Shakespeare and The Senses: Holly Dugan

Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.
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Shakespeare and the Senses

Holly Dugan*
The George Washington University
Abstract
This article examines recent critical approaches to Shakespeare and the senses.
Historicizing the senses has posed certain methodological challenges: what is the
relationship between subjective sensory perceptions and broader cultural under-
standings of sensation? Does the sensate have a history? Recent work on each of
the five senses demonstrates that the answer is yes. And, surprisingly, Shakespeare
and his literary works are at the center of the field. As an important figure of the
English literary canon, yet one about whom we know so very little, Shakespeare’s
sensory archive is both omnipresent and illusive. Shakespearean sensations thus
provide a way of grappling with the larger methodological stakes of this field.
This article examines a wide range of critical approaches to Shakespeare’s sensory
archive and ends by considering possible paths for further research.
In his summary of the field, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making

Sense: Perils and Prospects of Sensory History’, Mark Smith asserts that
it is a good moment to be a sensory historian (841). Despite the cautionary
tone of his title, sensory history is a burgeoning field: what was once
described as a ‘senseless’ profession is now rife with sensuous explorations
and encounters with the past (Roeder; Howes; M. Smith). Recent works
in early modern studies alone include studies of the acoustic world of the
Renaissance; of the role of voice in creating gender on the Renaissance
stage; of the role of touch in early modern culture; of scents as staged
properties; of taste in early modern manuscript coteries; of chocolate and
tobacco in early modern Europe; and of the sensory worlds of early
America, to name just a few examples (B. Smith; Bloom; Harvey; Harris;
Dugan; Masten; Norton; Hoffer). Though these studies are diverse in
their approaches and arguments, when read together, they collectively
argue that the five human senses – vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch
– provide an important way of understanding the interface between
material environments and somatic experiences and between scholars and
the sensory worlds of the past.
Until recently, such a conclusion seemed oxymoronic, if not impossible:
how could something as subjective, fleeting, and ephemeral as the sensate
have a history? Though Aristotle first defined the five human senses over
© 2009 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Shakespeare and the Senses 727
two thousand years ago, definitions and theories about them have varied
widely (Aristotle 436b). Scientists, for example, only recently discovered
how olfaction works (Nobel). Nor has there been agreement that the
human senses are limited to five: for example, Augustine posited that there
was a sixth, inner sense, which perceived not only external objects but also
the five senses themselves ( Vance). And contemporary scientific discourse
now recognizes nine (Guerts). Belief in five, six, or nine senses raises
important questions about their role as historical evidence: how might we
explain such differences? Has the human body adapted and developed
new modes of perception or merely new theories about them?
Mired in misconceptions about biology, cognition, and representation,
the senses thus represent both a provocative threshold of interpretation as
well as a historical paradox: is the body a static or shifting category of
knowledge? On the one hand, as literary critic Michael Schoenfeldt
argues, such differences result from cultural beliefs: ‘bodies have changed
little through history, even though the theories of their operations vary
enormously across time and culture . . . [w]e are all born, we defecate, we
desire and we die’ (6). Though this eloquent observation offers a seemingly
overarching truth about human experience, it obscures the ways in which
individual bodies sense specific phenomena, transforming both the body
and the object being sensed. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the problem
is this: within such an approach, a rose is always a rose, regardless of where
or when it was smelled or by whom.
Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including the sciences, social
sciences, and the humanities, have begun to challenge this approach along
both synchronic and diachronic lines, querying: what if the material body
has changed through history? Defining sensory perception as a shifting
interface between individual cognition and shared material environments,
these scholars and scientists argue that both the body and the object being
sensed are influenced through the act of sensation. Such an approach does
not assume that a rose is always a rose, but rather queries whether ‘that which
we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet’ (Shakespeare,
Romeo 2.1:85– 6). As this new avenue of research suggests, biological
operations of sensation, like cultural theories about them, offer a wide
range of information about life in the past, if one focuses on the act of
perception as both a subjective and social experience.
Roses, for example, like most modern flowers, have been bred to be
hardier than those of the past; as a result, most modern varieties do not emit
strong fragrance. Some do not emit any fragrance at all. As this example
suggests, the rapid pace of technological advancement in postmodern
Western culture has made it almost impossible to ignore significant
changes to both the environment and perceptions of it. Previously
undetectable sounds are now audible and recordable. Similarly, technological
and scientific breakthroughs disseminate quickly across cultural nodes:
research on nasal recognition of smell molecules, for example, has shaped
© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x
728 Shakespeare and the Senses
urban counter-terrorism practices, medical approaches to epilepsy, and

even the sales of French fries (DePalma; Burr 156; Schlosser ch. 5).
Observing such complicated relationships, anthropologist Constance
Classen argued that sensory perception – the act of seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, or touching – is as much a cultural action as it is physical (Classen
1). The human sensate, far from a biological universal, is culturally and
physically specific ( Bordieu; Elias; Gilroy).
If our contemporary sensorium is complex, varied, and unique, then so,
too, are those of the past. The growing field of historical phenomenology
studies these varied sensory worlds (B. Smith; Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-
Wilson). As a research model, it seeks to recreate lost ‘ecologies’ of sense
and sensation in order to chart how various cultural and physical
‘orientations’ shaped perceptions of the world in radically different ways
(Howes, ‘Charting’ 114; Ahmed 27). Though there is disagreement about
the extent to which we can recreate these sensory ecologies of the past,
and about the best methodological approach to do so, these practitioners
collectively argue that sensory history offers a unique approach to
understanding life in the past (M. Smith; Strier; Paster, Rowe, and
Floyd-Wilson).
Literary scholarship has already contributed much to this growing field.
The relationship between a physical sensation, like the sweet smell of an
actual rose, and a cultural representation of it, like its use in the play Romeo
and Juliet, is a gap filled by metaphoric language. That even biologists
describe the instantaneous nasal recognition of a smell molecule as a
‘Proustian’ memory emphasizes the important role of metaphor in both
biological and cultural experiences of sensation. Similarly, George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson argue that metaphoric language betrays cognitive patterns
of sensation, arguing that ‘metaphor is as much a part of our functioning
as our sense of touch, and as precious’ (Lakoff and Johnson 239). As
these biologists and linguists suggest, our subjective archive of sensory
experience is shaped by culturally shared metaphoric tags, like ‘rose’ or
‘sweet’. The study of metaphor can ‘make available to others the experience
of the corporeal senses’ (Stewart 15). Metaphors can function as an
historical archive of sensation. This is not to say that metaphors should
be interpreted literally or that they render themselves meaningful only
through shared cultural histories (Strier). Rather, they reveal how individuals
react to cultural and physical events. If interpreted thoughtfully, metaphors
demonstrate the potential of literary history to offer ‘abstract and
concrete’ contributions to other fields like quantitative history, geography,
and botany (Moretti 2).
This is especially true of early modern metaphors of sensation; early
modern English included a much larger vocabulary of sensory description,
which is now mostly obsolete (Dugan; LaPorte). Technologies of print
issued forth new transactions between ‘material language and the material
bodies of readers and writers;’ such transactions, Katherine Craik argues,
produced new kinds of bodily and literary pleasure (3). This pleasure was
both physical and cultural: early modern writing practices were overtly
visual, but they were also tactile, and, as Jeffrey Masten’s and Kim Hall’s
work on sugar suggest, perhaps even gustatory. Speech, while overtly
aural, was also olfactory, as Coriolanus’s horror at the rank breath of the
plebeians demonstrates (3.3:124 –7). And, as Carla Mazzio has argued, the
shift towards silent reading practices (and perhaps towards more metaphorical
rather than material sensations) reconfigured representations of love through
technologies of print culture rather than writing cultures (Mazzio, ‘Acting’).
These technologies certainly produced new pleasures, but they also
produced new kinds of bodily pain. The labor to produce the heft of a
book, particularly if it was heavily bound, armored, or locked, reoriented
the body around the experience of pain in much the same way as reading
practices reoriented the expression of pleasure. Early modern reading
practices could provide one useful schema for approaching sensation. So,
too, could drama.
In the archive of early modern material and metaphoric sensation,
Shakespeare looms large. As a central figure of the English literary canon,
yet one about whom we know so very little, Shakespeare’s sensory archive
is both omnipresent and illusive. He was, as Ben Jonson coined in the
First Folio of 1623, ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Yet, as Marjorie
Garber argues in the introduction of Shakespeare after All, such timelessness
is itself a paradox (3). The notion of Shakespeare’s universal influence
stems not from his transhistorical, universal imagery but from an uncanny
timeliness, an ability (like Lady Macbeth’s) to seemingly ‘feel now / the
future in an instant’ (1.5:55– 6). Malevolio’s yellow stockings; Fluellen’s
Welsh accent; Cleopatra’s strange, invisible perfumes; Katherine’s longing
for beef with hot mustard; and Lady Macbeth’s overly-scrubbed hands are
the stuff of Shakespearean sensations. They root his characters in their
dramatic world, and by extension, in ours. As Garber surmises, ‘every age
creates its own Shakespeare’ (1).
Shakespeare’s literary influence is thus a palimpsest of early modern
sensory metaphors and of distinctive interpretations of them throughout
a wide variety of cultural moments, environments, and performances. His
dramatic worlds – Cyprus, Egypt, Ephesus, Rome, Scotland, Venice, and
Verona, to name just a few – are distinct sensory realms. They have been
adapted to a wide variety of artistic forms: painting, poetry, opera, ballet,
film, comic books, puppetry, the virtual reality world of Second Life, and
even a series of perfumes. They have been translated, condensed, distilled,
bowdlerized, signed, silenced, sung, tagged, and retold. Each transmuta-
tion adds new kinds of metaphoric and material meanings about those
sensory worlds.
How, then, should one interpret such a diverse archive? We know, for
example, that Shakespeare was, most likely, never in battle. Yet he describes
it vividly: in King John, war is comprised of the ‘clamours of hell’. Horses
neigh, dying men groan, and trumpets bray along with ‘loud churlish
drums’ (3.1:229–30). In this play, and others, war is cacophony. Such
acoustic details suggest that Shakespeare most likely heard such loud
noises, though probably on the streets of London rather than the battlefield.
A German traveler, Paul Hentzner, commented on English love of sonic
displays in his records, noting that they are particularly fond of ‘great
noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, drums, and the
ringing of bells’ (47). Shakespeare’s description of the aural dimension of
war is, in some ways, a record of early modern sound, though its resonance
is metaphorical.
To listen to the acoustics of Shakespeare’s dramatic world, we need to
consider a host of criteria. Wes Folkerth, in The Sound of Shakespeare,
identifies three main conditions: the sound of the words on the page, the
space in which they were uttered, and the relationship to the audience
that heard them (14). Though such categories are the domain of theater
history, they also reveal broader insights about the role of sound in early
modern culture. How did Shakespeare grapple with the technologies of
sound available to him, including music, explosives, the actor voice, and
the space of indoor and outdoor stages? What was the relationship
between the soundscape of the stage and the soundscape of London? Were
certain plays written for distinct environments? Do their metaphors
of sense reveal this? In essence, Folkerth argues, we need to ‘listen to
[Shakespeare] listening’ (28).
The desire to eavesdrop on Shakespeare’s acoustic world is not new. As
Caroline Spurgeon concluded almost seventy years ago, Shakespeare’s
sensory metaphors hint at a distinctive personality, perhaps providing clues
to his identity. Using a dizzying array of Shakespeare’s sensory imagery,
Spurgeon concludes that Shakespeare loved music, particularly birdsongs
(58); he paid particular attention to the color of one’s visage (73); and
though he had a keen sense of smell and taste, his ‘strongest feeling’ is
reserved for ‘evil smells’ and ‘the loathsomeness of greasy, dirty, ill-cooked
or ill-served food’ (90). Yet even Spurgeon, with her investment in
biographical criticism, connects the senses with broader cultural norms.
She concludes that Shakespeare’s attention to vile smells and bad food is
easily explained: on the whole, he probably had more opportunity to
experience them then good ones.
Intuitively, Spurgeon’s conclusion makes sense: surely Shakespeare was
repulsed by such vile tastes and smells. Yet, it also documents the perils
of sensory scholarship. Even if we concede her point that most food
smelled vile and was cooked poorly (a point that most food anthropologists
challenge), why would Shakespeare be repulsed by something that was, at
least in this framework, a ubiquitous, cultural norm? Spurgeon’s is a
common mistake: she is attentive to the material differences of the sensory
world of the past and the metaphors that reveal them, yet she interprets
their cultural resonance through a modern understanding of sensation.
The past, we assume, not only smells differently than the present, it is
smellier than the present. As Mark Jenner argues in his study of early
modern smell, such a notion interprets the history of sensation within a
troubling ‘narrative of progress and deodorization’ (129–30).
Western cultural divides between the divine and the bestial in man have
often been mapped through the senses: vision and hearing are defined as
the ‘highest orders’ of perception, whereas smell, taste and touch are
defined as animalistic and primal (Crooke 712). Aristotle and Plato, for
example, were among the first proponents of vision’s predominance and
the relegation of touch as the most base of sensory ways of knowing
(Harvey 2, 6). Yet, the sensorium is often defined in complicated and
contradictory ways. Because the primary sensory organ of touch – skin – is
dispersed across the body, touch is inherently reflexive. This reflexivity,
Elizabeth Harvey argues in her introduction to Sensible Flesh, defines the
body’s borders and extends it. Though it was often characterized as the
most primitive of sensory ways of knowing, some touches, like medical, erotic,
or divine touches, transformed early modern sensory hierarchies (19).
Harvey’s approach reflects a general trend in the field, as scholars examine
early modern sensory worlds through careful study of each of the five senses,
linking general arguments about cultural beliefs to specific environments
and practices. Shakespeare’s stage is one such realm. By now, it is almost
a cliché to note that early modern playgoers went to ‘hear’ a play: they
were auditors, an ‘audience’, before they were ‘spectators’ (Neill 36).
Scholars in early modern musicology have long argued that Shakespearean
musical soundtracks were an important part of early modern theatricality.
Almost fifty years ago, Richard Hosley queried if ‘there was a music-room
in Shakespeare’s Globe?’ Since then, a number of interdisciplinary approaches
to theatricality have focused on the relationship between music and
Shakespearean drama (Simons; Ichikawa; Sanders; Jorgens; Kelsey; B.
Smith; Lyons; Tan; Hart; Wright; Fox-Good; Johnson). At the same time,
Smith’s, Folkerth’s, and Bloom’s research on early modern acoustics have
reinvigorated work on hearing and early modern culture, exploring topics
as divers as such as subjectivity, the occult, theories of translation and
post-colonialism, to name just a few (Marshall; Kranz; Shurbanov; Neill).
Two dominant themes structure the recent work on sight and Shakespeare
– audience perception and visual spectacles. The 2006 international
conference on performance and spectatorship, ‘Watching Ourselves Watching
Shakespeare’, examined Shakespearean theatrical spectacles through modern
performance, interrogating how contemporary emphases on vision have
impacted how we capture, re-perform, and remember theatrical spectacles
(Hodgdon). As Sarah Werner argues in her review of the 2007 synectic
(and wordless) production of ‘Hamlet . . . the Rest Is Silence’, modern visual
cultures release Hamlet from its weighty performance history, allowing the
audience ‘to experience the production for the story it tells, rather than
wondering whether it honors Shakespeare’s language’ (323, 328). James
Knapp underscores this point in his study of visual materiality, using a

well-known Shakespearean prop: Othello’s handkerchief. Othello, Knapp
argues, offers a cautionary parable about the ‘disaster of confusing the
objecthood of things with the stories we tell about them’ (694). In
essence, we must learn to see the difference between sensory history and
our desire for it.
Recent work on early modern visual materiality examines just such a
gap, particularly in relationship to early modern staging practices (Caldwell;
Langley; Barrett-Gravees; Sedinger; Callaghan ch. 5; Nordlund; Gent).
Consider, for example, recent approaches to the dumbshow of the senses
in Timon of Athens. Frederick Kiefer’s analysis of it – of whether and how
it would have been staged – links the play to a long tradition of theatrical
spectacles of the five senses (140). Comparing it to contemporaneous
paintings, pageants, and masques of the senses, Kiefer demonstrates why
Timon’s theatrical spectacle, with Cupid as director, connects the visual
opulence of masques with sensory pleasures. Jon Jowett revisits this
question of staging, reading Timon of Athens’s masque through early modern
print culture. Arguing that ‘performance is a sensory activity’, Jowett
interprets the playtext as a script ‘for a theatrical sense-scape that works
with and against a binary opposition of the two senses of hearing and
sight;’ as such, it requires a reader to grapple with the tensions between
text and the full, phenomenological ‘splendour’ of a performance, a splendor
that is both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’. The trick, Jowett argues, is learning
‘what we can say’ about such ‘magical transformations’, and what we
cannot (79; Bosman; Preiss).
Such work builds on previous examinations of vision, particularly its
central role in psychoanalytic studies of Shakespeare’s works; in histories
of Renaissance medicine; and in Reformation controversies. The centrality
of vision in Lacanian theories of identity led to a number of important
examinations of Shakespeare and sight, including analyses of the link
between the eye, truth, and poetic persona in the sonnets, of theoretical
explorations of theatrical spectatorship of the comedies, and of ‘repressed’
pre-modern theories of vision (Fineman; Freedman; Armstrong). Vision
was also central to Renaissance understandings of the gendered body and
representations of the body’s interior, as a number of influential studies of
Renaissance anatomy have demonstrated (Lacquer; Sawday; Lobanov-
Rostovsky). Examining such influence in literary representations, Howard
Marchitello argued that medical theories of vision could explain Othello’s
desire for ‘ocular proof ’ (Marchitello; 3.3:365). And, as Huston Diehl has
argued, it also structured post-Reformation ‘iconophobia’, particularly around
images of saints (Diehl). Such approaches demonstrate that Shakespeare
has been central to understanding the relationship between verbal and
visual culture in the Renaissance; one need only briefly glance at the
Folger Shakespeare Library’s Institute’s online exploration of early modern
visual culture to understand its scope.
Although the structures of vision and hearing structured the sensory

worlds of Shakespeare’s stage, smell, taste, and touch undoubtedly contributed
to early modern acoustic and spectacular theatrical environments. Though
early modern play-goers were described as both ‘hearers’ and ‘beholders’,
Andrew Gurr notes that neither term fully captures the ‘feast of conjoined
senses which drama began to offer in Shakespeare’s time’ (102). Gurr
concludes that the ‘the distinction between playgoers as a crowd and the
individual spectator’ may result from etymology – the etymological roots
of both ‘audience’ and ‘spectator’ defines the theater through that particular
sense rather than the interplay between the two and others (102). It is
equally plausible that such terminology reveals the multi-sensorial dynamics
of the theater.
Smell, for example, connected the environment of the theater with the
dramatic world unfolding on stage. Embodiment and environment were
often entwined in early modern medicine (Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan 3).
The humors were both physiological and environmental and the passions
were thought of as internal emotions and external winds: in early modern
England, affect could be ecological (Paster ch. 1). As Jonathan Gil Harris
argues in his reading of Macbeth, this could have made smell a powerful stage
property. For example, the play’s opening call for thunder and lightening
would have required the detonation of squibs, or small fireworks, filling
the theater with the smell of gunpowder, and providing a material reference
for the witches’ ‘witches’ bizarre incantation, “Hover through the fog and
filthy air” ’ (465). I have made a similar argument in my reading of Twelfth
Night, examining how stage perfumes might have performed same-sex
female desire in material spaces where there were no women (Dugan).
Finally, Mark Jenner’s olfactory history of the smell of garlic demonstrates
a counter approach: how the smells and odors of daily life – like food
smells – create metaphors of national identity, particularly in Henry V.
Taste, as an analogue for eating and for aesthetics, has largely been
approached through metaphors of food (Boehrer 14 –19). Shakespearean
representations of gustatory and sexual appetite have been integral to
feminist, political, psychoanalytic, and postmodern literary theories
(Gowing; Iyengar; Clavell; Munson; Greenblatt, ‘Eating’; Schoenfeldt,
‘Fables’; Adelman; Clayton). Yet the trend continues towards more materialist
examinations (Thirsk; Candido; Appelbaum). Recent work on women’s
domestic economies and on imported, consumable goods like chocolate
and tobacco suggest that taste could have equally contributed to early modern
stagecraft (Korda; Harris).
Like taste, studies of Shakespearean touch have focused on the ways in
which tactility is a metaphor for the affective power of theater, particularly
since the organ for touch extends across the boundary of the body. In
‘Acting with Tact’, Carla Mazzio queries: ‘What do we make of the
lexicon of touch when it . . . signified both affective and physiological forms of
receptivity’ (160)? For Mazzio, such reflexivity enables the ‘dead’ metaphors
of sensation from the past to live again, to become structures of perception

and ‘move’ us once again (163). Ian Maclachlan’s ‘sensuous’ analysis of
Shakespeare’s sonnet 109 makes a similar argument: the sonnet’s metaphors
of tactility create a ‘different understanding of love’s timelessness, and for
that matter, of the so-called timelessness of this love poem’, a timelessness
that is ‘historical through and through’ (62). The tactility of long-distance
loving suggests a way of understanding not only structures of desire in the
poem, but also structures of critical reception.
The preceding exploration of the each of the five sensory fields is by
no means exhaustive. Rather, I have tried to demonstrate the contours of
each subfield. As work continues on early modern sensory history, and
Shakespearean sensations, we will need to reexamine this approach, applying
what we have learned about each of the sensory modes towards further
study of their interrelatedness. Then, as now, perception was multi-sensorial.
For this reason, a number of critics have begun to approach Shakespearean
sensation through the concept of synaesthesia, a neurological disorder
where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to stimulation of a
second pathway. A patient suffering from synaesthesia might, like Bottom
in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, describe the phenomenon of his dream
in the following way: ‘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’ (4.2:204–7). Bottom’s malapropisms
gesture towards an overwhelmingly rich archive of sensation and a metaphoric
failure to describe them accurately.
What would it mean, for example, ‘to hear green’ (B. Smith, ‘Hearing
Green’)? And what did it mean to early modern audiences? If the field is
to advance, it will have to grapple with such questions. Scholars have
already begun to deal with this problem (B. Smith, ‘Hearing Green’;
Harris; Robson; Dundas). For example, Mark Robson uses Bottom’s
malapropism as an interpretive reading strategy for modern scholars,
examining visual ‘eye-rhymes’ alongside of early modern homophones
(Robson; Dundas 54). Likewise, Jonathan Gil Harris’s analysis of homophonic
puns about dropsy, swelling, and pregnancy in All’s Well that Ends Well
demonstrates how the auditory register both ‘conceives’ and ‘deconceives’
the visible realm of the theater. The social register of sound is a homophonic
chain of signification: ‘there is no end to the play of sound that is All
Swell That End Swell’ (177; Parker 172, 184). Carolyn Sale takes a
different approach to synaesthesia in her analysis of Hamlet, reading Hamlet’s
advice to his players as a meditation on theatrical phenomena. Hamlet’s
‘theory of performance’ emphasizes a material connection between actors
and audience, both of whom ‘eat’ air and ‘feel’ smells (145). While such
phrases might seem catechrectic, they invite the audience to ‘experience
a heightened sense of one’s own embodiment along with a paradoxical
liberation from it’. Such a synaesthetic experience emphasizes a phenom-
enological connection with a larger body, the body of the crowd. The
‘artifact of the text’ thus articulates ‘the remains of the theatrical experience’
through Hamlet’s theory of performance.
As these studies demonstrate, Shakespearean sensation encompasses a wide
range of approaches. And there is still much work to be done. Although
these new critical endeavors do not necessarily need Shakespeare, and
Shakespearean studies certainly do not need sensory history, there are ways in
which the methodological challenges of sensory history seem particularly
Shakespearean, and the material challenges of producing Shakespeare’s
works in the twenty-first century, particularly sensory. Perhaps he framed
the problem best in sonnet 59: pondering whether his ‘composed wonder
at his lover’s frame’ is justified, the sonnet’s speaker notes that ‘if there be
nothing new, but that which is/has been before, how are our brains
beguiled’. Are there new, material sensations or are we merely beguiled
with our own wonder of old ones? If only there was a historical record
that could, with a ‘backward look’, demonstrate how those in the past
might regard it and easily resolve ‘[w]hether we are mended or whe’er
better they, / Or whether revolution be the same’. The sonnet’s volta
abandons such comparisons as futile; the narrator concludes only that
poets in the past surely must have praised worse subjects than his. Its lofty
questions about history, desire, and sensation collapse into a pragmatic
take on literary history. Yet the desire for a ‘backword look’ remains. It is
a desire to examine the past both critically and experientially, to look,
listen, smell, touch, and taste in the present yet sense the past. The field
of Shakespeare and the senses desires something similar. As it continues to
evolve, it must grapple with that backward look, examining both his
sensory worlds and our own much more closely.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jennifer Wood for her research assistance with
this article; two anonymous reviewers for their substantive feedback on
its argument; and Lucy Munro and Kivmars Bowling for their editorial
acumen.
Short Biography
Holly Dugan teaches sixteenth-century English literature and early English
drama at The George Washington University. Her research and teaching
interests explore relationships between history, literature, and material
culture. Her scholarship focuses on questions of gender, sexuality, and the
boundaries of the body in early modern England. She is currently working
on a book-length project that examines the ephemeral history of perfume
and the role of smell in early modern culture. Professor Dugan teaches
sixteenth-century literature and early English drama. Her article, ‘Scent of
a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Early Modern England’,
was recently published in the Spring 2008 Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies.
Note
* Correspondence address: Department of English, The George Washington University, 801
22nd Street, NW, Suite 760, Washington DC 20052, USA. Email: [email protected].
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Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.

Shakespeare and the Senses

In his summary of the field, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making

urban counter-terrorism practices, medical approaches to epilepsy, and

Knapp underscores this point in his study of visual materiality, using a

Although the structures of vision and hearing structured the sensory

of sensation from the past to live again, to become structures of perception

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x

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