The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 ed. by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (review)

“What can texts, performances, and artworks tell us about the senses in early modern England?” (1). This stimulating collection poses, and offers some insightful answers to, this provocative question. Evolving out of the scholarship that fueled the October 2011 Globe Education series, which “challenge[d] the idea that Shakespeare’s first audiences went only to ‘hear’ plays or that they were either auditors or spectators,” the volume’s editors posit that early modern theatrical performance was a “multisensory phenomenon” that engaged whole-body audience responses (219). Studies of sensory performance, such as Simon Smith’s chapter on Antony and Cleopatra’s visual music and Lucy Munro’s sampling of tasting scenes, are situated alongside readings of poetry, conduct books, objects, and dances, including Hannah August’s study of “paper pictures” and Darren Royston’s chapter on dance and courtship (212). Departing from previous collections in this area through the range of artistic media that it explores, this volume brings together imaginative and thought-provoking contributions from a range of established and rising scholars. It raises penetrating questions about, and offers fresh understandings of, “the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in early modern England” (9).

Beginning with the belief articulated by Constance Classen that the “senses do not operate in fixed and universal ways,” The Senses in Early Modern England seeks to illuminate a variety of sensory encounters encoded in early modern works, within the context of the wider cultural moments in which they were produced and circulated (5). The volume is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on a spectrum of early modern textual, performative, and artistic forms. Each section also pivots on a specific question that engages with and adds layers to the main thrust of the enquiry: how do each of the individual senses appear in particular artworks; how were the senses understood in particular early modern contexts explored in works of art; and what sensory experiences might have been enacted when early modern subjects were actually engaged with works of art?

The first section spans the five familiar “external” senses: taste, sight, touch, hearing, and scent. Incorporating work by Lucy Munro, Jackie Watson, Darren Royston, Eleanor Decamp and Holly Dugan, this section has three drama-centric chapters (one, two, and four), one on performance (three), and one on material objects (five). The drama-focused chapters show a delightful diversity in their consideration of playwrights and playtexts that sustains the current trend for recognizing Shakespeare as one among many remarkable writers of his time; in doing so, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of the portrayal of sensation on stage.

Munro’s “Staging Taste,” like many of the contributions, offers a “sample” of the ways in which taste is performed. She discusses taste’s divided reputation as “solid, material and reliable […] synonymous with the experience of life itself” and as corruptly corporeal and sinful (21). She uses this potted history to offer play-specific examinations of examples of material tasting (as physical action) and immaterial tasting (figurative and semi-figurative presentations), finally uniting all of these elements to posit a “theatrical aesthetics of taste” (20). This chapter pleasingly pulls away from the familiar metaphorical associations of appetite to nibble at taste’s treatment in relation to salvation, sexuality, and touch, and to chew over the dramaturgical implications of simultaneously perceiving this sense as “fleshly” while disembodying it through of the unavoidable “fe[e]d[ing of …] spectators […] a substitute experience” (35).

Watson’s chapter pits “dove-like looks” against “serpents eyes” and pivots around the question: how far can an early modern playgoer trust the evidence of his or her own eyes? Drama, diarists, and scholars are all mined for their presentations of episodes of ocular perfection and ocular distrust to explore the ways in which visual clues could be used, adapted, and abused on stage and...