Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625) by Hristomir A. Stanev (review)

Hristomir Stanev’s study builds on important work of the past couple of decades on the literary sensorium; his unique and significant contribution is the study’s focus on the Jacobean theatrical space and the dramatists’ use of sensory fictions to represent the rapidly changing urban realities of London. Around 1600, London became “metropolitan” in response to the vast growth of the population and the expansion of trade and diversity. Stanev argues that Jacobean dramatists relied “upon sensation to channel concerns about some of the more nebulous and intractable challenges the scale of urban living was beginning to occasion at the turn of the seventeenth century” (183). The examples detailed in Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625) suggest that this moment in history is well worth special attention; Stanev shows how theatre was formative in linking the five bodily senses to new urban realities in a very pre-modern way.

Stanev recognizes that any project that seeks to engage a past sensorium risks anachronism. In this case, we cannot presume we sense the world—physically, culturally, symbolically—in the same way Londoners did more than four hundred years ago. To offset this inevitable critical blind spot, Stanev bolsters his readings of the literary texts with historical documents that record the relevance of particular sensual experiences across the urban and suburban spaces of London. He simultaneously asks: “is it possible to determine why the senses and the city became significantly entwined in dramatic performance during the particular historical context of Jacobean urban development?” (15). He determines that the answer in part is connected to the “meteoric rise and popularity” of a particular genre of theatrical text: the city comedy. The bodies that populate these comedies—by Jonson, Webster, Fletcher, Dekker, and Middleton—are confronted with the same sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that were impossible to avoid outside the theatre. In his second chapter, “The City and Its Theaters: A Jacobean Sensory Perspective,” Stanev tours London circa 1600 and uses words like “oddities,” “aggressors,” “disturbance[s],” and “distraction[s]” to describe the senses (32, 37, 46, 47). The growing city literally threatened the senses, and the theatre provided a space to explore and to challenge the things and people that posed these threats.

Stanev’s remaining five chapters predictably address each of the bodily senses but are arranged in the Platonic order, starting with taste, smell, and hearing, before addressing vision (Aristotle’s first and highest order sense) and, finally, touch. Stanev explains that he follows the Platonic order because it “register[s] a change in urban perspective…from material place and practice…to forms of communication and social expression” (20). Each chapter remains faithful to Stanev’s new historicist grounding by opening with a survey of each sense in the period; one of my few critiques of the book, though, is that these surveys are cursory and miss the nuances sense scholars have been working to define in recent years. When Stanev directs his historical analysis of each sense toward the specific sites of each chapter (places like London’s “stews” or brothels, its festering jail cells, or the shadows of Bedlam), his conclusions about the crossing influences of the senses, the city, and the theatrical space are themselves nuanced and broadly applicable.

For instance, to begin at the end, Stanev’s final chapter on the most elusive of the five bodily senses—touch—turns away from the city comedies to explore the applicability of some of the book’s conclusions to two of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. In both plays, plague is a force that affects both tactile and olfactory senses; to connect a play to plague is to connect it to the rhetoric “of lost breaths, foul smells, and purged airs [that] channel contemporary fears of the nocuous effects of aggressive social conflict, developing within the...