Shakespeare and the Senses Holly Dugan* the George Washington University

Home , Dumbshow, Sensory history, Shakespeare Quarterly

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

ShakespeareBlackwellOxford,LICOLiterature1741-4113©63610.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.xMarch0726???740??? 2009 2009 TheUK PublishingCompass andAuthor the SensesJournal Ltd Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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 understandings 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 Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 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,

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Shakespeare and the Senses 729 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

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 730 Shakespeare and the Senses 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

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 734 Shakespeare and the Senses 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 phenomenological 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’,

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 726–740, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.x Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 736 Shakespeare and the Senses 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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