"The Eye of Man Hath Not Heard": Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology

Why does Shakespeare's Bottom paraphrase Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians (2:9) when he awakens from his dream: "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"? (4.1.207-10).¹ Why does he mangle this gospel verse synaesthetically, crossing hearing and vision, tasting and touching? This essay examines the theologically inflected sensorium of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream by taking ancient theories of "syn-aesthesia," or "sensing-with," as models for theatrical phenomenology.

At the broadest level, Bottom's reference to Paul helps to reconfigure the question of how Reformation dispositions towards the body and the senses informed the experience of theatergoing in early modern England. Current accounts of the historical phenomenology of post-Reformation theater often begin with the basic premise that Protestants devalued sensory experience and bodily praxis. The embodied dimensions of both ritual and theater seem to belong to the "incarnational" Catholic practices that Protestants sought to disenchant—the "idolatrous" adoration of statues of the Virgin and the saints, or the belief that Christ's body and blood were physically present in the consecrated Host. Along these lines, one scholar has suggested that because it is was an embodied phenomenon, theater had an "irreducibly Catholic aspect" in post-Reformation England.² Relying on similar assumptions about the body, scholars interested in outlining a Protestant phenomenology of theater often tend to emphasize the inward or the cognitive, pitting the "eye" of faith against the "idolatrous" eye of the body.³ In both cases, the Reformation becomes a kind of engine of modernity, which demystified the material world in general, not just Catholic rituals and devotional objects.⁴ And there is much evidence to ground this side of the story, especially as far as the long-term effects of the Reformation might be concerned. Yet to take this position as typical of early Protestantism is to skip an important step in a long and uneven process of English and Continental secularization that could be said to culminate in (not to begin with) the predominance of "cognitivist" views of religion, in which religious truths were privatized as immaterial, while the spheres of the body and of common sense were relegated to the profane space outside of the church.⁵

Far from giving up the body as either irredeemably Catholic or clearly profane, early modern Protestants such as John Calvin and John Foxe often turned to the body as a divine creation in the world even as they repudiated idols of the human mind and hand. Calvin, for instance, reviews the body's divine origins, its ties to Christ's human body, and its full participation in resurrection when he argues for the body's positive role in the Protestant sacraments. Warning simultaneously of the dangers of idolatrous acts of worship, he dismisses the notion that the bodily component of worship is irrelevant: "The lordes supper, is it receaved in the minde only, and not also in the handes and mouth? Hath god engraven in oure bodyes the armes and badges of his sonne, that we afterward shuld pollute our selves?"⁶ As with doctrinal disputes over divine grace as the sole engine of salvation, a strict distinction between divine and human agency can be understood to structure Protestant attitudes towards the body: living beings (and nature more broadly) offered reformers dynamic exemplars of divine creations on earth, which they were fond of contrasting with products of human artifice.

The Lollard Conclusions, reprinted in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, offer a particularly pithy version of a claim that runs though many iconoclastic writings of this period, up through Calvin and the English reformers: "For God did not saye, let us make a block or stone unto our likenes and image, but let us make man."⁷ The iconoclastic move here is neither skeptical nor fully rationalist; it is instead based on an assertion that there is already a real...