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

Enticingly framed as an invitation into a conversation, Hristomir Stanev’s Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage intends to “expand our awareness of the sensory construction of urban knowledge in Renaissance theatrical culture” (4). It acknowledges its debt to some of the landmark bodily, spatial, and theatrical studies of the 1990s while it engages with, and offers its own, fresh parallel investigations into the sensibility of the urban on the Jacobean stage and the physiological experience of theater going. The resulting study is an erudite and incisive exploration of the tripartite relationship between the “sensorium, the city, and the stage” that will pave the way for new understandings of the early modern urban and theatrical environments (15).

Divided into seven chapters, Stanev’s work begins with an introduction to the sensory metropolis that demonstrates how “sensory codes demarcate and negotiate the construction of civic space” and how the city-on-stage can be read through, and as, a lens of urban knowledge (1). A further contextualizing chapter locates the forthcoming textual readings within the city-stage-sensorium’s “venture tripartite” (15). This second chapter focuses on the significance of the “metropolitan moment” of “preindustrial England” to the sensory experience of the city’s residents and tourists: the physical properties of the urban environment and their physiological impact on people (27). These sensible encounters are then pursued into the playhouses. Stanev outlines the unique “topographical, spatial and social profiles” of the indoor and outdoor establishments, drawing on personal, historical, and dramatic accounts of their diverse visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile characteristics (45).

Each successive chapter is dedicated to one of the five senses, respectively taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch. Chapter three seeks out the intersections of appetite and urban experience, utilizing “gustatory repertoire” as a means to “reclaim subjective evolution” (58). This interrogation of the “liquid margins of brothel spaces” and the bulk of the suburbs is one of the book’s most innovative readings. It revisits the familiar locations of Ursula’s booth at Bartholomew Fair to present a new perspective on the hybridity of “metropolitan” identities, one that challenges “the stigma of indeterminate topographic materiality” previously signified by the “suburban stews” (59). Pairing Jonson’s work with Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part One, this chapter reconsiders the relationship of the playhouse to its neighboring businesses, and the sensory metonymy of human bodies and the city corpus, to posit a contestatory yet codependent relationship between the substance-poor city “sippers” and the perilously “juicy” suburb-dwellers (70).

Chapter four moves upward from the gateway of appetite to the organ of scent. Here, Stanev probes the stage’s role as an olfactory archive that deliberately invokes the materiality of stages, of actor and spectator bodies, and the “foundations of metropolitan life” (83). It interrogates the city’s smellscape via its expression of the overarching religious ideologies of sin and salvation. These discourses are rendered, redolently, through the pong of the London prisons. Focusing predominantly on the jails featured in Westward Ho! and The Puritan, Stanev follows the heaviest scents on a journey between sites of corruption and sites of correction through the city. His focal playwrights, he suggests, map the olfactory disorder of the metropolitan terrain, while simultaneously anatomizing the sickness and health of the civic body.

The fifth chapter moves to the eyes and scrutinizes the now decentered visual realm of the city-on-stage through the “perverse […] spectacle” of the urban asylum as a “cabinet of curiosities” (107). This chapter contests the prevailing critical opinions of the late twentieth century; it builds on and moves beyond subsequent studies such as Carol Neely’s Distracted Subjects and Ken Jackson’s Separate Theatres. The work here concentrates on ocular distrust. It is a very dense chapter, sometimes straining at its own limits, and—somewhat surprisingly—underexamines the field of “Shakespeare unseen.” Among...