphasizes earthly decomposition; Lazarus rises four days after death. The stench of his partly decomposed body is depicted in Renaissance art through the reactions of those around him, many of whom hold their noses. See François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion, 2010), 132. 28 See Charles Mills, ‘Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic’, Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 583–606. 29 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 89–90. 30 See Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 149. 31 Andrew Bozio, ‘Embodied Thought and the Perception of Place in King Lear’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 55, no. 2 (2015): 263–84. 32 See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage’, Yale Review 81, no. 2 (1993): 35–50. 33 Fudge, ‘Animal Things’, 94. 34 See Colleen Kennedy, ‘Civet and Rose: (Early) Modern Perfume Ingredients Fit for a King’, The Recipes Project, 24 October 2013. Available online: https:// recipes.hypotheses.org/2503 (accessed 6 January 2020). For her reading of this scene, see ‘“Do You Smell a Fault?”: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor’, Appositions 3 (2010). Available online: h ­ ttp:// appositions.blogspot.com/2010/05/colleen-kennedy-deodorizing-king-lear.html (accesssed 6 January 2020). 35 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant. 36 Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘The Smell of Macbeth’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 465–86.

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37 Sara Thiel, ‘Wielding the Maternal Body: Queen Anna of Denmark Performs Blackface Pregnancy’, Shakespeare Studies 46 (2018): 156–59; see also Ian Smith, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33–67. 38 For more on Burbage, performance age, and Lear’s fictional ‘flesh’, see Drew Milne, ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted: King Lear and the Dissociation of Sensibility’, Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 56–7; Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatres (London: Routledge, 1987), 167. 39 Hamilton, Storm, preface, xv, 118. See also Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 39. 40 Ben Jonson, The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of His Humour (London, 1600), E2r. 41 Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horn-Booke (London, 1609), A2r. 42 William Fennor, Fennors Descriptions (London, 1616), B2r–B3r. 43 Karim-Cooper, The Hand, 43. 44 See R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89–91. 45 See Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015). 46 See Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 231. 47 For more on how this ritual worked in the Maundy ceremonies, see Caroline McManus, ‘Queen Elizabeth, Dol Common, and the Performance of the Royal Maundy’, English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 2 (2002): 206. 48 For more on the olfactory aspects of royalty, see my chapter on Henry VIII and his casting perfumes in The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 49 See Holly Dugan, ‘Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern ­England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 2 (2008): 229–52. 50 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 122. See also my work on scents as stage properties in ‘Scent of Woman’. 51 I am grateful to Simon Smith for pointing out these broader implications. 52 See, for instance, Jonathan Goldberg’s reading of this scene: ‘Gloucester emblematizes, literalizes, and makes fully horrific a path of fulfilled desire: the desire not to see’ (Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 133).

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53 Simone Chess, ‘Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Performance and Print’, in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 105–22; Amrita Dhar, ‘Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear’, in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (London: Routledge, 2015), 76–92. 54 For more on how Gloucester functions as an example of what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder term ‘narrative prosthesis’, representations of disability that perform narrative meaning, whether in terms of characterization, interpretation, or plot, see their Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), intro. and ch. 3. 55 On the cliffs of Dover scene in King Lear, see A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 98–100, discussed in Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 63; on the ending of The Winter’s Tale, see ibid., 63–5. 56 The one exception is the Hope Theatre. For more on its history and connection with smell, see my ‘“As Dirty as Smithfield and Stinking Every Whit”: The Smell of the Hope Theatre’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 195–213. 57 André Lepecki and Sally Banes (eds), ‘Introduction: The Performance of the Senses’, in The Senses in Performance (London: Routledge, 2007), 2. 58 Ibid., 3. 59 Ibid., 1. 60 Quoted in Philippa Kelly’s moving meditation on the play and her father’s decline from Parkinson’s disease, see Philippa Kelly, ‘To Be Lear in the 21st Century’, HowlRound Theatre Commons, 24 November 2014. Available online: https://howlround.com/be-lear-21st-century (accessed 6 January 2020). 61 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.

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‘Amorous pinches’: Keeping (in)tact in Antony and Cleopatra Jennifer Edwards

From Lucrece’s ‘alabaster skin’ (Luc  419) to the ‘choppy fingers’ and ‘skinny lips’ of Macbeth’s witches (1.3.44–5), Katherine’s ‘smooth-faced wooer[s]’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.816) to the once ‘smooth’, now ‘crust[ed]’ body of Old Hamlet (1.5.72–3), Shakespeare pays considerable dramatic attention to the skin’s surface. Constituting the borders of the body, operating as a site of the subject’s encounter with the world, the skin is, as Michel Serres writes, ‘a variety of contingency’: [I]n it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. […] things mingle with each other and […] I am no exception to that, I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.1

‘The use of the skinne’, barber surgeon Ambroise Paré tells us, ‘is to keepe safe and sound the continuitie of the whole body, and all the parts thereof, from the violent assault of all externall dangers, for which cause it is every where indewed with sense.’2 The function of the skin, very simply, is to keep the subject intact (contained, whole) while also functioning as the site of tact (of touch, of interaction): to demarcate the boundaries of the subject from the world, while simultaneously providing an opportunity to share in it. It is this dual function that has prompted Serres’s identification of skin as ‘where the ego is decided’, a notion explored elsewhere by psychologist Didier Anzieu who, reading literally the surface of Sigmund Freud’s body-ego, conceives of a ‘Skin Ego’:

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The surface of the body allows us to distinguish excitations of external origins from those of internal origin; just as one of the capital functions of the ego is to distinguish between what belongs to me myself and what does not belong, between what comes from me and the desires, thoughts and affects of others, between a physical (the world) or biological (the body) reality outside the mind; the ego is the projection in the psychic of the surface of the body, namely the skin, which makes up this sheet or interface.3

The skin ego, the sense that the self and our internal states are bound up with the external sensations of the skin, is supported by the key functions of this ‘unseamed garment covering the whole bodie’: a surface which contains and retains, keeps the outside out and, lastly, offers itself as a site of communication with others.4 ‘It is only at this boundary’, Claudia Benthein concurs, ‘that subjects can encounter each other.’5 The skin, in Anzieu’s terms, is ‘an “inscribing surface” for the marks left by those others’, and the subject is informed by this contact.6 In these models, identity is negotiated at the body’s threshold, located at and across the surface of the skin. Reading Antony and Cleopatra as a play that tests the tactile confines of the skin, this chapter explores subjectivity as something that resides at this surface. Recent critics of ‘touch’ and ‘tact’, including Elizabeth Harvey, Farah Karim-Cooper, and Joe Moshenska, have demonstrated that, for the early modern writer, this sense was particularly difficult to grasp – we find it variously ranked highest and lowest in the sensorium, dispersed throughout the body and located in specific parts, associated with both the divine and the sinful, and even blurring the boundaries that distinguish it from the other senses.7 A common ground between these early modern theories, however, appears to be the Aristotelian understanding that the skin – the organ of touch – renders this sense indivisible from the body. ‘This facultie of all others’, writes Richard Brathwaite, ‘is the most individuate; it inheres in the subsistence of man, and cannot be separated or taken away without the detriment or utter decay rather, of the subject wherein it is.’8 This sense of touch as ‘individuate’ will be central to what follows, which activates multiple connotations of the word in order to consider the subject’s skin as a surface that is both individuate (indivisible, inseparable) from it, and individuating (giving character or personality; forming an individual). In particular, this chapter considers the

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extent to which Cleopatra’s identity is articulated through touch. Informed by critics such as Karim-Cooper who have highlighted that ‘the sense of touch structures and defines our sense of embodiment’, what follows explores how matters of tact in Antony and Cleopatra test those structures and definitions.9 Travelling around the play’s tactile encounters – buffeted by amorous strokes and violent blows – this chapter highlights this play’s interest in different ways of touching, and the individuating effects of these contacts.

‘Written in our flesh’: Shakespeare’s skin ego Think on me That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black (AC 1.5.29–30) In Shakespeare’s work, we find Anzieu’s sense of the self as inextricably linked to the skin’s surface repeatedly played out. ‘Character’, for instance, ‘is writ on Juliet’ in Measure for Measure (1.2.144), while elsewhere Coriolanus’s identity is predicated on wounds or ‘marks of merit’ (2.3.161), and King John describes himself as being ‘a scribbled form, drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment’ (KJ  5.7.32–3). Elsewhere, in The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Ephesus is able to violently impress his frustrations onto his servant Dromio’s body, rendering his skin legible as ‘if the skin were parchment, and the blows […] were ink’ (3.1.13). For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as critics such as Patricia Akhimie and Catherine Loomis have considered, such ‘black and blue’ (2.2.198) marks could be used to indicate ‘both a moral and a social inferiority’, reminding audiences ‘of the costs of violating class and gender hierarchies whose strictures were maintained and enforced through brutal punishments’.10 Indeed, in The Comedy of Errors, violent touches and the marks they leave behind are repeatedly taken (and mistaken) as visible signifiers of identity. The fact that the Dromio twins display identical somatic marks – from birthmarks to bruises – renders them recognizable as a Dromio, even when that recognition is false, when identity has been mistaken. In a world where identity is bound up with somatic signs, this early Shakespeare play reveals the benefits and pitfalls of equating surface with self, skin with ego. Complicating

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Imogen Tyler’s assertion that ‘human skin […] is the border zone upon which self and not-self is perpetually played out’, Shakespeare’s work, as we shall see, continually tests the legibility of this surface.11 With each buffet and every blow, these Shakespearean subjects are rendered less and less ‘intact’: every tactile encounter necessarily means that they are no longer ‘untouched’ or ‘unblemished’ as the term etymologically dictates – from the Latin in- (un) + tactus (touch) – but instead come to bear visible markers of tactile interaction. Shakespeare often explores the metaphorical applications of this correlation between touch and blemish (subsequently literal in some cases), specifically when touches are, or are believed to be, transgressive. Linking supposed ‘foul unlawful touch[es]’ with the body’s surface, for instance, Desdemona’s ‘name, that was as fresh as Dian’s visage, is now begrimed’, the ‘fair paper’ of her skin blackened by a false inscription of ‘whore’ (Oth 4.2.86; 3.3.390; 4.2.72–3). Elsewhere, Hero’s alleged sexual transgressions are similarly figured as inky blemishes – ‘O, she is fallen / Into a pit of ink that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again’ (MA 4.1.139–41) – and arguments of Innogen’s infidelity constellate around images of blackened paper: ‘O damned paper. / Black as the ink that’s on thee’ (Cym 3.2.19–20). In these models, supposed sexual, transgressive touches redound upon the body and leave their mark. Considered in these terms, Shakespeare’s sense of the self as inscribed by its social encounters, written onto the surface of the skin, anticipates Anzieu’s sense of the skin as an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by others. And yet, by highlighting the extent to which these inscriptions may be misleading – a false narrative of infidelity, a bruise given to the wrong Dromio twin – Shakespeare also highlights the limitations and dangers of this model. Antony and Cleopatra repeatedly explores this notion of the self as bound up with the touchable, inscribable, legible surface of the skin. Dramatizing William Austin’s assertion that ‘if we curiously advise with the Palmisters, we shall find the Mind written in the Hand’, for instance, the Soothsayer asserts that he can read various fortunes in a show of hands, ‘nature’s infinite book of secrecy’ (1.2.10).12 Drawing our attention to his scars and wounds – ‘do you misdoubt […] these my wounds’; ‘I had a wound here that was like a T / But now ’tis made an H’; ‘I have room for six scotches more’ – a character such as Scarrus, as his name suggests, seems to embody the notion that selfhood

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can be ‘written in our flesh’ (3.7.62–3;  4.7.7–10;  5.2.118). In this, he shares Octavius’s sense of the skin as a record of violent encounters, and is keen to inflict that reality onto others: ‘Let us score their backs’ (4.7.12). This is a play where characters want the skin to act as a record of identity, and in turn seek to inscribe narratives onto these surfaces. In these circumstances, bodies are repeatedly presented, even celebrated, as legible markers of tactile violence: ‘Enter the city; clip your wives, your friends,’ commands Antony, ‘whilst they in joyful tears / Wash the congealment from your wounds, and kiss / The honoured gashes whole’ (4.8.8–11). Elsewhere, in a bid to sway Cleopatra to their cause, the Romans tactically – and we shall see how often in this play tactics involve the tactile – rescript the ‘scars upon [her] honour’ as ‘constrained blemishes’ (3.13.61–2), a message that will ultimately be inscribed onto its messenger and returned to sender: antony Tug him away! Being whipped, Bring him again. The jack of Caesar’s shall Bear us an errand to him.

(3.13.107–9) ‘My messenger’, Caesar laments, ‘[Antony] hath whipped with rods’ (4.1.2–3). This is a play acutely aware of the extent to which social encounters can be permanently impressed upon the body, as power endlessly seeks to inscribe meanings onto its surface. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that for Cleopatra touch should figure as an ‘individuate’ sense, and skin an individuating surface. Her identity, she tells us, is one that has been constituted through and by tactile encounter. We saw above how ‘transgressive’ female characters may be metaphorically blemished with inky darkness, their skin inscribed with false narratives. In a play that explicitly establishes the skin as an identification surface, the Egyptian queen seeks control over her narrative by rewriting the origin of her dark skin: ‘Think on me / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black / And wrinkled deep in time?’ (1.5.28–30).13 ‘Amorous’ contact with ‘golden Phoebus’ (5.2.316) has, Cleopatra asserts, not only left its mark on her skin but has determined her racial identity: central to her portrayal of self is this narrative of violent, sexual touch. Pinches, as Akhimie considers in this volume (269–90), constitute a particularly ambiguous kind of touch; for early moderns, being ‘pinched’ could refer to the

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sharp squeezing of skin between finger and thumb, the bite of an animal, being restricted by an item of clothing, as well as referring to less tangible experiences such as financial hardship and harassment. For Cleopatra, these ‘amorous pinches’ figure climatological effect – ‘the drying effect of the sun’s heat on the body’s humors’, as Mary Floyd-Wilson considers  – as immediate tactile experience.14 Touch, in this way, figures itself as a particularly important sense in the constitution of identity. More specifically, racial identity is articulated through the sense of touch and through the sensation of being pinched.15 Articulating her relationship with the sun god in these terms, Cleopatra rewrites what is elsewhere characterized as violent affliction – where ‘Phoebus scorching blase doth dye […] people black’ – as violently erotic encounter.16 As Joyce Green MacDonald notes, ‘the dark skin Cleopatra identifies as the result of Apollo’s rough sexual play was most commonly reported as the result of a cosmic accident, when the chariot of the sun and the mighty winged horses which drew it veered out of their normal course under the poor management of Apollo’s half-mortal son Phaeton’.17 If, as Joe Moshenska writes in Feeling Pleasures, it was ‘impossible to consider the sense of touch in the Renaissance without wondering whether it might offer a route to the divine’, Cleopatra’s coupling with a classical deity presents her as a subject desired even by the gods. If these touches are ‘transgressive’, it is not because they are sinful,18 but because they see Cleopatra ‘passing beyond some limit’:19 this is a subject who can touch and be touched by mortals and gods alike. The narrative of these divine pinches – ‘amorous’ touches which are forceful enough to render Cleopatra not temporarily ‘black and blue’ (2.2.198) with bruising but in fact constitute her blackness – figure Cleopatra not only as an excessively desirable subject but also as a subject of tactile excess. As well as depicting a character who is deliberately excessive in her sexuality, Cleopatra’s narrative of touch here expresses her capacity to take pleasure in pain; with these ‘amorous pinches’, Cleopatra introduces us to a tactile vocabulary that blurs distinctions between pleasurable and painful kinds of touch. Critics of the play have considered Cleopatra as a ‘theatrical figure of excess’, a protagonist befitting of the play’s emotional intensity and an embodiment of Egypt’s sensuous, erotic pleasures; I suggest in what follows that this excess extends to Cleopatra’s relationship with touch.20

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Beat – stroke – beat – stroke: Keeping tact Describing Cleopatra’s barge on the river Cydnus, Enobarbus locates the Egyptian queen at the centre of her sensual environment: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggared all description: she did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, O’erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy out-work nature. On each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids, With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did.

(2.2.201–15) Offering a feast for the eyes, inviting us ‘to gaze on Cleopatra’ (227), Enobarbus paints the scene in glittering detail, capable of projecting the audience imaginatively from the position of the distant voyeur upon the shore – observing the spectacular ‘golden barge’ that ‘burn[s] on the water’, its silver oars stroking the waves – to an intimate proximity aboard the ship. In a snapshot of Cleopatra in her pavilion, we are invited close enough to notice in scopic detail the ‘dimpled [faces of] boys’, the ‘divers’ colours of their fans, and the faint glow on Cleopatra’s ‘delicate cheeks’. Here Cleopatra is delineated by the ocular, but also by the olfactory – with purple sails ‘so perfumed’ that even the ‘winds’ are rendered ‘love-sick’ – and the aural: we hear the accompaniment of ‘flutes’, and layered beneath them the sound of the oars that ‘ke[ep] stroke’ with their tune, providing in turn a steady rhythm – ‘beat […] stroke […] beat […] stroke’ – that underscores Enobarbus’s speech. This sensuous beat and stroke of Cleopatra’s barge establishes her as a character whose synaesthetic touches both pleasurably ‘swell’ (220) and forcefully ‘hit’ (222): whose ‘infinite variety’ (246) seemingly

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extends to the tactile. The pleasure of Cleopatra’s contact, I am suggesting, is not easily distinguishable from the destructive touch. Elsewhere in this volume, Steven Connor identifies ‘[t]he exchangeability of pain and pleasure [that] is sometimes a feature of the cooperation of sense and insensibility in Shakespeare’s works’ (48–9). In what follows, I explore how the tactile semantics of amorous experience in Antony and Cleopatra dissolve dissymmetric opposition between the loving caress and the violent blow, stroking and striking; as Jacques Derrida suggests, ‘a caress may be a blow, and vice versa’.21 Beat – stroke – beat – stroke: this is Cleopatra’s characteristic tactile rhythm.

Stroking/striking Borrowing heavily from Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare figures Cleopatra as a subject ‘in touch’ with the world around her, and a world that is deeply desirous of those touches.22 In this sensuous haze, Cleopatra’s barge seduces the elements around it: just as the winds fall in love with the sails, the water grows enamoured of the oars that ‘beat’ it, ‘follow[ing] faster’ as though ‘amorous of their strokes’. ‘Beat’ and ‘stroke’, Enobarbus here reminds us, are words that span early modern musical and tactile lexicons. Turning to period music manuals, we find a ‘stroke’ described as what we would now more commonly term a ‘beat’: ‘a successive motion of the hand, directing the quantitie of every note & rest in the song, with equal measure’.23 As Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) has it, ‘Touch is that which Musicians call Tactus, or the stroke of the hand by which Time is measured.’24 To the tune of flutes the beating oars keep stroke, keep time. Stripping back the orchestra that is described in North’s translation – from ‘flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such other[s]’ to flutes alone – Shakespeare enables the line to enact the steady rhythm that it describes: ‘to the tune of flutes kept stroke’. Having drawn our attention to the rhythmic stroke of the oars, Shakespeare heightens the scene’s erotic charge by activating the tactile sense of ‘stroke’: the waves that are beaten by the oars desire to be stroked further. For to be stroked is to be caressed or touched lightly – ‘When thou camest first,’ Caliban recalls in The Tempest, ‘thou strok’st me and made much of me’ (1.2.333–4) – but also, as Warwick laments in  3 Henry VI, and as this chapter shall explore presently, to be forcefully beaten: ‘strokes received and

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many blows repaid / Have robbed my strong-knit sinews of their strength’ (2.3.3–4). Alive to the word’s lexical ambiguity, Enobarbus’s speech unsettles neat distinctions between strokes as a seductive, ‘amorous’ touch, and strokes which forcefully ‘beat’ or strike. ‘A blow’, as Derrida suggests, ‘is perhaps not a kind of destructive touching, indeed, of the excessive tangibility that […] can have devastating effects. Likewise, stroking is not only a species of soothing, beneficial, and pleasant touch, pleasure enjoyed by contact.’25 Like pinches, then, strokes occupy a mutable place in the tactile corpus: this touch can be given either gently or forcefully, and felt as both pleasurable and painful in turn. If Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’ extends to her tactile capaciousness, as I suggest above, then it seems apt that the kinds of touch that the play associates with her should beggar neat description. What the steady stroke of synchronized flutes and oars brings into focus, therefore, is the tactility of this musical scene; keeping stroke with the beat of the music, the silver oars of Cleopatra’s barge do not simply keep time but more properly keep tact.26 To think of sound as a matter of tact, of beating and stroking, would have been familiar to the early modern subject. As Francis Bacon reminds us in Sylva Sylvarum (1627), playing a musical instrument was often figured in substantially tactile terms: ‘in playing upon the Lute, or Virginalls, the quicke Stroke or Touch, is a great life to the Sound’.27 Moreover, this tactile stroke was understood as integral to the hearing process: The Outward [air] being stroke or collided by a solide body, still strikes the next ayre, untill it come to that inward naturall ayre, which as an exquisite Organ is contained in a little skinne formed like a drumme head, and strucke upon by certaine smal instruments like drum-stickes, convayes the sound by a paire of Nerves[.]28

Just as the ‘skinne is apprehensive of those qualities which strike or move the tactive sense’, in physician Helkiah Crooke’s terms, the ear is receptive to ‘the externall Aire being stricken’.29 This tactile striking is central to the hearing experience; ‘sound was not a wave’, Simon Smith explains, ‘but a substantial species’.30 Sound, very simply, was understood as having material substance and a tactile capacity in turn. Anything ‘that toucheth the Body’, asserts Margaret Cavendish, describing the body in almost musical terms, ‘goeth first thorow the Pores of the Skin and Flesh, [then] strikes upon the Nerves little

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strings’.31 It is in these circumstances that the early modern subject finds their ears, as William Baldwin has it, ‘incomparably amended in receiving and yielding the shrillness of any touching sounds’.32 Sounds can blow upon the air, and words can strike the ear.33 The skin is now under duress: the subject does not stay intact. Shakespeare’s plays are full of these ‘touching sounds’. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo not only describes the ‘touches of sweet harmony’ as ‘sounds of music / [which] creep in our ears’ but also imagines how these ‘sweetest touches’ might ‘pierce [Jessica’s] ear / And draw her home with music’ (5.1.55–7, 67–8). It is in this way that fantasies of touch extend to the audible, instilling in lovers such as Helena a faith that ‘my ear should catch your voice’ (MND 1.1.188). And so, while Brabantio may deny the powerful materiality of words – ‘I never yet did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear’ (Oth 1.3.219–20) – there emerges a clear sense that, as Ben Jonson’s Volpone warns, ‘if you have eares, that will be pierc’d […] a heart, may be touch’d’.34 On this matter contemporary sense theorists would agree; ‘according to the best philosophie’, writes Thomas Wright, sound ‘is nothing else but a certaine artificiall shaking, crispling, or tickling of the ayre […] which passeth thorow the eares, and by them unto the heart, and there beateth and tickleth it’.35 In Antony and Cleopatra, sounds and words are granted this material potential, for good or ill: merely uttering the name ‘Pompey’ can ‘strike’ (1.4.55), while ‘Antony’ is imagined as ‘that magical word of war’ (3.1.32); Lepidus entreats Antony to use words that can heal his relationship with Rome by ‘touch[ing] […] the sourest points with sweetest terms’ (2.2.25); and Caesar in turn will not speak ‘till he hears how Antony is touched / with what is spoke already’ (2.2.147–8). If ‘sounds are corporeall’, as Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius points out, imagining the particles of voice, then the listener may be touched by the ‘vocall bodies’ that enter the ear, both ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’: ‘soft and gentle speech’ (2.2.3) or verbal ‘sharpness’ (3.3.34).36 It is this kind of tactile audibility that Cleopatra variously desires of the play’s many messengers. While touch is dependent upon proximity, in Antony’s absence Cleopatra finds that the haptic effect of sound provides a way of keeping ‘in touch’, of keeping tact, with her beloved. Thus to Alexas’s claim that Antony’s parting ‘speech sticks in [his] heart’, Cleopatra demands that her ‘ear must pluck it thence’ (1.5.43–4), exhibiting a desire for aural tactility

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that intensifies in Antony’s absence: ‘Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, / That long time have been barren’; ‘pour out the pack of matter to mine ear, / The good and bad together’ (2.5.23–4, 54–5). Emphasizing the material nature of words, Cleopatra finds in these messengers a temporary substitute for Antony, extending the sensual, erotic forcefulness of touch that she enjoys elsewhere to the sense of hearing and demanding such tactility in excess. As the play keeps Antony at a distance, his touch deferred, Cleopatra’s capacity to locate alternative ways of keeping tact continues. Just as Cleopatra demands to be touched, she also desires to touch others – a kind of tactile reciprocity, of touching and being touched, that phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty would assert is always present in our experience of touch.37 In the company of her court, the Egyptian queen seeks to pass the ‘great gap of time’ with games – though Charmian’s ‘arm is [too] sore’ to grant her request for ‘billiards’ (2.5.3–4) – or by entertaining fantasies and memories of erotic encounters. As a billiard’s cue imaginatively doubles for the ‘bended hook’ of a fishing pole, tack for tackle, Cleopatra positions herself in the role of angler: Give me mine angle; we’ll to th’river. There, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws, and, as I draw them up, I’ll think every one an Antony, And say ‘Ah ha! You’re caught!’

(2.5.10–15) Imagining her hook ‘pierc[ing] / Their slimy jaws’, Cleopatra’s fantasy of touch transmutes ‘tawny-finned fishes’ into a shoal of Antonys. To the steady stroke of beating oars, Enobarbus presented Cleopatra as a subject who is desired by the entire populace as they ‘gaze on [her]’ (2.2.227); here, accompanied by her own distant music, Cleopatra articulates herself as desiring subject. By making Cleopatra an angler, Shakespeare aligns the character with a figure that was, as Evan Gurney has shown, associated in the period with seduction, temptation, and erotic desire.38 Simultaneously seductive and violent, this fantasy has an intensely ‘tactive quality’, to borrow Crooke’s phrase – one which Eve Best’s Cleopatra at the Globe in 2014 extended even further.39 As the play’s director Jonathan Munby noted:

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Eve used to have a lot of fun with the groundlings, hooking their mouths like fish, which of course the groundlings adored, and it was a wonderful moment because it broke through any sense of fourth wall and really allowed the audience to become part of and complicit in terms of [the] story.40

Curling her finger into a ‘bended hook’ and selecting a member of the ‘tawnyfinned fishes’ at her feet – recall that ‘groundlings’ are not only audience members standing in the yard but are also ‘small fishes which live at the bottom of the water’41 – this Cleopatra delighted in tactile excess. Touch is central to Cleopatra’s theatricality, and here it was used to produce theatrical pleasure: ‘This Cleopatra kisses the audience’, as Michael Billington’s review of the play highlighted.42 ‘As I draw them up, / I’ll think them every one an Antony’: in this theatre space, then, Antony became an exploded figure. Reimagining the ‘tactive quality’ of Cleopatra’s erotic fantasy of drawing Antony up on a fishing line, Best’s gesture functioned as both realization and dispersal of tactile desire; extending Cleopatra’s fantasy of touch to involve the audience, Best brought reverie into reality and actively used the audience to figure Cleopatra as a tactile subject. This merging of playful intimacy and violent play is characteristic of Cleopatra’s tactile mode and intensifies with the entrance of the messenger. The scene vacillates between offers of tactile encounter that have left subjects quaking with desire – ‘here / my bluest veins to kiss, a hand that kings / Have lipped, and trembled, kissing’ (2.5.28–30) – and those that will leave them shaking with fear: ‘The gold I give thee will I melt and pour / Down thy ill-uttering throat’ (34–5). Indeed, references to touch in this scene negotiate the fine line between amorous offer – ‘I’ll set thee in a shower of gold and hail / Rich pearls upon thee’ – and violent threat: ‘I have a mind to strike thee’; ‘I’ll spurn thine eyes / like balls before me! I’ll unhair thy head! […] Thou shalt be whipped with wire and stewed in brine’ (45–6, 42, 63–5). Punctuating such linguistic excess with tactile blows – ‘Strikes him down’; ‘Strikes him’; ‘She hales him up and down’; ‘Draw[s]a knife’ – Cleopatra makes it clear just how keenly ‘ill tidings’ can be ‘felt’ (87–8). ‘It is’, indeed, ‘never good to bring bad news’ (85–6). That Cleopatra is figured as excessively tactile, ‘touchy’ even, stages to some extent early modern anxieties about the ‘immoderate excesse of Women’, as James I has it, and the fact that the sense of touch was associated with, and blamed for, sin, sensuality, and excessive desire. ‘Female tactility’,

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Karim-Cooper asserts, ‘was particularly dangerous’, and Cleopatra’s excessive touches are repeatedly figured in these terms.43 ‘We have such a sort of touchy Spirits,’ writes Puritan cleric John Gaule, explaining how easily certain substances can be ignited, ‘whose Tinder hearts, apt to receive the least Sparke of a Flinty offence; kindle forthwith the Match of Contention’.44 Just as the ‘sighs of Octavia blow the fire up in Caesar’ (2.6.127–8), and like the touchpowder that primed the period’s firearms and could be ‘set on fire by the lest touch of a sparke that is put unto it’, Cleopatra’s response to the messenger’s ‘ill-utter[ances]’ makes clear this explosive potential.45 Yet to read this scene’s treatment of touch simply as repeating stock misogynies about female changeability is to miss both their theatrical appeal, and the part that touch plays in the construction of female agency. Just as these touches negotiate the line between offer and threat, they also represent Cleopatra’s balancing of genuine fury and the performance of it. Cleopatra’s excessive tactility is, I am suggesting, following critics such as Bridget Escolme, part of her self-display as a character of theatrical ‘excess’: a medium of self-authorship which she will employ through to the play’s final touching moments.46

Kisses/blows Written in a period neurotically aware of the cost of contact – where we understand that ‘Contagion is […] communicated unto an other by touch’ and therefore that ‘to contact may be to contract’ – it is unsurprising that we should find in Antony and Cleopatra an interest in touches that are both desired and dangerous.47 In particular, it is the kiss that holds this dual potential: amorous touches that are both kind and can kill. Like pinches and strokes, the physical contact of the kiss held a range of connotations for early modern writers: these touches could be devout and sinful, public and private, loving and poisonous, could give life and take it away.48 This tension between intense sexual passion and the threat of physical harm is, as we have seen, dramatized and enjoyed by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. In this, the play frequently aligns the Egyptian queen with Venus, elsewhere reimagined by Shakespeare as a ‘poor queen of love’ (VA  251), whose ‘fierce affections’ (AC  1.4.18) similarly blur the boundary between erotic and violent touch. In a threateningly impassioned offer to ‘smother [Adonis] with kisses’ (VA  18) at the poem’s outset, for instance,

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Venus balances violence and passion in a way that brings the more sinister implications of ‘d[ying] upon a kiss’ (Oth 5.2.357) into the realm of possibility. But it is Shakespeare’s Cleopatra who literalizes this dangerous potential: while Venus can ‘murder’ Adonis’s words ‘with a kiss’ (VA 54), Cleopatra seemingly has ‘aspic in her lips’ (AC 5.2.292) as her kiss proves deathly to Iras. The goddess of love would be ‘in love by touching’ (VA 438), and Shakespeare affords such tactile agency to Cleopatra, hyperbolically realizing Enobarbus’s description of the Egyptian queen ‘O’erpicturing […] Venus’ (AC 2.2.210). Where Adonis repeatedly flinches from Venus’s bruising encounter, Antony is irrecoverably altered by his contact with Cleopatra: the virtus of Roman identity may be inscribed upon and beneath the skin’s surface, but there are certain kinds of contact that have the capacity to unsettle that narrative. While Shakespeare’s poem offers ‘fresh variety’ (VA  21) of kisses – presenting those both ‘long’ and ‘short’ (22), biting kisses that turn lips simultaneously ‘red’ and ‘pale’ (21), kisses that ‘stray lower’ (234), and those that can stretch time (23) – Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes that offering in its ‘infinite variety’ of kisses. Kisses in particular play a part in the construction and dissolution of Antony’s Roman identity. Giving Cleopatra a ‘soldier’s kiss’ (4.4.30), for instance, Antony reminds her that if he ‘returns from the field’ to her ‘kiss’ again he ‘will appear in blood’ (3.13.178–9) and encourages his successful soldiers to have their welcoming parties ‘kiss / the[ir] honoured gashes’ (4.8.10–11). So often the successes and failures of Roman tactics are articulated through this amorous contact: Antony need ‘but kiss Octavia’ and Caesar’s friends will ‘follow’ (2.4.3), and yet the desire to return East will result in ‘Kingdoms and provinces’ being lost or ‘kissed away’ (3.10.7–8).49 In these tactical terms, the play positions kisses as both kind contacts – ‘Give me a kiss. […] Even this repays me’ (3.11.70) – and cruel blows: cleopatra Most kind messenger, Say to great Caesar this in deputation: I kiss his conqu’ring hand. […] thidias Give me grace to lay My duty on your hand. cleopatra [Offers him her hand.] Your Caesar’s father oft, When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in,

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Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place As it rained kisses. Enter antony and enobarbus

(3.13.77–89) Entering to find Thidias ‘so saucy with [Cleopatra’s] hand’ (3.1.103), and believing in turn that Cleopatra has betrayed him, Antony feels keenly Derrida’s assertion that ‘a caress may be a blow, and vice versa’. Indeed, in a play where one’s identity can seemingly be constructed via touch and the visible marks left on the body’s surface, this moment highlights Roman anxieties about who Cleopatra touches, and who she has touched before. ‘Let’s grant it not / Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy’ (1.4.16–17), asserts Caesar, and Shakespeare, having his Cleopatra reminisce about ‘great Pompey’ (1.5.32) – deliberately confusing Gnaeus Pompeius with his famous father, Pompey the Great – contributes to this anxiety that the queen has touched and been touched by a number of heroic subjects. Observing this kiss, Antony’s mind turns to the ‘hotter hours’ of Cleopatra’s past sexual encounters – ‘I found you as a morsel, cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher – nay, you were a fragment / Of Gnaeus Pompey’s’ – and is moved to question whether further encounters are yet to come: ‘would you mingle eyes / With one that ties his points?’ (3.13.121–3, 161–2). For Antony, there is an anxiety that this ‘triple-turned whore’ (4.13.13) will ‘turn and turn, and yet go on / And turn again’ (Oth 4.1.253–4). With this touch – this kiss, this blow – ‘authority melts’ (AC 3.13.95) from this ‘firm Roman’ (1.5.45), and his beloved becomes unrecognizable: ‘what’s her name / Since she was Cleopatra?’ (3.13.103–4). The lover’s ‘fortunes mingled […] entirely’ (4.14.24–5), Antony is no longer ‘rich in virtue and unmingled’ (TC  1.3.30) in the way that Roman identity demands. The ‘heavenly mingle’ (AC 1.5.62) of loving intersubjectivity is indeed anathema to the self-sufficient Stoic who would remind us that staying intact means keeping out of touch and would advise ‘retir[ing] into yourself as much as you can’.50 If Cleopatra’s identity is bound up with past touches, and Antony’s sense of self is inextricable from his loving identity – ‘I thought I had [her heart], for she had mine’ (4.14.16) – it is unsurprising that he should feel keenly the force of her touch, the blow of this kiss. As in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, where kisses are observed and scrutinized in scopic detail, much of the play’s

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remaining action, and the fates of the lovers, rests upon the interpretation of this kiss: to believe that Cleopatra is false here will ultimately lead Antony to conclude that she has ‘packed cards with Caesar’, that ‘she hath betrayed me’ (4.14.19,  26), a conclusion that will in turn bring about the lovers’ suicidal ends: ‘ourselves to end ourselves’ (4.14.22). Presenting touch as a site of emotional intensity, offering a tactile corpus built around beats and strokes, kisses and blows that dissolve into one another, Shakespeare grants Antony and Cleopatra an excessive tangibility. A key characteristic of this play is its capacity to situate itself at the fine line between pleasure and pain, a tension felt most keenly in the play’s final touches, where ‘sufficing strokes for death’ are offered both in terms of Roman resolve – ‘before I strike this bloody stroke, farewell’ – and Egyptian excess: ‘[t]he stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch / Which hurts and is desired’ (4.14.119, 92; 5.2.293–4). Placing Antony alongside the array of characters who die upon a kiss (4.15.19–22, 40–1), Shakespeare affords the scene great weight, seen both in the efforts to ‘heave Antony aloft’ to the monument, and felt in the ‘heavy sight’ (4.15.42) of the lover’s final embrace. Unable to ‘quicken [Antony] with kissing’ (4.15.40) but curiously able to kill Iras with the ‘last warmth of [her] lips’ (5.2.290), a final fantasy of touch drives Cleopatra to join her beloved: ‘If [Iras] first meet the curled Antony, / He’ll […] spend that kiss / Which is my heaven to have’ (5.2.300–2). Announcing that ‘I am again for Cydnus / To meet with Mark Antony’ (5.2.227–8), Cleopatra returns us to the barge and to her tactile rhythm: with this final deathly ‘stroke’ – or loving ‘pinch’ – Cleopatra locates the ultimate way of keeping tact. Welcoming the paradox of a final touch that hurts and is desired, Cleopatra not only brings together dissymmetric sensations but also the play’s central opposing forces; adopting the ‘high Roman fashion’ (4.15.91) of suicide, Cleopatra stages her death as an Egyptian variation on stoic marble constancy:51 Come, thou mortal wretch, With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool, Be angry and dispatch. O, couldst thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass Unpoliced!

(5.2.302–7)

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Applying an asp to her breast, Cleopatra’s final act, in this play’s characteristic mode, is one that collapses the tactile with the tactical, and Caesar finds himself ‘defeat[ed]’ by this ‘mortal stroke’ (5.1.64–5). In this ultimate denial of Roman fixity, Cleopatra refuses to hand herself over to the ‘eternal […] triumph’ (5.1.66) of Caesar, to be ‘an Egyptian puppet […] in Rome’ (5.2.207), to be ‘stage[d]’ (5.2.216) in any space other than her own. ‘Here on her breast / There is a vent of blood, and something blown – The like is on her arm’ (5.2.347–9): on the surface of her skin Cleopatra bears the ‘blow[s]’ of this final encounter. Having authored herself via these touches throughout the play, the subtle, legible marks left on Cleopatra’s ‘breast’ and ‘arm’ reveal a narrative ended on her own terms. In the end, Cleopatra’s ‘skin ego’ reads as a rejection of Caesar’s Roman narrative, revealing itself not as an ‘inscribing surface’ for others but as a site of self-authorship. Through this final touch, Cleopatra keeps her reputation intact. This chapter opened with the notion that identity could be located at and across the skin’s surface, and with touch as an ‘individuate’ sense that was necessarily and inextricably bound up with the form and formation of the subject. As we have seen throughout, Shakespeare’s sustained tactile attention to the surface of the body in Antony and Cleopatra repeatedly tests the capacities and limits of this model. This is a play which echoes with claims that a record of identity is ‘written in our flesh’, that repeatedly draws its characters into loving and violent contact, and where, accordingly, the desire to stay intact is complicated by the impulse to touch and be touched: by the desire to have and keep tact. Furthermore, as I have begun to explore here, Shakespeare reveals a keen interest in different kinds of tact and how those contacts constellate around individual subjects. Indeed, by affording a subject such as Cleopatra an intensely ‘tactive quality’ – a sense of touch that not only contributes to her ‘infinite variety’ but which also constitutes her racial, Egyptian, excessive, theatrical identities – Shakespeare invites us to consider how ‘individuate’ and individuating these contacts can be.

Notes

I am grateful to Farah Karim-Cooper and Eric Langley, who have inspired and

1

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret

informed much of my thinking on this topic. Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 80.

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174 2

Ambroise Paré, The works of that famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans.

3

Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), 89. University Press, 1982), 34; Didier Anzieu, A Skin for Thought: Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab on Psychology and Psychanalysis (London: Karnac, 1990), 63. See also Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). ‘The Ego’, Freud asserts, ‘is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’ (On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey [London: Penguin, 1984], 364). 4

Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man

5

Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World

(London, 1615), 72. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1. See also Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004). 6 Anzieu, Skin Ego, 40. 7

Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Europe, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in S­ eventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Eric Langley, Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Carla Mazzio, ‘The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England’, in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 85–105; Jennifer Rae McDermott, ‘“There’s Magic in the Web of It”: Skin, Mind, and Webs of Touch in Othello’, in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, ed. Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Eveyln Tribble (New York: Routledge, 2014), 154–72; Eveyln Tribble, ‘“O she’s warm”: Touch in The Winter’s Tale’, in Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 65–81.

8

Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the Five Senses (London, 1620), 27.

9 Karim-Cooper, The Hand, 159. 10 Patricia Akhimie, ‘“Bruised with Adversity”: Reading Race in The Comedy

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of Errors’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 188; Catherine Loomis, ‘“Sore Hurt and Bruised”: Visual Damage in Othello’, in Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance, ed. Annalise Castaldo and Rhonda Knight (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), 74. See also Katherine Hunt’s chapter in this volume (178–99), which also touches upon these blows. 11 Imogen Tyler, ‘Skin-tight: Celebrity, Pregnancy and Subjectivity’, in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London: Routledge, 2001), 77. 12 William Austin, Haec-Homo: wherein The Excellency of the Creation of woman is described (London, 1637), 115. 13 Despite the Greek heritage of the historical Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra’s claim here, alongside Philo’s allusion to Cleopatra’s ‘tawny front’ (1.1.6) and references elsewhere to Cleopatra as ‘a right gypsy’ (4.12.28), has led a number of scholars to persuasively argue that Shakespeare’s play portrays Cleopatra as black. See especially: Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–67; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 153–60; 178–87; Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112–34; Arthur L. Little, Shakespeare’s Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 143–76; Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Transmigrations: Crossing Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 73–96. 14 Floyd-Wilson, ‘Transmigrations’, 86. 15 Elsewhere, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a disguised Julia suggests that exposure to the sun – a paradoxical sign of male favour as Kim F. Hall reminds us – has ‘pinched the lily-tincture of [her] face / That now she is become as black as I’ (4.4.153–4). See Hall, Darkness, 92–106, 181. 16 Seneca, ‘Medea’, in Seneca his tenne tragedies, trans. John Studley (London, 1581), 129. 17 MacDonald, Women and Race, 65. 18 OED, s.v. ‘transgressive, adj., 1a’. 19 Ibid., 1b.

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20 Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 165. 21 Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 69. 22 Much of Shakespeare’s language draws directly on the description of Cleopatra in North’s Plutarch. See Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared Together, trans. Thomas North (London, 1579), 981. 23 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597), 9. Conversely, ‘beat’ in the sense of beats in a bar is not documented before 1911 by the OED (n. 1). 24 Johann Heinrich Alsted, Templum Musicum, trans. John Birchensha (London, 1664), 67. 25 Derrida, Touching, 69. 26 OED, s.v. ‘tact’, n. 1.a. ‘the sense of touch’; 4. ‘a stroke in beating time’. 27 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1627), 49. See also Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 145–82. 28 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 34. 29 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 87; Burton, Anatomy, 138. 30 Smith, Musical Response, 30. See also Penelope Gouk, ‘Some English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century: Before and after Descartes’, in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: Warburg Institute, 1991), 95–113; Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 31 Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy to which is added The Description of a New Blazing World (London, 1655), 27. 32 William Baldwin, A Marvelous Hystory intitulede, Beware the Cat (London, 1584), D1r–v. 33 For a fuller discussion of early modern theories of hearing, see Katherine Hunt’s chapter in this collection (182–6). 34 Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Foxe (London, 1607), H3r. 35 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 170. 36 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Lucy Hutchinson, ed. Hugh de Quehen (London: Duckworth, 1996), 4. 549–51, 578. 37 Merleau-Ponty’s central image is the chiastic touch between two hands, whereby one hand feels the touch of the other and also ‘feels itself touched even as it

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touches’ (The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Clause Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 147). 38 Evan Gurney, ‘“Give me mine angle”: Fishing for a Moral in Antony and Cleopatra’, Shakespeare 12, no. 1 (2016): 1. 39 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 730. 40 Jonathan Munby, Globe Research Interview (December 2014). 41 OED, s.v. ‘groundling’, n. 1. 42 Michael Billington, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Globe, theatre review, The Guardian, 30 May 2014. 43 James I, The Works of the Most High and Mightie Prince, James (London, 1616), e2r; Karim-Cooper, The Hand, 167. 44 John Gaule, Distractions, or The holy madness (London, 1629), 229. 45 Samuel Gardiner, A Pearle of Price (London, 1600), 108. 46 Escolme, Excess, 139–67. 47 Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague: Containing the nature, signes, and accidents of the same (London, 1603), B2v; Langley, Contagious Sympathies, 8. 48 See especially Karen Harvey, The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theatre in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 101–22. 49 OED, s.v. ‘kiss’, v.4. ‘To remove, put away, or lose by kissing’. 50 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, trans. Robin Campbell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 7. 10. 51 See Eric Langley, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 165–91.

8

Hearing at the surface in The Comedy of Errors Katherine Hunt

‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’ (2.2.190), asks Antipholus of Syracuse, bewildered by the unreliability of what he sees and hears. Confused at having been mistaken by Adriana for her husband, Antipholus makes the first mention in the play of the word ‘error’, here indicating a deep problem with and among the senses. Antipholus feels that both his seeing and his hearing have become compromised. He draws upon the root of ‘error’ in the Latin errare (to wander), an etymology which frames the play as a whole, with its story of lost twins, misunderstandings, and the dangers of travel. In Ephesus senses, like words and like people, can go ‘amiss’, can wander and be lost. Much of the play relies on the visual confusion for which it is famous. That the two pairs of identical twins are indistinguishable, both to the other characters in the play and to the audience, drives the comedic plot and the play’s more sinister implications about the roots and the instability of identity. But, as Antipholus suggests, the errors of Errors affect not just sight but hearing. Early modern people thought seriously about sound and how it worked. The significance of hearing to a self-consciously Protestant form of worship prompted the development in early modern England of a trainable auditory sense, an ‘art of hearing’ that could be improved, but which could also go dangerously un- or badly exercised. At the same time, the physical matter of the ear was becoming better known: thanks to developments in the science of anatomy, there was increasingly an understanding of the ear as something interstitial, mediating between the inner and the outer self. Above all, what hearing seemed to promise was a sense of depth, both literal and metaphorical – and many studies of hearing in Shakespeare have contended

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with this proposition. Work in the discipline of sound studies, too, has often been concerned with issues of depth, interiority, and subjecthood. The Comedy of Errors has a lot to say about sound and hearing, but much less about depth. If the romance frame sets up expectations that Errors will be a play about matters of interior identity, the farcical middle confounds them – and, I argue, it’s the aural profile of the middle section that dominates the way in which sound operates throughout. Martine van Elk has shown that ‘The Comedy of Errors is about genre as a system of representation,’ and any reading of the play must contend with the coexistence, or clash, of genres at its heart.1 In what follows I explore the association of romance with the depth model of hearing and propose an aural model for farce based on a poetics of adjacency, in which meaning is made by drawing attention to a profusion of links.2 In its farcical elements Errors proposes another direction for hearing: one based not on ideas of interiority and depth but rather on surface, sequence, and multiplicity. The linguistic wordplay, and particularly the parts of the play’s language driven by the Dromios, disrupts the early modern association of hearing with interiority. Instead, here sounds are things that bounce off surfaces, favour series over depth, and form aural allegiances that are tinkling and evanescent – but no less significant for that. Errors suggests to us an alternative, but still generative, early modern model of listening.

The failure of hearing The Comedy of Errors ends with a failure of hearing. In the final scene, generically a return to the romance frame with which the play began, hearing is unable to effect the family’s reunion. Despite all its deception over the course of the play, sight is the sense that brings resolution. The Folio’s stage direction, ‘All gather to see them’ (5.1.330.i), announces the presence on stage of most of the principal characters including both Antipholuses, both Dromios, Adriana, Luciana, the Courtesan, Egeon, the Duke, and now also the Abbess (Emilia), who is soon to be revealed as the lost wife and mother of the scattered family. Finally, after more than four acts of visual confusion

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in which the two pairs of identical twins have been successively mistaken for one another, both audience and characters can see and compare everyone lined up together in this convocation on the stage. The stage direction appears in between two other spoken references to sight: the Abbess’s order to ‘behold a man much wronged’, and Adriana’s marvelling ‘I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me’ (5.1.329–30). We are primed to appreciate this finale as a visual event. This reveal undoes the knots of the plot, and only sight can do it. Hearing, expressly, cannot. Earlier, in the lockout scene (3.1), many of the characters appear on stage together, or at least converse from within or without the locked doors of Antipholus of Ephesus’s house. The Dromios even speak to each other. But, because these exchanges involve hearing only, and not sight, nobody recognizes anybody else, and the scene provides no reconciliations: it is, as Kent Cartwright puts it, a ‘false denouement’.3 Just a few lines before the visual reveal in the final scene, the not-yet-reunited family has been similarly confounded by unreliable ears. Egeon tries to talk to the Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio, from whom he has been separated for many years but does recognize, because he imagines them to be the identical other brothers with whom he has until quite recently been living in Syracuse.4 The Ephesians, of course, do not know Egeon, having not seen him since their infancy. Egeon offers an appeal to hearing, rather than to sight, to prove their relationship: O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last, And careful hours with Time’s deformed hand Have written strange defeatures in my face. But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?

(5.1.298–301) Egeon expects that time, and the hardships he’s suffered in the years since he’s seen his son, will have made significant changes to his face. But surely his son should know his own father’s voice? Because he places more faith in hearing than in sight, Egeon is distraught to find that in fact his voice – which is supposed to be the mark of an individual’s uniqueness, the aural equivalent of the visible face – is unrecognizable also. Both face and voice have been deformed in some way. Egeon continues:

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Not know my voice! – O Time’s extremity, Hast thou so cracked and splitted my poor tongue In seven short years that here my only son Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares?

(5.1.307–10) Egeon’s two sets of four lines, one ending and one beginning with the refrain ‘not know my voice’, make clear that the aural has become just as decayed as has the visual. Time’s violent mark-making – writing, cracking, splitting – has affected not only the face but the tongue and therefore the voice. The passages echo to reinforce this double disfigurement: Time’s ‘deformed hand’ in line 299 becomes Time’s ‘extremity’ in 307; ‘careful hours’ become ‘untuned cares’. Hearing, the sense which Egeon expected to prove the familial bond, has faltered. At the end of his speech Egeon rounds up the equivalences between sight and hearing, and even tips the balance by admitting that hearing is the less reliable of the two. Acknowledging his frailty, he promises his audience that he still has some sensory power: My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left, My dull deaf ears a little use to hear; All these old witnesses – I cannot err – Tell me thou art my son Antipholus.

(5.1.315–18) Egeon’s eyes and ears are waning, but he can see and hear just enough to recognize his son. In presenting this last stand of sensory perception, he forges a link between error and hearing. The aural clash of ‘err’ and ‘ear’, particularly in the context of the ripe and frequent punning in the play (on which more below), and the not-quite-rhyme of ‘hear’ and ‘err’ at the ends of consecutive lines (themselves echoes and aural equivalents of the ‘fading glimmer’ in line 315), turns his claim that ‘I cannot err’ almost into ‘I cannot hear’, or ‘I cannot ear’. Egeon makes both an aural and a semantic link between erring and hearing, errors and ears, and primes the audience for the final – visual – resolution of the play a few lines later. Indeed, this scene summarizes several things about hearing in the play that have been important throughout the previous acts. First of all, hearing is often paired or paralleled with sight. Secondly, it – like sight – can be faulty,

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even more often untrustworthy than the visual. And finally, Errors is rich in wordplay. The serial, clashing pun of err-ear-hear in the final act strikes on ears that have been trained by the play’s farcical middle to be expert hearers of such figures. These three words – not etymologically related – signal the play’s interest in an auditory poetics based on adjacency and coincidence. The ear does err, does wander, and hearing makes meaning not in the deep but in the processes and relations at surface level.

Early modern senses of hearing Early modern writers loved to pun on the coincidental near-homonyms of ‘ear’ and ‘hear’, and if they added a third term to this comparison it was not ‘err’, as above, but ‘heart’.5 This reflects the widespread depth of feeling about the sense of hearing. Simon Smith’s essay in this volume (110–32) reminds us that we can no longer characterize the Reformation sensorium as one that performed a straightforward switch from the visual to the aural. But early modern English people loved to listen, and they thought carefully about it. Paul’s assertion in Romans 10:17 that faith comes through hearing was taken seriously, and Protestant theologians emphasized how important it was to hear the word of God, in sermons and in the scriptures read aloud. At the same time the importance of classical rhetoric betrayed the basis of much literary and other writing in the skills of the orator; and the new public theatres provided important new venues for listening and ways to hear. Sermons and plays both acknowledged the importance of an expert, or at least a practised, listener. In the decades after the first performance of The Comedy of Errors in 1593, a spate of manuals and published sermons recognized the importance of the ear, and aimed to train it to hear well.6 ‘Faith cometh by hearing’, wrote John Wilkinson in A Sermon of Hearing, or Jewell for the Eare (1593), an early hearing manual; ‘not by seeing, or feeling, but it entreth in at the eare, and so sinketh downe to the hart’.7 Literary studies of sound in Shakespeare have taken seriously the association of hearing with deep spiritual and individual authenticity: Wes Folkerth, for example, contends that ‘[h]earing is represented in early modern British culture as an opening up of the self, as a kind of surrender or submission, an openness’.8

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This is not to say that the early modern ear was never thought to err. There was a strong current of early modern thinking that was deeply suspicious of the sense of hearing. A necessary corollary to the idea of the ear as a trainable organ was the notion that it could be faulty or neglected. Preachers who sermonized about this often used the Parable of the Sower to explain it: the seed, that is the sound, has to fall on fertile and tended ground in order to grow well; if it falls on barren earth, the seeds may not only not grow but could become overtaken by weeds.9 Such thoughts about the potential dangers of the ear were compounded by the increasing contemporary understanding of its anatomy. In  1564 the Italian anatomist Bartolomeo Eustachio published his study, De auditis organis, showing how the ear contained a tube (now named after him) which formed a conduit from the outside world to the inside of the body.10 At once intriguing and disturbing, this discovery underlined the importance of the ear and the dangers always present within and around it.11 It also seemed to prove something about hearing that had long been held to be true: that sound penetrated the ear.12 Above all, the sense of hearing as it ‘sinketh downe to the hart’ promised to reveal depth – whether literally, in the tube going in, or metaphorically, in its association with a genuine, interior self. We know that Shakespeare made use of the two related developments of the Eustachian tube and the trainable ear. The vulnerable, ‘troublingly unclosable’ ear is key in Hamlet: Old Hamlet is poisoned through his ear, a moment reenacted in the play-within-a-play; the open ear operates throughout as a symbol of the play’s concern with interiority.13 The penetration of this organ, by sound or by poison, is an analogue to the metadramatic aspect of the play. As Tanya Pollard argues, sound reaching the interior of the body through the Eustachian tube parallels the radical and duplicitous possibilities of the theatre: it shows how the theatre, and language itself, is able to invade and profoundly change a subject.14 Shakespeare drew from the ‘art of hearing’ literature, too. Gina Bloom has shown how the emphasis in these texts on conduct and subject formation has many parallels in the plays, which stage the importance of ‘[l]earning to hear for profit’.15 Bloom’s discussion focuses on the late romances, in which this tendency is particularly strong: Leontes, Pericles, and Cymbeline all have to learn how to hear deeply in order to understand their situations fully, and

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for their stories to be resolved. At the same time, the female characters in these plays can work against this model of hearing. Because penetration was often associated with impregnation, chastity was incompatible with the drive to have a ‘willing ear’.16 Many women were thus excluded from the subject formation that good hearing was thought to produce, effectively ‘prevented from emerging as agentive subjects’.17 In these late romances, women instead perform a productive and deliberate practice of not-listening: an ‘aural defense that comes to constitute a form of agency’.18 Whether obeying or resisting the workings of the ear, the characters in the late plays live in an aural world in which hearing provides a deep connection to an inner self. The association of hearing with interiority persists and helped to shape the discipline of sound studies that coalesced in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. In these studies, which often display a profound optimism about the sense of hearing, sound is often associated with the genuine, the intimate, the deep. The aural is figured as a way to escape materialistic and superficial concerns, a parallel current to the dominant way of apprehending the world, which is led by the sense of sight. Studies of the soundscape by Murray Schafer and others have emphasized how the experience of listening could bind or even form a community, for example; the foundational work of Walter Ong forged a strong link between the aural and the idea of presence (particularly theological or spiritual presence).19 But must sound always indicate depth? Sound studies has been attacked for its rather uncritical attitude towards the sense of hearing, particularly as it relates to the sense of sight. Jonathan Sterne’s cataloguing of what he calls the ‘audiovisual litany’ is useful. He itemizes the propositions of a sound studies which idealizes the aural: ‘hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces’; ‘hearing tends towards subjectivity, vision tends towards objectivity’; ‘hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense that removes us from it’, and so on.20 Sterne resists these dichotomies. He criticizes the conception of the balance of the senses as a ‘zero-sum’ game, in which the significance of one sense at a particular moment must necessarily produce the diminution of another. And, relatedly, he shows how profoundly the idealized sense of hearing is associated with the letter/spirit distinction in Christian spiritualism (itself related to Plato’s discussion of speech and writing). As Sterne explains, ‘[s]pirit and letter have sensory analogues:

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hearing leads a soul to spirit, sight leads a soul to the letter’. Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest, had a particular stake in ‘the problem of how to hear the word of God in the modern age’: Ong’s assertion of the primacy, the profundity, of hearing is deeply invested in the promise of its spiritual efficacy, and the concurrent denigration of the visual. Sterne argues that, as sound studies grew up around and sincerely influenced by Ong, it didn’t fully take account of the particular situation from which Ong was writing – it took the depth-model of hearing as fact, and internalized what Sterne calls the ‘balance-sheet history of the senses’.21 If we follow Sterne and do away with sound’s presumed connection to interiority and presence, we are free to find parallel ways of thinking about how the aural operates. The final act of The Comedy of Errors demonstrates that hearing does not always go deep, and it can confound at least as much as, if not more than, vision. Act  5, Scene  1 is part of the romance frame of the play, but it does not operate at all like the late romances that Gina Bloom dissects. Hearing brings about no reconciliations; it’s sight that resolves the confusion of the plot. The ear continues to err. The play actively seems to resist the depth model of hearing – a model which was, after all, in its infancy when the play was written. Take the way in which doors operate in Errors. In the hearing manuals, ears are commonly likened to doors, porches, and entryways: portals to the interior. ‘God never commeth so neere a mans soule as when he entreth in by the doore of the eare,’ writes Wilkinson in A Jewell for the Eare.22 In Hamlet, a play which makes full use of the depth model of hearing, ears and doors are both dangerously open. Doors are often referred to in speech as being in the process of being opened or closed, or characters warn that others must guard against these actions: ‘Let the doors be shut upon him’ (Hamlet;  3.1.131); ‘bar the door upon your own liberty’ (Rosencrantz;  3.2.329–30); ‘dupped [opened] the chamber door’ (Ophelia;  4.5.53); ‘[l]et them guard the door’ (Claudius; 4.5.97); ‘keep the door’ (Laertes; 4.5.114); ‘let the door be locked’ (Hamlet; 5.2.296). These commands only serve to emphasize that the openings are not yet sealed up. The Ghost’s description of his poisoning – how ‘in the porches of my ears [poison] did pour’ (Ghost; 1.5.63) – cements the association of the vulnerable ear with the entryway; the word ‘porch’ contains within it the ‘pour’ of the poison that’s going to cause so much devastation to the body

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within, so that even words are unable to resist intrusion. ‘The doors are broke’, says Claudius (4.1.111): doors, like ears, are vulnerable. In The Comedy of Errors doors stay shut. The lockout scene (3.1) depends upon the doors of Antipholus of Ephesus’s house being closed against him, as the other Antipholus is mistakenly entertained within. In this scene, borrowed from New Comedy in general and Plautus’s Amphitruo in particular, characters speak to each other through entryways that remain resolutely closed.23 ‘My door is lock’t,’ says Antipholus of Ephesus, as he and Dromio of Ephesus try to open it up (3.1.29): ‘open the door’ (Antipholus; 3.1.38); ‘Master, knock the door hard’ (Dromio; 3.1.58); ‘if I beat the door down’ (Antipholus; 3.1.59). As the rhythm of the scene shifts from heterogenous stichomythia back to iambic pentameter the shut doors are passive, and then active agents: ‘at this time the doors are made against you’, remarks Balthazar; ‘mine own doors refuse to entertain me’ Antipholus mourns in return (3.1.93, 120). This scene’s closed doors echo through the rest of the play, too, as Antipholus in particular continues to use them, in the past tense, as a sign of his previous mistreatment. When he complains in the final scene that Adriana ‘shut the doors upon me’, Antipholus is recalling a string of references to the ways in which doors, and ears, have failed to work (5.1.204). How can we contend with this early modern model of hearing that resists the trend to go deep? Hearing doesn’t operate in Errors as it does in the later plays. The closed doors, for example, might signify the failure of one kind of hearing, but they also help the plot to carry on – in a mode that understands hearing to work differently, more digressively, spreading out across the flat surface of the shut-up entryways. What would it mean to explore the value of a reading of sound in The Comedy of Errors that is, as Heather Love puts it in another context, ‘close but not deep’?24 Errors is, I suggest, a particularly fertile ground for a surface reading because it is, at least in its long middle section, a play so directly concerned with superficiality, both in its content and its form. The play has long been aligned with the superficial – but usually in a pejorative way. Early critics described it as shallow, with this shallowness taken as proof of the play’s failures and of Shakespeare’s immaturity.25 More generous readings of Errors (and its intertexts) acknowledge the ways in which its superficiality might be generative. The Plautine comedies on which it is based rely not on post-Romantic notions of the self but on a raucous profusion which can operate only at the surface level; the mechanical, Bergsonian, modernist

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drama to which Errors has sometimes been compared is similarly uninterested in questions of interior subjecthood.26 Douglas Lanier’s influential work on the play exposed its reliance on exteriority and material objects: here, ‘character is in effect an ongoing inference we make from outward marks’, so that in this world the artefact that is the closed door might be more meaningful than the space of the open doorway.27 And in her important recent essay Patricia Akhimie has shown how intensely not only the form but also the content of the play is preoccupied with questions of surfaces, and bodily surfaces in particular: bruising, skin, marks, and race.28 Perhaps the prevailing surface reading of the play, and one related to many of the above, lies in its association with farce, a genre often derided as trivial and thin. Russ McDonald has shown us how embracing this label helps us to understand more about how Errors works: how farce can, in fact, create a productive kind of superficiality. Errors is a ‘superlative example of dramatic farce’, McDonald argues, in a definition worth quoting at length: certain effects and values are missing from this kind of drama: there is no thorough examination of characters, no great variety of tones, no profound treatment of ideas, no deep emotional engagement. But farce gives us what other dramatic forms may lack: the production of ideas through rowdy action, the pleasures of ‘non-significant’ wordplay, freedom from the limits of credibility, mental exercise induced by the rapid tempo of the action, unrestricted laughter – the satisfactions of various kinds of extravagance.29

Notice McDonald’s references to the superficiality of farce – nothing is ‘thorough’, ‘profound’, or ‘deep’. Instead, meaning is produced by interplay at the surface. It is a mistake, McDonald contends, to see this as a failing of the play. Instead we have to take seriously farce, and the aural profile it generates, to see what kinds of meaning can be made from within this genre. The Dromios operate at the surface of the play. They are main characters in the middle of the play, the very engine of farce, but much less important to the romance frame. They are the centre of Akhimie’s surface reading of the play, too: the characters most ‘bruised with adversity’. The Dromios are also the play’s best listeners: the most aurally nimble; those who best understand the importance – the danger, and the pleasure – of hearing. In what follows I focus on the Dromios to explore a surface model of hearing in The Comedy of

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Errors. They lead us to a verbal soundscape that is created by adjacency and profusion, and they also suggest to us another early modern model of hearing in which the ear is not a portal to the interior but an external organ and a site of attachment. The Dromios lead us to – indeed, they instruct us in – an alternative model of hearing that does not depend upon depth.

Sound and language The linguistic heterogeneity of The Comedy of Errors mirrors the confusion and ultimately the resolution of its plot. Its metrical variety, a direct inheritance from New Comedy (and particularly Plautus) to which it is so indebted, makes the play ‘one of the noisiest in Shakespeare’s corpus’.30 At the centre of the prosodic and etymological ingenuity of Errors lie the Dromios: throughout, and intensely at some moments, these two characters bend, cleave, and stretch language in order to make new connections – resetting the language of the play and the pace of its rhythm. They show the profusion but also the pitfalls of a flawed shared language. Shakespeare departed from his Plautine models in making not only the masters but also the servants twins. It has become a critical commonplace to describe both sets of twins as the ‘incarnation’ of one of the play’s most frequently deployed linguistic figures: the pun.31 Aural confusion parallels visual confusion and the pun operates as a kind of clue to the problems of misrecognition in the play: if only the characters could realize – as the pun aurally suggests to them – that what we assume is just a singular meaning (or person), might in fact be one of several. The Dromios pun so much and so deeply that they point almost too much towards their own status as multiples. Take this exchange between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse in Act  2, Scene  2, which follows one of the many misunderstandings in the play: antipholus s If you will jest with me, know my aspect, And fashion your demeanour to my looks, Or I will beat this method in your sconce.

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dromio s ‘Sconce’, you call it? So you would leave battering, I had rather have it a ‘head’. An you use these blows long, I must get a sconce for my head, and ensconce it, too, or else I shall seek my wit in my shoulders.

(2.2.35–9) In this exchange Dromio takes the final word from Antipholus’s iambic pentameter line and unfolds, even over-explains, his puns on it in rapid prose. First glossing Antipholus’s meaning of ‘sconce’ as a head, Dromio shows how this same word might also mean a kind of fortification, in which he should shelter (‘ensconce’) his head to protect it from blows. Dromio leads the audience through a chain of related words to show how Antipholus’s throwaway threat contains within it a seam of etymological meaning, just waiting to be unfurled. His unravelling of this word echoes both the copia of schoolroom learning and the potential for schoolroom punishment, in the ‘battering’ he is sure to feel soon. There is a lack of subtlety to this exhibition of antanaclasis (the rhetorical device ‘in which a word occurs and then is repeated in a different sense’).32 We are not allowed to let the play on ‘sconce’ hit our ears as it will, or form connections by accident: Dromio forces our understanding of the heard word into the three possible paths that its meaning might take, teaching us a series of ways to listen. The laboriousness of this exchange highlights that one of the Dromios’ main purposes in the play is to point out the links between things. The Dromios are ‘a pair of agents, go-betweens who link husband to wife or customer to merchant’;33 in addition to being conduits, they highlight moments of links and series. Unable to solve the play’s problems of misrecognition, the Dromios’ linguistic play instead points towards adjacent terms, words, or persons – proposing chains of signification that seem able to go on endlessly. Over and over again, they take a word thrown to them by another character and turn it into something else, unfold another meaning, or connect it to a separate term elsewhere. Their meaning-making is a poetics of adjacency because they not only form connections but also show how these connections are created: they not only make but also teach how making is done. The Dromios deploy rhetorical devices that depend upon repetition, series, and pairings. The antanaclasis discussed above shows how a single word might signify multiple things. Other puns – examples of paranomasia –

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rely on accidental homophony, when two words that sound the same do not share an etymology (Dromio of Syracuse on ‘the devil’s dam’ / ‘God damn me’, for example (4.3.52–3)).34 The Dromios’ incessant rhyming – even completing an interlocutor’s line, so that free verse becomes a rhymed couplet – shows how there might be pairs even when we don’t expect them. Forthright repetition echoes a single line or phrase straight back, such as Dromio of Ephesus’s antistrophe, repeating for emphasis the phrase ‘come to dinner’ (1.2.89–90). They also deploy what Laurie Maguire calls ‘connective repetition, or echolalia’, when repeating straight back the words of an interlocutor: Antipholus of Ephesus’s ‘were not my doors lock’d up and I shut out?’ is returned by Dromio of Ephesus, ‘Perdie, your doors were lock’d and you shut out’ (4.4.71–2), in a series of such statements that fasten together the pair and their experiences of the day.35 This same Dromio’s anadiplosis in Act 1, Scene 2 is even a kind of verbal chain. Here he complains to Antipholus of Syracuse ‘The meat is cold because you come not home, / You come not home because you have no stomach, / You have no stomach, having broke your fast,’ and so on (1.2.48–50). If these examples seem like the performance of a glossary of rhetorical terms (and this is not an exhaustive list of the linguistic devices that the Dromios deploy), it’s because the Dromios are a repository of this kind of wordplay. For the Dromios to use language in this multiplicitous way, language must be an aural medium. Despite its reliance on both the confusions of and the ultimate redemption achieved by the visual, Errors is in many ways a hearer’s play: one in which the pleasures of error are best appreciated by the ear. The wordplay, and the puns in particular, rely on a confusion in the ear that cannot be replicated by words written on the page.36 This experience of hearing allows us to dwell, even to revel, in the chaos that a productive misunderstanding can provide. ‘Marry we must not play, or riot too much with them [words], as in Paranomasies,’ wrote Jonson in his Discoveries: but the Dromios show how the playful riot of words can in fact open up networks of adjacency, and produce meaning from the performance of profusion itself.37 The failures of the ears in Act 5, Scene 1 are here, in the world of farce, the engine of a kind of madcap, joyous excess. They create a soundscape of ‘acoustic anarchy’, argues Brennan O’Donnell, both crazy and good.38

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Hearing in chains The Dromios do not only forge links, they also embody them: as enslaved people, they are referred to literally as a ‘bondman’ (5.1.141, 288, 289). Eamon Grennan suggests that, as ‘perpetrators of puns’, the Dromios ‘repeatedly compensate for their social bondage by their linguistic freedom’.39 This is surely not the case. Wordplay is no substitute for freedom; and, in any case, what the Dromios’ linguistic acrobatics show is the links between things. Like the chains of Dromio of Ephesus’s anadiplosis, the Dromios’ intricate language often brings into focus these characters’ enslaved status, forcing us to think about the facts and the conditions of bondage. They are not compensating for their enslavement: they are bringing it to our attention. Throughout, they are associated with the language of binds and bonds: a knot of verbs and nouns, things and actions, which lies at the heart of the play. Egeon must pay a bond in order to be reprieved; being ‘bound’ is a physical condition that many of the characters find themselves in over the course of the five acts. Dromio of Ephesus is the first described as having been bound, when he was chained as a child to Antipholus of Ephesus as the family’s boat started to sink (1.1.81).40 The enslaved twins are the bearers of the linked objects, themselves made of links – the ring, the chain, the rope: ‘goods that’, Patricia Akhimie points out, ‘perhaps not incidentally, all symbolize bondage in some way’.41 These objects, and particularly the chain, echo back as sounds, too – words rhyming with ‘chain’ pepper through the middle of the play.42 Errors is deeply concerned not only with things but also with relations – relations that themselves have particular thing-like qualities, such as the chain. As bondsmen and the carriers of chains, then, the Dromios provide the play’s central figure for hearing as a matter of relations and surfaces. So too with the organ of hearing. Ears in The Comedy of Errors, and particularly the ears of the Dromios, are organs at the surface, whose external characteristics are more important than the conduit they provide to the body within. They are frequently manhandled and beaten. ‘There is my hand, and let it feel your ear’, Antipholus of Ephesus swaggers, just before he goes to punch Doctor Pinch (4.4.54). This moment reminds us of all the other occasions of violence in the play, mostly performed on the Dromios. Again and again, their

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ears are used not to hear but to feel, so that for the Dromios the ears are organs less of hearing than of touch. When Antipholus of Ephesus swears to Dromio of Syracuse that he will ‘teach your ears to list [listen to] me with more heed’ (4.1.101), he is not proposing a course of hearing preparation as ordered by Robert Wilkinson and the others; instead, he is going to hit. ‘Master, knock the door hard,’ Dromio of Ephesus cries in the lockout scene (3.1.58): both ears and closed doors are material objects that are subject to blows. This violence brings to our attention what Wilkinson calls the ‘fleshiye instrument of hearing’: the outer ear, not its inner tube.43 Though Wilkinson associated hearing with depth he – along with other contemporaries – thought about the external ‘fleshiye’ bit of the ear, too. Another model of hearing that circulated widely in the late sixteenth century used the surface of the organ exclusively: the figure of the eloquent Hercules Gallicus, illustrated by a powerful image of bondage in which the outer ear is the most important part – and it’s in chains.44 George Puttenham describes this Hercules as a lusty old man with a long chain tied by one end at his tongue, by the other end at the people’s ears, who stood afar off and seemed to be drawn to him by the force of that chain fastened to his tongue, as who would say, by force of his persuasions.45

This description matches the examples of Hercules Gallicus in emblem books of the period, in which crowds of people are chained by the ear to the tongue of the elderly Hercules: despite his age, Hercules compels the attention of his listeners because he is so eloquent.46 Puttenham derives his account from Lucian, who describes the hearers as willing captives, men who ‘do not think of escaping, as they easily could’, but rather ‘follow cheerfully and joyously’. These hearers, attached by their ears with leashes of ‘delicate chains fashioned of gold and amber, resembling the prettiest of necklaces’, have been ensnared, and are happily compelled, by the persuasive rhetoric of the speaker.47 Like the ear of the ‘willing slave’ in Exodus 21.6, offered up so that his master can bore it through with an awl and fix him to the doorway, the ear here is a surface not a pit: a site ready to be pinned and chained as a sign of enslavement.48 The Dromios are not happy or willing slaves, like the subjects in these two examples – far from it. But their locked doors and beaten ears join these other images of ears and bondage that circulated in the period, suggesting another,

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not incompatible, model from the dangerously open ear. In the depth model, the most important part of the organ is the conduit it provides to an inner self.49 In these other examples, the ear works differently. The figure of Hercules Gallicus suggests that hearing is something that does not bury deep within a subject but rather links – chains together – individuals in a way that is visible and external. If the aural profile of Errors offers a version of hearing that skates on surfaces rather than burying deep within, it is matched by the materiality of the ear: no longer a portal to the interior, it is now merely a feature of the surface, one to be beaten and bruised, and only skin-deep (which, it turns out, is quite deep enough). Drawing on models of hearing that emphasize the outer ear rather than the tube inside, sound in Errors draws our attention to the possibility of multiplicity: of being both. This is, after all, a play about multiples: two sets of twins, a pair of classical source plays, a brace of genres. The aural anarchy that the Dromios create allows them to model how different ways of hearing – or just different hearers – could work. One word might have several meanings, and the Dromios show us how to hear it, and have it, both ways. Blank verse might in the next line become prose or rollicking ballad metre, reminding us to confound our expectations of form and remember that one register can exist alongside the other. In their mastery of different modes, the Dromios show off the pleasures to be had from profusion and variety; they urge us away from the ‘or’ and towards the ‘and’. This way of hearing does not create subjects, does not go deep, but instead allows us to inhabit a sequence of different positions without being tied to any of them. The aural profile of the farcical middle of the play primes us for a poetics of adjacency that reminds us of the relations between things, words, sounds, and genres. If, as van Elk argues, this is a play about genres and the relations between them, the model of hearing that the Dromios display makes us think about the clash of the two and what might be made in, and by, that moment. When Egeon appeals to the sense of hearing at the end of the play in order to be recognized, he is presuming that the ear is the route to a singular subjecthood, a deep interior essence. The preceding three acts have taught us that the ear does not always operate in this way and we, unlike Egeon, are unsurprised when hearing can’t solve the mistakes we’ve seen unfold. The ear is more like the organ by which Hercules Gallicus’s listeners are chained:

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superficial, visible, and haptic, and involved in an abundance of links that bind together people, objects, and sounds. Although the Dromios are pretty quiet in act five, their final lines – the final lines of The Comedy of Errors as a whole – continue the cultivation of multiplicity that has marked their aural profile throughout: alone on stage, the Dromios’ language offers a synecdoche of their linguistic acrobatics, moving from iambic pentameter to prose to ‘tumbling verse’.50 The final couplet cements this commitment to adjacency: dromio e Nay, then, thus: [embracing him] we came into the world like brother and brother; And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

(5.1.425–6) The reunited Dromios prepare to walk out of the play ‘hand in hand’, a human chain. No longer just their language but now also their bodies reflect their enslavement and the ties that bind.

Notes

I would like to thank Nick Gaskill and Simon Smith for their careful comments on this chapter; and Jonah Gaskill and the originator of the YouTube audio file ‘Relaxing Sounds of Café in Japan’ for creating the conditions in which I could finish it (uploaded 27 August 2015. Available online: https://youtu.be/-AC5ZSroJs [accessed 10 January 2020]).

1

Martine van Elk, ‘“This Sympathizèd One Day’s Error”: Genre, Representation, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2009): 48.

2

For another way to read the aural profiles of theatrical forms, see Allison Deutermann, Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

3

Kent Cartwright (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Comedy of Errors (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 81.

4

Egeon says that he and Antipholus of Syracuse have been separated for ‘five summers’ (1.1.132) and then later for ‘seven short years’ (5.1.309), but as Cartwright points out, seven often stands in Shakespeare for ‘an indefinite amount of time’ (5.1.309n).

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  5 Jennifer Rae McDermott, ‘“The Melodie of Heaven”: Sermonizing the Open Ear in Early Modern England’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 180.   6 Some such manuals were in circulation by the time of Errors’ first known performance in 1594: William Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion, Gathered into Sixe Principles (London, 1591); and Robert Wilkinson, A Sermon of Hearing, or, Jewell for the Eare (London, 1593). By the time Errors was published in the First Folio in 1623, the trend was in full swing: not only the hearing manuals but also a much wider knowledge in English of the anatomy of the ear, evidenced for instance in Helkiah Crooke’s discussion of the Eustachian tube in Mikrokosmographia (London, 1615). Arnold Hunt’s study The Art of Hearing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) examines this phenomenon in detail. See also Deutermann, Theatrical Form; McDermott, ‘“Melodie of Heaven”’; Ceri Sullivan, ‘The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century’, Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (2006): 34–71. The most wide-ranging study of hearing and listening in early modern England remains Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), to which many subsequent studies are indebted.   7 Wilkinson, Jewell for the Eare, A8v.   8 Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), 68.   9 Gina Bloom expands upon this reading of the Parable of the Sower in Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 112–16. 10 Jennifer Rae McDermott traces the incorporation of Eustachian anatomical ideas into England: his influence on John Banister’s The History of Man (1582) seems likely but not definitively provable. However, Helkiah Crooke’s discussion of the Eustachian tube in Mikrokosmographia (1615) shows that these ideas were well known at this point (‘“The Melodie of Heaven”’, 180–2). 11 It also inspired some real and imaginary instances of poisoning through the ear, most famously in Hamlet. On this see Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 123–43; Allison ­Deutermann, ‘“Caviare to the general”?: Taste, Hearing, and Genre in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 230–55, revised in Listening for Theatrical Form; McDermott, ‘“The Melodie of Heaven”’, 181. 12 Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 30.

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13 Pollard, Drugs and Theater, 123. In this volume, Simon Smith (110–32) offers a reading of Hamlet that emphasizes the importance of sight to this play. 14 Pollard, Drugs and Theater, 123–43. 15 Bloom, Voice in Motion, 121. 16 Ibid., 115. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 134. 19 Walter Ong’s work on sound can be found in The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967) and Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982). Foundational studies of the soundscape include R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977) and Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd edn (1984; Westport, CN: Ablex, 2001); the concept has more recently been described and discussed by Ari Y. Kelman, ‘Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies’, The Senses and Society 5, no. 2 (2010): 212–24. 20 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 15. 21 Ibid., 16–17. In this volume, Simon Smith (117–21) argues persuasively that both sound and sight were routinely appealed to in early modern drama: a specific example that works against the ‘balance-sheet theory’ to which Sterne is also opposed. 22 Wilkinson, Jewell for the Eare, A8r. On doors as ears see McDermott, ‘“The Melodie of Heaven”’, 186–7; Bloom, Voice in Motion, 127–8. 23 Robert Miola explains that in both the Plautine comedies on which Errors is based, the lockout scene operates as a ‘climax’ of the sequence of errors (Shakespeare and Classical Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 19). 24 Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91. Love’s essay argues against the dominant literary tactic of a hermeneutics of depth and tries out instead a way of reading the surface of a text. Her essay is inspired by two social scientists (Bruno Latour and Erving Goffmann) who, she writes, ‘have little time for traditional humanist categories of experience, consciousness, and motivation’, and instead ‘offer descriptions of surfaces, operations, and interactions’ (375). There is much scope for a surface reading of The Comedy of Errors that picks up on its processes and poetics of description, but I focus here on the ways in which hearing and surfaces coincide in the play. For more recent work on surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108,

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no. 1 (2009): 1–21. Kevin Killeen and Liz Oakley-Brown have explored surface readings in early modern writing, arguing that ‘[t]he accomplished metaphor of depth and profundity worked to the full in early modern thought, but by no means did it monopolise the era’s ontologies or its poetics’, in: ‘Introduction: Scrutinizing Surfaces in Early Modern Thought’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 8 (2017): para. 2. 25 Martine van Elk gives references for many early studies that dismissed the play as ‘immature’, in ‘“This Sympathizèd One Day’s Error”’, 47n1. 26 Harry Levin’s comparatist approach to the play discusses it with Plautine and later comedies and also in the context of the modernist, and particularly Bergsonian, comedy of mechanization (‘Two Comedies of Errors’, in Refractions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 128–50). 27 Douglas Lanier, ‘“Stigmatical in Making”: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors’, English Literary Renaissance 23, no. 1 (1993): 102. 28 Patricia Akhimie, ‘Bruised with Adversity: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors’, in The Oxford Handbook of ­Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 186–96. A longer version of Akhimie’s essay appears in her Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2018), 83–116. 29 Russ McDonald, ‘Fear of Farce’, in Bad Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 80, 88. 30 Brennan O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse: Metrical Reading and Performance of The Comedy of Errors’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), 414. Miola discusses how the Dromios’ language is indebted to the New Comedy in Shakespeare and Classical Comedy, 22–3. 31 Eamon Grennan, ‘Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in The Comedy of Errors’, Philological Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1980): 150–64, at 158; on this idea see also van Elk, ‘“This Sympathizèd One Day’s Error”’, 59; O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse’, 402; Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 56–82, esp. 61; McDonald, ‘Fear of Farce’, 84. Although the earliest printed use of the word ‘pun’ as we understand it now dates from the 1660s, and the word didn’t attain common currency until the following century, the figure itself was widely used in the English Renaissance. See Sophie Read, ‘Puns’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81–94, at 82.

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32 As Sophie Read explains, the reliance on repetition in the figure of antanaclasis quickly becomes annoying as it ‘shades from being clever to being clever-clever’ (‘Puns’, 83). 33 McDonald, ‘Fear of Farce’, 82. 34 These words perhaps also suggest ‘Epidamium’ (1.1.62), the city of the Antipholuses’ birth and from where the newborn Dromios were sold into slavery. This was not a known place in the classical world, although Epidamnus was, and in Menaechmi – which is set in the latter – Plautus punned on the ­coincidence of this place name with damnation (Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy, 25). 35 Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 174. 36 There are some echoes of the staged errors in the printed versions of the play: numerous speech prefixes in the first four Folio versions of the play seem deliberately ambiguous, replicating on the page some of the onstage confusion. Alice Leonard estimates, for instance, that almost two-thirds of the speech prefixes for the pairs of twins in the First Folio fail to identify which one is speaking (Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), ch. 4). I am grateful to Dr Leonard for sharing her forthcoming work with me. 37 Ben Jonson, ‘Discoveries’, ed. Lorna Hutson, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7:564. 38 O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse’, 408. 39 Grennan, ‘Arm and Sleeve’, 159. 40 See also 4.1.13n. On the language of bonds and binds see John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 41 Akhimie, ‘Bruised’, 192; O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse’, 415. 42 O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse’, 414–17. 43 Wilkinson, Iewell for the Eare, A5v. 44 There are no direct references to this figure in The Comedy of Errors, but it was widely known in the late sixteenth century. On the use of Hercules Gallicus in English Renaissance literature see Bloom, Voice in Motion, 157–8; Vin Nardizzi, ‘Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage’, in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 196–8; Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 66–79; and Abishek Sarkar, ‘Prince Arthur and Hercules Gallicus’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 31 (2014): 73–87.

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45 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 226. 46 Sarkar lists some, in ‘Prince Arthur’, 84. 47 Lucian, ‘Heracles: An Introduction’, in Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1:65. Simon Smith has shown that the concepts most often associated with hearing music in the period were ‘enforcement, and compulsion’ (Musical Response, 26): Hercules Gallicus seems to illustrate an aspect of this model. 48 In other early modern contexts, this same action – the outer ear bored through or even cut off entirely – served as a punishment (McDermott, ‘“The Melodie of Heaven”’, 183). 49 Stephen Egerton borrows the image not only for the title of his book, The Boring of the Eare (London, 1623), but also when he writes that a true believer has to be a willing servant to God and have his ear bored at the door of God’s house (A6r). 50 Cartwright (ed.), CE 5.1.420–5n.

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9

Sense, reason, and the animal–human boundary in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Natalie K. Eschenbaum

The title of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Puck’s final address to the audience – ‘If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear’ (5.1.413–16) – remind us that the entire play occurs in dream-space. Although sleep conjures immaterial visions and imaginings, it binds the senses; it makes people senseless and unable to use their capacities for reason. In The Haven of Health (1584), Thomas Cogan describes a typical Renaissance understanding of the effect of sleep on the senses: in sleepe the senses be unable to execute their office, as the eye to see, the eare to heare, the nose to smell, the mouth to tast, and all sinowy parts to feele. So that the senses for a time may seem to be tyed or bound, and therefore Sleepe is called of some ligamentum sensum. And for this imbecillite, for that Sleepe after a sort maketh a man senselesse, and as it were livelesse, it is called in Latine Mortis imago.1

Sentience is one defining feature of humanity, so sleep brings humanity itself into question. In Thomas Newton’s  1581 translation of Touchstone of Complexions, the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius proffers that the sleeping human reminds us of our connection with beasts: ‘Sleepe is nothing els but a resting of the Animal faculty […] all the weary members & Senses [are] recomforted.’2 Humans and animals share the ‘Animal faculty’, or sentience. Lemnius continues: ‘For when the powers natural be fresh and lusty native heate gathering it self inward, is of more force and strongly applyeth concoction,

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perfourming the same not onely in the Stomach, but also through the whole body beside, whose vapour and pleasaunt sent moisteneth the brayne, & bringeth a sleepe the Instruments of the Senses.’3 Sleep sleeps our senses and reason, but, according to Lemnius, it is the result of natural, or beastly, ‘fresh and lusty native heate’. Midsummer is comedic, in part, because it reveals how love and sleep have similar reductive and ridiculous effects on reason. Love, or more rightly desire, makes people senseless and unreasonable. Significantly, the central comedic character, the donkey-headed Bottom, is the only one who recognizes this truth of humanity. In this chapter, I argue that Bottom’s insight is due to the fact that he is a figure both animal and human. Bottom, somewhat ironically, helps to make sense of the most human of the early modern senses. Throughout Shakespeare’s play, the characters, whether human or humanlike faerie, attempt to distinguish their realities from their imaginations using their physical senses. Of course, in the drug-induced and dreamfilled world of Athens’ forest, the characters’ senses are disconnected from reason, and nothing actually is what it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, or feels like. For instance, when Lysander’s sleeping eyes are anointed with the love potion, and he awakens to desire Helena, he claims the change is completely reasonable, based on what his eyes see: ‘Not Hermia, but Helena I love. / Who will not change a raven for a dove? / The will of man is by his reason swayed, / And reason says you are the worthier maid’ (2.2.117–20). Helena is fair and thus fits the visual standards of Renaissance beauty, so Lysander claims that desire (emotional and sexual) is dictated by the senses and reason. Of course, he does not realize that his senses are skewed by the love potion and that what he is saying is not reasonable at all. Hermia points this out after her heightened hearing leads her to him when darkness renders the sense of sight useless: Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, The ear more quick of apprehension makes; Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, It pays the hearing double recompense. Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found; Mine ear, I thank it brought me to thy sound.

(3.2.177–82)

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When Lysander tells her that his love now belongs to Helena, Hermia responds by simply saying, ‘You speak not as you think; it cannot be!’ (3.2.191). What he is saying literally does not make any sense; it is so unreasonable that she does not believe him. And, she is right not to believe him because he is, in a sense, asleep. He is under the influence of a drug that has disconnected his sense from reason. It does not take long, however, for Hermia to take what Lysander is saying as truth; her confusion turns to anger, which she then directs at the apparent ‘thief of love’, Helena (3.2.283). When Titania, like Lysander, is bound with the love potion, she similarly relies on her senses to make sense of her new feelings. She hears Bottom singing about birds, unknowingly through his newly donned ass’s maw, and says: I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again: Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note. So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape, And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

(3.1.133–7) Her love for him is based on her sense (hearing and vision) of him, and thus it seems entirely reasonable to her. Bottom, however, is sceptical and responds with some of the most reasonable lines in the play: ‘Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends’ (3.1.138–42). Like Hermia, Bottom tells his new lover that she is being unreasonable. He admits that he is neither attractive nor musical, and uses his reason (‘Methinks’) to conclude that she cannot love him based on what she sees or hears. Bottom goes beyond Hermia’s conclusion to state that love is rarely grounded in reason. He says that if Titania loves him, it must be based on something other than physical, reasonable sensation. Which, of course, is true: the ‘other’ is either the nectar of a magical flower, or the inexplicable reason our senses prefer one person’s sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste, over another’s. As Helena reminds us at the beginning of the play, Demetrius has shifted his love from her to Hermia, even though ‘Through Athens I am thought as fair as she’ (1.1.227). Often, love simply does not make sense and cannot be explained by reason.

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In these scenes of mistaken love, it becomes apparent that Midsummer is one of Shakespeare’s most sensual plays; it explores the functions and misfunctions of the bodily senses and is, on one level at least, about bodily appetites and pleasures. A review of the Open Source Shakespeare concordance confirms this claim, based on the number of references related to the five bodily senses. Of all five, the most are to vision (2), the eye (16), eyes (31), see (34), and sees (3); Midsummer has more references to the eye/eyes than any other Shakespeare play.4 The play is fascinated with the physical nature of the senses, and especially with the eyes that are supposed to let in love and intelligence, but rarely let in both at the same time, and frequently are blinded or fooled. Bottom realizes that his dreamy, erotic foray into the sensual faerie world was a ‘most rare vision’ that is ‘past the wit of man to say’ (4.1.203–4). He even says he would be an ‘ass’ to try and explain the sights he has seen (4.1.204). The joke, of course, is that he was an ass – or half an ass – but he recognizes that his eyes cannot reasonably have seen what they saw; everything he saw was thanks to magic and through an animal’s eyes. Bottom’s animal head has received quite a bit of critical attention in recent decades, but the criticism has not focused on his animal sensations. There have been studies of Bottom’s possible classical sources, with a few coalescing on the idea that he represents either a ‘comic version of satyr or centaur’, or that his change was inspired by the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, or The Golden Ass.5 Others have considered the connotations of ‘Bottom’ and ‘ass’ to great effect. Deborah Wyrick provides the first focused study of the ‘tantalizingly slippery word, the connotations of which ranged from the sacred to the scurrilous […] [Bottom] represents the apotheosis of asininity. His palpably translated presence synthesizes the “admirable ass”, the “foolish ass”, and the “licentious ass” traditions’.6 More recently, in ‘The Name “Bottom” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Cedric Watts argues that ‘Bottom’ means ‘Buttocks’ and ‘Arse’, despite the claims of the OED.7 Richard Rambuss’s ‘Shakespeare’s Ass Play’ fully develops Watts’s argument, but also the anal erotics that place Bottom at the receiving end of female desire.8 And in Shakespeare Among the Animals (2002), Bruce Boehrer argues that Midsummer is ‘patently about bestiality [because] Titania’s animal passion for the asinine Bottom climaxes the play’s fairy subplot’.9

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Although by no means a full literature review, this survey offers a sense of how Bottom’s animal–human character has been read. As an inverse centaur, Bottom’s head is all animal and his body is all human. That is, his bottom is human, and his head is ass. But most of the studies have primarily focused on Bottom’s bottom – whether as connotations for human conditions, his physical derrière, anal erotics, or sex acts between Titania and Bottom. Even Boehrer’s argument, which considers Bottom’s animal nature (any claim of bestiality must), disregards the fact that Bottom’s bottom is human, and so are (presumably) his sexual organs. Boehrer does consider the Faerie Queen’s dotage on Bottom’s animal head: ‘Titania leads Bottom to a bed of flowers, embraces him and kisses him, and woos him with some of the play’s most extravagantly sensuous verse.’10 He also explains that bestiality is less about a sex act between two individuals, and more about the assumption ‘that human nature is in constant danger of corruption from the bestial and/or female other, and that it must therefore be continuously and rigorously policed’.11 Rambuss similarly notes that the line between animal and human in Midsummer is fuzzy: ‘Shakespeare’s fairy queen takes a love object that is both a “he” and an “it”, thing and person, human and animal.’12 He further stresses: ‘Bottom is literally (the play repeatedly puts it) “translated” – changed, transported, enraptured – into something else: a hybrid genus that straddles species. The human-animal.’13 To make sense of Bottom, our readings of his character need to straddle the animal–human divide. Bottom is not just a transformed human but in the play’s imaginary, his ass’s head gives him access to animal sensation and reason, which suggests that Shakespeare was exploring the boundary of the animal–human. Considering the themes of Midsummer, Shakespeare was especially interested in the sensitive boundary, which was something humans and animals shared: the animal faculty. Such animal-centric readings are now possible, thanks to the groundbreaking work in Renaissance animal studies of the past twenty years.14 In Animal Characters, Boehrer sees ‘how haunted Shakespeare is by the relationship between people and other animals’.15 He suggests that there have been ‘recent efforts to celebrate Shakespeare as the inventor of the human. Perhaps we should remember him instead as the poet of humanity in crisis’.16 The crisis, as Boehrer and others have argued, was about delineating the boundary between animals and humans, and it was one that Descartes attempted to resolve by

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making consciousness the marker of humanity. Erica Fudge insists that we recall Shakespeare was writing before consciousness was associated with humans. She says: ‘There should be little separation for us between humans and animals because there was so little separation for those writers we are interpreting. I want to take this further: To think only about humans when reading early modern texts is to apply anachronistically Cartesian ideas to preCartesian thought.’17 Shakespeare and his pre-Cartesian contemporaries turned to classical philosophy for their definition of humanity, and ‘again and again it is assumed that the crucial characteristic distinguishing human from animal life is the capacity of reason’.18 In the Renaissance, reason was the slippery line between beast and human. To return, briefly, to a scene of mistaken love, Robert N. Watson argues that the repeated misuse of ‘reason’ demonstrates the Athenian youths’ acute loss of humanity: ‘When Demetrius – four times within six lines – ludicrously cites “reason” as the cause of what we know is an arbitrary, drug-induced shift of lust-objects, Shakespeare is surely parodying the principal criterion Renaissance philosophers used to differentiate humanity proudly from other species.’19 For reason to be parodied, one wonders if reason was not deemed exclusive to humanity, or, in fact, present in any of the species. The answer is less interesting than the fact that Shakespeare was exploring such questions about reason and its relationship to human and creaturely worlds. Erica Fudge has considered the connections among humanity, animals, and reason at length in Brutal Reasoning (2006). A number of her lines of inquiry and conclusions are foundational to my reading of Bottom. First, although Aristotle argues that reason separates humans and animals, they ‘do share some aspects of behavior – those which are directed by the sensitive soul. The sensitive soul makes use of the “external senses” – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – and the “internal senses” – common sense, fantasy, imagination, cognition, and memory’.20 In Midsummer, Bottom’s behaviours frequently show the sensitive soul conjoining his animal and human selves. Second, Fudge draws on classical theories that gave animals the capacity of reason: ‘Plutarch argued that animals are reasonable and that they are more virtuous than humans.’21 And: ‘While in some – orthodox, that is, Aristotelian – texts the goodness of animals is based on their lack of reason (and therefore on their natural lack of vice, in others – those that follow Plutarch more closely – it is animals’ possession of a natural reason that makes them superior to humans.’22

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Similarly, she explains that some Platonists did not separate sense and reason, which would also have assigned reason to animals: ‘Unlike in Aristotelianism, where sense and reason were regarded as separate faculties (one of the body, the other immaterial), in this Platonist’s thought, sense is inseparable from reason as they are both situated in the body.’23 Fudge provides an extended study of Morocco, the popular intelligent horse who performed in London, and concludes: ‘How can one maintain human superiority – maintain, in fact, the discourse of reason – in the face of an intelligent horse?’24 Fudge shows how humans attempted to define themselves in opposition to animals but consistently discovered that their creaturely selves blended into one another. Considering a pre-Cartesian, non-Aristotelian philosophy such as Plutarch’s – as Fudge does – shows that the ‘equivalent binaries of human versus animal and reason versus unreason certainly existed, but they existed in constant opposition to other theories which held that animals were not only sentient but also sometimes even reasoning’.25 Animals not only crossed into humanity through reason but, as Karen Raber states, ‘early modern bodies were shared with, invaded by, occupied by, and colonized by animal bodies. This was both an unremarkable fact of everyday Renaissance life and a specter that threatened to dismantle efforts to distinguish the human self from its licit and illicit cohabitants’.26 Raber calls ‘attention to the many and varied contexts in which Renaissance and animal bodies mingle, in pursuits like riding and sex, or […] in the remedies for both humans and animals, prescribed by husbandry and medical manuals, and in mutual acts of consumption’.27 Bottom’s body becomes a visual representation of this animal–human mingling. With these new lenses, it is worth reconsidering Midsummer and the figure of Bottom. As an animal–human who specifically calls attention to his use of reason, and other humans’ misuse of reason, I contend that Bottom’s figuration is about the constant threat (and possible opportunities) of animal–human intermingling that was a Renaissance reality. To return to the scene of Bottom’s translation: when Oberon squeezes the floral love juice on Titania’s eyes, he reveals his plan to make her fall in love with an animal: What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true love take; Love and languish for his sake. Be it ounce or cat or bear,

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Pard, or boar with bristled hair In the eye that shall appear When thou wak’st, it is thy dear. Wake when some vile thing is near.

(2.2.31–8) Rambuss notes the pronominal shift from ‘his’ to ‘it’ in the passage, questions whether an animal is ‘a “he” (or “she”), or an “it”’, and concludes that Bottom is both a ‘he’ and an ‘it’.28 Oberon places some of the beastliest beasts on his list of potential loves for the Faerie Queen: snow leopards, cats, bears, pards, and boars. These are all ‘vile things’ that Oberon hopes will be first to enter Titania’s line of vision after the spell is cast. Titania’s sight is emphasized twice (‘What thou seest’ and ‘In the eye’) not only because the magic works through vision but also because vision will be one of the ways in which Titania and Bottom conjoin. In the Renaissance, vision was often considered to be the highest and most human of the five bodily senses. In her essay on the tactile space of the Renaissance theatre, Carla Mazzio argues that ‘Since Aristotle, touch has been aligned with both human and animal capacities, and contrasted with vision and hearing as senses integral to the ethical and intellectual contours of what it means to be human.’29 And, of the two (vision and hearing), Elizabeth D. Harvey suggests that ‘beginning with Plato and then consolidated into a regime […] with the advent of modern science’, the visual ‘has been privileged as the highest and purest of the senses’.30 Robert Burton sums up the views of many of his contemporaries in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘Of these five Senses, Sight is held to bee most pretious, and the best, and that by reason of his object, it sees all the body at once, by it wee learne, & discerne all things, a sense most excellent for use.’31 Seeing was frequently considered the most human sense because of its seemingly direct connection to the intellect or reason. Unlike beasts, we filter what we see through reason to make better sense of it. Although we do the same with what we taste, smell, and touch, much intellectual development happens via seeing. Titania’s eyes are laced with the love drug, and her vision is readied for perversion, but it is sound that leads Titania to Bottom, not sight. Titania sleeps in her drugged state on the side of the stage, while Bottom rehearses Pyramus and Thisbe in the woods with the other Mechanicals. The still human-headed

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Bottom stumbles over his opening line to Thisbe: ‘Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet’ (3.1.77). Quince quickly corrects the sense, and the sense, of the line – ‘Odours, odours’ (3.1.78) – and Bottom continues, ‘odours savours sweet. / So hath thy breath, my dearest Thisbe dear. / But hark, a voice. Stay thou but here a while, / And by and by I will to thee appear’ (3.1.79–82). Bottom attempts to act at this moment, but these are the final lines spoken before Puck transforms him into a half-ass. Their focus on smells and sounds is appropriate considering the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: the beloveds need to rely on these two senses more because of the wall that separates them physically, their only visual and tactile access being through the wall’s small crack. But to have Bottom demonstrating – indeed, emphasizing – his reliance on two of the lower senses begins to connect him with his animal side. In The Wonders of the Little World (1678), for example, Nathanial Wanley states that ‘By some one or other of the Beasts man is excelled and surpassed in every of the Senses; but in this of Smelling by the most of them.’32 Bottom is just reciting lines, but he leaves the stage with scents lingering, and thus a whiff of the beast about him. And then: ‘Enter [bottom] with [an] ass’s head’ (3.1.98). When Bottom returns to stage, he continues playing his part as Pyramus, apparently unware that he has been turned into an ass. He is called ‘monstrous!’ and ‘strange!’ by his friends, who flee, assuming magical foul play, as they rightly should (3.1.100). Snout says, ‘O Bottom, thou art changed. What do I see on thee?’ (3.1.110–11). He questions what is before his eyes; he questions his vision because it is both unreasonable and terrifying. Like Helena, Bottom believes his friends have turned on him: ‘I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, to fright me if they could’ (3.1.116–17). Bottom thinks it is more reasonable that his friends would ‘make an ass of him’ than he would actually have an ass’s head, and the fact that he is right is the humour of this scene. To prove that he is not afraid, and to calm his nerves, Bottom decides to sing: I will walk up and down here, and I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid. The ousel cock so black of hue With orange-tawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill.

(3.1.118–24)

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Bottom does not just sing, but he sings about birds’ song in a manner he hopes will echo through the forest to his runaway friends. This birdsong is what awakens Titania: ‘What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?’ (3.1.125). Titania’s eyes have been charmed, but it is Bottom’s song that makes him her love object. The potion may be powerful enough to affect all of her senses, or this may be a case of senses crossing – a sort of synaesthesia – and Titania ‘seeing’ Bottom with her ears. Bottom continues to sing, now to the finch and the cuckoo, but when he stops singing to question why one might ‘set his wit to’ a cuckoo (3.1.130), Titania quickly interrupts, pleading Bottom to leave talking and return to his birdsong (to quote again): I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again: Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note. So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape, And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

(3.1.133–7) Titania states that it is her ear that first loves Bottom, and she has comparative love for the vision of him (‘So is mine eye’; my emphasis). To be ‘enamoured’ is to be ‘inspired or inflamed by love’,33 but to ‘enthral’ one is ‘to subjugate or control (a person, the mind, will, judgement, etc.), either by means of artifice, sorcery, seduction, etc., or by possessing positive qualities such as beauty and charm’.34 Titania’s attraction to Bottom’s shape is one of the OED’s sample uses of this transitive verb. Bottom’s voice inspires love, but Titania recognizes something artificial, magical, and seductive about his animal–human shape. Because Titania is then moved by Bottom’s ‘fair virtue’s force’ to express her love for his unusual shape, one can understand the readings of bestiality. The fact that her desire is initiated through birdsong further confirms her love for beings in the creaturely world. In Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature, Rebecca Ann Bach argues that the joke of this scene ‘depends on Bottom’s poor singing voice. The audience should hear the difference between the beautiful, musical voices of wrens, throstles, and larks and the horrible grounded voice of Bottom the ass/man’.35 Titania, however, ‘hears the “immusical” voice of the ass as if it were the musical voice of singing birds’.36 Bach suggests that the play privileges musicality throughout, which means that

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humans are not always in the position of knowledge and power over animals. She writes, ‘[t]he workmen produce distinctly “immusical” verse, placing their voices on a scale below the singing birds and hounds that populate the play [… and thus] the relative rhetorical beauty of language divides humans from one another and categorizes some as “little better than” beasts and some as not as good as singing birds and hounds’.37 In the creaturely world of Midsummer, there is no presumed hierarchy that grants humans a position over animals. This is not necessarily to say that humans who fall below animals on a hierarchy are ‘beastly’ in all regards but rather that animals may excel humans in certain aspects. Bach makes the important statement that, ‘since Renaissance beasts and birds were not seen as mindless and without character or personality, characterizing people with human bodies as beasts or birds did not signify as harshly as it might today’.38 Bottom’s ass head and birdsong may be a source of humour in the play, but they give Bottom access to the minds and senses of creatures that were valued in the Renaissance. Fudge explains that both Aristotelian and Plutarchian texts celebrated animals in relation to their reason, albeit from different perspectives: ‘While in some – orthodox, that is, Aristotelian – texts the goodness of animals is based on their lack of reason (and therefore their natural lack of vice), in others – those that follow Plutarch more closely – it is animals’ possession of natural reason that makes them superior to humans.’39 As Fudge discovers in her research, Thomas Wright wonders about animals’ natural reason in The Passions of the Minde (1601): I must confesse one poynt of my ignorance, that it seemeth to me, that God endowth bruite beastes with more sparkes of knowledge then reasonable men, and they may be sayde, even in their nativitie, to have imprinted a certayne knowledge and natural instinct, to inquire and finde things necessarie, to be their owne Physitians, to flie that may hurt them, and followe that may profite them.40

Bottom’s transformation does not appear to be simply a transformation of form; the ass’s head gives Bottom access to a ‘natural instinct’ or reason, which would explain why he so quickly and smartly responds to Titania’s expression of ridiculous love: ‘Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together

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nowadays’ (3.1.138–40). Titania’s gushy response of ‘Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful’ certainly is meant to make the audience laugh, but whilst Bottom’s beauty is the result of skewed perception, his wisdom is not. That is, the potion makes him appear beautiful only to Titania, but the wisdom of his statement about reason and love becomes a thesis of sorts for the whole play. This truth about reason and love only becomes possible thanks to Bottom’s embodied animal state. Wright wonders why God provides creatures with greater native intelligence. Fudge gives an interpretation from the Book of Numbers that gives an ass both native intelligence and Godly intervention: ‘In his 1625 discussion of Balaam and the ass (Numbers 22:21–33), Joseph Hall […] begins with the miracle of the speaking ass “whose common sense is aduanced aboue the reason of his rider”, and argues that this is an example of the power of the Almighty.’41 There were Renaissance writers, though, who saw beasts as completely disconnected from reason because they were disconnected from God. For example, in his Essaies upon the five senses (1625), Richard Brathwaite looks specifically at the difference between the human and animal senses of sight.42 He tells us that ‘there is a motive of thankfulnesse in the eye of man, more than in the eye of any other creature; a muscle which lifteth the eye upward, whereas others be more depressed, bending downward’.43 Beasts, according to Brathwaite, do not use their senses metaphorically; they just use their eyes to look at the lowly world around them, and they do not look up to heaven, or through God, as humans should. There is, of course, a warning or a reprimand embedded in his distinction; if you do not filter your vision through religion, you are a beastly individual. But Brathwaite admits, ‘the eye of all other senses is the most needefull, so of all others it is most hurtfull’.44 Even though humans might be able to filter their vision through God, their eyes are more easily, and more dangerously, misdirected than are beasts’ eyes. Stephen Gosson, in his infamous anti-theatrical tract, The Schoole of Abuse (1579), suggests that humans can learn something from an animal’s use of sensation. He tells the Aristotelian story of a vigilant crane that uses sound to alert her flock to dangerous enemies. This bird holds a pebble in her claw that she hears drop when she is about to fall asleep: ‘The Crane is said to rest upon one leg, and holding up the other, keepe a Pebble in her clawe, which as sone as the senses are bound by approche of sleepe, falles to the ground, and with the noise

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of the knock against the Earth, makes her awake, whereby shee is ever redy to prevent her enemies.’45 In contrast, Gosson says, humans do not use ‘any witte, to garde our owne persons’ against the enemy, which, in this case, is the Renaissance theatre.46 If only we could be as smart as birds (Gosson says) or as dumb as beasts (Brathwaite suggests), we might be able to better use our senses for survival; whether that be to survive the evils of the theatre or the dangers of love. In his second essay, ‘Of Hearing’, Brathwaite tells us that the problem with ‘vulgar’ humans is that they ‘have their eares in the eyes’.47 That is, if they do not like the look of a person, they will not listen to anything they have to say. Conversely, if they find someone attractive, they will agree with everything they say. He suggests that a ‘discreet eare seasons the understanding, marshals the rest of the senses wandring, renews the minde, preparing her to all difficulties; cheeres the affections, fortifying them against all oppositions’.48 Smart humans should use their ears as ‘marshals’ to bring reason (and safety) to the other senses that may be more easily tricked. As discussed, in Midsummer Titania’s ear first ‘marshals’ her sense of Bottom. Her eyes are anointed, but her ears are what enamour her to Bottom, and her eyes follow suit. One could argue that the love potion combines her senses of vision and hearing, and thus makes her ‘vulgar’. As Brathwaite suggests, ‘such a neare affinitie have the eare and the eye in the vulgar’.49 But the ‘marshal’ to Titania’s sense of Bottom is not really a sense at all – it is her love of him. He looks and sounds beautiful not because he actually is beautiful but because she adores him. Again, Bottom points this out when he says that she cannot reasonably love him based on her sense of him. As Brathwaite and Gosson suggest, we can learn something from the way in which animals sense the world. They may not be able to filter their vision or hearing through God (or love?), but their senses are not as easily confused or misdirected. The half-ass Bottom reminds us that sometimes pure, animalistic sensation is safer than sensation that travels through the channels of possibly perverted reason. As important as the senses are to intellectual understanding and advancement, they also can allow evil access to the body, according to Renaissance writers. Brathwaite argues that the eye, as the harbour of the highest sense, ought to direct all of the other senses. But, he says, it is ‘the principall organ of errour’ and ‘there is no passage more easie for the entry

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of vice, than by the crany of the eye’.50 Hearing is no safer. Gosson tells us that the theatre affects the senses in horrible, ravishing ways. Painters and cooks only tickle the eyes, the tongue, and the nose, and ‘both are ended in outwarde sense, which is common too us with bruite beastes’.51 The arts of poets and players, however, get into ‘the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule’.52 He suggests that we should close up our ears to poets, pipers, and players, because the sense of hearing can draw things through the surface of our bodies and down to our hearts. Or, as Mazzio explains, ‘Words touch skin, blood and bone, and enter the body interior as a kind of liquid physiology, altering the substance of heart and mind.’53 Whether it is the ear (in Gosson’s case) or the eye (in Brathwaite’s case), the problem with the most human of the senses is that they are portals that allow things entrance to our souls. The fact that Gosson, in his anti-theatrical tract, points his finger at the players’ ability to pervert the playgoers’ senses is relevant to my consideration of Bottom. In addition to being half-animal, Bottom is a player. Shakespeare’s play is, in large part, a play about putting on a play, and Bottom is the main player. Immediately before Puck swaps Bottom’s head for the head of an ass, Bottom and the Mechanicals have been discussing how to ensure that their play does not pervert the senses of the Duke and his guests (3.1). They are concerned, for instance, that the Athenian women will be afraid of the lion in their play. Bottom says: ‘Masters, you ought to consider with yourself: to bring in (God shield us) a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wildfowl than your lion living, and we ought to look to’t’ (3.1.27–30). He argues that a prologue will not be sufficient when bringing a lion on stage, but rather the audience will need to see proof that the lion is not a lion but Snug the Joiner moonlighting as an actor and an animal: ‘Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck, and he must himself speak through’ (3.1.33–5). The actor must proclaim that he is not what he pretends to be; he must say, your vision may be fooled, but I am not a lion, I am, ‘a man as other men are’ (3.1.40). Shakespeare seems to be poking fun at the antitheatricals who worried that theatre would confuse peoples’ senses and affect their souls. In Midsummer, theatre is entertainment that is thoroughly aware of its theatricality. Theatre, the play tells us, is much safer than sleep or love.

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In her study of touch in the early modern theatre, Mazzio concludes: ‘What is suggestive […] is not simply that touch encodes a logic of contagion, or that touch results in disrupted boundaries between bodies, but that it disrupts the boundaries between the senses themselves.’54 She says that, according to Gosson, the problem with the theatre is not simply that it holds a mass of closely confined bodies; the problem is that the words on stage are not just heard but touch the bodies of the playgoers. Theatre going is dangerous because it is multisensory and it shows how the senses might be linked. Brathwaite had suggested that this linking of senses was a sign of vulgarity. Sophisticated humans should not ‘have their eares in the eyes’, or their eyes in the skin, or their noses in the tongue.55 Bottom famously confuses – or disrupts – his senses when he wakes up and imagines that the faeries and his ass-head were all just a dream: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was – and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

(4.1.203–12) Helen Peter provides an apt summary of the way in which this speech usually is read and glossed: we ‘insist on viewing his speech on awakening from his dream as confusing senses and misquoting scripture, showing himself to be merely a more dazed version of the figure which has appeared in the play up to this point’.56 Wyrick states that Bottom ‘erects a comically impenetrable synesthetic barrier against asinine exegesis’, suggesting that Bottom saves himself from appearing unreasonable, or ‘asinine’.57 Peter proposes, however, that if we remember that sight was often considered the ultimate sense in the Renaissance, and that it was the sense upon which all others depended, then Bottom is neither confused, nor misquoting scripture, nor attempting to reclaim his humanity. ‘Having mentioned the eye first’, she points out, ‘it does not matter to him that the remainder of the vehicles of sense and their perceptions are mismatched,

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because all senses are subject to sight, and he has had the ultimate vision in the play’.58 I would take this reading one step further and suggest that, via this speech, Bottom reveals that it is impossible to use any senses to make sense of what has happened. He tries to use his reason a couple of times (‘Methought I was – ’), but he stops himself because he recognizes that only a ‘fool’ would try to explain what happened to him using reason. As part animal, part human, Bottom was able to separate sense and reason. His ass-head allowed him to experience sensation without the soul-altering risks of human sensation. And as a player, Bottom is aware that senses are not just confused but their boundaries are disrupted in the space of the theatre. The theatre is like a dream-space in that it binds our senses and makes them, perhaps, a bit animalistic. Bottom’s attempts to think through and to articulate what he was (an ass) and had (an ass’s head) are significant comments on his nature. Fudge addresses the concept of self-knowledge in Renaissance theories of animality and humanity: ‘Without self-knowledge a human is living a life without use of the rational soul; is living, therefore, the life of an animal.’59 The post-Cartesians came to understand knowledge of the senses as a version of this self-knowledge. For instance, Fudge explains that according to Anthony Le Grand’s A Dissertation Of the want of Sense and Knowledge in Brutes (1694): while the organs of sense may be similar in humans and animals, those organs do not operate in the same way all of the time, because, when a human is applying him- or herself, those organs are joined with reason. An animal’s organs never have this possibility and are therefore very different: an animal cannot reflect on what its eyes perceive; it can only perceive, by its nature, it has no further – or higher – faculty or perception.60

As a pre-Cartesian text, Midsummer explores the animal–human boundary along the sensitive seam. It wonders aloud, through Bottom’s characterization, about the possibilities of animal perception. Bottom may be marked as more animal than human because he is unaware of his animality over the course of his ‘rare vision’; he lacks self-knowledge, but he attempts to parse it out after he awakens to his whole human self. In my reading, what is most powerful is that Bottom holds onto his asinine nature by attempting to, but then refusing to, use human reason to proclaim self-knowledge. He may be the butt of a joke, but he also is uncovering the fulcrum of a complex debate about animality

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and humanity at the turn of the seventeenth century that focuses on the very nature of reason and sensibility. Boehrer argues that the literary character developed as a response to this philosophical crisis and became ‘a means of manufacturing and perpetuating the distinction between people and animals’.61 Raber insists that ‘animal bodies were as troubling to the emergent early modern divide between animal and human as was animal reason’.62 Bottom thus becomes an embodied characterization of the difficulty of drawing this distinction. When he reflects on his ‘rare vision’ and finds his senses crossing (‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive’), Bottom’s reason is not faltering; rather, his synaesthetic memories sit on the edge of dreams and reality, animality and humanity. Although it risks anachronism, I would like to conclude by considering the work of V. S. Ramachandran, a contemporary neuroscientist who works on synaesthesia and other brain phantoms. In ‘Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheeses’, Ramachandran quotes plentifully from Shakespeare’s works, including Midsummer, to explain how ‘our everyday language is replete with synesthetic metaphors, cross-sensory metaphors’ and to note that synaesthesia ‘is seven times more common among artists, poets, novelists’.63 He says the reason why is pretty simple: artists, poets, and novelists have exceptional abilities at forming metaphors, or connections among dissimilar objects; they are able to do this because they are synaesthetes. Ramachandran then questions: ‘Why did this ability evolve in humans in the first place? Why cross-modal abstraction? If we compare the brains of lower mammals, monkeys, great apes and humans, we find progressive enlargement of the TPO junction and angular gyrus, an almost explosive development. And especially so in humans.’64 In other words, from this neuroscientist’s perspective, the sliding scale from animality to humanity is an ability to create metaphors and abstractions, like a synaesthete, like a poet. Bottom’s senses cross as he returns to full humanity, but he is not inspired to write poetry. Instead, he says, I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

(4.1.212–17)

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Editors have commented on the muddled nature of this speech, wondering why Bottom says ‘a’ play, and whether or not ‘her’ refers to Thisbe.65 What is clear is that Bottom is not inspired to create ‘cross-modal abstractions’ based on his dream, and, as he returns to his fully human self, he returns to his base language and speech. The poetic birdsong and wise utterances were connected to his animal nature. It was his ass-head that imagined reason and love as warring neighbours, which is an abstraction today’s neuroscientists would associate with advanced humanity. Fudge says that the ‘making of the boundary which separates the human from the beast is important in two ways: because it is an issue in many areas of culture which are central to our understanding of the early modern period and because it raises ethical and political issues which remain relevant today’.66 Today, we believe that we are ‘merely sophisticated apes’, as Ramachandran puts it, which disrupts the boundary between humans and animals, but maintains a hierarchy that has been devastating to animal populations.67 Shakespeare’s characterization of Bottom does not subvert this hierarchy, but it does unsettle it. In Midsummer, the ass-head gives Bottom access to astute reason, keen sensation, abstraction, song, sex with royalty, and a world of fancy. For many, this would describe an entrée into high humanity rather than beastly degradation. It would describe a dream come true.

Notes 1

Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health: Chiefly gathered for the comfort of Students (London: 1584), 2G2v.

2

Levinus Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton (London: 1581), [G8]v–H[1]r.

3 Ibid. 4

Eric M. Johnson, ‘Open Source Shakespeare Concordance’, Open Source Shakespeare. Available online: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ concordance/ (accessed 1 ­November 2018).

5

Neil D. Issacs and Jack E. Reese, ‘Dithyramb and Paean in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, English Studies 55, no. 4 (1974): 353; Deborah Baker Wyrick, ‘The Ass Motif in The Comedy or Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 444.

6

Wyrick ‘The Ass Motif ’, 439, 444.

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7

Cedric Watts, ‘The Name “Bottom” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Borrowers

8

Richard Rambuss, ‘Shakespeare’s Ass Play’, in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion

and Lenders 5, no. 2 (2010): 1–11. to Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 234–44. 9

Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 41.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 44. 12 Rambuss, ‘Shakespeare’s Ass’, 237. 13 Ibid., 238. 14 In addition to Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals, see Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 1–17; Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Bruce Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Bryan Alkemeyer, ‘Remembering the Elephant: Animal Reason before the Eighteenth Century’, PMLA 132, no. 5 (2017): 1149; Rebecca Ann Bach, Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies (New York: Routledge, 2018). 15 Boehrer, Animal Characters, 10. 16 Ibid. 17 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 186. 18 Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals, 9. 19 Robert N. Watson, ‘The Ecology of Self in Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (London: Ashgate, 2011), 35. 20 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 8. 21 Ibid., 87. 22 Ibid., 93. 23 Ibid., 88. 24 Ibid., 128. 25 Ibid., 174. 26 Raber, Animal Bodies, 79.

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222 27 Ibid.

28 Rambuss, ‘Shakespeare’s Ass’, 237. 29 Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 161. 30 Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses”, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2. People did occasionally present hearing or (very occasionally) touch as the highest sense. In the past decade, a counter-tradition of scepticism about sight has been emphasized in sensory studies that is in opposition to the ‘rationalization of sight’ narrative. See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) as well as Simon Smith’s chapter in this volume (113–17). 31 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), part 1, sect. 1, memb. 2, subsect. 6. 32 Nathanial Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World; or a General History of Man. In Six Books (London, 1678), bk 2, ch. 7:104. 33 OED, s.v. ‘enamour, v.’. 34 OED, s.v. ‘enthral | enthrall, v.’. 35 Bach, Birds and Other Creatures, 81. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid, 83. 38 Ibid., 29. 39 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 93. 40 Quoted in Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 99. 41 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 80. 42 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the five senses revived by a new supplement; with a pithy one upon detraction (London, 1625), 2. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579), D2r. 46 Ibid., D2v. 47 Brathwaite, Essaies, 10. 48 Ibid., 11. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 2–3. 51 Gosson, Schoole, B6v.

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52 Ibid., B7r. 53 Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact’, 178. 54 Ibid., 179; my emphasis. 55 Gosson, Schoole, 10. 56 Helen Peter, ‘Bottom: Making Sense of Sense and Scripture’, Notes & Queries 35 (1988): 46. Robert Watson suggests that Bottom’s confused senses speech derives from a different biblical passage than most presume: ‘Scholars commonly link this soliloquy to a passage early in First Corinthians: “The things which eye hathe not sene, nether eare hathe heard.” But a passage later in that book engages directly with Bottom’s wonderful confusion: “If the whole bodie were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? … those membres of the bodie, which seme to be more feble, are necessarie … God hath tempered the bodie together, and hathe given the more honour to that parte which lacked, Lest there shulde be anie division in the bodie: but that the members shulde have the same care one for another”’ (‘Ecology’, 55). 57 Wyrick, ‘The Ass Motif ’, 446. 58 Peter, ‘Bottom’, 47. 59 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 27. 60 Ibid., 170. 61 Boehrer, Animal Characters, 5. 62 Ibid., 19. 63 V. S. Ramachandran, ‘Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheeses’, in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (London: Pi Press, 2004), 62, 72. Thanks to Dr Alexander O’Brien (Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) for suggesting I consider Ramachandran’s work. 64 Ramachandran, ‘Purple’, 74. 65 In the Arden 3 edition, for instance, Chaudhuri writes: ‘Editors have puzzled unnecessarily over the mild inconsistencies in Bottom’s befuddled words’ (4.1.215-17n). 66 Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 1. 67 Ramachandran, ‘Purple’, 82.

10

Sense and community: Twelfth Night and early modern playgoing Jackie Watson

On 2 February 1602, the men of the Middle Temple gathered in their Hall for the final night of their Christmas revels. The four Inns of Court – Middle and Inner Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and Gray’s Inn – were primarily training grounds for lawyers. Alongside the smaller Inns of Chancery, client institutions of these four larger Inns, they equipped young men with the skills to take part in the increasingly litigious world of early modern England.1 This meant the absorption of specific legal knowledge and expertise, certainly, but it meant more than this. For success in this combative and highly verbal public sphere, Innsmen needed to acquire skills of linguistic dexterity, to present an approved appearance, and to behave in a way that convinced others of their status. At the Inns, they needed to learn how to act as a lawyer, or – for those who did not plan to enter the law professionally – to act as legally educated gentlemen, as courtiers or diplomats. Acting as a lawyer, or indeed as a legally educated gentleman, was as performative a task as the kind of early modern ‘acting’ found across the river at the Globe, and this lawyerly performance depended centrally on the young men’s abilities to embody sensory ‘clues’ for one another. Significantly, the period of the Christmas revels, where for some weeks members of the Inn enacted the roles of councillors at the court of an imagined Prince, was an ideal way to practise these performance skills. As well as the drama inherent in the creation of this realm and, more broadly, in the humanist learning that these men had taken part in, staged performance of plays by professional actors had become a typical part of the revels by the early seventeenth century. This particular season ended on Candlemas with a

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production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, presented to the assembled Inn by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The period of revelling was a time of licensed disruption, as suggested by the etymology of the word from the Latin rebellare. Rational order was challenged, even overthrown, by the Innsmen’s rebellious behaviour – an institutional equivalent of the traditional Christmas Lord of Misrule seen across the country. Young students replaced benchers of seniority and status ‘ruling’ the Inn, and at Middle Temple, at irregular intervals when the Inn’s parliament agreed, this meant the selection of a Prince and of courtiers to manage the imaginary state’s affairs. Candlemas was the final day of this period: the day before equilibrium would be restored. The context for the performance of Shakespeare’s play in February  1602 is significant for this essay in two ways. Firstly, the disruption caused by the period of revelling echoes much of the disruption in the play itself. Not only are the ‘revelling group’ within the play (Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and their various associates – Maria, Feste, and Fabian, at different points) significant in disordering Olivia’s household, but the play stages a wider disruption beyond the influence of that group: a disruption to the sensory order, and consequently to rationality more widely. Examination of this disruption involves something of a reinterpretation of Malvolio, often seen as ‘a scorn-worthy scapegoat’ in critical assessment.2 Instead, here, I argue that the character reflects preoccupations shared by aspirant young men of the period, and partly through discussion of how Malvolio is portrayed, and how he fits into the wider sensory order of Twelfth Night, this essay will examine Shakespeare’s treatment of sensation in the play and consider what can be inferred about the responses of the play’s 1602 audience. As a means of exploring the latter, I shall look at the neuroscience underlying empathy, suggesting how and why the specific group of men who formed the majority of playgoers for this performance could have shared key responses to the play ending their Christmas revels. I remain aware throughout that these areas of shared response will not have been common to every single playgoer, even at this performance; nonetheless, the essay proposes contextual factors likely to have influenced the reactions of many. It is important to establish firstly that the audience for the performance was unusually cohesive. Although bringing guests (even sometimes female guests)

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to revels performances was not unusual, the majority of those watching the play that evening would have been male and Innsmen (mostly, of course, from the Middle Temple itself). Research into the population of the Inns at this period shows that ‘[b]y the end of the century, there were […] 1,040 men in residence (1,703 including those in the Inns of Chancery)’.3 This demographic was educated on humanist principles, and typically about half had been to Oxford or Cambridge before entering one of the Inns. Most were wealthy and socially ambitious. Middle Templar Benjamin Rudyerd recorded the events surrounding the  1597–8 Revels period at the Inn in a book later published as Le Prince D’Amour or Noctes Templariae, and this shows the men involved to be keen on combative verbal wordplay, making intertextual allusions and engaging with the late Elizabethan fashion for epigrams and satire.4 In his work on the group of Innsmen surrounding John Marston at the Middle Temple (those such as Richard Martin, John Hoskyns, and John Davies who were responsible for the 1597–8 Revels), Philip J. Finkelpearl concludes, ‘To a remarkable degree, these Middle Temple wits came from the same background, pursued the same course in life, shared the same tastes and preferences, and often tended to act in very similar ways.’5 One famous – and typical – example of the playgoers of  1602 is the young man who wrote about seeing Twelfth Night that evening, John Manningham. In his so-called Diary, Manningham summarized sermons he had heard and, often quoting other Innsmen, gossiped about the contemporary literary and political world. His time at Middle Temple followed an education at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and after seven years sharing chambers with another student, Edward Curle, he married Curle’s sister, Anne. His subsequent social progression, practising law and with a position at the Court of Wards and Liveries, relied both on his legal learning and the contacts he impressed as a student in the Inns’ homosocial environment. Manningham’s Diary shows him to have been part of a group of similarly educated men, often of middling rank, with the ambition to marry well and to secure preferment. In terms of gender, age, social position, intellect, and transgressive instincts, then, the playgoers surrounding Manningham form as cohesive an in-group as a modern literary scholar can envisage in the early modern period. As sensory response is contingent on variables such as these as well as on historical period, this cohesion is important if one is to draw any substantive

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conclusions about their likely response to a staged play.6 Assumptions and conjecture in such a field are inevitable, but developments in cognitive science provide a new evidentiary basis upon which to theorize engagement and response when exploring drama and its spectators. As Naomi Rokotnitz notes in her exploration of embodiment and cognitive approaches to theatre, ‘each production creates a microcosm in which actors and audience members participate in a reciprocal experience’.7 It is in this light that I wish to explore the relationship between the 1602 audience and Twelfth Night. Over the last twenty years, research has led neuroscientists to develop new ideas about how human beings react to what they observe, and what language allows them to understand of action and feeling. The application of this research to audience response in the theatre allows us to perceive how human beings might react to witnessing events and emotions on stage. In  2004, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero summarized work to date on the brains of macaque monkeys and began to explain how that research might apply to human beings. Experiments had originally shown that both when observing a transitive action (that is, when they could see an action being carried out) and an intransitive one (when the action was hidden from view), the animals’ brains showed a matching neurological response, as if they had carried out the action themselves. This matching response was in a system that scientists named the mirror neuron system (MNS). The response to intransitive action demonstrated action comprehension, and when it became possible to monitor which neurons in human beings were triggered, scientists found a similar, but even more sophisticated, response. It showed that ‘actions done by other individuals become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation’, and although this might appear to be a scientific understanding of an obvious process in the human brain, soon the connection was made to the development of language.8 Even in monkeys the researchers discovered that some of these neurons were also triggered if the stimulus was auditory, and that visual stimuli were not needed for the mirror neuron system to be triggered. In humans, they suggested, the association of a sound with an action led increasingly to the neurological response to the action being transferred to the hearing of the sound – and thus to the development of language triggering a response formerly associated with the perception of the action itself. This theory has been used in recent work

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by literary scholars examining theatrical experience, and Bruce R. Smith, for example, explains that mirror neurons (MNs) ‘help to explain why trans-body relations in theater are experienced so intensely’.9 This initial research into the MNS led to papers exploring its effect on our understanding of emotion and empathy. By 2013, Simone Hunter, Robin A. Hurley, and Katherine H. Taber were writing of meta-analyses that led scientists to see an emotional, or limbic, MNS in humans. Research had shown that ‘observing and imitating emotional facial expressions […] activates roughly similar areas in the premotor cortex, suggesting the participation of the action (motor) MNs in implicit understanding of observed emotions’; that is, there is evidence that the brain demonstrates similar responses to witnessing an emotion such as pain or happiness as it does to experiencing that emotion.10 Indeed, their paper explores further the link between our observation of actions and our sensory understanding of the world, suggesting that ‘the experiences of an individual interacting with the external world form the basis for internal mental representations’.11 They argue that ‘[a] key aspect of social interaction is recognition of the emotional aspects of another person’s actions (eg. facial expressions, body language)’ and that therefore ‘[t]here is growing evidence from functional imaging (fMRI, PET) that the motor (action) MNS plays a role in coding for experienced, observed, and imagined emotional states and behaviors’.12 Functional imaging, though, shows clearly that individual humans respond in different ways to the same stimulus, depending on their familiarity with a physical sensation or emotion. The range of neurons triggered in a pianist, for instance, when a piano is played is different to that triggered in nonpianists. As other psychologists note, ‘which actions are encoded by their MNs, and at what level of abstraction, will all depend on the types of sensorimotor experience received by the individual in the course of their development’; there is clear evidence that how a person’s neurons react is contingent on their experiences and is not genetically determined.13 In fact, a further paper suggests challenging the terminology: ‘Mirroring […] is actually a misleading term, suggesting an identical response. “Attunement” or “congruent response” would be more appropriate to the actual psychological process.’14 But importantly for Hunter and colleagues, the MNS is also ‘activated during imitative learning’.15 Moving back into a theatrical context, it has been persuasively argued that audiences learn from what they observe on stage;

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Laurie Maguire, for instance, demonstrates that this is particularly the case in early modern theatre, where audience members were responding to a new technology in playhouse performance and were being guided explicitly by actors and playwrights in how to respond.16 The MNS research in the area of empathy suggests that, while watching a play, members of the audience would have a stronger neural reaction to emotions they have already experienced, but that watching unfamiliar feelings and situations would also allow a development of ‘internal mental representations’. Drama is, of course, unique in literary terms in that it allows individuals to respond to direct perception of action or emotion; a response is triggered by using physical senses to perceive actions and their emotional context, not simply by imagining them. Thus the developing understanding of the cognitive science behind empathy allows a greater insight into how audiences are likely to react to what is happening on stage. If, as in Middle Temple Hall in 1602, members of the audience share many aspects of life and have a great deal of common understanding, then one part of this research is especially resonant: as Hunter and colleagues point out, an important component of empathy is ‘a feeling of commonality (typically based on socially-shared emotional experiences)’.17 Such audience members are likely, therefore, to share responses to elements of a staged performance due to their shared culture. Not all psychologists see a mechanism for empathic response working in quite the same way. There are those, such as C. Fred Alford, who dispute some of the conclusions drawn about the MNS and its connections to empathy, arguing instead that empathic response is driven more by these familial and cultural conditions rather than hard wiring in the brain; one might see his argument as prioritizing nurture over nature. He is led to conclude that ‘it is the observer’s assumptions concerning the identity of the other person that modulates the activation of the mirror neuron system’, and this is a helpful concept when considering our Middle Templars.18 Young men are both learning consciously by observation and imitation, in a process of social mimesis, and reacting unconsciously through neuron responses. Their reactions to staged action and emotion are undoubtedly contingent on their historical period, their social class, their gender etc., but a high level of commonality in these areas makes it more likely that we can draw some conclusions about likely shared responses to staged emotion and the language of actors. It is, in this way, possible to

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explore potential effects of the sensory ideas and embodied action in Twelfth Night on a significant portion of the 1602 audience within this framework of ideas about empathic response. To begin, let us take the opening speech, setting the sensory tone for the play and establishing audience members’ initial responses.19 Twelfth Night shows the effect of uncontrolled love on Orsino and his passion for Olivia is demonstrated in the sensory overload he demands. The taste of ‘food’ (1.1.1), along with ‘appetite’ (1.1.3) and the gustatory sense of ‘sweet’ (1.1.5,  8), is combined from the start with olfactory sweetness and the ‘odour’ of ‘violets’ (1.1.6). Orsino’s ear is the site of multisensory focus – a point of access to his body, open to the expected sound of the music’s ‘strain’ and ‘dying fall’ (1.1.4), but also touched by the breath of the warm south wind, and implicitly receiving the scent of the violets the breeze has passed over. The sensory conflation appears to overwhelm Orsino and he cries ‘Enough, no more’ (1.1.7). The stimuli have moved beyond his control and the pleasure he initially felt at the polysemic sweetness tips over into pain and distress, undoubtedly registered through the actor’s facial expression and gesture.20 The vulnerability of human beings to auditory invasion is a common early modern fear and is used by Puritans in anti-theatrical tracts, where the playgoer’s inability to control what entered the body through the ears is presented as a key reason for opposing theatrical performance. ‘There commeth much evil in at the eares’, wrote Anthony Munday, who concludes of both ears and eyes, that ‘by these two open windowes death breaketh into the soule.’21 To a contemporary audience uncontrolled and excessive sensuality could signify Orsino’s uncontrolled passion, a muddle disrupting the rational order of the ideal human mind. The immorality of theatre proposed by anti-theatricalist polemicists such as Munday and Stephen Gosson seems to suggest a post-Reformation distrust of this communal medium that relied on sensual stimulus for its effect.22 Several recent scholars, though, who have positioned sensation in a religious debate over the relative status of embodiment in this period, have challenged more traditional views that saw the staged human sensorium as reflective of Catholic ideas of religious experience. Jennifer Waldron, for instance, disputes the notion that theatre, with its reliance on embodiment, was seen as naturally akin to Catholic practice. Taking as her focus Bottom, translated to an ass, mangling St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, she proposes that

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his synaesthesia can be read instead as a reflection of the recently reformed church’s sense of man as a reflection of the embodied Christ.23 ‘We cannot take as a given of early modern experience’, she argues, ‘the disenchantment of the body, of the theater, or of everyday life more generally.’24 We must not, this implies, take for granted an audience’s disapproval of a staged lover’s embodied response to his emotion. However, in the opening scene of Twelfth Night the uncontrolled sensuality of Orsino seems more likely to signify that the love he feels is in some sense not reasonable, is even culpable. His five wits (his physical senses, and, by implication, his reason) are disrupted by the ‘fancy’ that he describes as ‘high fantastical’ (1.1.15). Keir Elam suggests this is an allusion to Plato’s divine creative frenzy of ‘the lunatic, the lover and the poet’, or what George Puttenham labels ‘furor’.25 In this condition bodily responses are no longer reliable in guiding thought, and this makes the lover, like the madman, unstable. This idea is picked up again in Orsino’s dialogue with Cesario in Act 2, Scene 4, the next scene to focus on his mental state. The duke explains the ‘sweet pangs’ (2.4.16) of love to Cesario, with this intersensorial oxymoron bringing taste, smell, and touch together to convey again the pain and pleasure combined in the emotion. Along with the sound of the disembodied music playing as Curio goes to find Feste, and Orsino’s assumption that love has entered Cesario through the eye (‘thine eye / Hath stayed upon some favour that it loves’ (2.4.23–4)), all senses are conflated again as Orsino’s passion destabilizes him: such as I am all true lovers are, Unstaid and skittish in all motions else Save in the constant image of the creature That is beloved.

(2.4.17–20) The truth-telling fool, Feste, conveys his mockery of the duke’s emotional state as he departs shortly afterwards, suggesting visual images of this muddled changeability. ‘[T]he /tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta’, he playfully requests, ‘for thy / mind is a very opal’ (2.4.73–5), using the fluctuating appearance of shot silk and of the expensive but inconstant gemstone to insult Orsino through apparent flattery. Innsmen in the audience by this early point

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in the play may well already feel tension in their response to Orsino: they may share ‘a feeling of commonality’, emotions Orsino’s language enables them to feel, emerging perhaps from a ‘congruent response’ to the situation of a lover, but at the same time they are being called upon to make judgements on this changeability, the result of his (and the observer’s) unreliable body. Orsino’s loss of control over his senses due to love is, in the play as a whole, connected to being out of one’s proper wits in other ways. Later, I shall discuss further Plato’s parallel between the lover and the madman, but in the scenes involving the revelling group the cause of this loss of control appears to be alcohol – a factor affecting the Middle Temple audience of revellers too. The late-night revelling in Act 2, Scene 3 is enhanced by further sensual muddling, and there would undoubtedly be enjoyment amongst the clever young men of the audience, able to access the double meanings and join in the mockery of Sir Andrew. Obviously set up as the butt of jokes, Sir Andrew is as much a victim of sensory conflation as is the lovestruck Orsino – and the comparison makes one see how Orsino’s emotions could make him an object of mockery to the young men of the audience, albeit many of them were familiar with the destabilizing sensations of love. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew’s response to Feste’s singing of ‘O Mistress Mine’ is a good example of the sensory muddle caused by drunkenness, a state generally agreed to make a human being less rational and more bestial. Sir Andrew’s comment that Feste’s singing voice is ‘mellifluous’ (2.3.52) is met by Sir Toby’s punning reply, ‘A contagious breath’ (2.3.53), with the adjective’s malodorous connotations as well as the main meaning of ‘catching’. Entering into the verbal capping competition so appealing to young Innsmen who enjoyed combative wordplay, Andrew tries to bring the two together with ‘Very sweet and contagious, i’faith’ (2.3.54). His idiocy means that he brings opposing olfactory sensations together into an oxymoronic line, and leaves the smarter, but equally drunk, Toby to offer the final line, capping their by now nonsensical heap of muddled sensation: ‘To hear by the nose it is dulcet in contagion!’ (2.3.55). The mixture of admiration and insult the two men produce at Feste’s singing is complicated by the etymology and layers of meaning surrounding key terms, and adding a third sense to the play’s terms denoting sweetness – taste, smell, and now hearing.

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This sensory muddle is heightened by the ongoing comparison in this scene of humans to animals, showing further evidence of a connection between uncontrolled sensation, passions, and a less than human rationality. The proposal for an auditory extravaganza in the night-time catches proposed by Sir Toby leads Andrew to declare ‘I am dog at a / catch’ (2.3.59–60), using a contemporary colloquial comparison to suggest being good at something, but at the same time building implicitly on images of scent, a sense used particularly by dogs. Feste uses the opportunity to cap his comment, insulting him (and perhaps Toby) with ‘some dogs will catch well’ (2.3.61). Malvolio’s entrance to reprimand the revellers is followed by another reference to smell from Sir Toby as he admires Maria’s plan to scent out their prey: ‘Excellent, I smell a device’ (2.3.157). The imagery now progresses on to another animal used in hunting – horses – as, when Maria suggests ‘My purpose is indeed a horse of that colour’ (2.3.162), Andrew plays on her language to insult, suggesting Malvolio is so foolish that he’s not even a horse: ‘And your horse now would make him an / ass’ (2.3.163–4). But the scene returns to dogs as it closes, with Toby flatteringly comparing Maria to a dog particularly well known for its ability in the hunt. She is ‘a beagle true bred’ and, typical of the loyalty of the breed, ‘one that adores / me’ (2.3.174–5). Whether the use is intended as a compliment or insult, the sustained play on animal types throughout the scenes with the revelling group lowers their tone and makes the audience doubt further the rationality of the duke as in their humorous prose they echo the sensory muddle already seen in Orsino’s poetry. The similarity between the drunken revellers on stage and their audience responding to the action is acute. The wordplay and the verbally combative context echo the world of contemporary epigrams, many written by members of the Inns, or that evoked by Manningham, who records regular instances of Innsmen’s mockery of their fellows.26 The combination of alcohol (‘O knight, thou lack’st a cup of canary’ (1.3.78)), plentiful food (‘I am a great eater of beef ’ (1.3.83)), and dancing mirror the Middle Temple context in key respects and increases the likelihood of Gallese’s ‘congruent response’ from those watching. The situation matches that envisaged by Hunter and colleagues, where observers shared the ‘experienced […] emotional states and behaviors’ and ‘feeling of commonality (typically based on socially-shared emotional experiences)’

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mentioned above. Here this might include the emotions surrounding public mockery by one’s peer group and the humiliation caused to the victim. In this scene where the key members of the revelling group are introduced, mockery of Sir Andrew is shown through visual stimuli – his hand being placed humorously against Maria’s breast, his hair ‘like flax on a distaff ’ (1.3.98), and the inevitably ridiculous dancing – as well as the auditory stimuli of laughter and the tone of others’ voices talking to and about Andrew. An empathic response from the audience members is likely to have enhanced the power of this scene for the 1602 audience, with some men feeling an emotion matching Sir Toby’s cruel mockery and instinctively grasping Andrew’s status as a victim, where others would feel an emotion counter to this dominant strain, having experienced the victimization of others and mirroring the perceived feelings of Andrew. In either case, neurological mechanisms could produce feelings similar to those experienced by one of these contrastingly staged characters. Yet it is quite credible that audience members’ emotions might not match one of the embodied characters on stage and, though driven by the visual and auditory stimuli, produce a connected but dissimilar response: for example, pitying Andrew as he is mocked. No character on stage is feeling pity, but it would be a reasonable response to Andrew’s appearance and behaviour, or to the tone of Toby and Maria’s voices. Here, it becomes useful to look at further theoretical work on empathy: work that will prove particularly helpful as I move shortly to explore responses to the character at the centre of Manningham’s record, Malvolio. By  2015, psychologists Joshua D. Wondra and Phoebe C. Ellsworth were looking beyond matching emotional response to vicarious empathy  – a different feeling to those in the observed subject, but brought on by observation of that person. In a paper outlining an appraisal theory of empathy, they explore ‘universal patterns’ – seeing how people who appraise situations in the same way have the same emotional response, regardless of the precise stimulus, whereas those who appraise differently have a different response, even to the same stimulus. Again, whether people are part of an in-group or not makes a difference, and Wondra and Ellsworth note ‘[i]f past experiences help observers appraise targets’ situations, then this might be one reason why people are more sympathetic toward each other when they have had similar experiences’.27 Outside the theatre, they argue, ‘empathy occurs

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when an observer appraises a target’s situation in the same way as the target. If the observer appraises the target’s situation differently, then the observer will have a non-matching vicarious emotional experience’.28 Applying their ideas to our theatrical context, this will be the case if one Innsman is more ambitious than another, or more likely to adopt a combative role, but interpretation of a character onstage is also swayed by attitudes of other characters and, ultimately, by the writer and actors, who aim to create a specific emotion towards a character at a particular point in the play. Non-matching vicarious emotions will sometimes be the result of a playwright’s making the audience laugh at a character, and this is key to our thinking about the revelling group in Twelfth Night. Wondra and Ellsworth call this effect ‘perspective taking’, explaining that what information is given or emphasized to observers affects their appraisal of circumstances. Structure in drama, as well as language and acting choices, will affect a playgoer’s perspective. For instance, in the introduction of Sir Andrew in Act 1, Scene 3, the dialogue between Toby and Maria that precedes his entrance frames him as the gull of the drama, a rich, quarrelsome fool for whom it will now be more difficult to feel pity. When Manningham reflected on the play and made his famous note on the 1602 performance in his Inn, his description tells us much about his focus in the narrative, and we might infer something about his perspective from this: A good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady-widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his lady, in general terms telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel etc. and then, when he came to practice, making him believe they took him to be mad.29

The focus is immediately on ‘the steward’, the ambitious man – perhaps young – who aims to marry well and who, in order to succeed in life, expects to have to shape his appearance and behaviour to match the requirements of those in authority. In tension with a scholarly tradition of reading Malvolio as the deservedly mocked Puritan, Charles Whitney emphasizes the connection between the steward and many in the  1602 Middle Temple audience – a connection, I argue, seen in Manningham’s focus on Malvolio and particularly important in a study of empathic response. Whitney notes, in his exploration of early modern audience response, the law student ‘finds

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particularly amusing the gulling of someone […] in a similar position to his own’.30 Yet the potential for an empathic response is clearly problematized by the positioning of Malvolio as the Puritan spoilsport, who aims to prevent the revelling of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. As the Middle Temple audience meets the revelling group first, and feels a connection through their witty language, dancing, and drinking, the play’s structure leads to Malvolio being immediately less sympathetic. To add to this tension, whereas Andrew is a (perhaps likeable) ‘natural’ fool, named as such by Maria (1.3.27) and later inadvertently saying the same of himself (2.3.82), Malvolio is associated with a less sympathetic condition, madness. The plot to make Malvolio appear mad turns on an aspect of Malvolio that would have been familiar to the Innsmen in the 1602 audience: his conscious social mimesis. To be taken as a gentleman, and to rise in society, a young man at the Inns had to learn to behave as a successful lawyer or courtier would behave, and, in situations such as the Christmas Revels, this often involved rehearsed performance. As the Innsmen of the audience were well aware, visual and kinaesthetic clues led to the acceptance of a man in society and Malvolio’s vulnerability to mockery in Act 2, Scene 5 of Twelfth Night comes directly from his self-fashioning performativity. In order to achieve social mobility, in other words, men learnt to give false sensory clues to others: to dress, behave, and speak in ways that indicated they were similar to those rich men they hoped would prefer them, and that would be appealing to well-born women they hoped would marry them. Malvolio’s behaviour in the scene is, unknown to the steward, witnessed by the revelling group, and they are able to turn his private actions against him. But his actions are, in reality, common enough for these aspirant gentlemen. Shakespeare’s cleverness in the scene is making an audience laugh at their own behaviour – and any awareness of this implies their having some level of empathy with Malvolio. In the lines preceding his finding of Maria’s letter in the orchard, the steward is observed to be ‘practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour’ (2.5.17–18), and, as the revelling group watch, he enacts how he plans to respond when his ‘kinsman Toby’ is called for: I frown the while, and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my – some rich jewel. Toby approaches […] I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar smile with an austere regard of control.

(2.5.59–67)

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This is a rehearsal of his future behaviour, when he will ‘have greatness thrust upon’ him, and his verbal commentary on his actions and facial expression only makes clearer what he believes will be key to his imagined success. When he reads Maria’s letter a little later in the scene, his consciousness that he will have to adapt the sensory clues he is giving if he is to secure social ambition causes his ready agreement to ‘be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and crossgartered’ (2.5.171–2). If we return to theories of empathy discussed above, we can propose mechanisms by which an Innsmen audience member would be drawn to respond to Malvolio. It is possible, in Wondra and Ellsworth’s terms, for an audience member with similar social ambition and behaviour to ‘apprais[e] a target’s situation in the same way as the target’ here, and match Malvolio’s emotion. But this is unlikely in the terms of the play, as already established audience empathy for the revelling group and an awareness of the mockery Malvolio faces from the observation of his actions, unknown to the character himself, militates against this. Playgoers are guided by wit and dramatic structure to oppose Malvolio and ally themselves to the revelling group. But Innsmen playgoers might have had some matching responses in Act 2, Scene 5, enjoying, for instance, the feelings echoing their own experience, and imagining power over someone socially their superior or pleasure at the prospect of marriage as social enhancement. Manningham’s engagement with the steward in the play, with ‘prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel etc.’ and with his desire to ‘believe his lady-widow was in love with him’ is clearly in tune with theories of empathy. Though the structure of Shakespeare’s play and a competing empathy for members of the revelling group problematize a simple reading, an analysis of audience response must take into account elements of empathic response for Malvolio even at this early stage; Innsmen are able to see in the steward elements of their own aspiration and the behaviour they perform to secure societal approval. Performativity verging on deception is thus key to both the actions Innsmen witnessed on stage and to their own social aspiration. Their own performances in the Middle Temple revels, and the material they are watching in the play world of Twelfth Night, are both echoes of the onstage performances of the professional players. The manipulation of sensory response is required in all three contexts, and the use of metatheatricality in the play draws further attention to this. In the love plot, the play’s self-conscious theatrical performance is a continual refrain in the text, often playing on the muddled

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sensory clues given out by a boy actor playing a female character dressed as a boy. Orsino’s comment on Cesario/Viola’s ‘small pipe […] as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound’ (1.4.32–3) and the punning conclusion of this, ‘all is semblative a woman’s part’ (1.4.34), both draw audience attention to the gender instability and to the player’s dramatic part. ‘It shall’, Orsino tells Cesario, ‘become thee well to act my woes’ (1.4.26) and the conscious ‘acting’ involved works both in the context of the play’s world and in the context of a play being performed at Middle Temple. Olivia is both acting and reacting to Cesario’s acting, and in her Shakespeare reveals a character in a sensory muddle as profound as that of Orsino. Just as we saw the truth-telling Fool, Feste, mocking Orsino’s ‘opal’ changeability, he argues to Olivia that, for mourning her brother in heaven, she is the fool. And again sensory clues deceive. Though Feste appears to be a fool, and visual signals confirm this, he explains ‘cucullus non facit monachum’ (1.5.50–1; translated as ‘a habit does not make a monk’). The monastic habit, like the Fool’s motley, has no existential link to the man who wears it, and this acts as a warning to the play’s many false sensory signals – signals that appear to reveal folly, gender, or madness, but in fact do not. In Act 1, Scene 3, Sir Andrew is said to be able to dance, but he can’t (in this case, the ears – hearing the false compliment from Sir Toby – are in error, but the eyes – seeing his appalling galliard – tell the truth). Viola appears to be a boy, but isn’t. The play centres on the senses deceiving and on the evidence presented to the observer’s senses being manipulable by others. Appearing to be something that you are not is an inherent part of drama but is also, as we have seen, linked to the Innsmen in the revels – or more broadly to the ‘self-fashioning’ necessary for social mobility – where a man performed the thing he wished to be. When analysing likely audience response to the play in 1602, the level of awareness of sensual manipulability is a confusing factor; the evidence given by one’s eyes and ears in a play is, in a neurologically direct, non-conscious way, productive of reaction. It generates a response, a feeling of parallel sensation or of matching or non-matching empathy, in the observer. But this is complicated in watching drama by audience members’ conscious awareness of sensual deceptiveness – a distrust of sensory stimulus prevalent in early modern society, a distrust of the sensory clues on which the theatre relied, and a distrust of characters in the play’s world who clearly set out to

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muddle and mock others. And as the play provides characters who echo the situations of men in their audience, it also provides characters who voice this societal distrust of sensory perception. In her soliloquy reflecting on the dialogue she has just concluded with Cesario, Olivia does just this and shows herself well aware of the uncontrollable effect of sensory stimuli, this time visual ones: ‘Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections / With an invisible and subtle stealth / To creep in at mine eyes’ (1.5.288–90).31 The competition between conscious and unconscious reaction is surely at the root of her later comment too: ‘I […] fear to find / Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind’ (1.5.301–2). Cesario/Viola also notices the muddle of Olivia’s senses, noting with a reflective intersensoriality ‘methought her eyes had lost her tongue’ (2.2.20) and realizing that the deceptive visual clues presented by Cesario’s appearance have led Olivia to be less articulate, or less rational, than she wishes to appear. Her sensory confusion is combined with the play’s metatheatricality, as Cesario tells her ‘that question’s out of my part’ (1.5.173–4) and ‘I am not that I play’ (1.5.179). The parallels between the play’s world, the performance of the players, and the performativity of the audience’s world is made explicit through the dialogue, and awareness of these parallels must necessarily influence the neurological interaction between the Innsmen in the audience and the action on stage. As Plato linked the lover with the lunatic, by the end of the plot against Malvolio, Olivia explicitly connects the two. As the muddle between the two pairs of lovers is brought to equilibrium, close to the play’s ending, Olivia is forced to reflect on why she has forgotten her apparently mad steward. ‘A most extracting frenzy of mine own’, she explains, ‘From my remembrance clearly banished his’ (5.1.277–8), making a parallel between her situation and Malvolio’s. And this returns us to the empathy – or lack of it – an Innsman in the audience is likely to have had for Malvolio. In the early part of the play, his unconscious matching and non-matching empathic responses caused by ‘socially-shared emotional experiences’ would be, as we have seen, confused by a conscious desire, generated by the play’s structure and humour, to distance himself from the steward. But as the revelling group goad Malvolio further, in and after Act 4, Scene 2, attitudes begin to shift. Ironically, the means by which this shift is achieved is sensory. As Maria instructs Feste in his role as Sir Topas, she asks the Fool to ‘make [Malvolio] believe’ (4.2.2) his visitor is a curate. Malvolio has been a victim of

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sensory deprivation and his imprisonment is in ‘hideous darkness’ (4.2.30). The steward can hear Sir Topas, and the tricksters clearly presume he is able to see him as Feste has had to adopt a gown and beard for the part, although actually any kind of sight seems to be denied to the prisoner as Maria later notes that disguise is worthless: ‘He sees thee not’ (4.2.64). Feste must adapt his voice as, by line 65, he is told by Sir Toby to return ‘[t]o him in thine own voice’, and this adds to the deceptiveness of sensory stimuli. Malvolio’s sense of reality, based on the little he can see and hear, is challenged, as Sir Topas tells the man in darkness that there are ‘bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south-north […] as lustrous as ebony’ (4.2.36–8). These expressions are on one level, of course, nonsensical, and, if Malvolio were in an emotional state to respond rationally to verbal evidence, the paradoxical qualities of being as transparent as something decidedly not so or as light giving as dark wood, or the geographically meaningless ‘south– north’, would expose the deception. On another level, Feste’s description of the bay-windows and clerestories, both present in Middle Temple Hall, would remind the audience of their situation outside the play world. Similarly, Malvolio’s response to Topas’s question on transmigration of souls is similar to position statements in moots – the legal learning that regularly took place in that building. Both of these add to the play’s overall metatheatricality and the correlation of the audience’s sense of their real location with that of the playing world. According to the cognitive models explored above, it is through precisely such correlation that neurological connection is enhanced and empathic connections are established. Feste’s ‘reappearance’ as himself prompts discussion of Malvolio’s loss of his ‘five wits’ (4.2.86) and the conclusion that he is ‘mad indeed’ (4.2.89). Darkness – deprivation of light – is the most punishing sensory action the tricksters have used against Malvolio, and it is harder to imagine an audience continuing to ally themselves with the revelling group, and to continue the early mockery of the steward, in this context. Perhaps at this point vicarious rather than matching empathy may begin to take over and pity for the steward may strengthen. In modern productions feelings for Malvolio often shift as the play goes on, and a cognate shift is likely to have occurred at some point during the  1602 production too. By Malvolio’s return to the stage at the end of the play, after being forgotten even by Olivia, the audience

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often experience an uncomfortable mixture of dislike, pity, and guilt. This is exacerbated by our shifting perception of Sir Toby, whose persecution of Malvolio, humorous alongside the drunken lack of control of early acts, has turned sour in the hangover of Act 5. Even Toby himself seems to show distaste for what the group have done in their revels, admitting to Feste that he ‘would we were well rid of this knavery’ (4.2.66–7). This is clearly not said out of any feeling for Malvolio – he is instead worried about how far he is ‘in offence with [his] niece’ (4.2.68–9) – but it does reflect a shift in audience response from enjoyment of the broadly amusing trick to discomfort at its being taken too far. Audiences, even the members of a highly cohesive 1602 audience at Middle Temple, experience different responses to a series of characters and events on stage. The level of matching or non-matching empathy felt will always vary between playgoers: for the gulling of Malvolio; for the revelling group and their mockery of one of their own members, Sir Andrew Aguecheek; for the sensually overloaded love, verging on ‘frenzy’, of Orsino or Olivia. Ideas arising from neuroscience and psychological work on empathy, though, give some entry points into a discussion of areas of possible commonality in the response of a particular audience such as this, at Middle Temple in 1602. The existence of the MNS in humans, working through direct observation and through linguistic representation of emotion, leads to a theory proposing some consistency in response amongst these young men with so many experiences in common. Twelfth Night is a play that consciously explores sensory perception and Shakespeare uses metatheatricality to show a connection with his audience’s experiences. As Jennifer Waldron notes of live theatre, this is ‘a specifically communal, intersubjective phenomenon, during which many people sense or feel a similar event at the same time’, and awareness of neurological response adds to our understanding of how an audience might have reacted to this play at this moment.32

Notes

The research for this chapter was originally inspired by the late Dr Gillie McNeill. In a 2011 conference titled ‘The Senses in Early Modern England, 1485–1668’

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at Birkbeck, University of London, Gillie gave a keynote paper on the opening speech of Twelfth Night, alongside Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones. Her sensitivity to the play combined with a specialist’s view of the neuroscience behind the feeling it conveyed and inspired led me to find out more about research into the MNS and empathy. This chapter is the work of a non-scientist and perhaps shows limitations in my understanding on which, had Gillie lived longer, she might have been able to advise me. But I remain very grateful for her support and for the opportunity to talk to her on this topic. In fact, I feel privileged to have known her. 1

Jessica Winston, in her recent work on Innsmen, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), comments that changes to the law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included ‘a dramatic rise in litigation rates, the rise of the common law as the dominant legal system in England, the creation of a two-tiered system of legal professionals (barristers and attorneys), the increase in parliamentary “enactments” in terms of both number and range of issues, and the upsurge in legal printing’ (9).

2

Karin S. Coddon, ‘“Slander in an Allow’d Fool”: Twelfth Night’s Crisis of the

3

Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan

Aristocracy’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 33, no. 2 (1993): 309. Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 5. Finkelpearl discusses the growth in the number of men studying at the Inns in Elizabeth’s reign and estimates a 30 per cent increase over the last thirty years of the sixteenth century. 4

Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince D’Amour (London, 1660).

5 Finkelpearl, John Marston, 46. Winston comments that ‘There were no scholarships for poorer students, as there were at Oxford and Cambridge, so in terms of social background, the Inns were even more socially homogeneous than the universities’ (Lawyers at Play, 34) – though there are regular comments in the period about the sons of (newly wealthy) yeomen rising in society by this means. 6

In considering cognitive science as one of a range of theories applied by scholars in recent years, Rebecca Yearling has warned persuasively against a ‘flattening’ of our perception of contemporary emotional response to early modern drama by applying theory too broadly: ‘Emotion, Cognition and Spectator Response to the Plays of Shakespeare’, Cultural History 7, no. 2 (2018): 129–44. I try here to bear in mind her warnings.

7

Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11. Her first chapter explores

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embodiment and storytelling in The Winter’s Tale. Another useful example of work combining developments in neuroscience with audience studies is Amy Cook’s exploration of Hamlet in: Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2010). 8

Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, ‘The Mirror-Neuron System’, Annual

9

Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell,

Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 183. 2010), 153. Smith also refers to the use of the MNS research in his contribution to this volume, in his survey of mediational frames to examine the senses. He comments, ‘Recent experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated how so-called “mirror neurons” cause spectators to feel in their own bodies what they are witnessing in a virtual space, namely a space that presents itself as reality, and functions as reality, but is not itself real. Theatre stages are signal examples of such spaces’ (31). 10 Simone Hunter, Robin A. Hurley, and Katherine H. Taber, ‘Windows to the Brain: A Look Inside the Mirror Neuron System’, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 25, no. 3 (2013): vi. 11 Ibid., 172. 12 Ibid. 13 Richard Cook, Geoffrey Bird, Caroline Catmur, Clare Press, and Cecilia Heyes, ‘Mirror Neurons: From Origin to Function’, Behaviours and Brain Sciences 37 (2014): 189. 14 Vittorio Gallese, Morris Eagle, and Paolo Migone, ‘Intentional Attunement: Mirror Neurons and the Neural Underpinnings of Interpersonal Relations’, Journal of the American Psycholoanalytic Association 55, no. 1 (2007): 151. 15 Hunter, Hurley, and Taber, ‘Windows to the Brain’, 172. 16 Maguire demonstrates that through textual directions, the dramatization of ‘right and wrong reactions’, onstage commentators and ‘audience surrogates’ who model appropriate responses, and sometimes through metatheatrical paratexts, playwrights and actors guide their audiences: Laurie Maguire, ‘­Audience-Actor Boundaries and Othello’, Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 127. 17 Hunter, Hurley, and Taber, ‘Windows to the Brain’, 172. 18 C. Fred Alford, ‘Mirror Neurons, Psychoanalysis, and the Age of Empathy’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 16. 19 This speech is also explored by Bruce R. Smith in this volume (15–39), where he uses it as a way of opening up different sensory approaches.

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20 For a developed discussion of the semantics of sweetness in the early modern period see Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), ch. 2. 21 Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters (London: Henrie Denham, 1580), 64. For a discussion of musical compulsion see Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 27–37. 22 In this volume, Tanya Pollard (62–81) offers a full discussion of the early Christian (and late Antique) influences on the anti-theatricalists. 23 ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’ (MND 4.1.207–10). See Jennifer Waldron, ‘“The Eye of Man Hath Not Heard”: Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology’, Criticism 54, no. 3 (2012): 403. Also see Natalie Eschenbaum’s chapter in this volume (203–23). 24 Waldron, ‘Eye of Man’, 405. 25 The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. D. J. Allan and H. E. Dale, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 107–8; George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (London, 1589), C1v. 26 For an example of contemporary Innsmen epigrams, see Marston’s Scourge of Villainy (London, 1599). In Manningham, one example of this verbal parrying can be seen in Overbury or Rudyerd’s comments on John Davis. See Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-atLaw, 1602–3, ed. John Bruce, Esq. (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1868), 168. 27 Joshua D. Wondra and Phoebe C. Ellsworth, ‘An Appraisal Theory of Empathy and Other Vicarious Emotional Experiences’, Psychological Review 122, no. 3 (2015): 420. 28 Ibid., 422. 29 Manningham, Diary, 18. 30 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 128. 31 For more on the deceptive nature of sight, see my chapter, ‘“Dove like looks” and “serpents eyes”: Staging Visual Clues and Early Modern Aspiration’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, ed. Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 39–54. 32 Waldron, ‘Eye of Man’, 408.

11

Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline Darryl Chalk

Cymbeline is filled with moments where characters are forced to process complex sensations. In these instances of intense sense-awareness, standard sensory experiences overlap and become confused, challenging in particular the veracity of the ‘surest sense’: sight. Touch, hearing, and taste regularly supplant seeing as modes of determining the legitimacy of objects or events. Two moments in particular stand out. Innogen, upon waking from her druginduced coma, which has been ‘murd’rous to th’ senses’ (4.2.330), and finding what she thinks is the headless corpse of Posthumus, cannot believe what she sees – her ‘dream’ (4.2.299) must be ‘felt’ (4.2.309) as she touches parts of Cloten’s body to confirm the seeming ‘shape’ (4.2.311) of her beloved. Equally striking is the ‘simular proof ’ (5.6.200) concocted by Iachimo to falsify Innogen as an adulterer, a ‘picture, which by his tongue being made’ (5.6.175), that dupes Posthumus into seeing what he only hears: a synaesthetically confused vision of the false Italian ‘tast[ing] her in bed’ (2.4.57).1 Through such examples, this essay will examine Cymbeline’s intricate sensorium, reading its synaesthetic perceptions in the context of emerging early modern thinking about the embodied mind’s interaction with the world in treatises concerned with medicine, disease, and the passions. The play features repeated images of the senses pushed to their limits: eye-strings crack, ears are infected or wounded, taste is overwhelmingly bitter or poisonous. These sensory extremes overlap at times and are often conjoined with powerful emotional states, where senses and passions are indistinguishably entangled. Becoming ‘senseless’ (the term appears more times in this play than in any other by Shakespeare) is a frequent response to such affective overload as characters are seized by sleep or dream

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states and the desire to be unfeeling. I will suggest that these moments produce cognitive rupture, upsetting the sensory system where normally distinctive and hierarchized senses blur, morph into, or stand in for, one another in ways entirely consistent with contemporary ideas about perception and the potentially fraught relationship between the five external senses and the imagination. As one of the body’s internal senses, the imagination (alongside the common sense) was considered to be the part of the brain where the various sensible forms collected by the external senses were brought together. The kinds of perturbed and entwined senses that I will demonstrate as central to Cymbeline are suggestive of the rare medical condition of synaesthesia where, as David Howes has defined it, ‘the stimulation of one sensory modality is accompanied by a perception in one or more modalities’ and thus ‘hearing colours, seeing sounds, and feeling tastes’ become possible sensations.2 Synaesthesia need not necessarily always be evidence of perceptual confusion or sensory impairment, of course. As Jennifer Waldron has shown (by way of Daniel Heller-Roazen) it can simply be a way of explaining the complex multisensory way in which an individual encounters any object. Derived from the earlier term sunaesthesis, it can mean both ‘sensing with’ and ‘joint perception’, suggesting that it is impossible for most human actions and interactions ‘to be tied to one sense’.3 Indeed, Holly Dugan has called for approaches to sensation in Shakespeare’s work to be mindful of such joint perceptions and ‘applying what we have learned about each of the sensory modes towards further study of their interrelatedness’.4 Paying attention to the synaesthetic conjoining of the senses in Cymbeline and early modern medical discourses confirms that the embodied mind’s engagement with the world is indeed always-already multisensory, but it also repeatedly suggests how easily this process can be corrupted. In Cymbeline, intersensoriality becomes a constant and troubling emblem for duplicity, cognitive rupture, and emotional excess.

Senseless feeling Sensory overlap and emotional turmoil are features of the imagery from the very outset of the play. In the opening lines we hear that Cymbeline is deeply upset at his daughter’s choice of husband, a disposition endemic throughout

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a court consumed with ‘frowns’ as their ‘bloods […] still seem as does the King’ (1.1.1–3). Innogen weeps as she tells of being forced to endure ‘what / His rage can do on me’ (1.1.88–9) and ‘abide the hourly shot / Of angry eyes’ (1.1.90–1) while her lover is removed from her sight into exile, but later avows that she is ‘senseless’ of her father’s ‘wrath. A touch more rare / Subdues all pangs, all fears’ (1.1.136–37). Posthumus mingles sight, taste, and humoral substance in his promise to devour her letters: ‘with mine eyes I’ll drink the words you send / though the ink be made of gall’ (1.1.101–2). When Pisanio describes the scene of Posthumus’s leaving, and his attempts to keep himself distinguishable to ‘this eye or ear’ (1.3.9) by waving a handkerchief and expressing the ‘fits and stirs of ’s mind’ (1.3.12), Innogen declares that she ‘would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them / But to look upon him […] till he had melted from / The smallness of a gnat to air, and then / Have turned mine eye and wept’ (1.3.17–22). She yearns to swap places with the handkerchief, jealous of its proximity to her beloved but also its unfeeling state: ‘Senseless linen, happier therein than I!’ (1.3.7). Hours spent crying and reading will later make her attest that her ‘eyes are weak’ (2.2.3) and grant her wish to be insensible. ‘Seized’ by a ‘sleep’ (2.2.7) that is ‘the ape of death’, leaving her ‘sense but as a monument’, she is so ‘dull’ to sensation that Iachimo can creep undetected into her chamber and remove Posthumus’s bracelet from her arm (2.2.31–2). These are just the examples from the opening scenes of a play where, even for Shakespeare, the characters seem to be experiencing peculiarly concentrated, almost overwhelming, sensations. Cymbeline appears from its inception to be particularly attuned to the relationship between sensory and emotional experience in early modern culture and the kind of impact one could have on the other.5 Bruce R. Smith has suggested that: ‘Cymbeline shares with Othello a sense that the act of seeing is not so much the receiving of something that comes to the viewer from without as it is casting forth something that comes from within the viewer.’6 Smith’s argument is compelling and I agree that the eyes were widely understood in the period as palpable conduits for acts of contagious extramission.7 I would like to suggest, however, that Cymbeline shares with The Winter’s Tale an explicit concern with the reception of sense information from without. Early modern medical texts repeatedly emphasize the problems that can occur when the embodied mind processes external

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sense data and the way in which the body’s external and internal senses sometimes conspire to produce cognitive failure.

Similitudes of things without If we look at the evidence and advice provided in treatises on the passions, it can be seen that Cymbeline indeed very closely reflects contemporary theories about the sensory system and its effect on the humoral body, and vice versa.8 While certain individuals were thought to be predisposed to particular humoral imbalances and thus disease was often considered an almost entirely internal phenomenon, the body and mind could also be infected and altered through the conduits by which they interacted with the world. The five external senses were particularly vulnerable in this process. Thomas Wright, in his oft-cited The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), during a chapter entitled ‘How senses moove Passions, and specially our sight,’ calls for the individual to be vigilant in monitoring what they look at: All senses no doubt are the first gates whereby passe and repasse all messages sent to the passions [… but] of all senses, sight [is] the surest and certainest of his object and sensation […] no sense hath such varietie of objects to feed and delight it, as this […] no sense sooner mooveth, than this; […] nor no sense perverteth more perilous than this; for if the guide be corrupted, the followers will hardly escape uninfected.9

Sight, as the ‘surest’ sense, is also the most susceptible to perverting the images that make their way into the requisite parts of the brain and body, ‘the followers’, and thus is capable of causing infection. Richard Brathwaite, in his Essaies upon the Five Senses (1620), suggests that all of the senses are fallible and prone to misperception, ‘for in what erre wee and take not the occasion (as primitive source) from one of these’,10 but he agrees with Wright that the eye, ‘which ought of itself to be a directrice to all other Sences, becomes the principall organ of error to the affections’.11 The failure of sight to properly conceive leads the rest of the senses, and particularly the body’s interior senses of the common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory, to misapprehension of the object perceived causing excessive and potentially harmful emotions.12

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Much of this thinking relies on the delicate reciprocal relationship between the internal and external senses. Early modern psychology held that the organic soul was comprised of a range of faculties, each with their own specific purpose and operation. The faculties for sense perception and emotion resided in the sensitive soul, one of the organic soul’s three further divisions. The five external senses, responsible for the receipt of present objects, corresponded with five internal senses (although the exact number varied in philosophical debates), which processed and retained images of absent objects.13 The senses were distinctive and hierarchized, but the slippage from ‘present’ to ‘absent’ revealed just how much the internal senses relied on the external. In Mikrokosmographia (1615), Helkiah Crooke declares that ‘nothing is in the understanding that was not before in the sense’, explaining: For without these externall senses, wee must needs acknowledge the Internall imperfect and unprofitable. For if wee conceive any thing in our minds, & nourish that conceit by discourse, againe and againe ventilating it to and fro, wee shall observe that all things had their original from the outward senses, for neither could colours, odours, nor savours be knowne, neither could the Internall sense discourse of sounds, or of any Tactile qualities without the message as it were, and information of the outward senses, by which the Images of thinges are imprinted in it.14

Humans shared external senses with animals but it was the internal senses, and their higher cognitive function, that separated humans from other kinds of perceptive beings.15 The inward senses were thus considered more noble and intellective than the outward senses as the latter merely received as yet unprocessed raw data. The brain’s requisite faculties then subjected these sensible forms to several layers of scrutiny, preserving but also transforming this information into new data that would stand in place of the now absent material object. A detailed description of this cognitive processing is provided in Pierre de la Primaudaye’s influential philosophical and scientific text The French Academie, first translated into English in  1584. He sees the outward senses as merely functional since they ‘send to the understanding the similitudes of things without, and be the messengers of the minde, and witnesses of experience’.16 Once received, the sense data is first examined by the common

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sense, the internal sense in closest proximity ‘next to the externall, so is it the meanes whereby they communicate with one another’ and acts as the main repository for all of the images taken in by the external senses which have ‘no iudgement of that which they outwardely receive’.17 When the common sense has completed ‘his duetie, Imagination and Fantasie’, which were often seen as indistinguishable and interchangeable, ‘execute their offices’.18 He defines the imagination as: the eye in the bodie, by beholding to receive the images that are offered unto it by the outward senses: and therefore it knoweth also the things that are absent, and is amongst the internall senses as it were the mouth of the vessel of the memorie, which is the facultie and virtue that retaineth and keepeth whatsoever is committed to the custody thereof by the other senses, that it may be found and brought forth when need requireth.19

This ‘inner eye’ functions to formulate understandings of the images received and once these perceptions were stored, as Katharine Park has shown, it was believed to pass ‘them on to fantasy, which acted to combine and divide them, yielding new images, called phantasmata, with no counterparts in external reality’.20 The new images would then be transferred to other parts of the brain, eventually to stick as a kind of ghost of that image in the memory. When everything worked well, this was the basic mode of cognitive functioning. But the imagination was a very fragile thing, all too susceptible to sudden changes, to being shocked by certain sensory experiences or transformed by emotional states. Its status in the cognitive theories of the period positioned it very much as the pivot or filter – or as de la Primaudaye calls it, ‘the mouth of the vessel of memorie’21 – between the interior and exterior of a person’s body and mind. The imagination had the capacity to shape the individual subject’s perception of the world around them and was a determining factor in either maintaining or destabilizing well-being.22 The capacity for the fantasy to make new images was the most fraught aspect of the gap between the internal senses and the mind’s grasp of exterior reality. De la Primaudaye highlights the ‘giddines’ of the fantasy, noting its predilection to be ‘sudden, and so farre from stayednes, that even in the time of sleep it hardly taketh any rest, but is always occupied in dreaming & doting, yea even about those things which have never bene, shalbe, or can bee’.23

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Even so, he suggests, the fantasy cannot work alone, it must be stimulated by objects in the world through the senses, which it will then transform into new things. It is at such moments that the fantasy proves most precarious because it can be provoked into misperceptions that are only exaggerated by its imagemaking facility: But although fantasie can doe nothing without this gappe & entrance, yet it is a wonder to see the inventions it hath after some occasion is given it, and what new and monstrous things it forgeth & coyneth, by sundry imaginations arising of those images and similitudes, from whence it hath first paterne. So that in trueth, fantasie is a very dangerous thing. For if it be not guided and brideled by reason, it troubleth and moveth all the sense and understanding, as a tempest doeth the sea. For it is easily stirred up not onely by the externall senses, but also by the complexion and disposition of the body.24

The danger of the imagination and its fallibility to happenings both within and without the body was that it could produce disturbing effects. Physicians considered it either the direct cause of, or the conduit by which, a range of diseases could be manifested in an individual subject. ‘Fantasie’ in particular became a byword for explaining maladies such as hysteria, hypochondria, madness, melancholia, demonic possession, lycanthropia, and emotional excess – all manner of conditions that might best be termed ‘diseases of the imagination’.25 The fifteenth-century Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino, whose work was vastly influential, proposed that ‘all diseases, [without exception, were] in the end, diseases of the imagination’.26 The powers of the imagination and fantasy to transform perception and even forge new images of reality are intrinsically connected to the other key faculties residing in the sensitive soul: those governing motion and the passions. The senses could have a deleterious impact on emotional balance and, in turn, the body’s roiling humoral liquids and perturbed organs could rupture the senses’ ability to receive accurate information. Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) examines the ways in which the body processes the information it receives from objects it encounters through the senses and the kinds of emotional disturbance that can result. While perturbations can be caused by the humours themselves, the source can also be external: ‘First occasion riseth from outward

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things, wherein wee either take pleasure, or wherewith wee are offended: this obiect is carried to the internall senses from the outward.’27 Whether the object is found to be ‘pleasant’ or ‘offensive’, Bright suggests, is a determining factor in how the body will react. Offensive objects produce a reaction from the brain and then the heart, which in turn stimulates the humours, altering both organs, leading to misapprehensions and ‘disorderly passions’. If the brain and heart become ‘overcharged of humour, the apprehension and affection both are corrupted, and misse of their right action, and so all things mistaken, ingender that confused spirit, & those stormes of outrageous love, hatred, hope or feare, wherewith bodies so passionate are here and there, tossed with disquiet’.28 Once the disordered passion has taken hold of the individual’s body and mind, it can in turn bring about extreme emotional states, and work to distort the reportage of the sensory system. This is particularly the case with melancholy, which, for the most part is setled in the splene, and with the vapours annoyeth the heart, and passing up to the braine, counterfetteth terrible objects to the fantasie, and polluting both the substance, and spirits of the braine, causeth it, without externall occasion, to forge monstrous fictions […] breaketh out into that inordinate passion, against reason.29

The emotional malfunction explained here by Bright is brought about by the ways in which the senses sometimes misperceive the objects they ‘receive’ into the body but also breeds further sensory failure by counterfeiting ‘terrible obiects to the fantasie’ and forging ‘monstrous fictions’. Sensory perception is thus rendered as a fragile, and often fraught, process in early modern medical thought. There was so much that could go wrong as sense data travelled from the external to the internal senses, something of which Shakespeare seems to be acutely aware in his plays.

Simular proof Iachimo’s deception of Posthumus seems to rely precisely on the kind of defective sensory perception that so concerned Bright, de la Primaudaye, Crooke, and other early modern commentators. Iachimo appears aware of such sensory processes even as he prepares the key parts of his ruse. Innogen

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is figured as the kind of incomparable ‘object’ that would provoke absolute devotion purely through multisensory affect: Had I this cheek To bathe my lips upon; this hand whose touch, Whose very touch, would force the feeler’s soul To th’oath of loyalty; this object which Takes prisoner the wild motion of mine eye, Fixing it only here:

(1.6.98–104) This flattery is part of an attempt to also deceive Innogen into thinking that Posthumus has been unfaithful in his travels abroad. It fails, leading Innogen to denounce Iachimo’s tale as a kind of auditory ‘assault’ (1.6.149), ultimately trusting her ‘heart that both mine ears / Must not in haste abuse’ (1.6.129–30). Her dismissal of this ‘false report’ (1.6.174) recognizes just how vulnerable the senses can be to deceptive tactics: ‘Away, I do condemn mine ears that have / so long attended thee’ (1.6.140–1). When Iachimo invades her bedchamber, Innogen’s sensory vulnerability and her status as affective object are once again in play. She announces that her ‘eyes are weak’ (2.2.3) having read Ovid’s Metamorphoses for some three hours, and that ‘sleep hath seized me wholly’, praying for ‘protection’ from deceptive supernatural beings such as ‘fairies and tempters of the night’ (2.2.7–9). As he leers at her sleeping body, longing to ‘touch’, to steal ‘but […] one kiss’ (2.2.16–17), he notes the scent of her breath ‘that / Perfumes the chamber thus’ (2.2.19), and imagines her eyes as ‘enclosed lights’ (2.2.21). He praises ‘sleep, thou ape of death’ for its capacity to reduce sensory awareness to that of a tomb-bound effigy: ‘lie dull upon her, / and be her sense but as a monument / Thus in a chapel lying’ (2.2.31–3). The scene is rendered all the creepier by its explicit references to famous rapes (she was reading the story of Tereus, and Iachimo invokes Tarquin from Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece), and as Jean Howard has pointed out: ‘Although Giacomo does not literally rape Innogen, he violates the privacy of her body with his peering eyes.’30 It is a sensory assault akin to the one he will commit upon Posthumus, and he is quite calculated about the specific nature of his trick. Perhaps knowing that, like the jealous dupes seen in other Shakespearean dramas, he will

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demand ‘ocular proof ’ of Innogen’s infidelity, Iachimo, providing what he will later call ‘similar proof ’, not only records a written itinerary of her room – ‘Such and such pictures, there the window, such th’adornment of her bed, the arras, figures’ (2.2.25–6) – but also procures two crucial pieces of visual evidence: the bracelet and a five-spotted mole he spies ‘on her left breast’ (2.2.37), ‘a voucher / Stronger than ever law could make’ (2.2.39–40), so unforgettable an object that it is ‘riveted, / Screwed to my memory’ (2.2.43–4). These ‘natural notes about her body’ he knows will provide ocular testimony well ‘Above ten thousand meaner movables’ (2.2.28–9) or mere items of property. When Posthumus calls for proof, blurring sensory boundaries by asking that Iachimo make him see (‘make’t apparent’) that he has ‘tasted her in bed’ (2.4.57–8), he is provided with details of Innogen’s bedchamber. He relates the features of the room, describing a tapestry, the location of the chimney, its decorated ceiling, statues of Cupid – all elements that Iachimo did indeed witness. With such particulars far from enough to convince Posthumus that he has lost the wager, Iachimo produces the bracelet, announcing it with a dramatic ‘See!’ (2.4.96), before quickly hiding it again. In his shock, Posthumus asks to ‘behold’ it ‘once more’ (2.4.98) and Iachimo uses the ‘jewel’ to conjure an image of her absent-presence from his own imagination: ‘She stripped it from her arm. I see her yet’ (2.4.101). Momentarily convinced, Posthumus removes Innogen’s ring and, escalating the visual metaphors that dominate this scene, declares it ‘a basilisk unto to mine eye / Kills me to look on’t’ (2.4.107–8), before Philario prompts him to ask for evidence that might not have been ‘stol’n’ (2.4.117). Iachimo then tells of the mole, a ‘stain’ (2.4.138) that he ‘kissed’ (2.4.137) where it lies ‘under her breast’ (2.4.134) confirming for Posthumus ‘a stain as big as hell can hold’ (2.4.140). Together, these tokens form ‘the cognizance of her incontinency’ (2.4.127), the ‘corporal sign[s]’ (2.4.119) that truth is but a ‘semblance’ (2.4.109). Iachimo here exploits the gap between Posthumus’s internal and external senses, having already made his intention to do this explicit in the bedchamber scene by averring of the bracelet that ‘this will witness outwardly, / As strongly as the conscience does within’ (2.2.35–6). Forced to rely in his exile on his memory of Innogen, and largely bereft of what his external senses might have told him (apart from what he hears and the proxy object that he can see and feel in the form of the bracelet), Posthumus’s imagination takes over.

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‘Imagination’, as we saw earlier, denoted something quite different in the early modern period from post-Romantic understandings of the term, instead indicating the part of brain where objects received by the senses were processed as mental images before being stored in the memory. As Stephen Pender has shown, this was not in any way a simple or transparent process. The imagination, in accord with Aristotelian thinking, was considered generally faulty and prone to ‘produc[ing] misunderstanding’.31 Images processed by the imagination became phantasmata and continued to produce sensations in the embodied mind even in the absence of the object: ‘Hence human beings are stimulated to feel and to act not only by present objects but by phantasms, which represent an object remembered or anticipated as helpful or harmful.’32 As Pender further explains: If the imagination presents or represents images that last longer than the presence of the object itself, if they resemble sensations activated by the real, and if they are sometimes false, then the implication is clear: conjuring images, especially if they are related to an actual occurrence, inspires passion, which moves both body and soul[.]33

Iachimo takes advantage of how defective the internal senses could be, providing just enough external stimuli to trigger a false impression of Innogen. She is the absent object and Posthumus’s memory of her is replaced by new sense data (i.e. the bracelet) that causes his imagination to forge new images. This moment directly echoes the rendering of sensory failure in period medical accounts capturing the way in which, as de la Primaudaye put it, ‘what new and monstrous things’ the imagination ‘forgeth & coyneth’ when ‘some occasion is given to it […] by the externall senses’.34 Iachimo manipulates the space between the body’s sensorium and the real, relying on the fact that the internal senses create phantasmata that, as Park so succinctly puts it, have ‘no counterparts in external reality’.35 His con trick has the desired effect and produces an extreme emotional change in Posthumus wholly consistent with that described by medical writers such as Bright. His demeanour rapidly transforms through the end of the scene, building to the frenzied threat that, were Innogen present, he would ‘tear her limb-meal!’ and culminating in the misogynistic soliloquy of Act 2, Scene 5, where he falsely envisions her as the very embodiment of all female ‘Lust and rank thoughts’, and of ‘Nice-longing, slanders, mutability’

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(2.5.24–6). As Bright warned, once the individual is overtaken by sensory misperception, the internal senses will begin to ‘forge monstrous fictions’ of the like made by Posthumus’s fevered and infected imagination here. That Posthumus effectively ends up seeing what he only hears demonstrates the kind of synaesthetic overload that this play repetitively foregrounds as its representation of extreme sensory experience. This is confirmed when Pisanio despairs over his master’s accusatory letter: Leonatus, O master, what a strange infection Is fall’n into thy ear! What false Italian, As poisonous tongued as handed, hath prevailed On thy too ready hearing?

(3.2.2–6) Hearing could be just as vulnerable as sight in constructing powerful images for the internal faculties. Brathwaite calls hearing ‘the organ of understanding; by it we conceive, by the memorie we conserve, and by our judgement wee resolve’.36 But in invoking common stereotypes of deceptive Italians, he creates a synaesthetic slippage from hearing to touch in Iachimo’s equally contaminatory tongue and hand.37 Carla Mazzio and other recent scholars have revisited touch as perhaps the sense most neglected by historians of the body and explored its incredibly broad-ranging significance and elusive quality. In Mikrokosmographia, Helkiah Crooke called touch ‘the onely Sense of all Senses’38 and Mazzio shows that ‘the word touch (like the word “feeling”) signified both affective and physiological forms of receptivity’.39 To illustrate she cites Thomas Cooper’s definition of touch from his 1578 thesaurus: ‘To touche: to move or grieve: to come: to deceive: to quippe: to taunt: to take up: to write: to speake or mention a thing.’40 This not only reveals touch’s sheer complexity, it also perfectly sums up Iachimo as the confusion of synaesthesia embodied, touching Posthumus through his ears, moving and deceiving him with taunting speech from his poisonous tongue to create a false image in his mind’s eye. Thus, at least in this particular play, Shakespeare offers a version of sensory interaction that emphasizes the relationship between intermingled senses and notions of failure, overload, and confusion. The deceptive acts that drive the events of

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Cymbeline repeatedly demarcate the unreliability of the senses, particularly when one sense entwines with, or stands in place of, another.

Not imagined, felt Equally blurred and overpowering sensations are apparent in the effect the consequences of this manipulation ultimately has on Innogen and Pisanio. In discovering the letter that Pisanio designates a ‘senseless bauble’ (3.2.20), recalling Innogen’s earlier envious berating of insentient linen, she demands to see it, hoping that ‘what is here contained’ can provide a taste of Posthumus, ‘relish of love’ (3.2.30), through her eyes. The play’s repeated imagery of sensory overload continues when she breathlessly asks Pisanio to tell her how far it is to Posthumus’s present location: ‘say and speak thick / (Love’s counselor should fill the bores of hearing / To th’ smothering of the sense)’ (3.2.56–8).41 As they arrive in South Wales, and Posthumus’s false accusation comes to light, Pisanio is suddenly overcome, a vexed state that Innogen describes: What is in thy mind That makes thee stare thus? Wherefore breaks that sigh From inward of thee? One but painted thus Would be interpreted a thing perplexed Beyond self-explication. Put thyself Into a haviour of less fear, ere wildness Vanquish my staider senses.

(3.4.4–10) Sighing, fixation, seizure, frenzy – all are potential symptoms of the intense emotions that can result from the kind of sensory rupture that this play repeatedly offers as central to its concerns. Iachimo’s deception thus induces a series of extreme emotional transformations. His poisonous tongue is reinvoked in Innogen’s exclamation: ‘That drug-dammed Italy hath out-craftied him’ (3.4.15). In an aside, Pisanio confirms the association, calling the accusation ‘slander […] whose tongue / Out-venoms all the worms of the Nile’ (3.4.33–5). Innogen employs medical metaphor to explain the vilification she has suffered, again conjoining hearing and touch as if Iachimo has unleashed synaesthetic contagion. ‘Talk thy tongue weary,’ she scoffs at Pisanio,

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Speak. I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear, Therein false struck, can take no greater wound, Nor tent to bottom that.

(3.4.113–16) Again, as so consistently in this play, the senses here recur as injured and incapacitated, stretched to their very limits, leaving individuals bewildered and benumbed. If Innogen has been ‘false’, she asserts of Posthumus’s betrayal, ‘All good seeming […] shall be thought / Put on for villainy; not born where’t grows? But worn a bait for ladies’ (3.4.54–7). Deceptive signs disturb the body’s key perceptive faculties, and when perception is unhinged, all sensory legibility is in peril. In perhaps this play’s ultimate scene of sensory impairment, Innogen wakes from yet another death-like sleep some time after swallowing Cornelius’s drug, which was concocted ‘to stupefy and dull the sense a while’ (1.5.37) and lock ‘up the spirits a time’ (1.5.41). Again, Timothy Bright’s thorough examination of sense perception in his Treatise helpfully contextualizes the astonishing somatic landscape of this scene. He writes of ‘the effectes of poisons in our natures, as of henbane, coriander, hemlock, night shade, and such like, […] by which the mind seemeth greatly to be altered, & quite put beside the reasonable use of her ingenerate faculties during the force of the poysons’.42 Innogen’s perception is clearly impacted by the lingering effects of the potion but, following Bright’s view of how sensory awareness can be significantly transformed and impaired by certain external objects, the image that greets her upon awakening is itself another possible stimulus of sensory rupture. She is greeted by a most offensive object, the bloodied and headless corpse of Cloten, and immediately doubts the veracity of what her faculties and senses (particularly vision) tell her. Her reaction is couched in the language of early modern psychology: I hope I dream. […] But ’tis not so. ’Twas but a bolt of nothing, shot of nothing, Which the brain makes of fumes. Our very eyes Are sometimes like our judgements, blind.

(4.2.296–301)

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The vaporous ‘fumes’, thought to rise from the stomach, distort the imagination, and impair ‘judgements’, are the same that can mislead the sight. To Bright such moments can be debilitating for several senses simultaneously. He suggests ‘that in vehement contemplations, men see not, that which is before their eyes: neither heare, though noyse beat the ayre and sound: nor feele, which at other time […] they should perceave the sense of, with pleasure or paine’.43 He argues that while ‘the bodie it selfe [can] drive our mindes’, so too can the things we observe with our sight: ‘likewise of visible things, certayne sturre us to indignation and disdayne; and other to contentedness, and good liking […] some to rage, furie and frensie; and other some to dulnes & heavines of spirite’.44 This he equates to the effects of ‘certain poysons’ [which] do manifest these passions unto us; besides such as rise in our own bodies; which may be reasons […] so to mistake these effects of corporall things’.45 This scene thus represents a moment of extraordinary sensory deprivation in early modern medical terms: her senses compromised both by the drug and what Bright would call a ‘vehement’ image, Innogen cannot tell if she is awake or still dreaming. Trembling and disavowing what she sees, Innogen experiences a kind of proprioceptive drift, as she believes she can palpably feel this phantasm: ‘The dream’s here still. Even when I wake it is / Without me as within me; not imagined, felt’ (4.2.305–6). Simultaneously ‘within’ and ‘without’ her body, the headless Cloten seems in her present blurred field of perception a projection of ruptured internal and external senses. The sense of what is ‘felt’ here is closer to the multiple resonances of touch in the period than an indication that Innogen has, at this stage in the speech, made physical contact with this ‘bloody man’ (4.2.296). If touch, as in Cooper’s definition, could concurrently encompass such ideas as ‘to move or grieve’ and even ‘to deceive’ beyond its more obvious tactile associations, ‘feel’ offered an arguably even more diverse range of potential meanings. As Joe Moshenska has demonstrated, although its origination and ‘primary meaning’ seem to be connected ‘directly to acts or experiences of touch’, it is remarkable that ‘this single word can refer to an extraordinarily wide range of experiences’.46 To illustrate he compiles the varying definitions that ‘by its transitive use “to feel” came to assume’:

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‘to perceive, be conscious’; ‘to be conscious of one’s powers; to be at one’s ease’; ‘to perceive mentally, become aware of ’; ‘to be conscious of (a subjective fact); to be the subject of, experience (a sensation, emotion), entertain (a conviction)’; ‘to have the sensation of being; to be consciously; to regard oneself as’; ‘to entertain a certain sentiment, be in a particular frame of mind’; ‘to believe, think, hold as an opinion’.47

Innogen’s ‘felt’ encapsulates so many of these senses at once: intensely aware of her perceptive faculties, their potential fallibility, and yet also experiencing the sensation of this unshakeable material object that seems so palpably there. The seeming persistence of her ‘dream’ into her waking life fits the view of dreams offering all the sensations experienced in reality. Bright suggests that while, Sleepe is a kinde of separation of the soule from the body for a time, at the least a rest from outward sensible actions […] In sleep I say, our dreames in some sort make evident unto us, how the soule without instrument, lacketh not the practise of senses: in which dreames we see with our soules, heare, talke, conferre, and practise what action soever, as evidently with affection of joye or sorowe, as if the very object of these senses were represented unto us brode awake at noone day.48

And yet, this ‘headless man’ in the ‘garments of Posthumus’ (4.2.307) is undoubtedly present, a ‘visible thing’ enduring enough to bring her fully awake. As the surest sense fails her and with growing concern that, since it wears his clothes, the body is Posthumus’s, she gropes for certitude, now physically touching its lifeless parts to mistakenly ‘confirm’ it as her husband: ‘I know the shape of ’s leg; this is his hand, / His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, / The brawns of Hercules’ (4.2.308–10). The classical images of godlike strength are particularly absurd given that the body is Cloten’s, further signs of her continuing impairment. Bright suggests that when the internal senses are ruptured by intense emotion, offensive objects, poisonous substances, or combination thereof, the memory is also compromised: ‘Neither is only common sense, and fantasie thus overtaken with delusion, but memory also receiveth a wound therewith: […] For as the common sense and fantasie, which doe offer unto the memory to lay up, deliver but fables instead of true report, and those tragicall that dismay all the sensible frame of our bodies.’49 He affirms that the external senses themselves are not to blame, as passive

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receivers of external data that ‘never faile in their busines’; the distortion is rendered in the faculties of the mind since ‘the reporte of them is committed by Gods ordinaunce to the instruments of the brain’.50 Innogen’s recollection of how Posthumus’s body feels is here subject to her other misfiring internal senses. Although aware that the ingested potion is ‘murd’rous to the senses’ (4.2.327), she proceeds on the misapprehension that Cloten and Pisanio are the conspiring beheaders, smears her ‘pale cheek with [the corpse’s] blood’, and returning to the senseless state that has been a habitual response to overloaded sensation in this play, faints. Innogen’s moment of misprision has struck critics as laughable and, indeed, is often held as a prime example of this play’s many incongruous excesses and supposedly ridiculous and implausible plot points. Martin Butler has detailed the history of such responses to this play and sees this scene in particular as offering ‘agony and absurdity […] compressed into a single event’ that a certain ‘strand of modern criticism’ has viewed as a ‘Jacobean theatre of the absurd for a sophisticated audience that would have found her error amusing’.51 Cynthia Lewis has contended that Innogen is deliberately ‘portrayed as a buffoon’,52 but, as Butler suggests, to ‘read it as farce risks trivializing her sufferings’.53 I do not wish to underestimate the possibilities for playing this scene with humour, nor do I think my reading precludes such tragi-comical theatrical renderings, but I would suggest that being attentive to how this scene, and the play more broadly, offers such detailed representation of sensory perception and failure is indicative of other possible readings by an early modern audience. If we are to understand the senses in early modern terms then Innogen’s failure to recognize the body of her beloved is, rather, exactly as early modern sense theory would predict under narcotic influence and the circumstances of synaesthetic overload.

Does the world go round? The images of synaesthesia that have defined so much of this play reach their apotheosis (and partial resolution) in the long recognition scene of Act 5, Scene 5. Iachimo’s dislocation of vision as the surest sense by infecting Posthumus’s imagination – a deception that overrides the passage to reason

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through a synaesthetic slippage of making his internal senses see what his external sense only hears – breeds a series of further sensory deceptions. The un-recognition scene in the Welsh cave with Cloten disguised as Posthumus’s body double, playing out like a mortal parody of a bed-trick scene, is extended by Pisanio’s faking of Innogen’s death and Innogen’s own disguise as a man, Fidele. In Pisanio’s choice of a ‘bloody sign’ (3.4.125) to signify her demise, he redeploys Iachimo’s deceitful technique: the ‘bloody cloth’ echoes the bracelet from the earlier ruse, a token of visual evidence that requires Posthumus’s defective imagination to fill in the blanks. The deceptive visual and auditory signs of Innogen’s disguise are again laid out by Pisanio in ‘doublet, hat, hose’ (3.4.169) and instructions to transform her demeanour ‘into a waggish courage, / Ready in gibes, quick-answered, saucy and / As quarrelous as the weasel’ (3.4.157–9). Smith has convincingly argued that Cymbeline repeatedly dramatizes ‘the incongruity between words and image’, a sequence of ‘misalignments of things heard and things seen’.54 As I hope to have shown, we can extend Smith’s insight to suggest that Cymbeline also continually exposes the dangerous possibilities that arise when normally divided and hierarchized senses – both external and internal – are made incongruous. Time and again, this play shows how easily the embodied mind’s faculties can be disrupted, and lays bare the particular threat of this process of dissimulation to vulnerable senses such as the imagination and the fantasy. Shakespeare offers a fundamentally pessimistic view of sensory interaction in Cymbeline, demonstrating the complex ways in which intersecting or intermingled sensations can produce the deleterious effects of cognitive unravelling. As if the actual moments of deception themselves were not enough to illustrate this sensory dismantling, Iachimo provides, in this final scene, a lengthy confession of his ‘villainy’ (5.5.142), detailing exactly how he misled Posthumus. Pitting his ‘Italian brain’ against the mind of the ‘duller Britain’ he therein ‘Gan [to] operate / Most vilely’ (5.5.196–8): My practice so prevailed That I returned with simular proof enough To make the noble Leonatus mad By wounding his belief in her renown With tokens thus and thus; averring notes Of chamber-hanging, pictures, this her bracelet –

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Oh cunning how I got it! – nay, some marks Of secret on her person, that he could not But think her bond of chastity quite cracked, I having ta’en the forfeit.

(5.5.199–208) The stereotype of the double-dealing Italian trickster is here recast as a master manipulator of the sensorium, forging impressions that bypass regular cognitive processes and operate ‘most vilely’ in the brain. Posthumus’s predictably volatile reaction gathers ironic force when he strikes Innogen down, again under sensory misapprehension, mistaking her for the British traitor in her disguise as Fidele. When her true identity is revealed, along with the fact that she is indeed not dead, the cognitive dissonance is summed up in the dazed reactions: cymbeline Does the world go round? posthumus How come these staggers on me?

(5.5.232–3) By invoking the ‘staggers’, a disease usually associated with unsteadiness in horses, the return of sensory fidelity is marked by an image of the collapse of cognitive certainty, as the perceptual ‘world’ spins, disorienting the faculties with palpable somatic affect. If this play offers its audience any kind of cautionary tale, fraud and deceit are its watchwords, and it reveals that the senses are deeply suspect, especially during the processing of multisensory data or, more particularly, when one sense is forced to act in place of another by duplicitous wiles. Cymbeline thus ends just as it commenced: with images of sensory rupture and overlapping senses triggering vertiginous sensations and seemingly diminished consciousness. But to be ‘senseless’ in this period, as this play continually foregrounds as the inevitable response to synaesthetic overload, could also be a moment of concentrated cognizance. Elsewhere in this volume, Steven Connor deftly navigates the relationship between senselessness and self-identity in early modern culture. He suggests that the internal ‘metasense’ known as the common sense ‘allows also for the sensing of insensibility’:

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‘To be insensible was not to be insensate, making insensibility as potent a preoccupation as sensuality. It represented more than the simple negative or minority of sense: it could prompt a distempering or perturbation of the finely configured economy of the senses’ (43). Shakespeare’s characters seem to have the remarkable capacity to self-diagnose, even as debilitating symptoms overwhelm them – witness Innogen’s detailed description of her stupefying dream state in the Welsh cave or Posthumus identifying his sickness at the very moment that he ‘staggers’. The moments of cognitive rupture, synaesthesia, and sensory deprivation that I have suggested are core to this play thus give rise to intense feelings: becoming insensible here operates as itself a powerful kind of sense-awareness. Like so many aspects of this enigmatic play, these unexpectedly sensate moments may be encountered today as startlingly strange, yet this strangeness must be precisely interrogated and historicized, as this chapter has sought to model, if we hope to approach Shakespeare on something approximating early modern terms. It may actually be the period’s wider sensitivity to the interconnectedness of sensory perception that is unfamiliar to modern readers and playgoers, rather than deliberate obtuseness in the play, opening up new interpretive possibilities for Cymbeline where Shakespeare and sensory studies intersect.

Notes 1

Elizabeth L. Swann’s chapter in this volume discusses Iachimo’s image in relation

2

David Howes, ‘Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material

to contemporary understandings of taste (86). Culture Theory’, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), 161–72. 3

Jennifer Waldron, ‘“The Eye of Man Hath Not Heard”: Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Pehnomenology’, Criticism 54 (2012): 407. For an extended history of conceptions of the common sense, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

4

Holly Dugan, ‘Shakespeare and the Senses’, Literature Compass 6 (2009): 726–40. For further thinking about synaesthetic sensations in Shakespeare and early modern culture, see Mark Robson, ‘Looking with Ears, Hearing with Eyes:

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Shakespeare and the Ear of the Early Modern’, Early Modern Literary Studies 7, no. 1 (2001): 10.1–23; Carolyn Sale, ‘Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet’s Theory of Performance’, Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 145–68; Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Holly Dugan, ‘Seeing Smell’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, ed. Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2015), 91–110. 5

For a broader consideration of this relationship in Shakespeare and early modern culture, see Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6

Bruce R. Smith, ‘Eyeing and Wording in Cymbeline’, in Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 56.

7

See Darryl Chalk, ‘“To Creep in at Mine Eyes”: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night’, in Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 171–94; Darryl Chalk, ‘“Make Me Not Sighted Like the Baslisk”: Vision and Contagion in The Winter’s Tale’, in Embodied Cognition in Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, ed. Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (London: Routledge, 2014), 111–32.

8

For foundational work on emotion, the passions, and the humoral body in early modern culture, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). More recent reconsiderations include The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

9

Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in Generall (London, 1604), L3v–L4v.

10 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the Five Senses (London, 1620), A3r. 11 Ibid., A5v. 12 For a more comprehensive consideration of emergent scepticism about visual reliability in the period, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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13 See Katharine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84. Michel de Montaigne’s related concerns about sensory reliability are discussed in Elizabeth L. Swann’s chapter in this volume (100). 14 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrocosmographia (London, 1615), 647. 15 See Natalie K. Eschenbaum’s chapter in this volume for a full account of ‘Sense, Reason, and the Animal–Human Boundary’ (203–23). 16 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie (London, 1605), 154. 17 Ibid., 155. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 146–7. 20 Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, 471. 21 de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie, 146. 22 For a broader consideration of the pathological imagination at this time, see Suparna Roychoudhury, Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). For further examinations of Shakespeare and cognition, see Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, ed. Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (London: Routledge, 2014). 23 Ibid., 155. 24 Ibid. 156. 25 A broad range of examinations of such phenomena is provided in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 26 Guido Giglione, ‘Coping with Inner and Outer Demons: Marsilio Ficino’s Theory of the Imagination’, in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 19. On Ficino’s impact across early modern Europe, see Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence, ed. Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 27 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), H2r. 28 Ibid., Iv. 29 Ibid., J2v–J3r.

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30 Jean Howard, ‘Cymbeline’, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 2008), 2967–8. Critics have often read this scene as a figurative ‘rape’ of Innogen. See, for example, Georgianna Ziegler, ‘My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73–90; Susan Frye, ‘Staging Women’s Relations to Textiles in Shakespeare’s Othello and Cymbeline’, in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 215–50. 31 Stephen Pender, ‘Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 61. 32 Ibid., 64. 33 Ibid. 34 de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie, 156. 35 Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, 471. 36 Brathwaite, Essaies, A8v. 37 Thomas G. Olsen discusses this Italian stereotype, ubiquitous on the early modern stage, in ‘Iachimo’s “Drug-Damned Italy” and the Problem of British National Character’, Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 283–4. 38 Crooke, Mikrocosmographia, 648. 39 Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 160. 40 Ibid. 41 For an extended reading of similar sentiments in the opening speech of Twelfth Night, see Bruce R. Smith’s chapter in this volume (15–39). 42 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, D3v. David Howes suggests that the ‘inter-modal associations and transpositions’ of synaesthesia are commonly reported ‘by persons under the influence of hallucinogens’ (‘Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia’, 162). For a comprehensive treatment of the preoccupation with narcotics and poisons in Shakespearean drama, see Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 43 Ibid., C2r. 44 Ibid., C4r–v. 45 Ibid., C4v. 46 Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6–7.

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268 47 Ibid., 7.

48 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, H3v. 49 Ibid., G4v. 50 Ibid., G4v–G5r. 51 Martin Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Cymbeline, New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22. 52 Cynthia Lewis, ‘“With Simular Proof Enough”: Modes of Misperception in Cymbeline’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31 (1991): 343–64. 53 Butler, ‘Introduction’, 22. 54 Smith, ‘Eyeing and Wording’, 52.

12

Pinching Caliban: Race, husbandry, and the working body in The Tempest Patricia Akhimie

Introduction Selected by Prospero as the perfect marriage partner for his daughter Miranda, Ferdinand endures, briefly, the same kind of punishing pain that drives the other working folk of The Tempest, sprightly Ariel and slavish Caliban. He labours ‘upon a sore injunction’ (3.1.11). As Ferdinand understands it, however, ‘some sports are painful’, but that same painful labour, ‘delight in them sets off ’ (3.1.1–2). His meditation considers the role of ‘pain’ in the differentiation of labour from pleasure. Ferdinand’s phrasing, ‘sets off ’, suggests both a causal relation and a counterbalancing effect. It is the threat of punishing pain that makes the more pleasurable pain of labour unavoidable. Ferdinand has access to a kind of privileged pain, an exertion that yields nobility, increases appeal, and proves worthiness – as evidenced by Miranda’s breathless admiration in the exchange that follows: ‘Alas now, pray you, / Work not so hard’ (3.1.15–16). Perhaps Ariel’s endeavours are similar in that he hopes to earn by them and indeed does earn his freedom. Caliban, however, does not have access to this kind of productive pain. Instead he is driven only by the threat of punishing pain, the pain that enslaves rather than frees. Caliban refers to this repeatedly as ‘torment’ in Act  2, Scene  2, but the word he uses most often to refer to Prospero’s punishment is ‘pinch’.

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When Caliban predicts his own execution for misdeeds at the end of The Tempest, he imagines not hanging but pinching: ‘I shall be pinched to death’ (5.1.276). He refers to Prospero’s preferred method of punishment, namely pinches, bites, and nips delivered remotely by the small spirits of the island at his command. This treatment does not usually cause death but is instead intended to alter behaviour. Depending upon the severity and length of the punishment, Prospero’s pinches also have the power to alter the shape and colour of the body and, in turn, to alter the mind. Eventually, as Caliban’s prediction indicates, the anticipation of this punishment begins to pinch in its own way, even convincing the recipient that such treatment is deserved or appropriate. His pronouncement that he will now be ‘pinched to death’ seems dire, suggesting that the pinches he has received in the past will now be redoubled, or that he will be executed by means of pinches, or tortured by pinches indefinitely. In this last sense, Caliban’s prediction is also a description of the experience of perpetual servitude, a pinching that continues for the length of one’s life. At this point in the play, both Prospero and Caliban seem to acknowledge that Caliban has been remade; he is no longer a rival or a rebel, but a carefully cultivated servant, a pinched thing.1 Prospero identifies Caliban as a lowly creature by his bodily form and his parentage: ‘This misshapen knave, / His mother was a witch’ (5.1.268–9). In fact, Caliban’s parenting, if not his parentage, and indeed his bodily shape as well, are of Prospero’s making. At first nurtured and educated like a foundling son, Caliban is later repudiated for his ambitions and treated more harshly. Prospero’s spirits plague him with pinches, bites, and pricks to punish his rebellious cursing, and to goad him into working. The opposite of nurturing or education, this kind of cultivation uses deprivation and withholding to shape a dependent and obedient creature. Controlled by the pinch of deprivation, Caliban may desire mastery but he cannot achieve it. Pinching punishes any personal ambition and finally removes even the capacity for self-improvement. Caliban’s difference from other characters in the play is manifest as a visible physical difference in his body and understood by other characters in the play as synonymous or even caused by his lack of education, ambition, ability, humanity. However, audiences come to understand Caliban’s bodily difference as the result of consistent deprivation or ‘pinching’ (incarceration, beatings, and the withdrawal of affection, education, and opportunity) at Prospero’s hands.

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Within the realm of sensory studies this reading of the pinch in The Tempest takes up Steven Connor’s proposition that ‘The theatre […] is a venue for [the] sensory commons’, the ‘common sense […] [that] forms a bridge between sensation and ideation’, and which ‘mediates between our self-sensing and the self-sensing of others.’2 The play enables audiences both to visualize and to feel the pinch, and to rationalize its use and abuse. This is a phenomenological exercise of embodied sensation – to use Bruce Smith’s terms in his essay in this volume – in which audiences sense the onstage sensory experience of abject characters but understand that sensory experience as different from their own, creating palpable difference by ‘quite literally […] incorporat[ing] those differences’ (33–6). The pinch – not just a material, physical squeeze of the skin but a strategic practice of withholding life’s material necessities – is transformative but not readily describable. Caliban, as well as Trinculo, and Stephano are pinched until they ‘become’ pinched, a state imagined to include spots and small depressions, indentations or tears, temporary or permanent injuries from nips, bites, or squeezes. As a result of these injuries, recipients are then misshapen, transformed for the worse. The pinch is easily extrapolated to a whole group in the play, so that Calibans are a pinch-spotted race of subhumans without land or hope for improvement, fit only for labour. The pinch robs recipients of the opportunity to imagine (of leisure and freedom to freely imagine without penalty) by punishing attempts to imagine and by forcing idle minds to labour continually, by restricting movement, thought, and action. ‘Pinching’ is a kind of active and attentive depreciation of others. By pinching one can forcibly alter another’s behaviour so that he or she will be prevented from doing any better or any differently. This poor conduct is then believed to be innate, the individual culpable for his failings, and the pinch a just punishment for bad behaviour. Prospero and Caliban’s respective accounts of their early relationship confirm that some attempt at cultivation was made, though neither seems to know what the hoped or anticipated outcome of this nurturing exchange was to be. Caliban remembers a time before the brutal pinch when Prospero used a more gentle touch – ‘thou strok’st me’, ‘wouldst give me’, and ‘teach me’ – that was also generative – ‘made much of me’ (1.2.334–5). Prospero speaks in harsher terms when describing the process of cultivation he prescribed for Caliban,

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not the fostering or breeding that nurtures an heir, or land, or livestock, but the tolerance and ‘use’ a servant or other lowly member of a household receives at his master’s hands – ‘I have used thee’, ‘Lodged thee / In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate / The honour of my child’ (1.2.346–9). Prospero’s gentleness is revealed as princely magnanimity, rather than love, when it is removed suddenly as a punishment for overreaching. Caliban’s education is broken off when he attempts to realize his future by claiming the island as his own and Miranda as mate and mother of his progeny. This attempted rape is part of Caliban’s claim not only to ownership or rule of the island, but to shared or equal status. When we find Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban on the island at the start of the play, their arrangement has Caliban serving not in exchange for access to improvement through education but slaving in order to avoid painful physical and mental punishment. Prospero withholds certain kinds of support, sustenance, and affection as a way of maintaining power. Prospero justifies Caliban’s deprivation as a proportionate and even generous response to his attempted rape of Miranda. However, Prospero’s ministrations also serve as a forcible denial of Caliban’s claims to ownership and sovereignty of his ‘inherited’ land, the magic island. Miranda suggests that Caliban’s service is a kind of just punishment for his inability to improve, but she also pushes further, decrying Caliban’s heritage as ugly, foreign, and demonic, insisting that Caliban’s very nature is unapt for education or improvement, and that his progeny would be unwanted and illegitimate: miranda But thy vile race (Though thou didst learn) had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

(1.2.358–63) In this clearest articulation of the history of the current relationship between Prospero and Caliban, Miranda reminds Caliban why he is not just confined but ‘deservedly confined’ both in space and in other ways. The ‘rock’ – which Caliban calls ‘hard’ (1.2.344) – is a barren place without growing things and a place in which Caliban himself cannot grow.3 Restricted to these outskirts, Caliban becomes not only detestable but also reducible to his base nature,

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a member of a group of ‘vile’ subhumans. Once, Prospero was Caliban’s ‘schoolmaster’, just as he was Miranda’s, but he rejected Caliban as a pupil after his attempted rape of Miranda (1.2.172). Miranda’s accusation is more devastating, however, since she rejects not Caliban’s acts but his ‘race’, an ambiguous term that may refer to Caliban’s heritage or parentage (‘the foul witch Sycorax’ [1.2.258]), but which suggests that Caliban is seen as one of many who share unwanted traits or who lack redeeming ones.4

‘Pinch never thy wennels’ The island is a kind of crux, an overdetermined space in which the management of land, as would be found on a country estate or farm, is synonymous with the management of the state (always metonymically and metaphorically connected to the country estate in the first place). Located both in and outside history, Prospero’s island is a lordship in its own right, a green or desert place that provides food and shelter, with a lost dukedom as its constant referent. Prospero is not titillated, as Gonzalo is, by the prospect of colonization, of the island as fertile and ‘advantageous to life’ (2.1.52). Though Prospero is perhaps the least interested in the island itself as a plantation, country estate, or substitute for his lost dukedom, he nevertheless presents himself as lord of this unwanted plot: prospero Know for certain That I am Prospero and that very duke Which was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangely Upon this shore where you were wrecked, was landed To be the lord on’t.

(5.1.158–62) Prospero is at once ‘landed’ – saved from shipwreck by washing ashore – and ‘landed’ – he suggests that he attained ownership of the land just by virtue of being himself and setting foot on it. He pretends to accuse Ferdinand, calling him a ‘traitor’ (1.2.461) and a ‘spy’ (1.2.456), and accusing him of trying to ‘usurp’ (1.2.454) and ‘win it / From me, the lord on’t’ (1.2.456–7). Prospero has been unwilling to acknowledge the island as a potential site for settlement (Caliban, by contrast, covets it and sees it as fertile and full of wonders).

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Nevertheless, here he makes use of the island, presenting it as a lordship, himself as an island lord and Miranda as a treasured, landed heiress. In his presentation, the island becomes a piece of scenery for his illusions, a painted backdrop depicting a two-dimensional country estate. It is Caliban’s husbandry, however, that maintains Prospero and Miranda’s island ‘court’, and it is only Prospero’s rhetoric (backed up with threat of force) that transforms Caliban’s right to rule, his ownership of the island, into a kind of damning autochthony. Caliban is of the land, but the land is not his, though it is only for Caliban, not Prospero, that the island itself yielded up its green shoots. Caliban asserts a right of ownership and/or inheritance, and he articulates Prospero’s sovereignty as a competing claim, one that is predicated in particular upon Caliban’s own subservience. ‘For I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king’, he reminds Prospero, describing the precariousness of his rule (1.2.342–3). For Caliban, education and tenderness were welcome, and the secrets of the island’s fertility were an equal exchange for such caring. Ultimately, however, Caliban can never be rewarded by Prospero for this knowhow; instead he must be punished for it. In fact it is Caliban’s knowledge of the island’s husbandry and his willingness to engage in the labour of husbandry that truly stake his claim to mastery and lordship of the island. In order to maintain mastery and claim the benefits of cultivation, Prospero must own all the profits of Caliban’s labour by depriving Caliban of access to improvement of any kind. While husbandry manuals – how-to books about farming – elevate the work of estate management, the tactile work of husbandry, grubbing in the dirt, is far less glamorous, assigned to the tenant farmers and labourers that populate the fuzzy margins of the fantasy of lordship that is presented. This fundamental disconnect separates those who own land from those who work on it, and those whom husbandry will improve from those who will cultivate vegetable life but not themselves. In The Tempest Prospero maintains this division. Functionally, he acts as lord of the island, which is interpreted at times as either a kind of country estate or as a foreign land inhabited by strange beings. If Prospero is the lord and husbandman of the island, then Caliban is its tenant farmer or hind, a ‘sunburnt sickle[man]’ (4.1.134). It is the practical work, the everyday work of husbandry and even huswifery that Caliban is enjoined to do, that allows audiences to believe that an old man and young girl might survive on a barren island for twelve years’ time. As Prospero

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admits, ‘We cannot miss him; he does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us’ (1.2.312–14).5 However, the self-same agricultural labour – log bearing – that disinherits Caliban, transforming him from a would-be king to a servant, cultivates Ferdinand as a desirable son-inlaw, future ruler, and heir. Under Prospero’s guidance, Ferdinand practises the precepts of the cultus animi. Caliban is remade as well. His labour effaced, he is marked as uncultivatable, a born slave. Caliban’s ‘offices’ are as commonplace as any valuable retainer, a bit of butler, gardener, farmer, and gamekeeper all rolled into one (1.2.313). Even as Caliban’s humanity, his capacity for self-improvement, is devalued, the value of his labour increases. His contributions as servant, indentured labourer, or slave are indispensable, crucial to Prospero and Miranda’s survival, to Prospero’s successful lordship of the island, and crucial to Prospero’s aim to reclaim the dukedom of Milan. Though he curses and rails, his skill set is irreplaceable and represents a bit of gritty reality on the magical island. While other characters wonder whether the island is barren or fertile, Caliban is privy to its secrets and knows its every nook. Caliban is seemingly very knowledgeable about the flora and fauna of the island, and his tasks take him all over the green spaces of the island to employ various techniques to harvest its natural plenty. Although Caliban controls access to plenty, he is not in power, not a landlord, because he is not using the pinch. Nevertheless, it is Caliban’s very self-sufficiency – his access to plenty in a barren place – that presents a threat to Prospero. It is in order to neutralize that threat that Prospero wields the pinch against Caliban with a vengeance. Whilst in its simplest sense a mutual touch, in which pincher and pinchee are differentiated by their sharply contrasting tactile experiences, early modern English ‘pinches’ in fact took a strikingly wide range of forms. In the play and in early modern English usage more broadly, as the OED indicates, a ‘pinch’ may be direct or indirect (personally and physically – the dog’s bite – or remotely inflicted – the winter wind or the memory of it). A pinch may even be intangible, injuring internally the head, heart, or soul, attacking faith, esteem, or will – the guilty conscience. A pinch may also be a kind of withholding, an injurious lack – penury, hunger – imposed by taking or refusing to give. Used effectively, a pinch may be most devastating when anticipated but not delivered, when delayed, or used both for cause and arbitrarily by turns – a touch that alters without actually touching.

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In fact, the pinch is a basic technique used in husbandry. Husbandry manuals advise when and where to apply or remove pinches of various kinds but the most common reference is to sustenance, pinching food or water.6 Thomas Tusser advises husbandmen to give wennels – young cattle – plenty of water and food year round, but to reduce their access to pasture in the summer months. Pinch never thy wennels, of water or meate, if euer ye hope, for to see them good neate. in sommer tune daylie, in winter in frost: if cattle lack drink, they be utterly lost. For coveting much, over laye not thy ground, & then shall thy cattle, be lusty & sound. But pinch them of pasture, while sommer doth last, & lifte at their tailes, er an winter be past.7

For Tusser, pinching and providing for wennels is a matter of timing, seasons, a method of maximizing profits and minimizing losses. Essentially, it is the role of farmer or husbandman to manage stores in anticipation of the pinch of want to come and indeed husbandry might be described as the art of preparing for want. The advice contained in husbandry manuals is largely devoted to the anticipation of future seasons, what will be lacking later, what needs or wants will present themselves, what stores and fruits will supply them, and how to prepare for both inevitable eventualities as well as unforeseen disasters. Husbandry manuals describe the pinch as that point of contact with the natural world that may allow control of your own want or another’s (Figure 12.1). At this point the good husbandman must manage things in his favour to profit both from the appropriation of workers’ and work animals’ labour and the economics of supply and demand.8 This kind of husbandry is as much about managing plants and livestock as it is about estate management, including the care and maintenance of agricultural labourers themselves. Husbandry manuals, such as Richard Surflet’s English translation of Charles Estienne’s Maison rustique, or The countrie farme (1600), are aimed at educated readers who own land.9 A number of husbandry manuals were available only in Latin, accessible only to an elite set of readers. An introductory letter in The Country Farm makes clear that the book is not for ‘ordinary husbandmen’ but for men of vision, ‘renowned men’, landowning gentlemen.10

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Figure  12.1  Gervase Markham’s design for a pair of ‘Nyppers’, for pulling weeds without damaging corn stalks, Markhams Farwell to Husbandry (1620). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Estienne recommends or dissuades readers from pinching animals, as in his advice on fattening goslings: ‘above all things you must not pinch them in their meate or drinke’.11 Just as livestock and plants can be pinched of water or food, the farmers (tenants who work farms on the land owned by a lord), too, may be pinched or under-supplied with the things they need. The lord holds ultimate control over want on the farm, and Estienne advises him to supply his farmers generously, as only he can. He describes the ideal farmer and his treatment in the chapter ‘The office of the farmer’.12 He should be able and knowledgeable but, to ensure the best results, this farmer should also be well supplied: ‘Doe not pinch him of such necessaries as hee shall request of you, whether it be for the maintenance of your house, or the repairing of any other things that do belong unto you.’13 Between the lines, however, Estienne makes a more telling suggestion – the ideal farmer should be without ambition as well: Take unto you for your farmer […] Such a one as hath no farme or inheritance neer unto your house, who from his youth hath bin hardly brought up and well experienced in matters and businesses belonging to husbandrie, or otherwise by means of great diligence and good will toward the same, hath attained the mysterie of husbandrie. […] Praise him for what you see discreetly carried in the affaires of your farme, & rebuke him not sharply for that which you shall not find so well done, but counsell him to amend such and such bad tricks, signifying unto him therewith, that in so doing hee shall greatly please you.14

The ideal farmer is imagined to have been bred and built for labour and nothing more. Estienne warns that it is important to choose farmers without

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ambition to do more than work your land, labourers who either cannot or will not attempt to rise through the possession of new land. If the farmer owns land or stands to inherit land nearby he may seek to acquire your land to add to it, or put the maintenance of his own farm before his work on yours. Lavished with praise and gentle guidance rather than rebukes, Estienne’s ideal farmer is never pinched, but is instead supplied with both material and emotional plenty. Like fattening goslings, the pinch must be administered with skill and foresight so that this well-kept worker will not attempt to supplant but instead ‘greatly please you’. Pinching is the tool that sustains the status quo, keeping landowners in possession and, thus, in power. Used to cultivate plants and animals for food and profit, pinching is effective husbandry. Used to manage human capital, personnel, competitors, consumers, pinching has an emotional and political twist; it is a strategic manipulation. Pinching effectively maximizes control of limited resources in such a way as to retain and concentrate power, manoeuvrability, and access by preventing others from attaining such control. The discursive and practical shifting of control of resources from one group to another can be so effective that ‘pinched’ status may even come to be considered a natural attribute of the losing group, people deemed incapable of more effective allocation and management and thus ill-equipped to care for themselves or others. This losing group may then become themselves a resource, a labour pool, human chattel. On one’s land, as on Prospero’s magic island, it is want (the perception of need and lack) that distinguishes power from subservience. This telling lack is visible on the body as a change in shape or colour caused by ‘pinching’ and expressed as a loss of autonomy, freedom, or well-being caused by the less tangible ‘pinch’ of conscience, penury, cold, and the like. Though Miranda suggests that Caliban earned his punishment by enacting the ‘vile’ proclivities of his ‘race’, it is Prospero’s confinement – deprivation by means of withholding, or holding in this case – that changes Caliban into a monster. In Caliban’s version of the same events it is not Caliban who is confined but Prospero who has taken land, and this redrawing of borders benefits Prospero and Miranda who have, in Caliban’s eyes, stolen it from him. Prospero, too, reasons that Caliban is ‘deservedly confined into this rock’ (1.2.362), but Caliban calls this captivity and theft:

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caliban Here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’th’ island.

(1.2.343–5) Used against Caliban, the pinch of deprivation is payback for Caliban’s power over plenty on the island – he knows where to find the best foodstuffs and provides firewood for warmth. Caliban may deprive Prospero and Miranda of what they need to survive, and the pinches mimic this power in an effort to negate its potency. According to Miranda, the punishment for Caliban’s acts should be ‘more than prison’ – execution perhaps, or torture. Instead Caliban’s ‘hard rock’ is an indentured servitude or slavery that is inescapable and without relief or expectation of future promotion or elevation or any kind of improvement. Penned in a ‘sty’ like actual livestock, Caliban has not been incarcerated so much as he has been estranged from the household-cum-family of Prospero and Miranda. This situation, cramped and abandoned, restrained beyond the bounds of acceptance and family, is the pinch, and it does more than deprive, it degrades and deforms. Ultimately, Caliban’s very shape is altered by the pinch of Prospero’s rejection and constant reprove. Caliban – misshapen, murderous, and foul-mouthed – represents the unlovely fact of labour. The critique of forced labour is embodied and voiced by Caliban, who argues against Prospero’s devaluation of his mind and abilities, attesting to his own claim to the land and to the value of his subsistence survival skills. The achievement of Prospero’s Old World dream depends upon the skilful maintenance of Caliban’s subservience, the benefits of Caliban’s labour, and the denial of Caliban’s competing claims not to the dukedom of Milan but to the lordship of the island.

‘Fill our skins with pinches’ There is evidence throughout the play that Caliban is somehow strange to look at. Alonso is perhaps the most blunt, saying of Caliban, ‘This is a strange thing as e’er I looked on’ (5.1.290). However, there is no clear description of the appearance of Caliban in the text of the play. While descriptions of Caliban

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do not form a complete picture, his body and his conduct are conflated into a unified whole. As Prospero says, ‘He is as disproportioned in his manners / As in his shape’ (5.1.291–2). This relation is of particular interest when pursuing an inquiry into the discursive production of race through the stigmatization of somatic marks. Attending to the implicit and explicit links between Caliban’s body and his behaviour, and to the treatment of Caliban’s body, reveals the ways in which the received analogy between Caliban’s monstrous body and his monstrous behaviour has been used to substantiate the belief that Caliban’s (and Calibans’) difference is racial. In the context of the play, Caliban’s bad acts necessitate Prospero’s punishments, pains that afflict both Caliban’s body and his mind. This simple causal relation is troubled by the backstory testified to by both Prospero and Caliban. In the past, it seems, Prospero believed that Caliban’s mind, at least, was mutable, improvable, and he lavished his uncivilized pupil with nurturing attention and attempts at education. In the moment of the play’s action, however, Caliban’s attempted rape has introduced a new status quo. Now, Caliban is treated as savage and un-improvable, and his body is treated and discussed as a symptom of his stagnant inner self. Yet Caliban’s mind and body remain mutable, as he attests, susceptible to the pinches (bites, pricks, and aches) that Prospero inflicts on him. These punishments have the power to change his colour, change his shape, and ‘hiss [him] into madness’ (2.2.14). Is Caliban’s misshapen body an innate sign of his misshapen mind, or is it the result of ill treatment, in turn the result of bad opinion? Since, over the course of the play we witness Caliban suffer a near-continuous onslaught of painful punishments, and there is no place within the finite space of the island where Caliban does not feel or at least fear to feel these ministrations, audiences have no way of evaluating to what extent that bestial and monstrous Caliban may have been constructed by his ill treatment. Like Caliban’s, Miranda’s appearance is not clearly described by any character, and yet it is deemed acceptable and treated as desirable. Caliban is deemed undesirable and, to make matters worse, he refuses to be changed; his failure to conform to an acceptable standard (of beauty, of behaviour) is understood as wilful resistance. His resistance to subjugation by means of reshaping is particularly dangerous to Prospero because Caliban is also aggressive and territorial. Caliban’s plans for mastery and revenge resemble

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Prospero’s own. If Caliban’s ‘manners’ are misshapen, then so too are Prospero’s. Even Ferdinand notes that his father-in-law-to-be is frighteningly ‘crabbed’ (3.1.8). Caliban’s shape is associated with his inability to improve, to be educated or cultivated, and with his unholy parentage (Sycorax the witch as mother, and allegedly a devil or demon as father). Explanations of Caliban’s origins are inconclusive, however, and no one seems sure whether Caliban was born or made into such a monstrous shape. Everyone seems to agree that he was born to Sycorax, who was herself misshapen not by nature, but by ‘age and envy / […] grown into a hoop’ (1.2.258–9). According to Prospero, however, Caliban emerged with a marked skin and an undesirable form – ‘(a freckled whelp, hag-born) not honoured with / A human shape’ (1.2.283–4). Prospero’s complaint is that Caliban was impervious to or incapable of cultivation. Prospero maintains that all his efforts to actually change Caliban are in vain, that gentle cultivation makes no difference and leaves no mark, calling Caliban ‘Abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take’ (1.2.352–3); yet Prospero knows that shape-changing control is possible. He suggests that pain is the only way to gain Caliban’s obedience, ‘Whom stripes may move, not kindness’ (1.2.346). The phrasing recalls the language of domestic manuals, in which authors endorse ‘stripes’ as a form of ‘correction’ for household servants while also referencing those same ‘stripes’ as proof of their innate waywardness. Prospero rehearses Caliban’s education, and claims to be saddened by his failure to improve Caliban – ‘a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains / Humanely taken – all, all lost, quite lost!’ he laments (4.1.188–90) – but his education of Caliban continues in another vein and these new and constant torments have succeeded in transforming his pupil. Caliban’s shape is changed as the direct result of Prospero’s punishments and torments, though Prospero claims that it is because of ‘age’ that Caliban’s body and mind are changing: ‘As with age his body uglier grows, / So his mind cankers’ (4.1.191–2).15 Pinches in fact can change the shape of men and Prospero’s oddly specific punishments would transform bodies by degrading musculature and bone in much the same way old age would. Even Caliban knows the transformative power of pinches, and he warns Stephano and Trinculo of this possibility, one they have not yet experienced: ‘From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, / Make us strange stuff ’ (4.1.234–5), and later, ‘We shall […] / […] all

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be turned to barnacles, or to apes / With foreheads villainous low’ (4.1.247–9). These transformative pinches would change not only tissue and bone, but also appearance, giving Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo spots or bruises all over their bodies like leopards: prospero Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’mountain.

(4.1.258–61) prospero For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches, that shall pen thy breath up; urchins Shall forth at vast of night that they may work All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging Than bees that made ’em.

(1.2.326–31) While Caliban was a ‘freckled whelp’ perhaps from birth, Prospero hopes to make him ‘spotted’ with each mark a reminder of the punishments that Caliban’s misbehaviour has incurred. Prospero promises pinches in many forms: ‘cramps’, ‘side-stiches’, and the all-night ‘pinch’ of ‘urchins’. These pinches again are imagined to be transformative, since one can apparently be pinched ‘as thick as honeycomb’, meaning all over but also covered with small depressions in the repeating pattern of honeycomb. In The Tempest stripes, spots, and pinches serve to distinguish Caliban both as a base, nearly inhuman creature and as an upstart. Caliban seeks to rise, believes in his ability to rise, and actively pursues opportunities as he sees them. The Tempest explores the cycle of abusive pinching, of power snatched away and then reappropriated. Prospero’s aggressive suppression of Caliban repeats his own suppression by Antonio. In the imagined Old World politics of Milan, the world of the court rather than the countryside, the pinching control of resources is expressed in terms of the granting and denial of suits. It was Antonio, Prospero’s greedy brother, who, ‘having both the key /

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Of officer and office’ (1.2.83–4), used this power to sway followers to his side and punish resistance. Finally, Antonio’s abuse of power is imagined as a kind of organic vampirism: ‘Now he was / The ivy which had hid my princely trunk  / And sucked my verdure out on’t’ (1.2.85–7). Verdure, in the horticultural metaphor, is both a vital substance like blood and a sign of growth of life. This essence of vitality is recognizable as that intangible thing, abundance, a life-giving source, that allows Antonio or Prospero to control and even transform others by allowing that vitality to flow or stopping it up, pinching it. Pinched by Antonio in Milan, transformed into a ‘crabbed’ and starved thing, Prospero will now eliminate his own rival, usurping Caliban’s position, by withholding all goodness and transforming him into a monster.16 Caliban, along with Ariel, Stephano, and Trinculo, the play’s working folk, are shaped by more direct punishments: prods, nips, bites, and pinches. They are punishments administered magically or invisibly but at the direction of Prospero for misbehaviour, disobedience, and as a way of maintaining power through fear of pain. Notably, Prospero never engages in the mutually tactile act of pinching himself. Caliban speaks of the pinches with awe and disgust. Caliban’s torments are not only confounding and constant, but mystical, seeming to appear in direct response to his actions (and thoughts) rather than at the hands of an angry master or mistress. In this way, the pinches and the resultant marks on Caliban’s body testify not just to his subservience but to his resistance to that position: prospero Hag-seed, hence: Fetch us in fuel, and be quick – thou’rt best – To answer other business. Shrug’st thou, malice? If thou neglect’st, or dost unwillingly What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar, That beasts shall tremble at thy din.

(1.2.366–72) Prospero forbids not only Caliban’s presence but his reticence and resistance. To ‘shrug’, ‘neglect’, or ‘do unwillingly’ is not acceptable and is punishable by ‘cramps’ and ‘aches’.

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Caliban explains the power relation most clearly when he reminds himself that his need to curse will result in his punishment only if Prospero wills others to unleash it, the pinch is not direct: caliban His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’th’mire, Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark Out of my way unless he bid ’em. But For every trifle are they set upon me: Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount Their pricks at my footfall.

(2.2.3–12)17 The pinches, bites, and pricks of spirits in the shapes of urchins, apes, and hedgehogs will come only if ‘he bid ’em’. Caliban claims that Prospero is petty, setting the spirits on him ‘for every trifle’, but in this power dynamic the magnitude of the offence, or even its validity as an offence, is not important. Instead the key act is the reduction of people to beasts that can neither reason nor supply their own wants. Finally, Caliban and his co-conspirators are recognizable by the changes in their shapes, rendered ineffectual, returned to their servant status, and marked as misbehaving underlings: Prospero commands the courtiers to recognize Stephano and Trinculo – ‘Mark but the badges of these men, my lords’ (5.1.267) – and claims Caliban as his own, ‘This misshapen knave […] this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (5.1.268–76). The reprimanded crew stand reticent and shamed. Stephano’s lament is particularly poignant: stephano O touch me not; I am not Stephano, but a cramp! prospero You’d be king o’the isle, sirrah? stephano I should have been a sore one then.

(5.1.286–9)

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Not only is he in terrible pain from the punishments Prospero has visited on the threesome, but his very identity is changed from Stephano to ‘cramp’. Pinching has the power to turn one into a mere ‘pinch’. The pinch becomes not just a bodily mark but an inescapable and abject social identity. Stephano’s punning – ‘I should have been a sore one then’ – allows him to relinquish his desired identity in the face of Prospero’s teasing – ‘you’d be king o’ the isle’ – and accept his new one – ‘I am […] but a cramp.’ Though his demotion has not extinguished his quick wit, the transformation from island god-king to ‘cramp’ is a devastating one. Caliban imagines that pinches are powerful enough to be fatal if the onslaught is sustained – ‘I shall be pinched to death’ (5.1.276). However, it is not death but transformation from rebel to servant that marks Caliban’s fall. alonso This is a strange thing as e’er I looked on. prospero He is as disproportioned in his manners As in his shape. Go, sirrah, to my cell; Take with you your companions. As you look To have my pardon, trim it handsomely. caliban Ay, that I will; and I’ll be wise hereafter And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass Was I to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool!

(5.1.290–8) In this exchange, Caliban utters an affirmative ‘Ay, that I will; and I’ll be wise,’ accepting both Prospero’s command and his condemnation. In the hope of a pardon, Caliban will agree to be this misshapen and bad-mannered creature. He calls this transformation (from rebel to willing slave) wisdom and imagines taking on this role ‘hereafter’, in perpetuity. He promises not only to be ‘wise’ but also to ‘seek for grace’, and this may mean simply Prospero’s promised ‘pardon’ or a more general kind of self-cultivation. In reality, no such self-effacing labourers exist; they are instead constructed actively and discursively by means of a continuous withholding, a physical and epistemological injury that I have here called the ‘pinch’, adopting a term used by both Prospero and Caliban to describe both the action and the injury as

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well as the mark it leaves on the skin. Marking some groups as un-improvable is achieved by withholding or restricting access to the very kinds of nurturing that conduct books maintain are necessary to grow a better subject: to ‘pinch’ is to injure by withholding opportunities for advancement through education or other kinds of cultivation, by punishing ambition or attempts at advancement, and by restricting mobility and freedom of thought. Members of this abject group, slave-like, would then be incapable of making competing claims to the land, without access to education or advancement by any means, and deprived of their histories of lineage (meaning family and blood, as well as structures of inheritance such as primogeniture). The lack of civility, humanity, urbanity, even will, that results from such sustained withholding can then seem or be made to seem inherent. Over time such groups may come to seem inhuman when they are merely bereft. In the colonial context, for example, this shift is particularly potent discursively since it is colonists themselves who often experience a lack of technical knowhow and of basic human needs such as food and shelter. Authors of promotional literature about the New World rhetorically shift this lack onto indigenous groups whose supposed lack of civility overshadows any paucity experienced by English settlers themselves. This rhetorical shift even suggests a solution to that paucity since uncivil and subhuman rivals can be overthrown, enslaved, robbed with impunity. Any attempt on the part of such rivals to regain or retain mastery can then be labelled as violent aggression, effective proof of savagery.

Notes

Some material in this chapter is © 2018 from Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World by Patricia Akhimie. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc. This essay was completed with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1

The dynamic between master and servant or slave has long been a focal point of critical work on The Tempest. For a recent discussion of the forms of servitude

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represented in The Tempest, see Elizabeth Rivlin, The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), ch. 5. 2

Steven Connor’s chapter in this volume (40–41). See also, Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), ch. 5; Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

3

Caliban’s imprisonment recalls Ariel’s own treatment by Sycorax; each incarceration seems to represent a negation of elemental nature. Where the airy spirit was confined in a tree, Caliban, a thing of ‘earth’, is bound to barren rock (1.2.315).

4

Miranda’s usage of the word ‘race’ represents one of the most evocative appearances of the term in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, though it is unclear whether Miranda imagines a group linked by blood, family, region, or something else. On the phrasing ‘thy vile race’ and its import, see, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 120–4; Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

5

We might imagine the power dynamics on the island in terms of mastery over wood. Prospero, too, carries a wood log, or rather a staff, an accoutrement that links Prospero to magician and hermit, shepherd and king, it is the staff (rod or sceptre) of power signifying both his earthly sovereignty and his occult ability. Prospero refers to his staff, facetiously, as a ‘stick’ when he disarms and immobilizes Ferdinand effortlessly, ‘For I can here disarm thee with this stick / and make thy weapon drop’ (1.2.473–4). Vincent Joseph Nardizzi offers an extended treatment of the eco-politics of the magic island, with a particular focus on the wooden, including trees, sticks, and logs, in Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), ch. 4.

6

Agrarian historians and literary critics such as Joan Thirsk, Andrew McRae, Alistair Fowler, and Wendy Wall have chronicled reappearance of classical works on husbandry in England in the late fifteenth century. Numerous new translations of the classics as well as anthologized and original husbandry manuals soon followed. Both the revived classical and the original husbandry manuals promote the ideal of an aristocratic, georgic hero: a landowning gentleman who is both well educated and experienced in all the practical arts of husbandry. Joan Thirsk has shown that English gentlemen began to take up

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7

Thomas Tusser, Five hundreth points of good husbandry (London, 1573), N3r.

8

Estienne goes so far as to advise something like prognostication in the chapter entitled ‘That the Farmer must have knowledge of the things foretelling Raine, Wind, faire Weather, and other alterations of the Seasons’ (C8v): That by buying before hand, or ever that scarcitie pinch, he may either by keeping of his store, or else by husbanding of it sparingly and thriftily, reserve such corne as he shall know to be likely to proove deere, and that not onely for the maintenance of his familie and his seed, but also to the end he may take his best time and place to sell his owne for his most profit. (D3v) This skill in recognizing ‘tokens foreshewing whether it will be a good or a

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bad yeare’ will enable him to make not only preparation but also a profit (D3v). 9

See McRae, God Speed the Plough, 139.

10 Charles Estienne, Maison rustique, or The countrey farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London, 1616), b5v. Ultimately a collaborative work and compilation, The Country Farm passed through several hands and was later revised, amended, and published again by Gervase Markham. For a thorough review, see J. W. BarbarLomax, ‘The Countrey Farme’, Journal of Small Animal Practice 2 (1961): 202–5. The identification of husbandry manuals’ intended audiences presents some questions. Tusser refers to himself as a gentleman but reveals in the text that he is a tenant farmer, struggling under the burden of rent (see McRae, God Speed the Plough, 147). Laura Stevenson, however, claims that Tusser’s appeal to the common man is merely a pretence. Michael Roberts notes that the few authors, chiefly Tusser and Markham, who speak about women’s work do seem to be speaking to readers of a low enough status that their wives might actually have to engage in manual labour of some kind. Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 140–1; Michael Roberts, ‘“To bridle the falsehood of unconscionable ­workmen, and for her own Satisfaction”: What the Jacobean Housewife Needed to Know About Men’s Work, and Why’, Labour History Review 63, no. 1 (1998): 11. 11 Estienne, Maison rustique, H6v. 12 Ibid., C6v. 13 Ibid., C7v–C8r. 14 Ibid., C6v, C8r. 15 In Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen engages in a similar act of substitution when she laments the effects of age on her own body, ‘Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time’ suggesting that the sun’s heat has made her less desirable over time by making her skin darker and more wrinkled (1.5.28–30). In Cleopatra’s hyperbolic metaphor, prolonged pinching causes discoloration as well as deformity. However, Cleopatra is describing an injury caused not by the sensuous ‘pinches’ of the sun but by, as she imagines, Antony’s disregard, the pinching or withdrawal of his affections and sexual desire for her. 16 Prospero’s overthrow by Antonio consisted largely of manipulation rather than physical force, however. The most violent aspect of his expulsion, being put to sea in a worm-eaten boat, is described by Prospero as a wholly inappropriate move for a man of Antonio’s status, and his own revenge, beginning with the nonlethal shipwreck, consists of emotional rather than physical prods. It is the pinch

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of guilt (an internal anguish) that works upon Prospero’s most exalted enemies even without his help:

prospero

Most cruelly

Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter. Thy brother was a furtherer in the act. – Thou art pinched for’t now, Sebastian! – Flesh and blood, You, brother mine, that entertained ambition, Expelled remorse and nature, whom with Sebastian (Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong) Would here have killed your king, I do forgive thee, Unnatural though thou art.

(5.1.71–9) Guilt, rather than cultivation, now shapes the minds and fortunes of the play’s aristocratic characters. Prospero’s control is deft, and yet this pinch of conscience will leave no external mark. Prospero’s aim is not to reshape and reduce his fellow elites, but to reform them. He relies on ‘inward pinches’ to change the minds and hearts of his former enemies. This sharp, inward prodding – Gonzalo says ‘their great guilt […] now ’gins to bite the spirits’ – reinforces the difference between those with privilege and those without (3.3.105–7). The Italian aristocrats are enjoined to engage in a project of selfimprovement, though one prompted by Prospero’s forceful intervention. 17 Stephen Greenblatt’s remains the most salient examination of Caliban’s urge to curse and the uses of that desire in the maintenance of the status quo, see Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990), ch. 2.

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Shakespeare and the seven senses: Scenes from the twenty-first-century stage Erin Sullivan

‘The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses.’1 This was the conclusion of Samuel Johnson, at least, in the 1765 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ that opened his eight-volume edition of the plays. Johnson’s comments focused on the question of the unities of time and place in the theatre, which he believed could be disrupted without confusion or displeasure on the part of audiences. With spectators ‘in their senses’ – that is, with their wits always about them – Johnson argued that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were right to experiment more boldly with the possibilities of dramatic craft, skipping across time and place as they plotted their plays. Today, audiences of Shakespearean performance are still very much in their senses, though perhaps in a rather different manner than Johnson originally imagined. In what Hans-Thies Lehmann has famously characterized as a ‘postdramatic’ landscape, where ‘a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving is replacing the linear-successive’, traditional approaches to story and characterization increasingly give way to more fragmented and abstracted forms of dramaturgy.2 Experience replaces narrative, perception supersedes interpretation, and the bodily senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are exercised ever more vigorously in the process. In this ‘“energetic theatre” […] not of meaning but of “forces, intensities, present affects”’, sensation becomes the central means by which dramatic content is relayed to audiences and eventually made significant.3 In this way, Lehmann’s investigation of theatre follows a parallel trajectory to David Howes’s broader, anthropological consideration of cultural experience. As the long-dominant ‘empire of signs’ – that is, words – gives way to the equally powerful ‘empire of the senses’, we can

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begin to understand human experience as something that stretches beyond the limits of language while still very much being shaped by cultural beliefs and pressures.4 Over the last few decades, avant-garde productions of Shakespeare, particularly in continental Europe and, above all, Lehmann’s home country of Germany, have provocatively tested such principles, producing a body of Shakespearean performance that is as much sight, sound, and movement as it is classical text. And while Marvin Carlson has observed that ‘[i]n the Anglo-Saxon theatres of England and America’, such work has ‘scarcely [been] known in the mainstream theatre’, more recently there have been signs that this postdramatic sensorium, long incubated in the ‘experimental’ fringes, has started to leave its mark on more traditional Anglophone stages.5 Such developments have, at times, been met with criticism: in an interview with The Guardian’s Jeffrey Sweet, the British playwright David Hare complained that ‘an over-aestheticised European theatre’ was ‘beginning to infect’ the UK’s more text-based, rationalist tradition.6 Others, in turn, have been more optimistic about the influence of such work, with the critic Matt Trueman suggesting that European theatre-makers ‘have changed the fundamentals of British theatre’ by teaching young directors ‘that any production ought to tap into the core essence of a play’. In this ‘new age of minimalism’, he writes, directors strip back ‘anything extraneous or outmoded’ in order to present audiences not with characters in fixed historical settings, but with people ‘suspend[ed]’ beyond ‘time and place’.7 But how is it possible, we might ask, for an approach to be simultaneously ‘over-aestheticised’ and indicative of a ‘new minimalism’? The answer, I think, resides in the senses, for one thing that regularly underpins such work is a powerful engagement with affective and sensory experience. Vivid visual designs, evocative soundscapes, fragments of taste and smell, as well as choreographies of real and imagined touch come together to create richly sensuous moments in the theatre that are at once ornately embellished and ferociously primal. This chapter draws on the work of directors Yukio Ninagawa, Ivo van Hove, Emma Rice, Felix Barrett, Maria Aberg, and Joe Hill-Gibbins to explore how shifts within twenty-first-century theatre towards the postdramatic, the post-textual, the spectacular, and the immersive have given birth to new kinds of watching, and consequently new kinds of sensing,

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for audiences of Shakespeare and early modern drama. While the work of this diverse collection of theatre-makers varies greatly in style, each of the productions discussed includes moments that rely heavily, and at times even exclusively, on the visceral language of the senses. The result, I suggest, is a reformulation of the role of the Shakespearean text, though rarely (if ever) a rejection of it.8 Unfurling the significance at the heart of these experiential entanglements – or, at least, attempting to do so – demands that we grapple with the way meaning coalesces within the body and try to cast these corporeal flickers into words. In this aim I echo Carol Chillington Rutter’s desire to speak with ‘a body-conscious language attentive to feeling, to the itch and pleasures of desire, and to pain’, as well as many affect theorists’ fascination with the ‘sensate tendrils [that] constantly extend between unconscious (or, better, nonconscious) affect and conscious thought’.9 Such an interest in the continuities that extend across sensation, affection, and cognition informs the essay’s final section in particular, where a case is made for two additional, ‘inner’ senses in the contemporary theatrical sensorium: emotion and thought. Drawing on natural philosophical writings from the Renaissance, which regularly posited complex and profoundly networked relations between sensation, passion, and knowledge, I argue that sensing Shakespearean drama in contemporary performance is a direct precursor to feeling, knowing, and understanding it. In this way, being ‘in one’s senses’ in a twenty-first-century, postdramatic manner is not so different from Johnson’s eighteenth-century, rationalist mode, since both involve a deep, and at times transformative, engagement with an audience’s meaning-making capabilities.

Sight Of all the bodily senses that we take to the theatre, sight has undoubtedly come to dominate. While in Shakespeare’s time people sometimes spoke of going to ‘hear’ a play, audiences today almost exclusively talk of ‘seeing’ them, despite the aural roots of the word ‘audience’ itself (see Simon Smith’s chapter in this volume [117–21] for a reappraisal of this binary in the early modern theatre).10 This modern emphasis on sight is due in part to the extraordinarily

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wide range of meaning that the verb ‘to see’ encompasses: we see not only with our eyes, but with our mind, judgement, and understanding. To go see about something is to explore and apprehend it; to see what someone is saying is to comprehend and possibly agree. Sight, along with its inward twin ‘insight’, have become synonyms for knowledge and understanding. As Kent pleads to his dangerously solipsistic king, ‘See better, Lear’ (1.1.159). But the pre-eminence of vision in contemporary theatre can also be understood in a narrower and more literal sense. In addition to Lehmann’s characterization of avant-garde theatre since the  1960s as a postdramatic medium, Douglas Lanier has written of a more recent move in Shakespearean performance towards what he calls the ‘post-textual’.11 In such productions, language is usurped by image, verse-speaking by visual stagecraft. Set, costume, and lighting design create a visual aesthetic that powers the dramatic experience, conveying its emotional contours through colour, light, icon, and composition. Many contemporary directors have sumptuously embraced the possibilities of optical experience, in particular those also working in opera or film, but there is arguably no greater practitioner of the art in recent memory than the late Yukio Ninagawa. ‘Always visually ravishing’, ‘staggering aesthetic beauty’, ‘so beautiful, [it’s] painful to look at’ – these are the kinds of phrases that critics in Britain, as well as Ninagawa himself in his interviews with them, have applied to the director’s work.12 It perhaps comes as little surprise, then, that he originally aspired to be a painter before turning his attention to drama.13 Born in 1935, Ninagawa is by far the oldest and most classically inspired of all the directors discussed in this essay, and in this sense he sits the least comfortably within the rubric of ‘contemporary’, postdramatic, and post-textual forms of theatre-making. And yet, his mammoth body of work, which has stretched well into the twenty-first century, has been pivotal in creating an appetite for both non-Anglophone Shakespeare – in many ways ‘post-textual’ in the minds of traditionalist, largely monoglot English spectators – and visually spectacular forms of performance on the British stage. Consider his iconic staging of Titus Andronicus, for instance, which played in Stratford-upon-Avon for a week as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006–7 Complete Works Festival, making it ‘the first Japanesespeaking Shakespearean production to be performed in the Royal Shakespeare

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Theatre’.14 A vast, icy-white stage, almost blue in its frigidity, framed the action of this vicious revenge tragedy and provided a pristine canvas onto which its gore might spill. But audiences soon found that stage blood was in short supply: in a nod to Peter Brook’s iconic Stratford production in 1955, billowing strands of ‘Kabuki-derived’ red yarn twisted and hung from each character’s newly opened wounds, be they Alarbus’s severed limbs, Lavinia’s mouth and wrists, Chiron and Demetrius’s bulging necks, or Tamora’s back as Titus drove a knife into it in the final scene (Figure 13.1).15 The effect was at once patently artificial and uncannily shocking: against the antiseptic white of the stage, and the contorted agony that constantly emanated from the actors’ faces, these stark rivers of blood pointed ruthlessly to the unspeakable violence at the heart of the play. At the same time, in their strange, emblematic beauty, they released the production from the trappings of naturalism, setting it adrift in a mythic, dream-like world. No scene illustrated this heady mix of brutality and beauty more vividly than that of Lavinia’s mutilation in the forest. After the close of Act 1’s court sequences, which featured a towering statue of a she-wolf suckling Romulus

Figure 13.1  Lavinia (Hitomi Manaka) in Titus Andronicus, dir. Yukio Ninagawa, at the Royal Shakespeare Company (2006). Photograph by Ellie Kurttz © RSC.

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and Remus, the stage went entirely to black. Just a few seconds later, or at least so it seemed, lights returned to reveal a dazzling stage filled with dozens of huge, pearly lilies, set against a jet-black scrim and dappled with blueish light. This ‘scenographic […] coup de théâtre’ literally set the stage for the nightmarish violence that soon followed.16 After Bassanius’s murder, and Chiron and Demetrius’s offstage attack of Lavinia, the latter returned and staggered downstage, shrieking in horror and swathed in streams of garish red. Behind her followed Tamora’s howling sons, naked other than the bloody loin cloths that covered their genitals and the lurid strands of crimson yarn that fell from their bodies. Against their grotesque laughter, Hitomi Manaka’s Lavinia stumbled towards the edge of the stage, where she sank to the ground and raised her ribboned stumps for all to see. Positioned front and centre in this perfectly composed mise en scène, her searing pain was thrown into relief – both visually and viscerally – by the ethereal beauty of the stage that surrounded her and the intense contrasts of red, white, and black that it presented. When Marcus at last entered, his niece moaned in dread, draping her long hair over her face and frantically trying to hide behind one of the set’s delicate lilies, to no avail. No matter where she went, the shocks of red that issued from her arms and mouth ensured that all eyes remained fixed on her. The stunning dissonance at work in Ninagawa’s rendering of this sequence goes some way to explaining why such a gruesome moment has become the production’s most reproduced, and implicitly most celebrated, image (again,  Figure  13.1). Appalling violence and astonishing beauty sit side by side, with each extreme intensifying the other through the force of their juxtaposition. ‘When will this fearful slumber have an end?’ (3.1.253), Titus asks in response to the butchery inflicted on his family, but witnesses to Ninagawa’s extraordinary vision of the play have been less willing to wake from its otherworldly dreams. The fact that the majority of the production’s international audiences did not speak Japanese contributed to this sense of captivating, even hypnotic, estrangement, as well as a heavy reliance on the visual – or, as one critic put it, the experience of ‘hearing with eyes’.17 With Shakespeare’s original words gone, Ninagawa’s use of colour, composition, and contrast translated the play imagistically, ‘turning [its] horror into visual poetry’.18 In this sense, Ninagawa more than realized his early dreams of becoming a painter, though on a bigger and more dynamic canvas than he likely ever imagined.

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Sound For many, the dominance of visual experience in contemporary performance is one of the clearest signs of film’s impact on the stage, but the significance of music and sound in the theatre also owes a considerable debt to the rise of the screen. While early modern theatrical performances regularly included music, it was typically presented diegetically rather than through ambient underscore, which would rise to prominence in the nineteenth-century theatre and eventually film.19 Indeed, Ninagawa’s work has often been described as cinematic not only for its devotion to the visual mise en scène but also for its pronounced use of orchestral music, be it Fauré’s Requiem in the opening of his Macbeth or the ‘gorgeous chunks of slow movements’ by the Japanese composer Yasuhiro Kasamatsu that accompanied Lavinia’s suffering in the forest and returned in the final scene.20 While audience members might be most conscious of the fact that they are ‘seeing’ a production such as Ninagawa’s Titus, the parallel phenomenon of hearing it also underpins many sequences, producing a redoubled synaesthesia that might be characterized as ‘watching with ears’. Scholars of film have long recognized the power of music to shape cinema’s narrative meaning as well as audiences’ affective responses to it. ‘Music […] provides one of the strongest sources of emotion in film,’ Annabel J. Cohen has argued, while Claudia Gorbman has illustrated how it ‘increases the spectator’s susceptibility to suggestion’.21 Sound is always ‘sawing away in the backfield of consciousness’ and assembling complex significance, she writes, even as the ‘visual chauvinism’ of screen culture seemingly insists on the self-sufficiency of the image.22 Such principles have become increasingly relevant to theatre directors who make heavy use of sonic underscoring and what we might call ‘soundtracking’, or the weaving of popular music into a production’s storytelling. Ivo van Hove, the artistic director of the Dutch company Toneelgroep Amsterdam and ‘one of the world’s most in-demand directors’, is perhaps the clearest and most influential innovator of such forms in recent years.23 Although van Hove’s extensive use of screens and live video on stage has led many critics to focus on the visual dimensions of his work, his engagement with the emotional and psychological power of sound is at least as central to his celebrated dramaturgy.

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In Kings of War, which played at the Barbican in London in 2016, van Hove presented audiences with a ‘constant soundscape’ that hummed underneath the show’s lines while also, in crucial moments, bursting explosively through them.24 Epic in many ways, this multimedial adaptation amalgamated five of Shakespeare’s history plays – Henry V; Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3; and Richard III – into a single, four-and-a-half-hour-long production in Dutch. Sound played a pivotal role throughout: an onstage brass band made up of members of the music collective BL!NDMAN provided triumphal fanfares, while the countertenor Steve Dugardin interlaced poignant sequences, usually of death, with haunting vocal strains. Most prevalent of all, however, was Eric Sleichim’s moody, electronic score, which infused many of the production’s scenes with a Kubrick-esque sense of menace and dread. This was particularly true in Richard’s bloody rise to power in the second half. In the sequence leading up to Edward IV’s death, syncopated lounge music played quietly in the background while Richard, Edward, Elizabeth, Rivers, and Buckingham sat awkwardly around a coffee table topped with a cherry pie. As the Queen carefully portioned out the fruity dessert, which her guests duly began to eat, the music faded to silence for a few seconds before being replaced by the sound of a soft, whirring drone. Forks clinked on plates and characters grunted in appreciation as they ate, but the unnerving tones that echoed around them suggested that all was not well beneath the surface of this seemingly tranquil, domestic scene. Tension between sound and image finally broke with Elizabeth’s casual mention of Clarence, and Richard’s revelation of his death: at last, the threat hovering in the soundscape took on narrative form and the unity of the York family began to crumble. The ominous quality of the score continued to grow as Hans Kesting’s Richard inched ever closer to the crown. After the princes’ imprisonment in the tower, and an interpolated scene in which Richard comically pretended to telephone Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin, the wouldbe-king walked towards a long mirror leaning against a downstage wall and gleefully began to stage his own mock coronation. As he did so, a low, throbbing noise in the background slowly crescendoed and with it grinding drone sounds that lurched with malice. Dissonant elements of percussion came in, as did the distorted, distant sound of Joy Division’s post-punk classic, ‘She’s Lost Control’. Amidst a now-thundering soundscape, Richard feverishly circled the

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stage, delighting in the chaos he had almost single-handedly created. When his actual coronation arrived two scenes later, Ian Curtis’s foreboding voice could be heard once more, this time singing the lyrics to ‘Day of the Lords’ and exemplifying the ‘eerie spatiality’ of Joy Division’s famously ‘doomy’ sound:25 This is the room, the start of it all, No portrait so fine, only sheets on the wall, I’ve seen the nights, filled with bloodsport and pain, And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained. Where will it end? Where will it end? Where will it end? Where will it end?26

Where would it end, indeed? It’s a question posed both by the play itself, in terms of Richard’s seemingly insatiable appetite for devastation, and by van Hove’s fearsome production, with its modernized depiction of political violence, both past and present. As signalled in its title, Kings of War was a project very concerned with the nature of conflict – be it global, national, or familial – and the kind of world it creates. While such matters were certainly explored visually, sound played an equally formative role. Whether through underscoring with drones or soundtracking with Joy Division, van Hove and his team repeatedly engaged with what the composer Michel Chion has called ‘audio-vision’, or music’s ability to help us see through sound.27

Taste and smell If sight and sound are the power couple of sensory-rich, contemporary theatre – at times vying for dominance, but always making a pronounced and collective impact – then taste and smell might be thought of as their somewhat quieter twins. Still, while opportunities for gustation and olfaction are considerably more limited than those for audio-visual perception, when they do arise they can create some of the strongest memories possible in the theatre. This is especially the case with taste, I suggest, not only because of research that points to powerful links between food, memory, and emotion (à la Proust’s iconic madeleines), but also due to the fact that when the chance to directly experience taste through a production does arise, it typically means that an unusually interactive, even personal exchange has taken place between

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performers and their audiences.28 The most vivid memory I have from my first experience of watching Shakespeare on stage, for instance – a community production of Antony and Cleopatra that I saw when I was about twelve or thirteen – is the fact that the actors came into the audience to serve us little cups of juice during the banquet scene. The survival of such a memory, particularly in the absence of many others, attests both to the novelty of being invited to eat or drink within a performance, as well as to the startlingly participatory relationship that such an offer opens up between stage-world and audience-world, even when it only lasts a few moments. Emma Rice’s 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe, a space well known for its reflexive relationship between actors and audience, raucously demonstrated the power of taste with a single banana. When Katy Owen’s impish Puck, bedecked in a yellow leotard, ruff, and ‘disco-feet trainers’, moved onto a platform in the Globe’s standing yard to recount her antics as a ‘merry wanderer of the night’ (2.1.43), she paused for a moment to stoop down and archly feed the banana that she had been holding to an unsuspecting groundling at her feet (Figure 13.2).29 For the  1,500 or so people in the theatre watching but not partaking, it was an outlandishly funny moment, in which the already flimsy boundary between stage and spectator completely gave way, allowing the joy of the play

Figure  13.2  Puck (Katy Owen) with her banana, seconds before she fed it to a groundling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Emma Rice, for the Globe (2016). Screenshot.

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to spill over seamlessly into the pleasure of watching it, and back again. For the person doing the eating each afternoon or evening, it was presumably a much more exposing encounter, but hopefully an enjoyable one too. Such was the case for the Shakespeare scholar Adam Zucker, who after one August matinee bemusedly tweeted, ‘Let today henceforth be known as the day I was fed a banana by Puck in front of a full house @The_Globe’ – a post soon favourited by more than fifty appreciative readers.30 Given how rarely we get the chance to exercise our taste buds in the theatre, it makes sense that when we do we tend to remember it. It’s fair enough, then, that if and when this ever happens to us in front of a packed and boisterous Southbank crowd, we get to invite others to share in this strange culinary glory by memorializing it with us (see Jennifer Edwards’s chapter in this volume (167–8) for a somewhat less pleasant instance of shared taste at the Globe). In the open light of the Globe’s standing yard, audience experience is unusually public, communal, embodied, and reciprocal – qualities that have helped create a particularly fertile playground in which to experiment with all of the senses, including taste. Far more private in nature, but just as sensuous in its potential, is the work of Felix Barrett’s London-based, immersive theatre company, Punchdrunk. Exploring the internal drama and affective impact of sensation has become one of the company’s hallmarks: ‘Awakening and engaging the fullness and diversity of sensory awareness is a central feature of immersive practice,’ Josephine Machon writes, and of all the theatre groups that have contributed to the rise of immersive performance over the past decade, Punchdrunk has undoubtedly been at both the creative and popular vanguard.31 Within Punchdrunk’s sensory-rich dramaturgy, smell – perhaps the least loved of all the senses in contemporary theatre-making – enjoys a special place. In the company’s globe-trotting Sleep No More, its wildly successful adaptation of Macbeth laced with scenes from Hitchcock films, promenading spectators immediately encounter a damp, earthy odour as they step into the corridors of ‘McKittrick Hotel’ (the seven-storey warehouse in which this site-specific production takes place). Whether the scent is by design or default is not entirely clear: the musty quality of the air is redolent of both the smell and feel of fog produced by a smoke machine, but it’s also true that Punchdrunk designers Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns actively ‘seek out

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smells that trigger an emotion or memory’ and carefully fold them into a production’s experiential universe.32 Visitors to the old-fashioned sweet shop on McKittrick’s fourth floor, for instance, can breathe in the sugary scent of caramel, sprayed onto the store’s glass jars with regularity, or walk a few doors over to the taxidermy shop, where dried herbs help create a leafy, medicinal aroma.33 Beyond the limits of the production itself, enthusiastic fans have set up online forums where they can share notes about the scents encountered in McKittrick and whether or not they’re available to purchase ‘somewhere somehow’.34 Demeter Fragrance Library, a US-based company, is a recurring lead, with rumours circulating that Punchdrunk uses scents such as ‘Dirt’, ‘Paperback’, ‘Thunderstorm’, ‘Popcorn’, and ‘Mahogany’ to realize its aromatic settings.35 True or not, many fans seem to appreciate the possibility that they might bottle up a few drops of Punchdrunk’s magical atmosphere and re-experience it later. Like Proust’s madeleines, these fragrances transport those who seek them back to times, places, experiences, and emotions that they wish not just to remember but in some small way to possess. With both smell and taste comes a tantalizing intimacy, perhaps because each involves taking something outside of us and incorporating it, physically, into our own bodies and selves.

Touch Such acts of ingestion, be they morsels of food on the tongue or molecules of fragrance in the nose, create sensuous moments of bodily contact – otherwise known as touch – between audience members and the stage-world of a play. In interactive productions such as Sleep No More, opportunities for touch go well beyond the intimacy of taste and smell, moving in many scenes towards the eroticism of bodies on bodies. Performers regularly brush against spectators as they move around and take a select few by the hand when they invite them into one of Punchdrunk’s famous one-on-one encounters. In these private moments, a character guides an audience member to a secluded space, removes her mask, and tells her an enigmatic story. In some cases, these intimate exchanges end with a fervent kiss on the cheek or forehead, gesturing towards an ‘erotically charged’ form of touch that has left many visitors to Sleep

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No More dreaming of its ‘forbidden sensual delights’ long after the proverbial curtain has fallen.36 Such opportunities for direct touch may be among the most titillating of sensory experiences available in the theatre, but moments of indirect or witnessed touch can sometimes prove just as powerful, particularly when bodied forth through the medium of dance. It’s no accident that Punchdrunk’s performers are principally dancers rather than actors, or that the company’s choreographer, Maxine Doyle, has essentially become its second-in-creativecommand. The affective power of movement, and the forms of touch it encompasses, play a fundamental role in Punchdrunk’s almost-wordless storytelling. And while few if any other theatre companies use dance quite so heavily in their interpretation of Shakespeare, several contemporary directors have begun to look to it as a way of exposing new emotional depths in pivotal scenes. Maria Aberg’s  2012 King John for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for instance, culminated in an ecstatic dance of death set to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ 1967 song ‘Beggin’’. As Alex Waldmann’s King John doubled over in pain, cursing the poison in his ‘burned bosom’ (5.7.39), the lights suddenly changed and Valli’s cheery voice rang through the auditorium: ‘Riding high, when I was king / Played it hard and fast, cause I had everything […] Beggin’, beggin’ you.’37 Suddenly John jolted upright and began to dance wildly to the music, kicking his feet and clapping his hands to the rhythm. His bright smile soon faded back to anguish, however, as the flashing blue and red lights of the stage became increasingly frenzied and his feet began to falter. Through this surreal, physically intense sequence – which concluded with John ‘collapsing in a heap’, dead – Aberg and her movement director Ayse Tashkiran worked to externalize the king’s inner torment and give fresh meaning to his desperate plea, ‘Within me is a hell’ (5.7.46).38 Four years later, again at the RSC, Aberg turned to dance once more for her depiction of Helen of Troy in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. ‘Given Helen’s mute presence’ in this play, Laura Grace Godwin writes, ‘what an audience sees is critical to the interpretation of the moment’.39 In Aberg’s production, initial glimpses of Helen’s seductive eyes, mouth, and nose appeared first as lurid video projections, prompting the on-stage ensemble to contort with lust. But the tone changed dramatically when Jade Croot’s Helen finally appeared in

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person and joined Faustus and Mephistopheles on stage, now alone. Far from a smouldering temptress, this queen was a distressingly young, prepubescent girl, vulnerable in her knee-length nightshirt and damning in her blank, unconsenting gaze.40 Several seconds passed before Mephistopheles slowly began to recite Faustus’s famous speech about ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ (12.81), while the doctor himself stood shamed and silent before his Helen.41 She ran towards him, shoving him hard on the chest, and then they began to circle the stage, eyes locked. With the end of the speech – ‘And none but thou shalt be my paramour’ (12.100) – she jumped into his arms and wrapped her legs tightly around his waist, burying her head, childlike, into his neck (Figure 13.3). What followed in this eight-minute-long sequence, also choreographed by Tashkiran, was a sometimes delicate, sometimes disturbing pas de deux that positioned Helen both as a victim of Faustus’s destructive desire and as a symbol of his own fragile soul, which he was steadily crushing to death. Whether or not Faustus had any control over the devastation he was causing was a question that haunted the dance as it unfolded against a soundscape of lyrical strings and woodwind. At one point, Helen gently took Faustus’s head in her hands, and then guided him to do the same to her. But this tender mirroring was violently disrupted as she began to jerk her head, still in his hands, as if he were brutally shaking her. Faustus backed away, horrified, before submissively dropping to his knees. Moments later, she took his hands once more, this time gracefully winding his arms around her body and slowly bringing his palm to her face. Again, the dynamic instantly switched, with the gentle embrace suddenly transforming into an attack: Faustus’s hand covered Helen’s mouth and her legs began to kick desperately in the air (Figure 13.4). Against his own will, he was hurting her, killing her even, but he couldn’t seem to find a way to stop. In these moments of wordless touch, Faustus became both supplicant and aggressor, destroyer and the destroyed. ‘[A]lthough what [Helen] makes him do seemingly turns her into a doll’, Holger Syme has written of this dance, ‘it is in fact he that is the real marionette’.42 With Mephistopheles always looking on in the background, Faustus’s actions pulled him irresistibly towards the life – and eventually the death – that he was at once helpless and careless to avoid. That all this was conveyed through the experience of watching two

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Figure 13.3  Helen (Jade Croot) embraces Faustus (Sandy Grierson) as Mephistopheles (Oliver Ryan) looks on. Dr Faustus, dir. Maria Aberg, for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2016). Photograph by Helen Maybanks © RSC.

people touch one another suggests the power of physical contact to move and change us. Perhaps this is one reason why the verb ‘to touch’ can signal both physical contact and emotional communion: ‘Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling / Of their afflictions […] ?’ (5.1.21–2), Prospero asks Ariel in the final scene of The Tempest, ashamed of his own, as-yet unfeeling

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Figure  13.4  Faustus (Oliver Ryan), Helen (Jade Croot) and Mephistopheles (Sandy Grierson). Dr Faustus, dir. Maria Aberg, for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2016). Photograph by Helen Maybanks © RSC.

nature. By the end of the play, he too must be ‘touched’ by the suffering of others, with his subsequent acts of reconciliation helping ease the story from one of angry revenge towards a somewhat more hopeful, if still uncertain, resolution.

Emotion and cognition So far this essay has considered each of the five, ‘outward’ senses on its own: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching have been explored largely in isolation, though the moments of performance discussed have inevitably gestured towards more complex, intertwined forms of meta-sensation. Aberg and Tashkiran’s choreography of touch was dependent on both sight and sound, van Hove and Sleichim’s aural compositions relied on image and movement, Rice and Owen’s banana foisted smell and touch on its eater while also evoking parallel, imagined experiences in its spectators, and so on. Few if

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any of the senses exist purely on their own, especially within the multimedial world of the theatre. Also evident in each of these scenes is how central the kindling of emotion, and in turn knowledge-creation, is to the workings of sensoryrich dramaturgy. The idea that sensation and passion should be intimately, even integrally, connected would have come as no surprise to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Writings on the nature of the soul regularly indicated that physical and emotional feeling were both located in the ‘sensitive’ region of the anima, or the organic part of the soul that gave all creatures life. According to the priest and philosopher Thomas Wright, who wrote a treatise on the passions in the early years of the seventeenth century, emotion and sensation were ‘joint-friends’ that constantly worked together: ‘Passions and sense are determined to one thing, and as soon as they perceive their object, sense presently receives it, and the passions love it or hate it.’43 Through the workings of the sensitive soul, sensory faculties apprehended experiences from the outside world and the passions swiftly reacted to them, resulting in an almost instantaneous form of perception and understanding. For Wright and many of his contemporaries, such an instinctual approach to judgement could at times be dangerous. Because the passions, like the senses, were rooted in what Aristotle called the ‘material substratum of animal life’ – that is, they were of the body, and thus ‘drowned in corporal organs and instruments’ – they were both less reliable and less able to be resisted than the purely intellectual and disembodied workings of reason, which was the ideal guide to human life.44 But while many early modern thinkers saw reason and the ‘intellective’ soul that housed it as fundamentally separate from the lower workings of the passionate and sensual self, they still admitted that the information gathered below was of enormous value to the analysis that went on above. In this way, sensing, feeling, and thinking were entangled in one complex and ultimately virtuous project: the careful comprehension and intelligent navigation of human life. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare also intermingled sensation, emotion, and knowledge as he depicted characters struggling to make sense of the world around them. Emotional synaesthesia abounds in his writings, from Gloucester’s claim to ‘see […] feelingly’, despite his blindness (KL 4.6.145); to

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Richard II’s all-too-human ability to ‘Taste grief ’ (3.2.176); to Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo’s passionate ‘smel[ling of] music’ (Tem 4.1.178); to Cleon’s plea that the more fortunate in life might ‘he[ar] [the] tears’ of those who suffer (Per 1.4.54).45 Amidst the churning of the senses, flashes of emotion almost always appear, and intellectual reflection on their significance is rarely far behind. Early modern writers committed to a distinction between the affective, sensate body and the reasoning mind would have likely characterized this relationship as a kind of relay: the sensitive soul collects sensory information and gives it emotional charge, before passing it to the intellective soul for further consideration. But later writers, most prominently the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza – who would become a guiding light in the development of modern affect theory – suggested a more immediate and organically fused relationship between sensing, feeling, and thinking. ‘[T]he more the body is capable of affecting, and being affected by, external bodies in a great many ways, the more the mind is capable of thinking,’ Spinoza wrote in his Ethics.46 For him, and for the philosophers and theorists who have followed in his wake, ‘affect’ is a fundamentally embodied experience in which sensation, emotional charge, and instinctive judgement mix together at once, producing a form of awareness that exists somewhere along the same spectrum as thought. Three hundred years later, belief in an integrated body-mind that senses, emotes, and meditates is similarly visible in the writings of the theatre-maker Antonin Artaud, whose championing of ‘the materiality of performance’ and questioning of ‘the dominance of the text’ paved the way for sensory-rich, postdramatic theatre in the later twentieth century.47 In his prose-poem, ‘The Situation of the Flesh’, Artaud writes, ‘There is a mind in the flesh, but a mind as quick as lightning. And yet the agitation of the flesh partakes of the mind’s higher matter.’48 Again, sensation, cognition, and, implicitly, affection come to life simultaneously, giving rise to a holistic way of being that does not attempt to cordon off different parts of the self or create a hierarchy among its many capabilities. It is a way of being that one might argue is particularly suited to the theatre, with its multiple forms of storytelling and its emphasis on sensory immersion, emotional receptivity, and experiential knowledge. It is also one that is finding increasing support among cognitive scientists, such as

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Lisa Feldman Barrett, who argues that ‘the brain has no separate systems for emotion and cognition […] both are constructed by the same set of brainwide networks working collaboratively’.49 While many productions might be called on to explore how such a premise works in performance, iterations of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seem particularly apt given the play’s own richly emotional and synaesthetic investigation into the relations between perception, knowledge, experience, and creative imagination. ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was,’ Bottom marvels after his adventures with Titania (4.1.209–12), comically – but also, I think, suggestively – intermingling the body’s sensory and sense-making capabilities (see also Natalie K. Eschenbaum in this volume (203–23) on Bottom and his navigation of the animal–human, sensory-rational divide). It’s notable too that he plans to memorialize the affective delights of this ‘rare vision’ by commissioning and performing a ballad, or a work of art (4.1.203). As a play, Dream echoes and extends the ambitions of the ballad of ‘Bottom’s Dream’, using poetry and drama as a means of investigating not only the complex relations between people but also the more abstract question of how we experience the world around us and attempt to create sense from it. Joe Hill-Gibbins’s ‘bracing production’ of the play in 2017 for the Young Vic demonstrated a particular preoccupation with Dream’s more existential side, which it pursued through an insistent engagement with the audience’s senses.50 That a production of Dream should be found to be sensuous is no novelty, of course: the performance history of the play has long been marked by dazzling sets, enchanting music, balletic fairy trains, and an array of both pleasurable and disquieting emotions. But Hill-Gibbins’s production offered a tauter, more pared back, and quite frankly uglier display than is often the case. Running at two hours with no interval, this Dream presented audiences not with a magical fairy world but with a bare, semi-circular stage full of mud. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the upstage wall reflected Johannes Schütz’s stark set back on itself, producing a doubled view of the actors in what now looked like a circus ring (Figure  13.5). As the house lights slowly went down, the mirrors captured within their shiny surface the audience’s hazy, disembodied faces, hovering disconcertingly amidst the mise en scène.

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Figure 13.5  The mechanicals assemble on the muddy, mirrored set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins, for the Young Vic (2017). Photograph by Geraint Lewis.

Such a setting underscored the playful, hallucinatory, and at times unsettling quality of the play as the performance progressed. Like the lovers as they wake from their antics in the woods, spectators encountered a set that made them ‘see […] with parted eye, / When everything seem double’ (4.1.188–9). Very often, such double vision proved delightfully fun: as actors bounded across the stage, acrobatically tripping and falling into the dank, squelching mud, the mirrors exaggerated their efforts by reflecting the physical comedy back again and displaying it, fun-house style, from multiple perspectives. At the same time, these reflected visions cast doubt on the objective reliability of sight and the senses, which so often strive to find clarity in a world that can seem blurry, unstable, even flawed. ‘Hill-Gibbins sees the whole play as a study of what’s real and what’s not: fairies, feelings, theatre,’ the critic Matt Trueman commented in an interview with the director about this Dream, and the production’s mirrored set certainly contributed to such a reading.51 Its dizzying optics made strange the process of seeing and sensing the world, of discerning any fixed reality. In doing so, they also served as a wider metaphor for the challenge of

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perception throughout the play, riddled as it is with misapprehensions both enchanting and alarming. Both the disturbing liabilities and the tantalizing freedoms of such rare visions found expression in the production’s final act. As the lovers awoke and traded the dreams of the forest for the soberer realities of the court, other members of the cast covered the mirrors with black paint as high as they could reach, as if to blot out the heady, other-worldly sights to which they and the audience had thus far been privy. The path back to normal life seemed to require seeing in a more single, if limited, way, though such pragmatism could not fully quash the memory of what had come before. As the mechanicals staggered through Pyramus and Thisbe, a flash of recognition drew Bottom (Leo Bill) and Hippolyta (Anastasia Hille, who had doubled as Titania) towards one another, until they fell into a passionate clinch and rolled back down into the mud. In this startling moment of emotional communion, the distinction between dream-world and real-world dissolved, reintroducing the excesses of vision, perception, and experience that mark so much of the play. The young lovers soon joined suit, stumbling away from their roles in the court and repeating fragments of lines from the forest: ‘O hell!’, Hermia murmured (3.2.145), while Helena frantically cried, ‘Mine own, and not mine own’ (4.1.191). Most unsettling of all, Demetrius circled the stage, calling out, ‘Are you sure / That we are awake?’ (4.1.191–2), before eventually falling into the mud and directing his question to the audience members themselves. What is this world we are all a part of, he seemed to be asking, and how do our own sensations, feelings, and thoughts come together to coax it into being? For some critics, ‘a sense of horror and confusion fill[ed] the auditorium’ during this unexpectedly chaotic final sequence, giving the production a ‘persuasively nightmarish’ feel.52 But in this frenzied search for truth across different realms of existence, a more optimistic and rousing interpretation also came into view. Within a mud-soaked, double-dealing world, extraordinary visions, emotions, and knowledge might be possible for those willing to get their hands dirty – in this case literally. And while a more singular, stable, and pristine reality might prove illusive, perhaps this was no bad thing. The production’s final image seemed to suggest as much: as Puck delivered his epilogue to the audience, the company gathered at the back, stretching their hands up to touch the uppermost fringes of unblemished mirror that remained.

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Amidst the dirt and confusion, a desire for more knowledge, feeling, sensation, imagination – in a word, experience – persisted. After the curtain call, as the house lights gently rose, audience faces could again be seen in this thin strip of shiny mirror, producing an image that suggested that they too were players in this inescapable theatre of perception, emotion, and self-creation. In Hill-Gibbins’s Dream, as in all of the productions discussed in this essay, sensation played a central role in fuelling the dramatic experience. Such a statement may not seem particularly novel in the context of the long history of early modern drama in performance, which as this collection clearly demonstrates has always invoked the senses in rich and provocative ways. What is arguably new in a postdramatically inspired landscape, however, is a growing willingness across mainstream, Anglophone theatres to foreground sensuous spectacle as much as – and from some perspectives, even more than – the classical, Shakespearean text. While for some this might suggest a loss of ‘trust’ in the text, for others it very often reflects a thoughtful, rigorous, and in the most outstanding cases even visionary pursuit of new ways into it.53 In this sense, the ‘postdramatic’ quality of the wide-ranging productions discussed in this essay is not so much a movement away from language, story, or character, but rather a purposeful attempt to push deeper into them. Of course, these sensory-rich moments of performance won’t produce the same effects in every audience member, and what for some might seem a profound insight into Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ works might strike others as distracting, misguided, or even banal. But everyone has their trigger, and when the right production pulls it, sensation, emotion, and thought fire all at once. In such moments, we spectators find ourselves truly ‘in our senses’, making meaning with every faculty that we possess.

Notes 1

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare’s Plays 1765 (Menston: Scolar Press

2

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (1999;

Facsimile, 1969), xxvii. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 16.

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3

Jean-François Lyotard quoted in ibid., 37.

4

David Howes (ed.), ‘Introduction: Empires of the Senses’, in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 4.

5

Marvin Carlson, ‘Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance’, Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença 5, no. 3 (2015): 579.

6

Quoted in Dalya Alberge, ‘David Hare: Classic British Drama is “Being Infected” by Radical European Staging’, The Guardian, 29 January 2017. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jan/29/david-hare-classic-britishdrama-infected-radical-european-staging (accessed 24 November 2017).

7

Matt Trueman, ‘Is Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies the Most Significant Piece of Theatre in Britain in a Decade?’, WhatsOnStage, 23 March 2017. Available online: http://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/roman-tragedies-ivo-vanhove-barbican-significance_43186.html (accessed 24 November 2017).

8

I’m grateful to several colleagues working in theatre and academia for sharing photos, recordings, and personal memories of the productions discussed in this essay, as well as their own keen insights into sensation and performance. They include Christine Achampong of the Young Vic, Victoria Lane of the Globe, Geraint Lewis of Geraint Lewis Photography & Design, Michelle ­Morton of the RSC, Johan Reyniers of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Ewan Fernie, Brett GreatleyHirsch, Sandy Grierson, Sarah Olive, Will Sharpe, Simon Smith, Yu Umemiya, and Adam Zucker. Thanks are also due to seminar audiences at the University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and the Shakespeare Institute, who offered invaluable feedback on early versions of this chapter. Finally, thank you to the University of Birmingham-Royal Shakespeare Company collaboration, which provided generous funding for several photographs.

9

Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), xv; Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.

10 Gabriel Egan, ‘Hearing or Seeing a Play?: Evidence of Early Modern Theatrical Terminology’, Ben Jonson Journal 8, no. 1 (2001): 327–47. 11 Douglas M. Lanier, ‘Post-Textual Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey, 64 (2011): 145–62. 12 ‘Yukio Ninagawa, Theatre Director – Obituary’, Telegraph, 26 May 2016. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/05/26/yukio-ninagawatheatre-director–obituary/ (accessed 24 November 2017); Michael Billington,

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‘The State of Shakespeare’, Annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, 21 April 2017; ­Ninagawa quoted in Benjamin Secher, ‘Death, Mutilation – And Not a Drop of Blood’, Telegraph, 10 June 2006. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3653023/ Death-mutilation-and-not-a-drop-of-blood.html (accessed 24 November 2017). 13 Alexa Alice Joubin, ‘Yukio Ninagawa’, in Brook, Hall, Ninagawa, Lepage: Great Shakespeareans, vol. 18, ed. Peter Holland (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 95. 14 Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 2009), 276. 15 Christian M. Billing, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: Review of Titus Andronicus (Directed by Yukio Ninagawa)’, Shakespeare 3, no. 2 (2007): 205. 16 Ibid., 206. 17 Miriam Gilbert, ‘Hearing with Eyes: Watching Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin 25, no. 4 (2007): 35–45. 18 Alastair Macaulay, ‘Titus Andronicus – Royal Shakespeare Theatre StratfordUpon-Avon’, Financial Times, 23 June 2006. Available online: http://www.ft.com/ cms/s/0/eb483230-0253-11db-a141-0000779e2340.html?ft_site=falcon&desktop =true#axzz4pfCoc6EX (accessed 24 November 2017). 19 Bill Barclay and David Lindley (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, Music, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4–6. 20 Macaulay, ‘Titus Andronicus’. 21 Annabel J. Cohen, ‘How Does Music Evoke Emotions?’, in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 879; Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. 22 Ibid., 1–2, 5. 23 Mark Brown, ‘Jude Law Returns to London Stage in Ivo van Hove’s Obsession’, The Guardian, 10 May 2016. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2016/may/10/jude-law-returns-london-stage-barbican-ivo-van-hoveobsession-play-theatre (accessed 24 November 2017). 24 David Nice, ‘Kings of War, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Barbican’, The Arts Desk, 26 April 2016. Available online: h ­ ttp://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/kingswar-toneelgroep-amsterdam-barbican (accessed 24 November 2017). 25 Simon Reynolds, Rip It up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), 112. 26 Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures [Vinyl] (Factory Records, 1979).

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27 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 28 John S. Allen, The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 149–85. 29 Rosemary Waugh, ‘Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe’, Exeunt Magazine, 6 May 2016. Available online: http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/ review-a-midsummer-nights-dream-at-the-globe/ (accessed 24 November 2017). 30 Adam Zucker, tweet on 4 August 2016. Available online: https://twitter.com/ AdamLZucker/status/761327801228197888 (accessed 24 November 2017). 31 Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 75. 32 Holly Maples, ‘The Erotic Voyeur: Sensorial Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016): 127. 33 Erik Piepenburg, ‘Stage is Set. Ready for Your Part?’, The New York Times, 16 March 2011. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/ theater/sleep-no-more-from-punchdrunk-transforms-chelsea-warehouses.html (accessed 24 November 2017). 34 Anonymous, ‘Do You Know the Scent They Use in the McKittrick?’, At the Pit of Acheron [blog], 28 December 2014. Available online: h ­ ttp://at-the-pit-ofacheron.tumblr.com/post/106422261112/do-you-know-the-scent-they-use-inthe-mckittrick (accessed 24 November 2017). 35 Ibid.; Miss Formosa, ‘I Know Everyone Will Know What I Am Referring To’, The Chad Chronicles [blog], 24 February 2014. Available online: http:// chadchronicles.tumblr.com/post/77726759545/i-know-everyone-will-knowwhat-i-am-referring-to (accessed 24 November 2017). 36 Thomas Cartelli, ‘Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Masks, Unmaskings, One-onOnes’, Borrowers and Lenders 7, no. 2 (2013): 3. 37 The Four Seasons, ‘Beggin’’ [Vinyl] (Philips, 1967). 38 Will Sharpe, ‘King John’, in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-Living the World Shakespeare Festival, ed. Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott, and Erin Sulivan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 104. 39 Laura Grace Godwin, ‘“There is Nothin’ Like a Dame”: Christopher Marlowe’s Helen of Troy at the Royal Shakespeare Company’, Shakespeare Bulletin 27, no. 1 (2009): 69; my emphasis. 40 Croot was in fact seventeen years old when she played Helen, but her costume and the scene made her appear considerably younger. The production was also notable for casting a pair of actors to play both Faustus and

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Mephistopheles: who would play which role each night was decided by the strike of a match at the start of the show. 41 References are to Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (London: A&C Black, 2003). 42 Holger Syme, ‘Doctor Faustus (Marlowe; Dir. Maria Aberg)’, Dispositio [blog], 7 August 2016. Available online: http://www.dispositio.net/archives/2302 (accessed 24 November 2017). 43 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 9. 44 Aristotle, ‘De Anima’, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 403b.19–20; Wright, Passions, 8. 45 The Arden editor, among others, emends the line to ‘heed these tears’, but the 1609 quarto presents it as ‘heare’. 46 Benedictus de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. Edwin Curley, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985–2016), 1:539. 47 Karen Jürs-Munby’s introduction to Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 4. 48 Antonin Artaud, Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, trans. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1956), 166. 49 Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The Secret History of Emotions’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 March 2017. Available online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/ The-Secret-History-of-Emotions/239357 (accessed 24 November 2017). See also Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (London: Macmillan, 2017). 50 Michael Billington, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream Review – Forget Romance, This is a Raging Nightmare’, The Guardian, 24 February 2017. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/feb/24/a-midsummer-nights-dreamreview-young-vic-london (accessed 24 November 2017). 51 Matt Trueman, ‘Joe Hill-Gibbins: “Theatre Can Be Incredibly Real – It’s Dangerous”’, The Guardian, 25 January 2017. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2017/jan/25/joe-hill-gibbins-midsummer-nights-dreamyoung-vic-interview (accessed 24 November 2017). 52 Nastazja Domaradzka, ‘Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Young Vic’, London Box Office, 5 March 2017. Available online: h ­ ttps://www.londonboxoffice. co.uk/news/post/review-young-vic-midsummer (accessed 24 November 2017); Billington, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream Review’. 53 Chris Crowcroft, ‘Trust Shakespeare’s Text and Actors’ Delivery’, Letters to the Editor, Financial Times, 4 November 2016. Available online: https://www.ft.com/ content/d66e1462-9f99-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2 (accessed 24 November 2017).

14

Parted eyes and generation gaps in twenty-first-century perceptions of screen Shakespeare Diana E. Henderson

Setting the screen Shakespeare, the senses, and screens: thank goodness for the plural. Because the screen isn’t what it used to be, and for many teacher-scholars speaking to those born digital – and increasingly themselves born digital – that makes all the difference. When I was working on Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006), most people assumed the title referred to films, or videotaped versions of such ‘big screen’ Shakespeare; some expected supplementary attention to productions designed for the ‘small screen’, television. Their assumptions were both apt and accurate, although even then the implications of newer viewing technologies and practices were beginning to reshape the questions asked. Most particularly, some scholars were then wondering how DVDs (like VCRs and, briefly, laserdiscs before them) were, or in their views should have been, transforming medium-specific methodologies and disciplinary boundaries. Granted, even then ‘home theaters’ as well as televised film reruns had for decades made differences of screen size and the originary medium less salient, and digital cameras and CGI (computergenerated imagery) were fast supplanting the use of traditional film stock; yet scholarly vocabularies still derived primarily from the longer history of film studies, supplemented by the more recent emergence of cultural studiesinflected televisual analyses and a growing interest in comparing media across

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time (diachronically) and within historical moments (synchronically). Nor was that emphasis on film as a framework merely a residual holdover: by far the richest of screen technologies in terms of its theorization and history, those ‘moving pictures’ launched at the turn of the last century had – and continue to have – earned their lasting place in shaping cultures, framing both beliefs and sensory perceptions. But the scene has also shifted … and continues to shift at lightning speed. Shakespeare scholars in universities now live and write in double-time, simultaneously reacting to the daily barrage of news and change, while aspiring to publish in academic forms that take years to reach their audiences. Now the screens ubiquitous in this readership’s lives are the digitized ones of computers, whether handheld, in laps, or perched on desktops and tables. What we perceive as screen Shakespeare there embraces not only films and television but databases and online modules, social media exchanges, vlogs and blogs, theatre websites, and – perhaps most transformational of all in the short term since 2006 – YouTube. In its wake, many of those thoughtful scholarly analyses focused on single delivery systems (however recent those systems’ ascendency) became dated. Being dated, however, does not devalue their insights; it simply locates them within a more precise historical moment with its particular sensorium. There is enduring value, for instance, in W. B. Worthen’s recognition that DVD viewing better correlates with print culture, as a re-readable form of storage remote from the public experience of a stage performance, even as the ‘digital screen represents text as image, […] making no distinction between writing and performance as dataforms’.1 Moreover, his attending to the multiple functions of the computer, as tool and as technology, illuminates not only the fluctuating levels of perceived bodily agency involved for most users; it also bears upon the phenomenological complexity of newly emergent forms of streaming, during a decade that has greatly increased access to (and the blur between) present-tense ‘live’ stage performance and recorded documents in all senses. Datedness and the paradoxical shiftiness of screen technologies are not confined to works delivered from older media and the analyses thereof: the temporal speed-up and fluidity of what and how screen Shakespeare is represented now affects us all. Even groundbreaking studies of new screen platforms, such as Stephen O’Neill’s  monograph Shakespeare and YouTube,

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have quickly seen many of their links and examples either disappear or become superseded. Such is the digital ‘new normal’, in which a glut of Shakespearerelated material appears seemingly at will via your fingertips before your eyes – yet due to copyright, platform changes, new ownership, or new policies may just as swiftly disappear, becoming inaccessible or moving ‘off screen’, now and forever. (Lesson number one: hang on to your DVDs and DVD player/drive if you have them!) The paradoxical truth that Shakespeare’s works transcend time and place only through material instantiations that are destined to decay or disappear now has entered the consciousness of more than archivists, editors, and performance scholars alone. On the less ambiguously positive side, internet-based platforms and programs have unearthed a wealth of such fragile audio and video performances from the past and finally realized at scale the interactivity that new media theorists had long promised. These new technological affordances have further displaced academia’s traditional emphasis on a limited set of canonical works of screen Shakespeare, broadcast or projected, and redirected attention away from artistic expertise primarily (a path already being encouraged by cultural studies in the broadest sense).2 Digital screens have thus also reinforced a broader shift away from language-based fidelity within the Anglophone world, in a sense helping it catch up with the experiential, transformative emphases that have long made Shakespeare popular fodder (especially) for more experimental Asian and European performance adapters. Allowing Shakespeare’s twenty-first-century collaborators greater freedom accords greater attention to multisensory present-tense expression, both onstage and among audience members. Now we can all be the ‘makers’ of Shakespeare on screen – even if, paradoxically, we remain no less ‘dedicated followers of fashion’ than were most theatregoers when the playwright’s Henry V first sought to distinguish Princess Katherine and himself as the ‘makers of manners’, exempting only themselves from the conventions that constrained the mass of humanity.3 As scholars of the vast wealth of non-Shakespearean drama remind us, fixing our eyes on one playwright’s corpus, however diverse its reimagining, replicates a dominant cultural inheritance, blinding us to other artistic options. Such ironic tensions of fantasized individual agency encountering sociopolitical subjection persist. Furthermore, for all the delight and utopianism in much new media advocacy, the frequently demonized Frankfurt School critique of ‘popular’

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mass media itself, articulated polemically by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, still contains some harsh truths about large-scale sensory manipulation worthy of twenty-first-century consideration.4 In the context of sense perception per se as we watch our screens (incessantly), even more pressing might be Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological meditation on the ‘uninhibited hustle’ (or, in my experiential reformulation, ‘unmitigated bustle’) of work that conspires to prevent an experience of sustained or self-aware attention.5 Yet the societal pressures that Heidegger attempted to bracket return with a vengeance in Gilles Deleuze’s two philosophical inquiries into the ‘movement-image’ of classical (pre-Second World War) cinema and the ‘time-image’ of post-war cinema (in which the crossover figure of auteur/ Shakespearean Orson Welles plays a key role).6 Deleuze historicizes a larger cultural shift away from the premise that individuated human agency could meaningfully affect the world to a disoriented witnessing of ineffectuality, identifying its consequences both within the filmed representation of human relations and in the formal deployment of the filmic apparatus, in editing and shot composition. His insights are most immediately applicable to, for example, Jean-Luc Godard’s notoriously difficult (at least for those less immersed in film studies) King Lear (1987), but might also enrich the interpretation of Julie Taymor’s Fellini-esque spectacle in Titus (1999) and even her Tempest (2010). We return to the aforementioned twentieth-century classic texts of philosophy and cultural theory, whether they emphasize creativity or ideological critique, for good reasons – just as we return to Shakespeare’s plays themselves. Also like the plays, the significance of such works defies swift encapsulation here; they are recommended for the reader’s deeper study and the next generation’s thoughtful incorporation into sensory understanding of Shakespeare from a ‘born digital’ perspective. Cinema in its heyday induced productive anxiety among several generations of theatrical practitioners regarding the cultural value of ‘liveness’ (even though, in film’s contrast with the stage’s evanescence, it thereby became the quintessential screen medium for memento mori). Now computer screens blur present and past both simultaneously and sequentially, as well as fragmenting narrative and eliding other forms of distinction much more thoroughly than did film, creating a new world of ephemerality. How do the first generations of those for whom this digital mediascape is a given of their daily lived experience sense Shakespeare on (and off) various screens, differently?

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Setting the word against the word To provide a longer historical context than can film studies, as we experience what some see as the latter days of print culture, let us return to the word ‘screen’ itself – and immediately acknowledge that its dizzying array of meanings makes it only a slightly less daunting starting point than is the shifting media ecology gestured at above. Because even if we omit some specialized uses (in, for instance, mining, meteorology, and the military), the word’s history points to its dynamic, metaphorical diversity. Etymologically linked with the Anglo-Norman and Old French words for a fire screen, its first English usage similarly describes a movable panel to reduce the heat’s intensity or to prevent draughts. This sensory origin expanded to other forms of protection, concealment, or obstruction – perhaps with Shakespeare’s assistance, as the OED cites his as the first source for two of its figurative uses. Whether or not these are in fact originary, or simply signs of the playwright’s massive postEnlightenment influence, each is certainly suggestive of conceptual complexity. Once Birnham Wood nears Dunsinane, Malcolm tells his camouflaged troops: ‘Now, near enough: your leavy screens throw down, / And show like those you are’ (Mac 5.6.1–2). While Malcolm only realizes the protective use those ‘leavy screens’ have served, they have obstructed more than Macbeth’s ability to count the enemy’s numbers: they have become the means to shake the tyrant’s false faith and consequent fearlessness … a far more devastating ‘discovery’ than the materially minded Malcolm can imagine (5.4.6). Similar ironies surround the narrated perspective of villainous Antonio in The Tempest. Prospero tells Miranda how his brother, ‘To have no screen between this part he played / And him he played it for,’ became ‘Absolute Milan’ (1.2.107–9). But of course, in Prospero’s very ability to survive and recount that narrative, he reveals the doubleness which will thwart fraternal duplicity and Antonio’s claim to ‘absolute’ sovereignty. The difficulty of recognizing when concealment harms or helps becomes a central thematic paradox within Shakespeare’s drama, even as the need to maintain some ‘screen between this part he played’ and an actor’s own identity remains the duplicitous premise of all such fictional performance. Only with the OED’s twenty-first specified meaning of ‘screen’ do modern visual technologies appear, as a ‘patterned filter which is combined with a photographic plate or film during exposure or printing’ to create special effects;

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that usage has been extended, and now most often describes ‘a software feature used to modify a digital image to achieve a similar effect’. A word that began by describing a means to protect or block sensation becomes (like a screen door) permeable, simultaneously filtering out and filtering through. And as such it provides a resonant metaphor for what modern screen Shakespeares in fact do – in what they can and cannot convey of past performance conditions and the media in which each version has been created, and in the sensory effects their two-dimensional visual representations, combined with time’s multilayered fourth dimension, transmit. Finally, with the OED’s fifth major category and twenty-fourth specified definition of ‘screen’, the dominant twentieth-century usage in Shakespeare studies at last makes its direct entrance: ‘a surface on which to project or display something’, such as ‘a large, blank vertical surface on which films, slides, etc., are projecting’ and the ‘apparatus chiefly comprising such a surface’. The subsequent metonymic enlargement of that use to ‘film or television as a medium, genre, or industry’ derives from the early years of the US movie business. So does the introduction of colours (silver, to which we must now add the computer’s blue and green), and a plethora of prepositions, modifiers, and compounds. From the television era comes ‘a panel of glass, plastic, or similar material, which forms part of an electronic device such as a television, computer, or mobile phone, and which displays images or text’ and the consequent use of screen for each such temporally distinguished display (still conventionally described as a web ‘page’). The mid-twentieth century also saw the expansion of metaphorical associations for screens, with pictures one looks at, versus windows one looks through, as well as surfaces on which figures and stories dance. The predominance here of the visual befits what was then uniquely new as a sensory experience for its viewers – the bringing of distant events and performances before them from across a nation or even from dispersed areas of the earth. Given Shakespeare’s performance form and his drama’s recurrent value in legitimating early instantiations of nearly every new medium, it is unsurprising that early films were often called ‘screen plays’ prior to the development of the separate term (and OED entry) ‘screenplay’. If the screenplay is spoken of as if it were a playscript, however, then we elide the technological and sensory differences that these many definitions have revealed; despite aspects shared

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by drama, film, and television as temporally sequenced narrative performance arts, they obviously vary in the proximity of audiences to performers, in the proportions of visual and spoken stimuli, in scale, depth perception, kinetic variation, types of extra-diegetic sound, and so forth. Even more pronounced are the differences with consumption via computer screen; when the same word ‘screen’ is used for computer hardware and a single webpage, we further elide distinct temporalities. Nonetheless, by placing these most recent complications in historical context, they may serve as reminders of the spatiotemporal fractures and sensory paradoxes always inherent in screen media, especially obvious when adapting works such as Shakespeare’s from another medium. It did not, after all, require a computer screen for artists to become aware of the way the combination of specific compositional pieces and moments underpinned the illusion of a stable ground upon which ‘content’ (in this instance, an imaginary world beyond the material screen) was projected. Indeed, when the ‘silver screen’ began as a purely visual medium (accompanied by separately produced music), one of its first major theorist-practitioners, Sergei Eisenstein, emphasized montage as a series of discrete shots, evoking an emotional response precisely by requiring the viewer to do the imaginative work of connecting them (akin to what, much later, Lacanian-influenced screen theorists would discuss as ‘suture’). Development of integrated sound and visual tracks in ‘talkies’, and the gradual movement towards a set of techniques designed to minimize attention to the screen surface and the viewer’s limited field of vision (one solution being epitomized in the now-standard shot/counter-shot reaction sequences for dialogue) worked to create a unified, representational mise-en-scène: film’s proper goal, in André Bazin’s vision, and certainly a dominant narrative convention that has informed most Anglo-American Shakespearean ­filmmaking during the past half-century. In most cases, this aesthetic extends Hamlet’s Ciceronian vision of art ‘hold[ing] as ’twere the mirror up to Nature’ (3.2.21–2) and substitutes a more nearly transparent window for reflective glass; this, despite widespread awareness that Shakespeare’s drama (including that scene within Hamlet) emphasizes its own metatheatricality in preference to interpretive clarity.7 Comparable self-consciousness and play with the artistic medium itself has become the provenance of certain experimental

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film-makers such as Godard, Peter Brook (King Lear,  1971), Derek Jarman (The Tempest, 1980), and Peter Greenaway (Prospero’s Books, 1991), associated with ‘art house’ rather than mainstream Western film-making. If one looks beyond Anglophone cinema, however, the assumptions differ, and long overdue attention to world cinema in academic Shakespeare studies is revealing on-screen spaces where the spectacle, music, and poetic imagery of the plays find fuller sensory expression. The need to transform the text linguistically and culturally in, for example, Asian adaptations has encouraged greater interpretive freedom and creative connections with local performance traditions. As Anglophone scholarship more extensively (if belatedly) re-views the history of Shakespeare on film in a global context, the range of what Deleuze calls ‘op[tical] signs’ and ‘son[ic]signs’ expands. So does awareness of the sheer abundance of screen treatments – leading Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti to argue that, although the  115 features in their filmography were ‘until very recently, virtually invisible except to a few aficionados’, that number ‘demonstrates that Indian cinemas contain the largest corpus of Shakespeare films in the world’.8 The multiplicity of approaches and sensory experiences thus embraced by ‘screen Shakespeare’ brings not only greater complexity but also new energy, alongside the need for more nuanced claims rather than formal generalizations. With this longer and broader history in mind, we might view the computer screen as both moment and medium a bit differently. There, one does indeed experience more Shakespeare in bits as well as bytes, as contrasted with witnessing a full-length linear narrative construction created by (among others, in normative twenty-first-century film-making) a screenwriter, director, designer, cinematographer, editor, cast, and crew. Yet in making links and gifs, watching clips and responding to others’ posts, the ‘user’ arguably has a closer sensory affiliation with the early film-makers who self-consciously constructed their montage and temporal pacing to elicit affect, rather than striving simply to reproduce as transparently as possible a given story. At these moments of technological emergence, both the makers and the consumers appear hyperconscious of the sensory possibilities of the new medium. As such, these new ‘audience’ practices suggest a connection back in time, or even back to the future, especially for students and other members of the public who have not grown up with any particular interest in Shakespeare or his history – on- or off-screen. How might scholars and teachers now build

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on those user experiences to encourage more sustained attention to and engagement with works that, at first glance, seem unalterably distant in time, place, and medium? Perhaps turning back to another ‘dated’ instance of screen Shakespeare can provide some cues.

The serial star turn as case study The name is Hotspur … Harry Hotspur.9 The actor is thirty-year-old Sean Connery, two years before filming his first James Bond movie, Dr. No (and almost forty years before he was named the twentieth century’s sexiest man by People magazine’s voters). Celebrity and televisual serialization – two familiar referents for contemporary viewers – provide a fruitful route back to earlier styles of acting and oratory, different uses of a screen medium, and the foreignness of the world of Shakespeare’s English histories themselves – without denying or diminishing the alien quality of any of these. And, with the 2009 DVD release of the 1960 black-and-white BBC television series An Age of Kings, the captivating representation of and by Connery affords just such an opportunity to consider the paradoxes of screens and their layered temporalities. In one sense, this series is very ‘traditional’ in adhering to Shakespeare’s texts; in another, it forcefully remediates them to fit television conventions. Within those frames, conceptual director and producer Peter Dews, director Michael Hayes, and the rest of the production team clearly recognized Connery’s charisma, and how shot selection could both magnify its potential and suture the temporal gaps of serialization in a ‘pre-bingewatching’ era. Even before the two episodes remediating  1 Henry IV, his Henry Percy assumes more than the bit part Shakespeare granted him in Richard II. Having redistributed the eight plays based on fifteenth-century English history into (quite) approximately sixty-minute segments for fifteen alternate-week UK broadcasts from April to November as well as subsequent overseas screenings, the makers of An Age of Kings chose to open the second programme, ‘The Deposing of a King’, with the scene in which Percy (‘Harry’ Hotspur) first appears: he turns forward to reveal his face to the viewer’s eye at his crucial line that ‘King Richard lies / Within’ Flint Castle.10 Connery is not only visible

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among those closest to Bolingbroke when Richard subsequently submits, but his brief report to the king describing Prince Hal’s mockery of a triumphal joust is also moved from prefacing the farcical York family feud in Act 5, Scene 3 to instead open the drama’s climactic final scene (5.6; timecode 52:05–53:00, capturing R2  5.3.1–9, 13–22). Similarly anticipating the conflicts to follow, Hotspur lingers with his father Northumberland after the new King Henry IV utters the final lines of the play. In an added sequence to ‘hook’ the viewers for the next episode (55:56–56:25), Northumberland first re-offers his ‘paper’ with his accomplishments (R2 5.6.10) to King Henry for his closer attention, unsuccessfully; then, after all the rest except Hotspur exit, the elder Percy stabs that parchment with his knife into the king’s wooden council table, creating the episode’s (and thus the represented play’s new and disturbing) last image, as well as a segue to the coming instalment. When Connery reappears in that subsequent episode entitled ‘Rebellion from the North’ (televisualizing the earlier acts of  1 Henry IV), he again assumes an even more dominant role than the playtext might imply: a shot-byshot analysis can help make the televisual dynamics more visible to textually focused Shakespeareans and can reveal something about ‘screen sense’ to all. The mise-en-scène for the correlate to  1 Henry IV’s Act  1, Scene  3 (18:46ff) recapitulates the setting of the king’s council chamber that concluded Richard II/‘The Deposing of a King’ and which opens this episode as well – but with a dramatic difference. This time the whole council begins in an uproar, with an exasperated Henry seated in medium long shot, slightly elevated, as the nobility flanking him on benches yell at one another across the table in front of him. Connery’s Hotspur no longer stands deferentially behind the king’s chair as in the prior episode but intrusively moves across the front of the frame in medium shot to the left foreground, where he turns away from the others and towards the camera (Figure 14.1). Amidst the noise, he remains silent. He does not need spoken words to dominate in small screen performance, where the camera so rigorously delimits sensory attention to the field of vision. Beyond performance as representation, the body as performance affects characterological sympathies and the story’s thematics. Connery/Hotspur’s ‘downstage’ presence and the more inclusive full shot, especially compared with the same episode’s opening scene, make King Henry appear remote. Moreover, against type, as the other counsellors quarrel animatedly Hotspur

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Figure 14.1  Hotspur (Sean Connery) at the council meeting, An Age of Kings (18:46ff), adapting 1 Henry IV, Act 1, Scene 3. © British Broadcasting Corporation, 1960; 2009.

stands controlled and aloof, closest to the camera, encouraging viewers to see him as a sensible interlocutor. The first cut to close-up focuses on his uncle Worcester when the latter objects to the king’s words, whereas the camera returns to full shot when Henry speaks, expelling Worcester. The only alteration in Hotspur’s stance here is that Connery turns his head to profile in order to observe, showing concern but no more. He thus remains the focal insider/outsider, fully under his own command. The next close-up goes to his father Northumberland speaking in defence of Hotspur’s refusal to turn over his Scottish prisoners on the battlefield (a refusal that extra-diegetical knowledge of Connery’s Scottish nationalism retrospectively makes all the more amusing). Consequently, although Henry IV may control the court, the camera prioritizes the embodied family of Northern rebels visually – an effect compounded when Hotspur finally does speak. The older generation having played set-up to his star turn, Connery delivers his first lines with assurance – ‘My liege, I did deny no prisoners. / But […]’ (1H4  1.3.29–30) – turning his back to the camera and then moving screen right and back alongside the table to confront, while still standing, the sitting Henry. Another cut at ‘Came there a certain lord’ shifts King Henry to profile at the lower left of shot (indeed, his beard is cropped by the frame; 1.3.33). This places Hotspur, clean-shaven in the Richard II episodes but now sporting

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a short beard that marks his increased maturity yet contrasts with the king’s rather comically pointed one in profile, standing face front in midshot for his first lengthy set-speech, dominant. The camera gradually zooms in to a solo close-up while he playfully parodies the ‘popinjay’ courtier who had demanded the prisoners on the battlefield, and then replays his own anger – which includes his first of several stammers at ‘w’ sounds (here, ‘wounds’, motivating his exclamation ‘God save the mark!’ immediately after; see 1H4 1.3.56). As Emma Smith notes, ‘the slight stammer Sean Connery gives to his speeches as Hotspur’ marks him among those ‘individuated’ characters (alongside Robert Hardy’s Prince Hal and Tom Fleming’s Bolingbroke) who do not double other parts in the series; she distinguishes them from the ‘serial’ and ‘status’ characters, regarding the ensemble ‘more significant to the texture of An Age of Kings as a serial’.11 While apt and timely given her goal of putting scholarly analysis of screen Shakespeare in closer contact with the perspectives recently dominant in television studies, Smith’s prioritization may underestimate the crucial interplay within such serials – and certainly within this representation of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy as series – between conventionalized types and star-making celebrity. The filming of Connery’s physical performance here well illustrates that dynamic. More specifically, the stammer helps elide the diegetic past and present, fictional representation and dramatic event, by conflating Hotspur’s frustrations with the courtier on the battlefield and with his own mouth as he speaks at Henry’s court. Furthermore, it establishes a tic that helps motivate his later deprecations of poetry and the (capital W) Welsh language, and finally, most powerfully, foreshadows the tragedy of his unfinished life. For he will die in battle at Shrewsbury without completing another ‘w’ word, one which his killer Prince Hal instead utters to complete (or usurp?) Hotspur’s thought: hotspur O, I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust, And food for –   [He dies.] prince For worms, brave Percy.

(1H4 5.4.82–6)

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So reads the text: in Connery’s performance, more accurately, ‘And food for w-w-w –,’ with all the more pathos in that struggle to speak before the rest is silence (‘The Road to Shrewsbury’ 1:01–1:02:10). Just as the stammer will enrich the character’s entire narrative arc,12 the camerawork within his initial scene in ‘Rebellion from the North’ likewise creates cohesion through its visual emphasis on Hotspur. It thus retraces his and its steps after his set-piece, moving back from close-up to midshot in juxtaposition with King Henry, before Connery finally resumes his route back to the foreground of the full council shot, with Hotspur now seated at the table’s front right but again facing the viewing audience rather than the other characters. Not only is his the physical action that frames that entire sequence but all three members of the Northumberland clan have been given close-up treatment before the king has a single such focusing shot, enacting in televisual sensory practice the series’ retitling of this half of 1 Henry IV as indeed ‘Rebellion from the North’. To describe shot by shot serves as a reminder of the multiple dimensions of screen Shakespeare, including the design, composition, and embodied performance, which shape and complement text and story. Even this attempt, focusing on a four-minute segment within a larger scene, cannot capture all its aspects of sensory interest, nor is this the place to extend such detailed attention to subsequent exchanges whose dynamics differ. Nevertheless, it can provide the basis for encouraging readers, and even avid screen consumers, to slow their movement to judge interpretations until they have done comparable analysis of these sensory phenomena – that is, made more visible the specific choices that have helped inspire (consciously or not) their affective and intellectual responses. Precisely because the technologies deployed and the viewing experience presumed in An Age of Kings are less transparent to students now than to older viewers reared in the heyday of broadcast, yet the representation is fairly conventional in its inclusion of Shakespeare’s words and narrative, this might be the perfect work and time to help us address those perceptual gaps and changes in artistic consumption.

Back to black (and white) Similarly, a few broader observations about this Hotspur may suggest alternative routes to help twenty-first-century viewers engage with the

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foreignness of its black-and-white era televisual representation, besides the closely analytical alone. With benefit of hindsight (knowing his screen persona in the Bond years to follow), it may not surprise that Connery’s major solo sequence from 1 Henry IV, Act 2, Scene 3, begins with him warmly reflected in firelight, wine goblet in hand, his white shirt open almost to the waist to reveal a hairy chest as he reads the letter from an unsatisfactory fellow conspirator (37:02ff). Nor is it shocking that the sequence culminates in a bit of comic romping and close-up kissing on the marital bed with Kate (Patricia Heneghan; 39:01ff), anticipating his amused amorousness with many a ‘Bond girl’.13 But the effect of that sensualized masculinity (easily reinforced as a choice through quick contrasts with, for example, Tim Pigott-Smith’s less charismatic Hotspur in the  1979 BBC/Time-Life televised version) goes beyond simply individuating his character or helping a star be born. It also contributes to the production’s wider sympathy with the younger generation in the face of their elders’ corruption, further linking Hal and Hotspur and making the play’s narrative movement towards a proto-Western showdown between them more poignant for country and characters alike. Having a strong Hotspur is both challenge and opportunity for the actor playing Prince Hal, as it is of course for the character: Robert Hardy’s Hal (similarly mixing moments of youthful frustration at his own lack of bodily self-control in his drinking scenes, alongside more thoughtful contemplation) was deemed by early audiences as holding his own against this mighty opposite … no mean feat. Amidst a backdrop of period costuming and oratorical formality, the two younger men’s embodiment of attractive vulnerability transports their characters into the familiar present, their intimacy encouraging audience identification across the (blurred) centuries between story and performance. Attending to these screen sensations (in all senses) helps illuminate the series’ contemporary impact and also accords with Shakespeare’s own historical alterations. Most obvious among the latter is the reduction of Harry Percy’s age to make him a foil not to Henry Bolingbroke but to his princely son,14 who throughout the play comments upon both his own and Hotspur’s narrative as if with access to the playwright’s design. When Hotspur is presented with sufficient intelligence and charisma, as in An Age of Kings, the threat he poses is one that demands calculation and prompts due fear: thus he helps deflect blame or a sense of undue entitlement away from Hal, who must truly earn his

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spurs. That neither younger man constructed the political conditions refocuses responsibility on the fathers and uncles who risk and betray the ‘honour’ the next generation attempts to uphold. Viewed thus, Shakespeare’s reimagining of a figure precisely 200 years his senior and recasting him within an immediately accessible political and emotional narrative may resonate in ways akin to, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s similar redeployment of 200-year-old state politics to create Hamilton – a drama likewise culminating in an unfortunate duel that impoverished the nation.15 In each instance, youthful energy plays a crucial role in reanimating the history. Yet more is involved in a twenty-first-century viewing of An Age of Kings than even bringing the dead to life or the past into the present. For of course the screen upon which the DVD is watched in our present is unlike the television sets upon which it premiered, and the young actors viewed there are now old or dead. Only when different historical moments become visible – that is, once ‘the past’ is not an amorphous, undifferentiated ‘time before’ and can instead be considered as a distinctive, varied series of presents available for artistic reshaping, can the black-and-white television era itself become an object of study in the reinterpretation of Shakespeare within alternative, rather than inferior, conditions. These conditions include domestic (family) group viewing of such small screens during the first full generation of their widespread commercial availability, when a single television ‘set’ was located in a den or living room of most middle-class households; watching without recourse to replay or bingeing, but instead with the incentive to (re)visit the playscripts during the intervening fortnight between broadcasts; the literal repetition of title images to remind and recapture that audience; the stylization encouraged by a single indoor studio set being adapted for eight different plays, as well as by the reduced colour scheme (in which smoke works particularly well as a masking special effect); and – to return to the Scottish actor, who does not repress his accent – a moment when ‘Rebellion from the North’ might nicely capture as well the Angry Young Man dramatic revolution helping to transform British performance arts and masculine selfrepresentation. Appearing only four years after the momentous 1956 Royal Court staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in ‘kitchen sink’ drama, and a mere two years after Tony Richardson’s film conveyed to a wider public that play’s working-class challenge to elite social codes and

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antiquated nationalism, An Age of Kings stands on the cusp of the wider cultural upheaval we now shorthand as ‘the ’60s’. Within this last context, the showdown at Shrewsbury’s casting almost too neatly lends itself to class allegorization: in a triumph of the old order, Robert Hardy, a headmaster’s son from Cheltenham16 who studied English at Oxford and performed opposite Laurence Olivier in the prior year’s Coriolanus at Stratford-upon-Avon, effectively puts down the Edinburgh-born workingclass self-made actor Connery. Nonetheless, and aligning them generationally, both men had seen some army service during the actual war of their lifetimes, with Hardy’s education interrupted and his acting career delayed until his thirties (he is a boyish thirty-five in this first starring role). This was also a moment when some inherited theatrical distinctions were being challenged by the young: that same Stratford Coriolanus starring Olivier was directed by  28-year-old Peter Hall, who had already premiered Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the UK and was, alongside Peter Brook and actors such as Hardy’s Oxford friend Richard Burton, bringing contemporary acting techniques to bear upon Shakespeare performance.17 Olivier’s leading role as Coriolanus was understudied (and eventually performed) by Salford-born Albert Finney, one of the quintessential British New Wave film actors as well as one of the best classical performers of his generation; Hall’s founding of the then forwardlooking RSC was taking place as this television serial was being aired. An Age of Kings was itself part of the new popularization of televised Shakespeare, not only in the UK but internationally.18 Its subtitle ‘A cycle of the history plays of William Shakespeare’ (my emphasis) anticipated the repeated return on the television screen to this English subset as paradigmatic and unified, whether in the more existentially fraught mid-1960s The Wars of the Roses series directed by John Barton and Peter Hall or the more celebratory 1979–85 BBC/Time-Life Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare and 2012/16 Hollow Crown versions.19 It has been left to the experimental film-makers Welles (in Falstaff/Chimes at Midnight) and Gus Van Sant (in My Own Private Idaho, with its tribute to Welles’s famous tracking-shot cinematography) to resist the move towards such containment and closure. But then again, the hints of Shakespeare the remixer rather than the monument were also there to be modelled in An Age of Kings, from its textual cuts and resequencing to its serial form, repertory recastings, and added teasers. Perhaps most usefully

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of all in an era when realist assumptions seem capable of being transcended in Hollywood-produced film and video only through overt fantasy or comic book exaggeration, this televised series’ sensory differences can (like the work of those more experimental film-makers) challenge and, one hopes, expand the range of aesthetic possibility available to first-time viewers in the twentyfirst century. Much of its televisual and cultural context requires study to retrieve, however, as a new century marches on, even though those years and performances remain in the living memory of some elders among us (an incentive – lesson two! – for those pursuing performance history to seize the day in collecting oral histories). The chasm between what matters to a general audience and for historians of screen Shakespeare remains profound: although Hardy and Connery ‘star’ on the front and back illustrations of the Age of Kings DVD box set, Connery’s own website reveals no trace of his Hotspur, choosing to include only film credits.20 Such an erasure of domestic screens from the heyday of broadcast television consumption in at least this one major celebrity’s selfrepresentation hints at the continuing need for scholarly supplements – as well as more open-access digital archives. For audiences other than Shakespeare insiders and that dwindling number of its original fans, An Age of Kings’ most influential legacy (beyond the careers of the participants themselves) may still be the manic parody it spawned that same summer, in a revue show that rode the tide from Edinburgh’s Fringe to London, Broadway, and recorded posterity: Beyond the Fringe’s ‘So That’s the Way You Like It’. Mixing pitch-perfect mockery of Shakespeare’s more confusing and artificial moments (the naming of lords and territories; a dying lord’s self-reporting that ‘Now is steel ’twixt gut and bladder interposed’) with delightfully cheap howlers (‘O, saucy Worcester’), the cast album extended its aural influence well past the 1960s. But here is an instance where digital screens allow recovery of visual jokes as well, via a YouTube posting of their final West End performance as remediated by the BBC.21 Only by viewing that did I realize how directly they were spoofing An Age of King’s heavy use of smoke machines to create the illusion of exterior battle scenes. That fog in turn suggests the ongoing challenges of deciding where the boundaries of Shakespeare, screens, and senses begin and end. Certainly the waves ripple through the routine’s repetition across media and its four creators’ subsequent

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careers – but the list stretches beyond that overt, direct impact on Jonathan Miller as a major Shakespeare director on stage and screen (as well as overseer of three seasons of the BBC/Time-Life Complete Dramatic Works series); Alan Bennett as a writer of plays, film, and television; and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s influence on Monty Python’s blend of literary allusion with sketch madness. Indeed, the number of scholars who are able to quote lines from these sorts of high/low parodies as part of their ‘literary education’ inclines me to think that we underestimate at our peril the role of sheer sensory pleasure, wit, and their sillier forms of community-building in sustaining Shakespeare studies.22 A study of Shakespeare on screen can no longer aspire to ‘coverage’ even of a single play (or indeed scene) but, as these reverberations of An Age of Kings suggest, it can provide a springboard to reconsider Shakespeare within the wider artistic landscape at any particular historical moment. It is without doubt a field for sampling and remixing, revealing new shapes and addressing contemporary convergences – in which, perhaps now more than ever, embodied celebrity and mass-media serialization play their part. Who knows: perhaps the next routes back to recovering more and different perspectives on black-and-white screen Shakespeare, the stage career of Olivier, or the role of the longbow in the Wars of the Roses will come via a student who discovered the commonality among these topics via the actor Robert Hardy, whom they first encountered not as Prince Hal but rather as Cornelius Fudge, in another (film) series starring an heroic Harry?

The (other) digital divides In these decades of fast-changing screen transformations, how we sense – or at least, how we watch – does indeed seem more age-dependent, accessdependent, and fluid than ever. When Greenaway’s multimedia Prospero’s Books was released in  1991, it was regarded as the absolute avant-garde of Shakespearean film-making, using digital image manipulation to enhance animations and bring a Renaissance catalogue of books to life; now, my non-specialist students born after its release consider its digital effects primitive, even laughable. At the same time, many viewers remain

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as resistant to non-realist techniques as were the film’s first ‘traditional’ castigators, who were alienated by the artificial juxtaposition of nude bodies and exaggerated costumes, Michael Nyman’s score, and the projection of John Gielgud’s voice onto all the characters for The Tempest’s first four acts (until Ariel’s empathy with those suffering humans leads Prospero to ‘free’ all their voices). All told, what alienates versus what resonates shifts swiftly, and of course affects different audience members variously. Such variety ranges geographically, given the different cultural places of Shakespeare in national histories and performance traditions. As translation studies has increased awareness of the shaping role of textual variation in how the works are received and interpreted, so have screen collaborators worldwide made the non-verbal dimensions of narrative and spectacle more obvious and permeable, often filtering out English assumptions and letting local values shine through – as they have since the first days of silent film. More recently, the multiple reconceptions of Shakespeare’s tragedies by Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kosintsev, and Vishal Bhardwaj have both diversified the set of films commonly taught and also encouraged twenty-first-century feature filmgoers across the globe to consider plot, character, thought, music, and spectacle above diction (to use Aristotle’s still-influential categorization of tragedy’s component parts). Even in Anglophone cultures, many more people now encounter Shakespeare’s drama as multimedial rather than as writing. As screens have grown to dominate how Shakespeare’s plays are conveyed around the world, so too have they appeared with increasing frequency on the theatrical stage itself. Seven years after co-writing the screenplay and appearing in Godard’s film Lear, director Peter Sellars was among the early experimenters using closed circuit television in his  1994 The Merchant of Venice at Chicago’s Goodman Theater; five monitors were on stage, four more among the audience. In one sense, the two-dimensional screen allows a more radical disruption to the conventions of proscenium stage acting than has the trend towards thrust stages or theatre-in-the-round, which produces brief moments of audience disorientation through blocked sightlines (analogous with Connery’s initial back-to-the-camera delivery in ‘Rebellion from the North’), but generally aspires to more immersive, dynamic engagement of the audience with the narrative and performance. By contrast, the sustained use of video cameras onstage tends to fracture the fiction of unified and transparent

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perception, instead foregrounding the differences among viewpoints – the characters’ versus the audiences’, what appears at which angles on the screen and on the stage, and how these shape disparate interpretations of the live ‘event’. Certainly this was the effect when Sellars had the Duke’s face visible within the climactic trial scene only via the video feed and had Paul Butler deliver Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech to the camera of two television ‘interviewers’. But whether the ultimate goal of using these screen techniques was to obstruct judgement or to reveal a more fractured society needing to be addressed (or at distinct moments, both) remains harder to determine. For how these effects worked upon their theatrical audiences phenomenologically is virtually impossible to recapture on-screen, as a YouTube version of the latter passage illustrates: there, the feed shifts to the close-up visible on the video camera as close-up, thus undoing the always doubled, distancing effect on the stage.23 The remnant now viewable on the computer screen is a new kind of hybrid performance, one that more closely resembles the high-end filmed-for-broadcast genre of recent Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre Live productions – which most screen viewers have seen neither live nor as any theatregoer could have experienced.24 Not only for those accustomed to theatregoing in all its immediacy can the screens become an obstruction; they can also aggravate (or uncomfortably reveal the unavoidable?) critical confusion about what sensory experiences different viewers are presuming. Sellars’s production met with decidedly mixed reviews, generating controversy both for its use of screens and its casting – another reminder of how swiftly artistic conventions have changed. The house dramaturge at the Goodman attributed the director’s then-unusual decisions to his hope of making a film subsequently (yet one more screen) on location in Venice Beach, California, where he lived; this factored as well into the thematized diversity in casting, including an African American Shylock, East Asian American Portia, and Latino American Bassanio.25 The cinematic plan did not come to pass – although some of its thematics soon after appeared within the hyper-energized aesthetic frame of Baz Luhrmann’s exceptionally successful (in box-office terms for the Shakespearean film subgenre) William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). But whether or not that prospect of a film prompted Sellars’s choices, he was certainly not alone in perceiving the theatrical potential of

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screens within the increasingly hypermediated  1990s, building on avantgarde film and video performance art while confronting the consequences of broadcast and video capture alongside the new possibilities of hypertextual linking and the internet. It took a bit longer for most Shakespeare companies to catch up. In subsequent decades, the use of cameras has often been thematized (almost to the point of cliché in the case of Hamlet’s surveillance state) and discussed extensively, particularly as it reorients public and private space in some of the productions by Cheek by Jowl and Ivo van Hove.26 But within this dynamic decade, whether screens in theatre serve more as shield, obstruction, or permeable medium remains a topic for debate – among directors, actors, and audience members (not) alike. Two influential ‘classics’ of superimposed performances that go beyond video capture alone still provide resonant precedents for thinking about liveness and originality, what is dated and what that means: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, the latter performed in tandem with the fragmentary video remains of Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway stage performance directed by John Gielgud. Much has been said about their radical experimentation offsetting the nostalgic legacies of Hamlet and its stage performances, and each also wrestles with the ghostly nature of representation itself. Ironically, they now can also provide continuities as we consider not only televisions but new uses of computer projections, holograms (or pseudo-holograms), and green-screen technologies in twenty-first-century theatre – including a recent recircling around that focal tragedy – for once again establishing our sense of Shakespeare him- and itself.

A small case study: The screen goes green Beginning in  2017, a small boy dominated a short play about the most oversized, overdetermined text in history: the name of the character and play was Hamnet. From the play’s inevitable first line (‘Who’s there?’) to his last, Hamnet struggles with what’s in a single letter as well as a name,27 and what makes a ‘great man’. He is both caught in time at the age when the historical Shakespeare’s son died (eleven) and dressed in contemporary clothes, running Google searches and singing Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’. The one

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theatrical constant as he wrestles with his condition is a screen, functioning in several of the definitional senses cited earlier: sometimes mirroring the audience, sometimes a window through which we see a projection of his famous father, and sometimes a barrier against which he repeatedly throws a ball. Deploying not only closed circuit cameras but green-screen (chroma key) technology, the screen in its multiplicity here is integral to the ‘live’ performance’s themes and structures; it has become a theatrical character itself. Perhaps for that very reason, the playscript describes it as a ‘wall’ – more fitting (and comically familiar) for a metadramatic Shakespearean character, but not quite capturing all the wonder and paradox of its fluid technological performance. As with the gap between reading the text of  1 Henry IV and viewing its televisualization in An Age of Kings, the text of Hamnet provides a parallel yet distinct perspective from its first words, which are stage directions positing a location never explicitly represented: Setting: a hellmouth. The audience enter and see themselves – a live feed projected onto the back wall. They take a seat. Eventually, out of the crowd we see a boy, hamnet, stand up and walk on stage. He appears in the live projected image only, there is no one on stage. He stands centre, looking at himself. A moment of darkness and then lights up to find the real hamnet in exactly the same position looking at himself in the live projection.28

All this precedes Hamnet speaking his borrowed ‘Who’s there?’ and beginning a routine of throwing a ball at the screen partition for the 93-millionth-plus time in an effort to break through it via quantum tunnelling. This bit of stage business certainly updates the coin-tossing play with probability and the correlated tension between human agency and contextual determinism that open Tom Stoppard’s first produced Hamlet spinoff, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. But here it becomes the performance’s ultimate framing event as well, one that builds on repeated recalibration of the relationship between screen and stage. Moreover, it reorients Stoppard’s dialectic beyond the constraints upon fictional characters, roles, and actions as ‘written’ to embrace more

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focally the everyday lives (and deaths) of those who are left out of the historical narrative of events, words, and actions that matter beyond a lifespan. As such, the screen becomes the site for reconsidering as well the ways in which conventional narratives of writing about authorship and art efface many who are essential to the collaboration, in favour of the ‘great man’. By attributing the published playscript of Hamnet to ‘Dead Centre’ rather than that Dublinbased group’s co-founding directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, they put the emphasis on making collective ‘projects’ (albeit Moukarzel and Kidd are each credited as ‘writer/director’ in the tour’s theatrical programme). To their names it seems particularly important, then, to add not only co-founder and producer Rachel Murray but also set designer Andrew Clancy, lighting designer Stephen Dodd, video designer Jose Miguel Jimenez, and stage manager Barbara Hughes, all there since the premiere at the Schaubühne, Berlin in April 2017, as well as video engineer Eavan Aiken and Eugenia Genunchi (ASM/Onstage Effects), so listed in the programme.29 To see or not to see: when the screen appears, who’s (been) there? This particular example gestures beyond the named individuals to several wider developments demanding attention, as new technologies so often do. It acknowledges the greater role and possibilities of enhanced screen technologies in current theatre and the actorly performance as increasingly a body-machine assemblage (again recalling Deleuze); it also recognizes, even in a ‘one-person show’, the collective of people ‘behind’ the screen who quite literally bring it to life. Within the thematics of Hamnet’s representation, moreover, it allows us to recognize how artfully such a reprioritization accords with and applies to both sides of its particular dialectic between the technical environment and the embodied actor. For this play’s focus is not on the actor playing the ‘great man’ William Shakespeare (Moukarzel again) but on the child lead, impersonating a character performing in the shadow of both his father and his fictional prince. Written for Ollie West to perform when that actor was the same age as Shakespeare’s Hamnet at his death, the play demands much of him. He interacts early on with one member of the audience and later with his own and his father’s projections, but otherwise flies solo in the stage space (see Figure 14.2).30 Moreover, as he informs us when dismissing the audience member from the stage, he knows his historical fate as well as his role as performer:

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Figure 14.2  (Top) Hamnet (Ollie West) live projected on the screen, with Shakespeare (Bush Moukarzel) green-screened but not on the ‘live’ stage; (bottom) Hamnet (Ollie West) throwing his ball against the wall attempting quantum tunnelling. Hamnet, Dead Centre (2017). Photograph by Gianmarco Bresadola. By permission of Dead Centre.

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hamnet You can go now. Don’t worry about me, I’m dead. the audience member gets up off the floor and returns to their seat. hamnet I’m dead. hamnet then gets up, but his reflection doesn’t. He turns and sees his body lying on the floor.

When the body doesn’t get up, he addresses it: Okay, get up now. I said get up. I was pretending. Don’t you know what pretending is? You’re a terrible actor, I can see you breathing. Get up. The reflection gets up and joins him. hamnet is himself again. I choose to be. I choose to be. A figure walks on stage and is standing next to hamnet. We see shakespeare but only in the filmed reflection. hamnet looks at the empty air.

(Hamnet, 21–2) Having finally succeeded in conjuring his father, ironically it is that very (projected) presence that leads Hamnet to realize that the two sides of the wall, the mirror images, are the spaces of life and death: ‘shakespeare They’re two different places. Like different rooms. There’s a room called “to be” and a room called “not to be”. Once you’re in “not to be” you can’t go back’ (Hamnet, 29). The recognition gives more urgency to Hamnet’s attempts at quantum tunnelling, and increasingly objects appear to make the leap (though not by moving through the wall); for example, in the projection, ‘shakespeare kicks the ball. It moves across the stage by itself and rolls towards hamnet. He picks it up’ (stage direction, 26). More substantially, the play of screen images and now-ghostly presence captures the regret and precariousness of a father-son relationship that never had the chance to develop:

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shakespeare holds hamnet in his arms. In the projection they are connected, son in the arms of his father, but on stage, alone, hamnet is leaning impossibly far forward, leaning in the air by himself for a moment, and then levels again, as his father rights him.

(38) As in so much of the best theatrical work, the ‘magic’ happens not through seamless artifice but through risky, visible embodiment in a shared time and space. Such sharing between father and son is precisely what the play’s Shakespeare has sacrificed in order to produce the works for which he, but not Hamnet, is remembered. And the poignance of that double vision is what captures the audience, kinetically and emotionally. For most of the performance, Hamnet remains trapped in the ‘dead’ room that is the ‘live’ stage, with his father on the other side. Then the positions switch, as Shakespeare recites Constance’s speech lamenting her loss of her son Arthur in King John 3.4 – when (within that fiction) the prince is still alive. Although Hamnet does not call attention to this last particular oddity (attributable to Shakespeare’s early modern theatrical priorities), the citation serves as another reminder of the separations caused by men’s professional priorities, be they kings or playwrights. As the play approaches its finale, father and son (or we) shift perspective once more, and they finally share the stage together. Even so, a sense of distance remains. Moreover, Shakespeare becomes the avatar for the older audience members talking across the digital divide, as, for the young, we blend (and eventually disappear) into an undifferentiated past: hamnet Dad, were you born before the internet? shakespeare Yes. hamnet Dad, as a child, when you wanted to watch a film, tell me again what you had to do? shakespeare Well, we had to go all the way to the cinema on the exact day when it was on … hamnet So funny. I love this story.

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shakespeare  … and if we missed it, we had to wait until Christmas for it to be on the TV. hamnet (Laughing.) Tell me about the TV Guide! shakespeare Yes, so the TV Guide was a sort of book that told you about all the films that were on over Christmas, and we all sat around and looked in the guide and planned our days so that we would be in front of the TV at the exact time when the film started. hamnet The olden days are so interesting. shakespeare is gone.

(Hamnet, 43–4) The boy’s ‘olden days’ also function as a chastening reminder of how remote the materials in this essay’s earlier case study will appear to most students and how much work it requires to overcome that estrangement. An embodied screen allegory, Hamnet brings together strands of popular culture with Shakespeare as the re-viewed emblem of a disappearing high culture of words, while Hamnet serves as the ‘spectral form of humanity’, in German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s translated words, as it ‘escapes into apparatuses’.31 Or alternatively, in a more nostalgic key, Hamnet embodies that troubled trace of ‘liveness’ that so haunts US performance studies.32 The father-son exchange is not the play’s conclusion, nor will I make explicit its final turn (gestured at earlier). But for a more fittingly oblique as well as pertinent form of closure, I turn instead to a laudatory review in MIT’s newspaper, from a student born digital: The play is a kaleidoscope of visual effects, the primary one being that Hamnet is interacting with a green-screened version of his father. As a result, West is actually on stage alone almost the entire time, but his unwavering delivery makes it easy to forget the fact as West talks, plays ball, and dances alongside his incorporeal father. Although the technology is not new, I have not seen it leveraged to such an extent in a theatrical production.33

Like Hamnet’s ‘olden days’ of broadcast television viewing, the green-screen technology that is ‘not new’ for this reviewer serves as a somewhat jarring heuristic reminder of how swiftly the past can envelop our presence. It is all

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too tempting to invert Prospero’s words to similar ends and retort, ‘’Tis not new to thee.’ But neither words nor screens can protect us (or Shakespeare) from that ever-increasing pace of technological change and the everreformulated cultures of sight and feeling those changes prompt and enable. Nor should they. Perhaps their alternative permeability can instead encourage us to remember that, from the parallax of our eyesight to the double-vision that follows from reflecting on our (or Shakespeare’s) dreams, we all have the ability to use our parted eyes as well as our common sense and senses to transcend divisive boundaries and to complicate binaries – be they between generations, disciplines, media, or machines – and to keep looking both backward and forwards in space-time as well. Onward, then, to the VR world of Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, and back again to the live stage – and the great unknowable beyond.34

Notes 1

W. B. Worthen, ‘Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture’, in Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228.

2

Such approaches include materialist, feminist, postcolonial, queer, ecocritical, disability, and intersectional race studies.

3

The first quotation alludes to The Kinks’ ironic 1966 hit single of that title (in the singular) by Ray Davies; the second, Shakespeare’s King Henry V 5.2.268–9. That juxtaposition illustrates the cultural levelling that especially informs screen Shakespeare (broadcast, film, and online) and has led some to argue that his works are now ‘post-hermeneutical’; on this topic, see Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares, Revised Edition: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). For an elaborated philosophical rationale within the wider context of German media studies, see David Wellbery’s ‘Post-Hermeneutic Criticism’, the foreword to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Meteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). Available online: http://hydra.humanities. uci.edu/kittler/wellbery.html (accessed 28 July 2019). Just as new media never entirely replace older ones, plenty of evidence counters overgeneralizing the impact of newer critical approaches on most audiences. Nonetheless, the shift

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has certainly increased the types and forms of current scholarship (I reference Kittler’s other equally influential volume below). 4

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136.

5

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquerie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 122ff: his word is Betriebs. In a more popular key, see also William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), with its awareness of the need to ‘disconnect’ temporarily but regularly from our screens.

6

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [French 1983 and 1985] 1989). He considers Welles’s ‘Nietzschean’ conceptions of Othello and Falstaff in particular, as part of a critique of ‘truth’ (2.137ff).

7

Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen’s still-useful Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) in fact begins with this quotation from Hamlet alongside Aristotle; by the time of the revised fifth edition, in which Leo Braudy joined Cohen, it was removed. Both volumes contain short selections from Eisenstein and Bazin among many others, and elaborate on much of the film vocabulary referenced.

8

Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti (eds), Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ‘Local Habitations’ (London: Routledge, 2019), 1–2. See also (among others) Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

9

Although we arrived at it independently, Susan King anticipated this (predictable) witticism in opening her article about the five-disc DVD release, ‘Before James Bond, Sean Connery was Shakespeare’s Harry Hotspur’, Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2009. Available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/31/ entertainment/et-shaksespeare31 (accessed 28 July 2019). Writing for the general public she observes, ‘It’s best to brush up on Shakespeare before sitting down for the 15-plus hours of An Age of Kings – otherwise the first three episodes can be a bit confusing. But once Hotspur and Prince Hal arrives, the series hits its stride.’

10 An Age of Kings [TV programme] (BBC Video, 2009), timecode 1:24. Perforce I simplify the issue of the episodes’ length here; Susanne Greenhalgh, ‘“True To You In My Fashion”: Shakespeare on British Broadcast Television’, in Shakespeare

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After Shakespeares, ed. Richard Burt (Westport: Greenwood, 2007), 661, discusses the ‘bold cutting and rearrangement of scenes’ and notes the ‘ideological as well as commercial effects’ of the reformatting of episodes for sale abroad. 11 Emma Smith, ‘Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings’, in Shaughnessy, Shakespeare and Popular Culture, 142. She is drawing on Christine Geraghty’s article on ‘The Continuous Serial – A Definition’ in a volume on Coronation Street. 12 Deleuze might connect this ‘slackening of the sensory-motor connection’ with the crisis in the action-image that culminates in ‘the purely optical and sound situation which takes the place of the faltering sensory-motor situations’ in post-war European cinema (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 3) – an allegorization that would correspond well with the ‘angry young man’ ineffectuality of this moment in British performance, noted below. 13 Given what follows, I would reinforce the distance here from recent attempts to find symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the character’s dreams as described by Lady Percy – a difference that might correlate as well with the gap between Connery and Daniel Craig as Bond, the latter befitting an era of more anxious, overtly violent (and thankfully, also kinder and far more equitable) masculinity, as well as a time when more seriously wounded war veterans are surviving the battlefield. 14 The historical Hotspur was thirty-nine – older than Henry IV – at the time of his death at Shrewsbury; Prince Hal was sixteen. 15 A classroom exercise that allows students to participate in such re-imaginings: research an historical figure born 200 years before you, and sketch how an adaptation of their life could address a current political concern (i.e. Mary Shelley and the reception of women’s creative contributions) or how they could fit in a version of Shakespeare’s play (i.e. Nat Turner as a rebel leader in one of the histories). Depending on the class emphasis, this might involve storyboarding, a partial scene script, or shooting a single scene; or in a more analytically focused subject, providing a rationale for or against such a production. The point would not be to make it ‘work’ (at least, not to capture the historical facts or the Shakespearean emphases) but rather to make visible the labour and the balancing acts involved in screen remediation, as well as the recognition – sadly lacking in much public critique of both Shakespeare’s histories and Hamilton – that most successful artistic productions do not aspire to present ‘just the facts’ but more often aspire to creating experiential immediacy. That said, such re-imaginings can prompt ingenious spinoffs on occasion. Moreover, as with

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Hamilton, the freedom to recast makes visible a larger role for those whose bodies have been excluded by traditions associated with white privilege – which sadly includes many productions of Shakespeare’s plays. 16 It is almost too perfect that the elder Hardy went on to serve as headmaster at Shrewsbury. 17 On the theatrical performance changes of that moment, see Robert Shaughnessy, both ‘Stage, Screen, and Nation: Hamlet and the Space of History’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana E. Henderson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 54–76, and ‘“I do, I will”: Hal, Falstaff, and the Performative’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008), 14–33. 18 Susan King, ‘Before James Bond’, notes that it ‘aired in syndication on U.S. TV in 1961 and won the prestigious Peabody Award’, being ‘the most ambitious Shakespeare production ever undertaken on film or television, until the BBC adapted all 37 of the playwright’s works for television between 1978 and 1985’. The fairly useful Wikipedia entry mentions its positive reception in the United States, Australia, Canada, West Germany, and the Netherlands: ‘An Age of Kings’. Wikipedia. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Age_of_Kings (accessed 28 July 2019). Greenhalgh also confirms that the show was ‘celebrated’ and Hardy’s performance ‘admired’ (‘“True To You”’, 671, 688). 19 I choose the US rather than UK title for the 1970s to 1980s series in part to offset the primarily UK-focused treatment thus far, and to signal its role in further advancing the transnational circulation of screen Shakespeares that has become, if not ubiquitous, at least normative. 20 Sean Connery, ‘Home’. Available online: https://www.seanconnery.com/ (accessed 10 January 2020). 21 Broadcast 12 December 1964, the show captures the gala farewell performance of the West End run which had opened on 10 May 1961. A DVD release of sixty-six minutes is now available; the Miller Tapes version, however, is nearly two hours. The Miller Tapes, ‘Beyond the Fringe (Complete)’. YouTube, 2013. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUd1OxPbKk4 (accessed 28 July 2019). 22 See, for further illustration, the Cambridge Footlights Revue of 1982 featuring Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson, which includes a spot-on spoof of John Barton’s highly regarded Playing Shakespeare series rehearsing speeches with Royal Shakespeare Company actors; thanks to Emer McHugh for sharing an online link. Myrtle Myles, ‘Cambridge Footlights Revue 1/5’. Daily

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Motion, 2014. Available online: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2pgx6j (accessed 28 July 2019). 23 Richard Pettengill, ‘Peter Sellars' Merchant of Venice (excerpts)’. YouTube, 17 May 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nytLWFl961M (accessed 23 ­February 2019). The Goodman dramaturge wrote at the time, ‘If one were to watch the scene right in front of one of the monitors, the effect might be powerful – you would see the sweat on Shylock’s brow – but in the cavernous Goodman space it looks to most of the audience like nine tiny talking heads’ (305). Richard Pettingill, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice: A Retrospective Critique of Process’, Theatre Research International 31, no. 3 (2006): 298–314. Among the (comparatively) positive reviews is Mark Swed, ‘“Merchant of Venice” Beach? Peter Sellars Strikes Again’, Los Angeles Times, 12 October 1994. Available online: http://articles. latimes.com/print/1994-19-12/entertainment/ca-49207_1_venice-beach (accessed 28 July 2019). 24 On this newer phenomenon, which has benefited from extensive discussion by British Shakespeare scholars of various media, see especially Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie Osborne, Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018); and (on doubled adaptations) John Wyver, ‘All the Trimmings? The Transfer of Theatre to Television in Adaptations of Shakespeare Stagings’, Adaptations 7, no. 2 (2014): 104–20, and his Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 25 Pettingill, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 305. 26 Most recently, see Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, ed. Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018). 27 The one potential punning reference not used is the Broadband-Hamnet™ ham radio/wireless computer network developed earlier in this millennium (a point I mention to aid online search disaggregation). 28 Dead Centre, Hamnet (London: Oberon, 2017), 9. 29 The group was founded in 2012, Hamnet being their fifth project. It was coproduced by the Abbey Theatre and performed in Ireland, Australia, the United States, and Hong Kong between 2017 and 2019. I cite the programme for its Boston run as part of the ArtsEmerson series, 20 September to 7 October 2018. See also Dead Centre, ‘Hamnet’. Available online: https://www.deadcentre.org/ hamnet (accessed 28 July 2019). 30 I attended West’s final Boston performance at age fourteen. The role has

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subsequently been performed by Aran Murphy and was returning to the United States in late 2019 for its New York premiere. 31 See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. 32 See Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Enactment (London: ­Routledge, 2011) for a useful survey and complication of the emphases found in writings by the NYU/Richard Schechner theatre theorists, so haunted by Hamlet and other ghosts. 33 Alexandra Sourakov, ‘Two Rooms and a Sea of Troubles’, The Tech, 27 September 2018, 7. See also Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, ‘Hamnet: A Play for Shakespeare’s Forgotten Son (and One 11-Year-Old Actor)’, The Guardian, 11 September 2018. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/sep/11/ hamnet-a-play-for-shakespeares-forgotten-son-and-one-11-year-old-actor (accessed 28 July 2019). 34 Steven Maier of the Commonwealth Theater Company in Boston partnered with Google to direct this 61-minute virtual reality (VR) version of the play – quite long given the challenges of filming in this format (released 2019). I have as yet experienced only the fifteen-minute highlights version in VR, which gives new meaning to ‘the ghost in the machine’.

15

The senses and material texts Adam Smyth

Without harming the binding, one can open most codices far enough to still snugly fit the nose into the gutter. (Craig Dworkin)1 Taking advantage of the momentum generated by the previous chapters, I want to think about the ways in which we do, and do not, talk about material texts. I don’t quite want to trace how each of the senses might relate to the physical book – valuable though that large project would be – but, with a slightly wider focus, I want to make the case for considering the material text in sensory terms. This means, among other things, learning from the early moderns, and from Shakespeare, who often had a richer and more nuanced sense of the sensory possibilities of the book. A growing interest in the materiality of texts has been a defining feature of early modern literary scholarship for the last twenty-five years. While work under the material texts banner has been various, scholars tend to agree on the axiom that  material form effects meaning: or, at least, in a weaker form of relationship, that material form affects meaning.2 But the range of forms of materiality has been curiously restricted. We are used now to considering certain kinds of materiality as self-evidently expressive: book format, for example, or typography, or binding, or if we are concerned with reception, marks of annotation and use. But what forms are excluded in these accounts? In this chapter I will think about the text as a sensory object in order to consider versions of materiality that would feature in most people’s phenomenological account of consuming old books, but which fall outside the parameters of most

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academic discussions of the material text. I will look, in part, to Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, to explore how we might develop a language for a more inclusive materiality, and I’ll think, too, about how we, as book-users in the twenty-first century, might start to analyse how such qualities as heft, smell, and sound shape a modern reader’s consumption of Shakespeare’s texts. In doing so, I’ll be in conversation with recent work on bibliography and the material text, and I’ll also be following a path cleared by Bruce Smith’s work on historical phenomenology, as outlined in the present volume (15–39), and in his Phenomenal Shakespeare, where Smith considers the early modern text in phenomenological terms.3 There is little or no space for sensory experience in bibliographical descriptions of books, at least as those descriptions are delivered by current research libraries. The ‘Controlled Vocabularies for Use in Rare Book and Special Collections Cataloging’, developed and maintained by the Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association, provides what it calls a ‘standardized vocabulary for retrieving special collections materials by form, genre, or by various physical characteristics’. This provides an extensive and very detailed set of variables for describing books in terms of bindings (‘brass clips’; ‘brocade’; ‘buckskin’); genre (‘nonsense verse’; ‘notebooks’; ‘novellas’); paper (‘trimmed edges’; ‘Turkish marbled papers’); printing and publishing evidence (‘cancels’; ‘casting off ’); provenance (‘stamps’; ‘stationers’ labels’); and type (‘grooves’; ‘grotesque types’).4 But the sensory qualities of books find no place. Copy-specific descriptions – that is, accounts of particular copies of books within editions, a scale of description where one might expect to find note of such qualities – concern such features as imperfections, expurgated copies, insertions, hand-colouring, provenance evidence, binding, and ‘bound with’ notes. All such features necessarily fall within the purview of sight, but beyond this there is no explicit mention of how these objects might be encountered phenomenologically. Descriptions by rare book dealers sometimes include a note of, for example, a ‘slight musty smell’, but even these are very rare indeed.5 In this respect, the study of material texts lags some way behind recent work on object-based learning and museums which has been considering ways of

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countering an historic ‘distrust and denigration of bodily knowing’.6 In Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips present a critique of the dominance of ‘Western ocularcentricism’ by making the case for a multisensory engagement with material culture as ‘phenomenologically experienced’. As the editors explain: Rather than understanding objects as possessing an unproblematic concrete existence that can be apprehended visually, or flattening their unique properties by considering them only as sites of social inscription, the contributors argue for the necessity of thinking of objects as bundles of sensory properties.7

I will return to that resonant final phrase – ‘objects as bundles of sensory properties’ – at the end of this chapter. Shakespeare’s printed texts are well-described bibliographically in relation to most other books from his period. Here, as an example, are the copy-specific descriptions of two copies of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), both in North American research libraries. Folger Library STC 22345 copy 1 Burn-holes on B2 and B3, affecting text. Wanting the blank leaf. Red goatskin armorial binding, signed by Hering; paper spine-lining (exposed due to detached boards) is printed with the following: ‘Henry Shaw F.S.A.’ Provenance: possibly Lincoln Cathedral library copy (Folger files); Sir William Bolland copy (bookseller’s catalogue entry (lot  2187) for this (?) copy attached to front paste-down, with manuscript note: ‘Baron Bolland’s sale Novr. 1840 Evan’s’); gilt arms and crest of Frederick Perkins; inscribed on front free endpaper: ‘W. [William] A. White’; manuscript bibliographical note signed: ‘A.S.W. Rosenbach’.8 Beinecke Library Eliz 179 Bound in brown goatskin, gilt edges. George Daniel’s copy, with a manuscript note, signed, on a front flyleaf.9

Such accounts are representative of copy-specific descriptions of Shakespearean texts, not only in terms of their relative fullness but also in their focus on particular kinds of physical trait: attention to binding styles and materials; concern with, paradoxically, what is not there (‘wanting the blank leaf ’); and detailed records of provenance and sales history. Collectively, these fields of definition suggest

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something of the way in which bibliographical description grew out of the culture of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century book auctions with those associations with connoisseurship, the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ copy, and sales and buyers: a process David McKitterick has recently tracked in relation to the invention of ‘rarity’ as a bibliographical term of esteem.10 But if we return to a founding, and in many ways unfashionable definition of what W. W. Greg calls the ‘descriptive science’ of bibliography, we find at least the prospect of a role for the senses.11 ‘Bibliography’, writes Greg in 1933, ‘is the study of books as tangible objects.’ Bibliography, in other words, is founded on touch: it is, in its first instance, a haptic engagement with books, and from this axiomatically sensory encounter, bibliographical description can proceed: ‘[i]t examines the materials of which [books …] are made and the manner in which those materials are put together’.12 If Greg was (and the phrase would surprise him) a haptic reader – more W. W. Greg than www.Greg – then early modern bibliophiles were often deeply invested in the book as a tangible object. The letterbooks of Sir William Boothby (1637–1707) of Ashbourne Hall, Derbyshire survive in the Glamorgan Record Office and convey, in the words of Peter Beal, ‘the depth and extent of his personal passion for books’.13 Boothby’s correspondence with booksellers vividly portrays an insatiable curiosity for books, and his letters are preoccupied with material form, particularly in moments when his expectations were disappointed: ‘your little books bound onely plaine Calve are very deare’; ‘The 8o Books are so deare That I desire them Either in quiers or stich’d.’ In periods of particular irritation, Boothby’s complaints unfurl into a kind of loud, anti-bibliographical howl, a dirge to the physical shortcomings of the book: I find all or most are old Books – new Bound – & so many Leaves not cut & most cut narrow – & some Books part of the margett are cut – all wch are great faults – An ill & weake past[e] board (great fault this) yet set downe to deape for binding […] you must take great care in Examining & placing things rite, before you send them to me […] pastor fido is not well stitched the first sheet is come out.14

Like Boothby ‘Examining & placing’ his books, Shakespeare, in his plays and poetry, consistently draws a connection between books and physical contact. Books are objects to be held, carried, placed, displayed, laid ‘on their pillow’

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(R3  4.3.14), ‘put […] in the pocket of my gown’ (JC  4.3.251), ‘turned o’er’ (MV 4.1.154), ‘kiss[ed]’ (Tem 2.2.127). Across these snatched bookish references, we can discern something like a Shakespearean bibliographical culture in which the book is not autonomous or static – not a stable entity existing on its own terms – but rather an object placed in a dynamic relationship with the human body. A prayer book might be worn ‘in my pocket’ (MV  2.2.184) or held ‘in his hand’ (R3 3.7.46). This sense of books as haptic, as having heft, as objects experienced through physical contact, is an aspect of book-life that is distinct from the variables of size and format which bibliography has always been alert to. Indeed, even weight, which certainly can be tidily quantified, is rarely an aspect of bibliographical definition. In 2017, in response to a reader’s enquiry, staff at the Bodleian Library took two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio to the conservation studio where the volumes were weighed: Arch. G c.7 and Arch. G c.8 came in at 2.7 kilograms and 3 kilograms, respectively. In the words of one of the curators involved, ‘someone had finally asked a question no-one had thought of before’.15 This sense of books as relational objects is pushed to its limit in Shakespeare’s persistent concern with books as objects that might turn into people, or with people who might turn into books. We think, perhaps, of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s The Librarian (1566), in which the human subject is literally composed from physical books. In Shakespeare’s bibliographical imagination, the book is not only an object to be sensed by the body but has the potential to become the body itself: the opposition between sensing subject and sensed object collapses. Frequently we encounter what we might call this Ovidian materiality of Shakespeare’s books. A ‘man’s brow’, says Northumberland in Henry IV Part 2, is ‘a title-leaf, / Foretell[ing] the nature of a tragic volume’ (1.1.60). ‘Your face’, says Lady Macbeth to her husband, is ‘a book where men / May read strange matters’ (Mac  1.5.62–3). Richard II figures himself as a written litany of faults: ‘the very book indeed / Where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself ’ (R2 4.1.274–5). And in Macbeth: ‘My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten. / Kind gentlemen, your pains are register’d, / Where every day I turn the leaf, to read them’ (1.3.151–3). *** The absence of smell in bibliographical description is particularly striking when one considers how powerful the link is between old books and a musty

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scent in the popular imagination. Indeed, contemporary artist-perfumer Christopher Brosius developed a scent he calls ‘In the Library’ from a blend of Russian and Moroccan leather bindings, cloth, and wood polish to produce (in Brosius’s words) ‘a warm blend of English Novel’.16 According to Craig Dworkin, the library is, among other things, ‘a perfume factory, a laboratory of archived olfactory data’.17 As one chemical analysis put it, old books often smell like ‘a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness’.18 While modern bibliography generally fails to engage with scent, there is certainly an early modern awareness of the powerful connections between books and smell. This might function at the level of metaphor, either to praise (‘[o]ther Books smell of Men […] and a humane Spirit’) or to condemn: thus Henry Crosse, attacking the corrupting qualities of fashionable literary texts (‘Inkchorn-termes, swelling words, bumbasted [sic] out with the flocks of sundry languages’), describes the manner in which ‘young folkes have licked in the sweete juice of these stinking books’.19 But books might be more than metaphorically smelly. Book scent might be the product of not only the distinctive smells of the materials from which the book is made (glue, ink, leather, paper) but also the environments in which the books have been stored, read, and conserved. As David McKitterick notes, the ‘smell of chlorine in old books may indicate over-enthusiastic cleaning, and inadequate subsequent washing’.20 Book scent, in other words, need not be associated with ‘essence’, in the way it might sometimes be imagined, but rather might track layers of the history of a particular book, from composition, through use, storage, and preservation: the ‘sweet smell of provenance’.21 This is part of John Taylor’s joke when, in his rambling verse encomium to paper, printed in 1623, Taylor imagines the ways in which formerly humble materials might be converted in fine paper, but with a lingering stink: ‘And may not dirty Socks, from off the feet / From thence be turnd to a Crowne-paper sheet?’22 There is evidence that bookbinders in the sixteenth century rubbed their bindings with something to make the scent more appealing: that, in other words, books were understood to smell badly in their ‘natural’ condition. Books intended for special presentation, or to mark a particular (often royal) occasion, were frequently perfumed. Thus, for example, when  130 copies of the Genethliacum illustrissimorum principum Caroli & Mariae a Musis

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Cantabrigiensibus celebratum (Cambridge,  1631) were printed to mark (in the Cambridge University account book’s words) ‘the birth of Princesse Mary delivered at Courte etc.’, £1 8s was ‘paid at London for perfuming 4 of the said books and binding & stitching the rest’. And when 130 books were printed ‘att the birth of the Duke of Yorke’ in 1633, £9 2s was paid ‘For binding stitching & perfumeing them.’23 In these accounts, the never-elaborated – and therefore presumably relatively routine, or at least culturally comprehensible  – act of perfuming takes place alongside gilding, binding, stitching, and filleting with strings. The added scent seems to have been understood both as an augmentation that adds a new kind of splendour to the book (as gilding supplements what is already there) and as a way to cover up a book’s naturally unwinning scent (as a paste-down might conceal the boards). But if perfuming could signify a heightened sense of value, on occasion the scent could become a problem. When Elizabeth I visited East Anglia in the summer of 1578, Richard Howland, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, was warned that the University should be prepared for a possible royal visit. When the suggestion was made of presenting the Queen with ‘a book well bound’, Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief minister, insisted that any such book should have ‘no savour of spike, which commonly bookbinders did seek to add, to make their books savour well. But that Her Majesty could not abide such a strong scent.’ Spike, or spikenard, is a term loosely used to denote (according to the OED) an aromatic substance obtained from a plant of the Valerian order from Northern India, or sometimes used as a synonym for lavender. The Queen, who favoured bindings in textiles, not leather, was given a Greek New Testament in folio, ‘bounde in red velvet, and lymmed with gowld, with the arms of England sett upon each side’, and fragrance-free.24 Touch, then, and also smell, might be part of an early modern reader’s sense of a book. But taste? In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Sir Nathaniel articulates his disdain for a dullard’s lack of learning through a sustained metaphor that centres around taste as both critical discernment and the experience of eating: Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink, His intellect is not replenished.

(5.2.24–6)

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Nathaniel’s speech makes sense in an early modern culture which consistently draws connections between eating and writing, as one sees, for example, in Seneca’s formative metaphor of the writer as a bee converting pollen into honey (‘so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound’), and Ben Jonson’s description of writing as a kind of digestion (‘Not as a creature that swallows what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested, but that feeds with an appetite, and hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all to nourishment’).25 Elizabeth L. Swann describes how this Senecan tradition of understanding imitation in terms of a language of food and digestion developed, in the early modern period, into a ‘substantial and subtle poetics of taste’ in which literary judgement was grounded in ‘the language of gustation’.26 Swann notes also – and, for this present discussion, importantly – how this discourse of consumption might be applied not only to conceptions of imitation and creativity, but also to the material components of books and manuscripts: in Swann’s words, ‘this persistent linking of alimentary and literary taste might be grounded in experiential and materiality reality’.27 When Hugh Plat introduces his Delightes for Ladies (1602) with, ‘my pen and paper are perfum’d / I scorne to write with Copres or with galle,’ Plat is (in Swann’s convincing reading) drawing a connection between gall as an ingredient of ink (produced by the gall fly, and also known as copperas or Roman vitriol) and gall as choler, one of the bodily humours.28 Swann argues that while early modern men and women did not actually eat their octavos (but who knows?), a humoral economy, in which humours were distinguished by flavours (gall was bitter), encouraged an understanding of a real (and not only metaphorical) connection between eating and books. This humoral alignment of eating and reading was layered over a set of biblical precedents for bibliophagy which powerfully connects books with the senses, and in particular taste. The notion of eating books receives pre-codex precedent in Ezekiel 3.1–3 in which, in the King James Version, God says to Ezekiel: Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.29

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Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of ‘Saint John Devouring the Book’ (Figure 15.1), from his series of prints The Apocalypse (1498), is a representation of Revelations 10.8–11: ‘Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.’ In Dürer’s image, John is sitting on – but also somehow

Figure 15.1  St John devouring the book, from Albrecht Dürer’s The Apocalypse (1498). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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emerging out of  – the ground, as he clutches at a book handed down from heaven. John’s eating is at the same time a kind of drinking: the page appears to convert into liquid and pour into his mouth, suggesting a desperate appetite, an appetite that can only be conveyed by mixing modes of consumption. John is surrounded by the props of writing, and, as Peter Stallybrass notes in a recent reading of the image, the words John eats are transformed into the new text that John composes.30 *** Samuel Pepys’s diary gives expression to a delighted awareness of the material features of books, and his accounts might help us think about our ways of describing our own sensory bibliographical engagements. When Pepys acquired Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667), Pepys’s attention to the financial cost of the volume led him to a detailed description of the physical properties of his new book: I did agree for Rycaut’s late history of the Turkish Policy, which costs me 55s; whereas it was sold plain before the late fire for 8s, and bound and coloured as this is for 20 – for I have bought it finely bound and truly coloured, all the figures.31

Regularly in his diary, Pepys is alert to book format (‘I had a great mind to have bought the King’s works, as they are new printed in folio’)32 and to binding. Indeed, such is Pepys’s fascination with the skill of William Richardson, his bookbinder, that Pepys is happy to devote a large portion of a Wednesday in 1667 to watching Richardson work: As soon as dined, I with my boy Tom to my bookbinder’s, where all the afternoon long till  8 or  9 at night seeing him binding up two or three collections of letters and papers that I had of him, but above all things my little abstract pocket book of contracts, which he will do very neatly. Then home to read, sup, and to bed.33

Binding, reading, eating, sleeping. In his diary, Pepys uses two terms in relation to his interactions with books that suggest a particular kind of bibliographical encounter. On Friday 7 July 1665, Pepys took ‘5l. worth’ of ‘new books’ home, ‘to my great content’, and ‘at night home to look over my new books, and so late to bed’ (my emphasis). What does Pepys mean by ‘look over’? It’s one of

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his favourite terms, and he deploys it in relation to a range of texts (his father’s accounts, his own papers, pictures). To ‘look over’ suggests a scale of book-use that includes but also exceeds reading the text: that takes in a wider sense of the material whole. Pepys created particular sensory environments in which his domestic reading took place: his reading of his new books on 7 July 1665 probably took place in his ‘closet’ – also called his ‘chamber’ or his ‘study’ – which housed his book collection and, as Kate Loveman notes, was decorated with considerable care.34 These reading spaces also had particular qualities of light: ever since Pepys heard instrument maker Ralph Greatorex, in an alehouse in October 1660, talking up the qualities of ‘the Lamp glasses, which carry the light a great way’, Pepys had decided they were ‘Good to read in bed by and I intend to have one of them.’35 The process of ‘looking over’ took place in these heightened sensory environments: intimate, decorated, carefully planned spaces, late at night, the light ‘commodiously reflect[ing] upon a Table, or to a place assigned’.36 Pepys’s other suggestive verb of book use is ‘sort’: ‘I to the office again’, he writes for Tuesday 17 January 1665, ‘and there very late, and so home to the sorting of some of my books, and so to bed, the weather becoming pretty warm.’ The passage suggests the eroticism of Pepys’s kind of book use – something to be done last thing at night, before snuffing out the candle or the lamp glass – and also, in this instance, a relationship between sorting books and feelings of warmth. To ‘sort’ books means to arrange books ‘according to kind or quality, or after some settled order or system; to separate and put into different sorts or classes’.37 It conveys not quite reading, or not only reading, but also the handling, the weighing up (in all senses) of books, and the placement of books according to some sense of physical form. Sorting books is an embodied form of book-use, part of that same desire to arrange that Pepys describes as a feature of his own mid-to-late bibliographical style: whereas before my delight was in multitude of books, and spending money in that and buying alway of other things, now that I am become a better husband, and have left off buying, now my delight is in the neatness of everything, and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.38

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We might learn from Pepys’s looking over, and his sorting, and perhaps also his delight. (The ‘we’ I’m conjuring here is that group of bibliographically inclined literary critics – including myself – who have some sensory catching up to do.) In 2017, researchers attempted to make smell a variable of bibliographical description. Noting that ‘our knowledge of the past is odourless’, Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič developed an ‘Historic Book Odour Wheel’ – ‘where untrained noses could identify an aroma’ – to capture the ways in which visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter library experienced the smell of books. This diagnostic tool could produce a book’s ‘olfactory profile’ for conservators and was an attempt to consider smells as ‘part of our cultural heritage’ – a response to the fact that ‘there is currently no strategy in the UK for the protection or preservation of smells’, and that ‘smells are not recognized in the definition of intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO’.39 ‘Woody’ was the most popular description among visitors to St Paul’s Library, followed by ‘smoky’, ‘earthy’, and ‘vanilla’, although the Odour Wheel allowed for a much wider smell vocabulary. One route forward, then, would be to sustain the research of Bembibre and Strlič to develop something like a standardized vocabulary for the sensory qualities of a book. But might there be an alternative? If bibliography works through the establishment of fields of definition – and the careful vetting of proposed new terms is the task of the aforementioned Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association – then another, complementary method might be for critics to resist this normsetting and instead offer something like a thick description of the physical book: an account that is more subjective, even affecting, and rooted in our multisensory encounter with the book. Remembering that injunction to consider objects as not merely apprehended visually but rather as ‘bundles of sensory properties’,40 we might consider – for example – a copy of the 1611 third quarto of Hamlet, printed by George Eld for John Smethwicke, now held in the Bodleian Library as Arch. G e.13. The copy-specific description is already extremely, and (for Shakespeare, and for the Bodleian) characteristically thorough: Binding: Early 19th century gilt tooled English calf, floral roll and doublefillets used to produce panel design, 19th century marbled endpapers and paste-downs. Gilt tooled spine, with title picked out vertically ‘Hamlet. 1611’.

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Blank upper and lower endleaves are occasionally watermarked with the date 1820, and one leaf contains the watermarked initials ‘G.A’. Evidence of the original stab-sewing is still visible. – Imperfect: Lacks preliminary blank at A1. – MS additions: Minor MS corrections to text on C1r. – Provenance name: Heber, Richard,  1773–1833. – Provenance note: Purchased by Bulkeley Bandinel, Librarian 1813–1860, in 1837 for the price of 10 guineas. It had previously belonged to Richard Heber, and had been sold in 1834 at the sale of his books for 9 guineas.41

Those tendencies of bibliographical description that we noted earlier – a concern with binding, missing parts, and provenance – are once more on display. But a supplementary, sense-alert description of the same text might begin in the following way:42 The spine is embossed to the touch and reads, in gold lettering, ‘HAMLET. 1611’. A later label, a faded yellowy-brown, is pasted at the bottom of the spine and records in handwritten ink ‘Arch. G e.13’. The book is neat in the hand, comfortable to hold, easy to lift and, if we want to, carry. It is a slender volume, bound with hard boards: the impression is of both slightness and also of duration through time. The front board feels surprisingly heavy and, once lifted, falls easily and abruptly open: the spine seems fragile. How many more times can this book be opened? The pastedown and the conjugate free endpaper bear a repeated marbling pattern in red, yellow, blue, green, purple and white. The book has little discernible scent until, on reaching the text block itself (‘THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET Prince of Denmarke’), each turned page yields a waft of musty leather – although one must lean in what feels transgressively close (certainly within 6 inches) to notice the scent. The smell is strongest on each page turn, and particularly when pages are turned quickly and in number. Slower page-turning induces less scent. The title-page, front and back, is marked with brown circles suggestive of damp. The pages of printed text are somewhat rough to the touch. When the page is lifted, light passes through so that text from the other side is glimpsed, although, being backwards and faded, it is not quite legible. Each page turned feels thin, robust, dry, pliable. Turning the pages produces a crisp, crackling sound: the thicker endpapers lower in tone than the higherpitched pages of the play itself.43

I can’t supply an account of the taste of this copy of the third quarto of Hamlet, but in its place, I want to end by noting a document of book

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consumption that is curious even by early modern standards. Vox piscis: or, The book-fish (Cambridge,  1627) (Figure  15.2) is, the title-page declares, a book ‘contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish in Cambridge Market, on Midsummer Eve last, anno Domini 1626’. The book’s preface narrates the circumstances of the discovery of the original fish carrying three 1540s devotional works by John Frith, an early Protestant martyr. The fish, caught by one William Skinner off the coast of King’s Lynn in 1626, was brought to Cambridge Market where the head was cut off and the fish gutted. At this point, a ‘woman, casually standing by, espyed in the maw of the fish a peece of canvasse, and taking it up found the Booke wrapped up in it, being much soyled, and defaced, and covered over with a kinde of slime & congealed matter’. The preface gives a speculative account of how the little decimosexto book, wrapped in canvas, ended up inside the fish: it seemeth most probably, that upon some wrack this booke lying (perhaps manie years) in the pocket of some man, that was cast away, was swallowed by the Cod, and that it lay for a good space of time in the fishes belly. For the booke was much consumed by lying there, the leather cover being melted and dissolved, and much of the edges of the leaves abated away and consumed, and the rest very thin and brittle, having beene deepe parboiled by the heat of the fishes maw.44

Figure 15.2  Vox piscis: or, The book-fish contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish (1627), Folger STC 11395 copy 1. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Alexandra Walsham has read this text in the context of a seventeenth century in which ‘divine intervention in earthly affairs was deeply embedded and etched’, the discovery of a fish’s carcass containing Henrician treatises signalling ‘an unfolding apocalyptic chronicle’.45 But the book-fish stands also as an expression of an early modern bibliographical culture that, to twenty-firstcentury scholars policed and repressed by bibliography’s rather stark regime of book noticing, seems characterized by a kind of material and sensory excess: the book, in this instance, ‘soyled’, ‘defaced’, ‘covered over with a kinde of slime & congealed matter’, and smelling terrible.

Notes Thanks to David Pearson, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and Jo Maddocks for advice towards this chapter, and also to members of the SHARP discussion list, who responded generously to my questions. 1

Craig Dworkin, The Perverse Library (York: Information at Material, 2010), 31.

2

For the muddle around and the consequences of this slippage, see David McKitterick,

3

Bruce Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 87–93.

4

Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, ‘RBMS Controlled Vocabularies’, 14 March 2018.

5

As evidenced by searching Abebooks.com. Available online: https://www.

The Invention of Rare Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 340n25.

Available online: http://rbms.info/vocabularies (accessed 7 January 2020). abebooks.com (accessed 7 January 2020). 6

Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education, ed. Helen J. Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan (London: Routledge, 2015), 5.

7

Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3, 8.

8

Hamnet Folger Library Catalog, ‘Lucrece’. Available online: https://hamnet.folger.edu/ cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&Search%5FArg=Folger%20Library%20STC%20 22345%20copy%201&Search%5FCode=GKEY%5E%2A&CNT=50&PID=t56urRtML sj8DUiNbLc4OAPsOsHe4&SEQ=20190301051448&SID=1 (accessed 7 January 2020).

9

Orbis, Yale University Library Catalog, ­‘Lvcrece’, 2011. Available online: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/3618606 (accessed 7 January 2020).

10 McKitterick, Invention of Rare Books. 11 W. W. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, The Library 12, no. 1 (1913): 40. 12 W. W. Greg, ‘The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism Illustrated in a Study of the Text of King Lear’, in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 271; my emphasis.

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13 Peter Beal, ‘“My Books Are the Great Joy of my Life”: Sir William Boothby, Seventeenth-Century Bibliophile’, The Book Collector 46 (1997): 351. Noted in Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 184. 14 Beal, ‘William Boothby’, 357, 359. 15 Jo Maddocks, email correspondence, February 2019. 16 CB I Hate Perfume, ‘In the Library’. Available online: http://cbihateperfume.com/ shop/perfumes-a-to-z/306 (accessed 7 January 2020). The novel is not identified, although Dworkin (Perverse Library, 42n13) speculates it may be Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927). 17 Dworkin, Perverse Library, 27. 18 Matija Strlič, Jacob Thomas, Tanja Trafela, Linda Cséfalvayová, Irena Kralj Cigić, Jana Kolar, and May Cassar, ‘Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books’, Analytical Chemistry 81, no. 20 (2009): 8617–22, quoted in Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič, ‘Smell of Heritage: A Framework for the Identification, Analysis and Archival of Historic Odours’, Heritage Science 5, no. 2 (2017). Available online: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-016-0114-1. 19 Thomas Manton, A second volume of sermons (London, 1684), 245; Henry Crosse, Vertues common-wealth: or The high-way to honour (London, 1603), N4v; my emphasis. 20 McKitterick, Invention of Rare Books, 69. 21 Richard W. Oram and Edward L. Bishop, ‘The Sweet Smell of Provenance’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 6 (2005): B18–19. 22 John Taylor, The praise of hemp-seed (London, 1623), 20. 23 J. C. T. Oates, ‘Cambridge Books of Congratulatory Verses, 1603–1640, and Their Binders’, The Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 1 (1953): 403–4. 24 David Pearson, ‘A Binding Presented to Queen Elizabeth I by Cambridge University, 1578’, The Book Collector 49 (2000): 547. The book now resides in Queen’s College, Oxford, as Sel.d.21. 25 Seneca, Moral Letters 84.5, trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: Heinemann, 1920). Ben Jonson, Timber: Or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 2491–8. For Jonson and digestion, see Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For models of imitation, see G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1980): 1–32.

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26 Elizabeth L. Swann, ‘“To dream to eat Books”: Bibliophagy, Bees and Literary Taste in Early Modern Commonplace Culture’, in Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words, ed. Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher (London: Routledge, 2019), 71, 77. 27 Ibid., 78. 28 Ibid., 82. 29 See also Jeremiah 15.16 (‘Thy words were found, and I did eat them’). 30 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Eating the Book, or Why We Need to Digest What We Read’, in Scott-Warren and Zurcher, Text, Food, 178–9. 31 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–83), 7:326. Loveman, Pepys, 180. 32 Pepys, Diary, Tuesday 10 June 1662. 33 Ibid., Wednesday 27 November 1667. 34 Loveman, Pepys, 27. 35 Ibid., 26. Pepys, Diary, 1:35, 3:7. 36 Henry van Etten, Mathematicall Recreations (London, 1633), 157–8, quoted in Loveman, Pepys, 26. 37 OED, s.v. ‘sort v.1’, II.9.a. 38 Pepys, Diary, 10 August 1663. 39 Bembibre and Strlič, ‘Smell of Heritage’. 40 Edwards, Gosden, and Philips, Sensible Objects, 8. 41 SOLO: Search Oxford Libraries Online, ‘Copy-specific Notes’, 2019. Available online: https://solo-aleph.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/?func=direct&doc_number=006708 083&format=999&local_base=HOL60 (accessed 7 January 2020). 42 For a related attempt to describe Venus and Adonis, see Smith, Phenomenal, 87–93. 43 For an audio recording of the pages turning, see Adam, ‘Hamlet Q3 (1611), turning pages’, clyp, 2019. Available online: https://clyp.it/fj2mpni4 (accessed 7 January 2020), or email the author. 44 John Frith, Vox piscis: or, The book-fish contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish in Cambridge Market, on Midsummer Eve last, anno Domini 1626 (Cambridge, 1627), 9–14. 45 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Vox Piscis: Or The Book-Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation past in Caroline’, The English Historical Review 114, no. 457 (1999): 577, 585. The book-fish is also discussed in Kathleen Lynch, ‘Vox Piscis: Dead Men Shall Ryse Agayne’, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 154–9.

Further reading

Foundational work at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and sensory studies includes: Jonathan Gil Harris’s ‘The Smell of Macbeth’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 465–86; Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  1999). These remain key points of reference in contemporary Shakespeare studies (and, indeed, in sensory studies), modelling methods and approaches central to ongoing work on Shakespeare and the senses, and raising questions that continue to animate the field. Recent work with a particular interest in method and approach includes Bruce R. Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,  2010), making the case for the historical phenomenology that Smith has pioneered in an extended, lively, and accessible format; Simon Smith’s Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), advocating a multisensory approach to playhouse music (and to early modern culture more generally); and Holly Dugan’s Shakespeare and the Senses, which rethinks the sensory realms of early modern theatres, forthcoming in Oxford University Press’s ‘Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ series. Readers interested in particular senses should in the first instance consult: on touch, Joe Moshenska’s Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Farah Karim-Cooper’s The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare,  2016); on taste, Elizabeth L. Swann’s Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming  2020); on smell, Holly Dugan’s The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); on sight,

370

Further Reading

John H. Astington’s Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); on hearing, Wes Folkerth’s The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), and Bruce Smith’s aforementioned Acoustic World of Early Modern England. These studies all discuss Shakespeare as part of wider considerations of early modern sensory culture. Particularly useful essay collections include: Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman’s Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), focusing especially on knowledge and the senses; Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern’s Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), with a section dedicated to ‘The Sensory Stage’; Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard’s Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  2013), drawing on affect studies and the history of emotions as well as sensory methods; Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny’s The Senses in Early Modern England,  1558–1660 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,  2015; open access ebook forthcoming), ranging across authors, artistic media, and cultural contexts; and Robin Macdonald, Emilie Murphy, and Elizabeth L. Swann’s Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge,  2018), considering religion and the senses across a wide temporal and geographic span, and including chapters specifically focused on Shakespeare.

Index Abelard, Peter, Historia Calmitatum 47 Aberg, Maria 305, 307, 308 Adams, Thomas 46 Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment 322 Age of Kings, An (TV series) 327–36, 340 Aiken, Eavan 341 Akhimie, Patricia 159, 187 Alexander the Great 77 Alford, C. Fred 229 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, Templum Musicum 164 Altrick, Richard 138 anadiplosis 190, 191 Anglicus, Bartholomaeus 56 antanaclasis 189–90 antiquity and theatre 64–70 Anzieu, Didier 158, 159, 160 apoplexy 55–7 appraisal theory of empathy 234 Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) 206 Aquinas, Thomas 100 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, Librarian, The 356 Aristotle animals and reason 213 cited by Sidney 75 component parts of tragedy 337 concept of common sense 5, 40, 41 concept of imagination 255 De Anima 19, 33 De Sensu et Sensibilibus 19 hierarchy of senses 114 mimesis 25 Nicomachean Ethics 19 Poetics 19–20, 66–7 separation of humans and animals 208–9 sixteenth-century revival 70 story of crane 214–15

theories of sensation 5 understanding of skin 158 views on passions 309 views on poetry 68 Artaud, Antonin 310 Augustine of Hippo Confessions 68–70 sensory appeal of drama 5, 68–70 Austin, William, Haec-Homo 160 Bach, Rebecca Ann 212–13 Bacon, Francis prioritizing of hearing 24 Sylva Sylvarum 55, 165 Baldwin, William 166 Banes, Sally 151 Barrett, Felix 303 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 311 Barrough, Philip 56–7 Barthes, Roland 29 Barton, John 334 Bazin, André 325 Beal, Peter 355 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot 334 Bembibre, Cecilia 363 Bembo, Pietro 23, 24 Benthein, Claudia 158 Best, Eve 167 Beyond the Fringe (revue) 335 Bhardwaj, Vishal 337 Bill, Leo 313 Billington, Michael 168 Blackfriars Theatre 145 Bloom, Gina 183–4 Blount, Edward 17–18 Boehrer, Bruce 206, 207, 219 Bonian, Richard 25 book-fish 365–6 Boothby, Sir William 355 Bozio, Andrew 140

372 Brathwaite, Richard, Essaies upon the Five Senses 89, 99, 158, 214–17, 248, 256 Bretnor, Thomas, Opiologia 52 Bright, Timothy, Treatise of Melancholy, A 114, 251–2, 255, 258–9, 260 Bromley, James M. 47 Brook, Peter 297, 326, 334 Brosius, Christopher 357 Bryskett, Lodowick, Discourse of civill life, A 89 Burbage, Richard 23, 144–5 Burrow, Colin 116 Burton, Richard 334, 339 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, The 56, 114, 210 Butler, Martin 261 Butler, Paul 338 Caldwell, Mark L. 112, 116 Carlson, Marvin 294 Cartwright, Kent 180 Cash, Johnny 339 Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) 23, 24 Cavell, Stanley 94–5 Cavendish, Margaret, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy 165–6 chafing 46–7 Chakravarti, Paromita 326 Cheek by Jowl 339 Chess, Simone 149 Chiang, Connie 135 Chion, Michel 33–4, 301 civet perfume 141, 142, 143 Clancy, Andrew 341 Clark, Stuart 115–116 Cogan, Thomas, Haven of Health, The 203 Cohen, Annabel J. 299 Colleton, John 31 common sense 40–3, 250, 263–4 Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (TV series) 334, 336 Connery, Sean 327–35, 337 Connor, Steven 164, 263–4, 271 Cook, Peter 336 Cooper, Thomas, 256, 259 Corbin, Alain 140, 143 Cox, Lee Sheridan 121 Craighero, Laila 227

Index Crooke, Helkiah, Mikrokosmographia 90, 165, 167, 249, 256 Croot, Jade 305, 307, 308 Crosse, Henry, Vertues common-wealth 357 Curle, Anne 226 Curle, Edward 226 Curtis, Ian 301 Davies, Sir John 226 Epigrammes and Elegies 47 Davies (of Hereford), John, Wit’s Bedlam 32–3 de Bry, Johan-Theodor, Utriusque cosmic majoris 22 Dead Centre 341, 342 Hamnet 9, 339–46 Dekker, Thomas, Gull’s Hornbook, The 25, 146, 148 Deleuze, Gilles 322, 326, 341 Derrida, Jacques 164, 165, 171 Descartes, René 207–8 Dessen, Alan C. 110, 121 Deutermann, Allison 91 Dews, Peter 327 Dhar, Amrita 149 Dodd, Stephen 341 Donne, John, ‘Eclogue’ 49 Dowland, John Lachrimae 27, 30 Second Book of Songs 27–8 drugs, use of 51–2, 204–5, 210, 212, 245, 258 du Laurens, André, Discourse on the Preservation of Sight, A 114 du Vair, Guillaume, Moral philosophie of the Stoicks, The 93–4 Dugan, Holly 246 Dugardin, Steve 300 Dürer, Albrecht, Apocalypse, The 360–1 Dworkin, Craig 352, 357 Edwards, Elizabeth 354 Edwards, Jennifer 303 Edwards, Philip 125 Egan, Gabriel 117 Eisenstein, Sergei 325 Elam, Keir 231 Eld, George 363

Index Elizabeth I 358 Ellsworth, Phoebe C. 234–5, 237 Elyot, Thomas, Castel of Helthe, The 57 Epicurus 19 Erne, Lukas 16, 117 Eschenbaum, Natalie K. 311 Escolme, Bridget 169 Estienne, Charles, Maison rustique, or The countrie farme 276–8 Eustachio, Bartolomeo, De auditus organis 183 Fechner, Gustav, Elemente der Psychophysik 44 Fennor, William, Fennors Descriptions 146 Fernyhough, Charles 30, 36 Ficino, Marsilio, 251 film studies 319–20, 322 Finkelpearl, Philip J. 226 Finney, Albert 334 flagellation 47–50 Fleming, Tom 330 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 96, 162 Fludd, Robert, Utriusque cosmic majoris 21–2 Folkerth, Wes 182 Fortune Theatre 146 Foucault, Michel 35, 151 Frangenburg, Thomas 114 Frankfurt School 321–2 Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons 305 Frith, John 365 Fudge, Erica 142, 208–9, 213–14, 218, 220 funeral practices 137–8 Galen apoplexy 44, 57 cause of melancholy 114 conception of human body 20 sixteenth-century revival 70 Gallese, Vittorio 233 Gallicus, Hercules 192–3 Gaule, John, Distractions 169 Genunchi, Eugenia 341 Gielgud, John 337, 339 Ginette, Gerard 16 Glapthorne, Henry, Ladies Priviledge, The 118–19

373

Globe Theatre 24, 30, 122, 135, 145, 167–8, 302–3 Godard, Jean-Luc 322, 326, 337 Godwin, Laura Grace 305 Goodman, Steve 30–1 Goodman Theater 337, 338 Gorbman, Claudia 299 Gosden, Chris 354 Gosson, Stephen attacks on theatre 72–4, 75, 230 disparagement of spectacle 120 Greek poetics 71–3, 77 School of Abuse, The 63–4, 72, 214–16, 217 Greatorex, Ralph 362 Greg, W. W. 355 Grennan, Eamon 191 Grierson, Sandy 307, 308 Gurney, Evan 167 Gurr, Andrew 117 Hakewill, George, Vanitie of the Eie, The 113, 120 Hall, Joseph 214 Hall, Peter 334 Hamilton, Jennifer 145 Hamlin, William 100 Hamling, Tara 111 Hardy, Robert 330, 332, 334, 335, 336 Hare, David 294 Harris, Jonathan Gil 144 Harrison, William 31 Harvey, Elizabeth D. 1, 158, 210 Hayes, Michael 327 Head, Richard, Canting Academy, The 47 hearing (see also sound) as penetration 183–4 aural confusion 188–90, 193 change in voices over time 180–1 cultural significance of 182–3 danger of auditory invasion 230 early modern senses of 182–8 ears as doors 185–6 ears as material protrusions 191–3 failure in Comedy of Errors 179–82, 191 faults in 183 interiority 183–5 position in hierarchy of senses 210 ‘touching sounds’ 166

374

Index

Heidegger, Martin 34–5, 322 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 33, 42–3, 246 Heneghan, Patricia 332 Herbert, Edward, 1st Lord of Cherbury 26–8 Heywood, Thomas Apology for Actors, An 76–7, 119 Brazen Age, The 77 Hill-Gibbins, Joe 311–12, 314 Hille, Anastasia 313 Hillman, David 101 Hinman, Charlton 16–17 Hobbes, Thomas 101 Hollow Crown, The (TV series) 334 Homer Iliad 77 poetic example 72 Horace Ars Poetica 67 sixteenth-century revival 70 theories of sensation 5 views on poetry 68 Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment 322 Hoskyns, John 226 Howard, Alan 30 Howard, Jean 253 Howes, David 246, 293 Howland, Richard 358 Hughes, Barbara 341 Hume, David, Treatise of Human Nature 40–1 humours and bodily fluids 21–3, 114–15, 359 Hunter, Simone 228, 229, 233 Hurley, Robin A. 228 husbandry 276–8 Husserl, Edmund 34, 35–6 imagination definition of 250 early modern concept of 255 fantasies 250–1 inertia and lethargy 55, 57 Inns of Chancery 224, 226 Inns of Court 224–6 insensibility 43–6, 50–1, 53–6, 58 frequency in Cymbeline 245–6, 261 love and desire 204 senseless feeling 246–8

sensing of 263–4 sleep and dreams 203 J. G., Refutation of the Apology for Actors 119 jades and jading 48 Jaggard, Isaac 17–18 Jarman, Derek 326 Jimenez, Jose Miguel 341 Johnson, Samuel, Preface to Shakespeare 293, 295 Jones, Inigo 118 Jones, Richard, ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ 120 Jonson, Ben Discoveries 190 divisions of plays into acts 17 Epicœne 118 Every Man Out of His Humour 118 importance of hearing 117–19 Masque of Blackness 144 mockery of audience’s perfume 148 Volpone 166 writing as digestion 359 Joy Division 300–1 Kambaskovic, Danijela 116 Karim-Cooper, Farah 146, 158, 159, 168–9 Kasamatsu, Yasuhiro 299 Kennedy, Colleen 142 Kesting, Hans 300 Kidd, Ben 341 Kittler, Friedrich 345 Knapp, James 97 Kosintsev, Grigori 337 Kristeva, Julia 151 Kurosawa, Akiro 337 Lactantius, Divine Institutes 68 Lacy, John, Dumb Lady, The 50 Langham, William, Garden of Health, The 56 language of appetite 96–7, 98 link with common sense 42–3 of taste 104–5 Lanier, Douglas 187, 296 Laporte, Dominique 133 Laroche, Rebecca 134

Index Le Grand, Anthony, Dissertation Of the want of Sense and Knowledge in Brutes, A 218 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 293–4 Lemnius, Levinus, Touchstone of Complexions, The, 203–4 Lepecki, André 151 Lewis, Cynthia 261 Lodge, Thomas, Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, A 74, 75 Longinus On the Sublime 67–8 sixteenth-century revival 70 Loomis, Catherine 159 Love, Heather 186 Loveman, Kate 362 Lucretius 19 MacDonald, Joyce Green 162 Machon, Josephine 303 Maguire, Laurie 229 Manaka, Hitomi 297, 298 Manningham, John, Diary 115, 226, 233–7 Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 305–6 Tamburlaine the Great 120 Marston, John Jack Drum’s Entertainment 25 Middle Temple 226 Massinger, Philip, Bond-Man, The 118, 120 Maximus of Tyre 72 Mayne, Jasper, Jonsonus Virbius 118 Mazzio, Carla 210, 216, 217, 256 McDermott, Jennifer Rae 112, 121 McDonald, Russ 187 McKitterick, David 355, 357 medicine, early modern 23, 46, 48, 52, 55, 69, 99, 134, 146–7, 246–8, 251, 258–9 Meibom, Johann Heinrich, Tractatus 47 memes 28 Meres, Francis, Palladis tamia 88 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 33–5, 46, 167 Middle Temple 224–6, 232–3, 236, 238, 241 Middle Temple Hall 7–8, 20, 24, 229, 240 Middleton, Thomas, Nice Valour, The 47 Mill, Charles W. 140 Miller, Jonathan 336

375

Milner, Matthew 111, 137 mimesis 25, 64, 229 Minns, Beatrice 303–4 mind, early modern theories of 249–51 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 333 mirror neuron system 7–8, 227–9 Mithecus 72 Molière, Médecin malgré lui, Le 50 Montaigne, Michel de, Essays 100, 110, 116 Monty Python (TV series) 336 Moore, Dudley 336 Morley, Thomas First Book of Consort Lessons 30 Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music 29–30 mortality, smell of 133–51 Moshenska, Joe 158, 162, 259–60 Moukarzel, Bush, 341–2 Müller, Heiner, Hamletmachine 339 Munday, Anthony, Second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters, A 230 Munby, Jonathan 167–8 Munro, Lucy 91 Munroe, Jennifer 134 Munson, Rebecca 133 Murray, Rachel 341 Murrell, John, Daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen, A 87 National Theatre Live 338 Newton, Thomas 203–4 Ninagawa, Yukio 296–9 Nixon, Anthony, Dignitie of Man, The 50 North, Thomas, 164 Northbrooke, John, Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, A 71–2 Nosworthy, J. M. 125 Nuttall, A. D. 150 Nyman, Michael 337 O’Donnell, Brennan 190 Oliver, Isaac 26–8 Olivier, Laurence 334, 336 O’Neill, Stephen 320–1 Ong, Walter 184, 185 Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger 333 Ovid, Metamorphoses 253 Owen, Katy 302, 308

376

Index

pain 269–71, 280 Paré, Ambroise 137–8, 157 Park, Katharine 250, 255 Parker, Patricia 95 Pender, Stephen 255 Pepys, Samuel, Diary 361–3 PET brain scans 28 Peter, Helen 217 phenomenology 33–6 Phidias 72 Phillips, Ruth B. 354 Pigott-Smith, Tim 332 pinch definition of 275–6 marks on skin 283, 286 role in husbandry 276–8 role in managing human capital 278–9 transformative capacity 281–2 use in The Tempest 269–71, 275, 278–85 plague 137–8 Plat, Hugh, Delightes for Ladies 359 Plato attacked by sixteenth-century critics 71–4 discussion of speech and writing 185 divine creative frenzy 231 emphasis on sight 24 hierarchy of senses 89 Ion 65–6 mimesis 25 parallel between lover and madman 232, 239 Phaedrus 19, 65, 74 portrayal of Socrates 62, 63, 64–6, 72 Republic, The 62, 64–5, 66 sixteenth-century revival 70 support for 74–6 theories of sensation 5 Timaeus 19 views on senses 64–6, 68, 70 views on theatre 62–4 Plautus 186–7, 188 Plutarch animals and reason 213 Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans 49, 164 Pollard, Tanya 51–2, 183

Primaudaye, Pierre de la, French Academie, The 249–51, 255–6 Prynne, William, Histriomastix 74 Punchdrunk 303–5 Puttenham, George 192, 231 Raber, Karen 209, 219 Rainolds, John, Overthrow of Stage Plays, The 73–4 Raleigh, Sir Walter, Skeptick, or speculations 100 Ramachandran, V. S. 219, 220 Rambuss, Richard 206, 207, 210 Rankin, William, Mirror of Monsters, A 73 Red Bull playhouse 77, 118 Rice, Emma 302, 308 Richardson, Tony 333 Richardson, William 361 Rizzolatti, Giacomo 227 Roach, Joseph 23 Rokotnitz, Naomi 227 Royal Court Theatre 333 Royal Shakespeare Company 30, 296–8, 305–8, 338 Royal Shakespeare Theatre 296–7 Rudyerd, Benjamin, Prince D’Amour, Le 226 Rutter, Carol Chillington 295 Rutter, Joseph, Shepherd’s Holiday, The 118 Ryan, Oliver 307, 308 Rycaut, Paul, Present State of the Ottoman Empire, The 361 Sala, Angelus, Opiologia 52 scars, significance of 160–1 scent see smell Schaeffer, Pierre 34 Schafer, Murray 184 Schoenfeldt, Michael 51 Schütz, Johannes 311 screen technologies 320–1 various meanings of 319, 323–5 scrofula and royal touch 146–7 Sellars, Peter 337–8 senses (see also hearing, insensibility, sight, smell, taste, touch) common sense 40–3, 250, 263–4 confused in Comedy of Errors 178

Index culture of sight 110–28 deceptive 238–9, 240 disrupting reason 231–2 embodied sensation 271 hierarchy of 89, 114, 150–1, 158, 210 historical frame 20–5 inflammation of 63–4 internal 249–51, 262, 263, 308–9 mediational frame 28–33 mimetic frame 25–8 multiple 25 number of 58 phenomenological frame 33–6 philosophical frame 19–20 Plato’s hierarchy of 89 portrayed in antiquity 64–70 relation to Catholic ideas 231 relation to material texts 352–3, 355, 356–61 sense-alert description of book 364 senseless feeling 246–8 sensory perception as a fragile process 252, 258, 263 sensory studies 2–3, 9–10 synaesthesia 246, 256 thermodynamic model 44 sensory studies 2–3, 9–10 Serres, Michel 46, 157 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines 100 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra amatory significance of touch 161–2 ambiguity of touch 169–70 angling imagery 167–8 battle of Alexandria 123 beat/stroke terminology 163–5 Cleopatra as figure of excess 162, 169 Cleopatra’s barge 163–4 Cleopatra’s desire for touch 167–9 dramatic significance of skin 160–2 emphasis on tangibility 172–3 flagellation 48–9 inflammation of the senses 63 kissing 170–2 modern staging of 167–8, 302 skin ego 159–62, 173 tactile significance 6–7 ‘touching sounds’ 166–7

377 As You Like It civet perfume 143 definition of ‘taste’ 93 flagellation 49–50 invocation of multiple senses 25 loss of senses 44–5 smell as index of cleanliness 142–3 Comedy of Errors, The anadiplosis 190, 191 antanaclasis 189–90 aural confusion 188–90, 193 aural significance 7 confusion of senses 178 dramatic significance of skin 159 ears as doors 186 ears as material protrusions 191–3 evocation of melancholy 55 failure of hearing 179–82, 190 farcical elements 179, 187, 190, 193 images of bondage 191–4 puns 188–90 sound and language 188–90 superficiality 186–8, 194 visual denouement 180 Coriolanus chafing 46 dramatic significance of skin 159 lethargy 57 modern staging 334 smell as indicator of political unrest 140 Cymbeline defective sensory perception 252–4, 258, 260, 263 dramatic significance of skin 160 early modern interpretation 261, 264 failure of sight 248 frequency of senselessness 58, 245–6, 261 Innogen’s bedchamber scene 252–4 reception of external sensory information 247 ridiculed by critics 261 senseless feeling 246–8 sensory overload 8, 42, 245, 247, 256–7, 261 sexual meaning of ‘taste’ 86 synaesthesia 246, 256, 261, 263

378

Index

use of drugs 52, 245, 258 early modern audiences 117–21, 224–7, 230, 231–2, 235, 238, 241 effect of new technologies 319–22 engaged with sceptical thought 100 First Folio 16–18, 195, 198, 356 Hamlet apoplexy 57–8 ‘closet scene’ 115–16 death as equalizer 138 ear as metaphor for interiority 183 ears as doors 185–6 inflammation of the senses 63 misleading visual cues 126–7 modern staging of 339 Ophelia’s funeral 123–4 textual debates 125 third quarto 363–4 use of ‘tickle’ 32 visual appearance of Ghost 123, 125 visual demands 113–14 visual stagecraft 110, 112, 117–18, 121–8 Henry IV Part 1 Age of Kings, An 327–34, 340 death of Hotspur 139 depiction of poverty 139–40 Sean Connery as Hotspur 327–32, 335 use of ‘tickle’ 32 Henry IV Part 2 apoplexy 56–7 books as imagery 356 flagellation 49 Henry V amalgamated into Kings of War 300 depiction of death 139 jades 48 Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, amalgamated into Kings of War 300 Henry VI Part 2, insensibility 45–6 Henry VI Part 3, ambiguous meaning of ‘stroke’ 164–5 importance of taste 86 importance of sensory references 1–2 Julius Caesar books as treasured objects 356 flagellation 49 inflammation of the senses 63

King John dramatic significance of skin 159 modern productions of 305, 344 King Lear botanical allusions 134 chafing 46 civet perfume 141, 142 definition of ‘taste’ 92 depiction of outcasts 139–40 emotional synaesthesia 309 film versions 322, 325, 337 first performance 143–5 Gloucester’s ‘fall from cliffs’ 149–50 insensibility 44, 51 olfactory significance 6 royal hand-kissing 133, 146 sensory confusion 149–50 sight as synonym for knowledge 296 significance of Gloucester’s blindness 148–9 smell as indicator of political unrest 140–1 smell of excrement 133–4, 141–2 smell of mortality 133–51 staging of 143–51 Kings of War (condensed plays) 300–1 Love’s Labour’s Lost definition of ‘taste’ 92 dramatic significance of skin 157 sweetness and intellectual ability 88–9 sweetness as flavour 86 taste of books 358–9 Macbeth books as imagery 356 dramatic significance of skin 157 meaning of screens 323 modern adaptation as Sleep No More 303–5 Measure for Measure dramatic significance of skin 159 lethargy 57 Merchant of Venice, The books as treasured objects 356 CCTV in production 337–8 ‘touching sounds’ 166 use of ‘tickle’ 32 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, sweetness as sexual metaphor 87

Index Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Bottom’s animal–human character 206–7, 209 Bottom’s confused senses 217–18, 219 Bottom’s use of reason 205–6, 209, 213–14, 219 human–animal boundary 7, 218–20 human–animal hierarchy 212–13 insensibility 44 misuse of ‘reason’ 208, 209 modern staging 302–3, 311–14 Pyramus and Thisbe 210–12, 313 reason of animals 214–15 references to senses 206 senseless dreams 203 Theseus on sensations 21 ‘touching sounds’ 166 use of drugs 204–5, 208, 210, 212 modern stage performances 8–9, 167–8, 302, 305, 293–314 Much Ado About Nothing, dramatic significance of skin 160 Othello ambiguity of touch 170, 171 dramatic significance of skin 160 kissing 171–2 language of appetite 96–7, 98 sweetness as theme 94–9 taste as sexual metaphor 95 taste versus vision 97–8 ‘touching sounds’ 166 paratexts 16 Pericles, Prince of Tyre definition of ‘taste’ 93 emotional synaesthesia 310 Rape of Lucrece, The dramatic significance of skin 157 material text 354 rapacious nature of taste 90–1 screen versions 319–46 Richard II Age of Kings, An 327–34 books as imagery 356 emotional synaesthesia 310 Sean Connery as Hotspur 327–32, 335 Richard III amalgamated into Kings of War 300 books as treasured objects 355–6 death of Henry VI 138

379 misleading visual cues 126 Romeo and Juliet, film version 338 Sonnets 114–15 Tempest, The appearance of Caliban 279–81 books as treasured objects 356 cycle of power 282–4 dual meaning of ‘touch’ 307–8 emotional synaesthesia 310 film versions 322, 326, 336–7 island as metaphor 273–4, 279 meaning of screens 323 perceived smell of Caliban 139 pinching 269–71, 275, 278, 280–5 portrayal of husbandry 274–6 portrayal of pain 269–71 Prospero’s Books 326, 336–7 punishment 269–72, 274, 278–85 relationship between Prospero and Caliban 271–3, 279–80, 284 skin’s significance 8 stroking 164 Timon of Athens chafing 46 insensibility 55 Titus Andronicus film version 322 staged by Ninagawa 296–9 translations of 337 Troilus and Cressida 1609 quarto 25 determination of value 101–3 importance of taste 104 kissing 171 scepticism 100–1 taste and value 99–105 Twelfth Night animal imagery 233 appraisal empathy 235 deceptive senses 238–9, 240 disruptive play 225 drunkenness 232–3 early modern audiences 224–7, 230, 231, 235, 238, 241 empathetic response from playgoers 225, 229, 234–7, 241 empathy with Malvolio 235–7, 239–41 first performance 20 framing senses 4, 15–36

380

Index

historical frame of senses 20–5 mediational frame of senses 28–33 mimesis 229 mimetic frame of senses 25–8 mirror neuron system 7–8, 227–9 Orsino and memes 28 Orsino’s possible association with lute 27 Orsino’s imbalance of bodily humours 21–3 patterns of sound in Orsino’s speech 33–4 phenomenological frame of senses 33–6 philosophical frame of senses 19–20 senses disrupting reason 231–2 sensory confusion 239 sensory overload 230, 231, 233 shifting feelings for Malvolio 241 use of ‘tickle’ 31–2 Venus and Adonis ambiguity of touch 169–70 kissing 170 rapacious nature of taste 90–1 subjective nature of sweetness 99 sweetness as sexual metaphor 85–6 Winter’s Tale, The importance of touch 54–5 insensibility 50–1, 53–4 kissing 171–2 linking of speech and taste 54 reception of external sensory information 247 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Sensitive Plant, The’ 134 Shirley, James, Grateful Servant, The 118 Sidney, Sir Philip, Apology for Poetry, An (The Defence of Poesy) 74–7, 87 sight confusion in Comedy of Errors 178 deceptive 240 disputed status of 111–12 failure of in Cymbeline 248 importance in Renaissance theatre 110, 117–21 overwhelmed by other sensations in Cymbeline 245

pre-eminent in hierarchy of senses 114, 210, 217–18 references in Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 206 reliability of 116 role in contemporary theatre 295–8 significance for Catholics 113, 120 synonym for knowledge 296 visual stagecraft 110, 112, 115, 120–8 Skinner, William 365 Sleichim, Eric 300, 308 smell animal sense 211 excrement 133–4, 141–2 index of cleanliness 142–3 indicator of political unrest 140 mortality 133–51 old books 356–8, 363 position in hierarchy of senses 150–1 putrefaction 135–9 role in contemporary theatre 304 staging of 143–51 theme in King Lear 133–51 Smethwicke, John 363 Smith, Bruce R. 1, 228, 247, 262, 271, 353 Smith, Emma 330 Smith, Simon 150, 165, 182, 295 Socrates, portrayed by Plato 62, 63, 64–6, 72 sound (see also hearing) role in contemporary theatre 299–301 music in early modern theatre 299 spectrographs 28–9 Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics 310 Spurgeon, Caroline 101 Stallybrass, Peter 141–2, 361 Steffes, Michael 134 Steggle, Matthew 71 Sterne, Jonathan 184–5 Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead 340–1 Strlič, Matija 363 Stubbes, Phillip, Anatomy of Abuses, The 25, 31 Surflet, Richard, Country Farm, The 276 Swann, Elizabeth L. 359 Sweet, Jeffrey 294 Syme, Holger 306

Index synaesthesia confusion in Cymbeline 246, 256 definition of 246 emotional 309–10 synaesthetic overload 261, 263 synaesthetic slippage 256 Taber, Katherine H. 228 Tashkiran, Ayse 305–6, 308 taste ambivalence of 89–94 as form of proof 97–8 conflicted views of 93, 99 definitions of 92–3 importance of 86 language of 104–5 linked with speech 54 linked with value 99–104 old books 358–61 positive Renaissance associations 90–3 rapacious nature of 90 role in contemporary theatre 301–4 sexual connotations 86, 95 status of 103 subjectivity of 99–100 sweetness and intellectual ability 88–9 sweetness as sexual metaphor 87 sweetness in Othello 94–9 use in Troilus and Cressida 104 Taylor, John, Praise of hemp-seed, The 357 Taymor, Julie 322 Tennyson, Alfred 134 Tertullian, On Spectacles 68 theatre addiction to 69–70 attacked by sixteenth-century critics 71–4 hedonistic example 71–4 in antiquity 64–70 thermodynamic model of senses 44 tickling 31–2, 73 Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority 26, 42 Toneelgroep Amsterdam 299–301 touch (see also pinch) amatory significance 161–2

381

ambiguity of 169–70 ambiguous meaning of ‘stroke’ 164–5 blurring of pleasure and pain 162, 164 Cleopatra’s desire for 167–9 dramatic significance of skin 157, 159–61, 173 early modern definition of 256 emphasis on tangibility in Antony and Cleopatra 172–3 function of skin 157–8 importance in Winter’s Tale 54–5 kissing 170–2 location in hierarchy of senses 158 multiple meanings 307–8 neglected sense 256 old books 355–6 role in contemporary theatre 304–8 royal 146–7 royal hand-kissing 133, 146 ‘touching sounds’ 166 transduction 29 Tribble, Evelyn 55, 121 Trivedi, Poonam 326 Trueman, Matt 294, 312 Tusser, Thomas, Five hundreth point of good husbandry 276 Tyler, Imogen 160 value, determination of 101–3 van Elk, Martine 179, 193 van Hove, Ivo 299–301, 308, 339 van Sant, Gus 334 Vaughan, Livi 303–4 vibration studies 30–1 vision see sight voices, changing over time 180–1 Waldmann, Alex 305 Waldron, Jennifer 230, 241, 246 Wall, Wendy 87–8 Walley, Henry 25 Walsham, Alexandra 366 Wanley, Nathaniel, Wonders of the Little World, The 211 Ward, Ned, London Spy, The 48 Wars of the Roses, The (TV series) 336

382 Watson, Robert N. 208 Watt, Tessa 111 Watts, Cedric 206 Welles, Orson 322, 334 Wells-Cole, Anthony 111 West, Ollie 341–2 Whitney, Charles 235 Wilkinson, Robert, Jewell for the Eare, A 182, 185, 192 Williams, Clifford 30 Williams, Griffith, Best Religion, The 110, 113–14 Witmore, Michael 40 Wolfe, Charles, T. 116 Wondra, Joshua D. 234–5, 237

Index Woods, Gillian 120, 122 Wooster Group 339 Worthen, W. B. 320 Wright, Thomas, Passions of the Minde in Generall, The 166, 213–14, 248, 309 Wyrick, Deborah 206, 217 Yeats, William Butler, ‘Second Coming, The’ 45 Young Vic 312 YouTube 320, 335, 338 Zarlino, Gioseffo 29 Zucker, Adam 303

383

384