Shakespeare in Another Sense

276 Pages·2012·1.42 MB·English

Shakespeare in Another Sense:
A Study of Physical and Textual Perception in Four Plays

by
Jennifer Rae McDermott
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jennifer Rae McDermott (2012)
SHAKESPEARE IN ANOTHER SENSE:
A STUDY OF PHYSICAL AND TEXTUAL PERCEPTION IN FOUR
PLAYS

Jennifer Rae McDermott
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
2012

ABSTRACT

This dissertation investigates how the sensory body informs an audience’s
reception, and perception, of Shakespearean drama. Specifically, I question the nature of
subject/object relations through a comprehensive study of all five senses in Shakespeare.
Positioned as mediators of knowledge between body and mind, the senses provide a
means to examine the relationship between self-constituting subjects “in here” and
exterior world objects “out there.” I believe that early modern authors, and Shakespeare
foremost among them, used the liminality of the physical senses to test newly emergent
ideas of inwardness and individual consciousness. My dissertation upends the sensory
hierarchy assumed by Western tradition by arguing that smell, taste, and touch are crucial
to theatrical experience; indeed, they invite a deeper form of theatrical receptivity
through subject/object interpenetration than the senses of hearing or seeing. This is
because sights and sounds distance the perceiving-subject from the perceived-object
onstage, inviting us instead to reflect upon the theatrical medium that fills the divide. My
project places the bodily senses and affective faculties in conversation in order to explore
the sensory metaphors that motivate character judgements and plot understandings at a
level of felt engagement. Braiding together early modern medical conceptions of the
senses with literary analysis and stage history, my dissertation reconstructs bodily
ii
experience in the past on historically informed terms. Recognising the inherent diversity
of perception, my chapters advance a set of original arguments: that palpation leads to
jealous cognition through the skin-web in Othello, that colonial tastes merge with the
pleasures of speech on the double tongue in Antony and Cleopatra, that the smell of
blood harbours the infection of evil in Macbeth, and that sensory intelligencers subtly
couple two media – read script and heard play – in Hamlet. In sum, by analysing how a
modern appreciation of Shakespeare’s drama differs from the embodied perspective of
earlier audiences, I hope to provide a new understanding of early modern subjectivity
through early modern sensory experience.

iii
Acknowledgements
My dissertation was generously funded by a Canada Graduate Doctoral
Scholarship awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, two University of Toronto Fellowships, and several research travel grants
from Massey College, the School of Graduate Studies, and the Department of
English. I am also grateful to the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare
Association of America, and the International Shakespeare Association (specifically
their conference partner “The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust”) for their financial
assistance in support of my presentations at the society gatherings.
This project has benefited in countless ways from the exemplary guidance of my
advisory committee. I wish to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor Elizabeth D.
Harvey. Her incisive criticism, unflagging encouragement, and sage experience as a
mentor, both personal and professional, deserves special recognition. I owe a similar
debt to Jeremy Lopez, whose meticulous readings of my work and tough questions
have not only strengthened my arguments but sharpened my thinking about audience
response. I am very grateful to Jill Levenson for her rigorous attention to detail in
appraising my chapters, and thank her especially for raising my awareness of textual
variants and editorial concerns. The tone of my defence quickly transitioned from
oral examination to critical conversation in large part thanks to the rich comments
and intellectual generosity of my examiners. On that note, I would like to
acknowledge the perceptive contributions of Katie Larson, Deidre Lynch, and my
external reader Carla Mazzio. Our discussion will, I am certain, play a shaping role in
iv
my scholarship as I continue to publish in this sensory vein. I am especially
appreciative of Carla Mazzio’s external report, which offers a wealth of suggestions
for the future and opens up my claims into new and provocative avenues.
My understanding of Shakespeare and the senses has been enriched by
stimulating conversations with other scholars in the field. I have had the good fortune
to receive audience feedback at numerous specialised conferences, such as the
Arizona Centre for Renaissance and Medieval Studies session on “The Five Senses,”
and at major international assemblies including: the Shakespeare Association of
America, the Renaissance Society of America, the Modern Language Association,
and the International Shakespeare Association. I would like to thank Rebecca Lemon
for organising the seminar on “Shakespeare and Science” (SAA 2011), and the
seminar participants: Jean-Francois Bernard, Liza Blake, John D. Cox, Mary Thomas
Crane, Stephen Deng, Allison Kay Deutermann, Katherine Eggert, Jean E. Feerick,
John Garrison, Joe Keener, Allison Kellar Lenhardt, Scott Maisano, Carla Mazzio,
and Henry Turner. I would also like to thank Wietse de Boer, Holly Dugan,Wes
Folkerth, Brett D. Hirsch, Laurie Johnson, David McInnis, Tanya Pollard, John
Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers at Early
Modern Literary Studies for their reflections on my research. An abridged version of
my fourth chapter on eyes and ears in Hamlet already appeared in print in the
“Embodied Shakespeare” special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies, and I
would like to acknowledge the general editor Matthew Steggle for the journal’s
permission to allow that material to appear in the dissertation. My evidence for the
dissertation was unquestionably deepened by my research trips to the Newberry
v
Library in 2011 and the British Library in 2008, and I would like to thank the
librarians and staff at these libraries for their help with the rare book collections.
I could not have completed this dissertation without the mentorship, support, and
camaraderie of my colleagues at the University of Toronto. My writing group –
Tony Fong, Spencer Morrison, and Kailin Wright – provided editorial suggestions,
helped to spark insights, and shared together in the frustrations and triumphs of the
dissertation experience. A special place of gratitude is reserved for Claire Battershill,
who not only proofread the final dissertation product but who became a preparation
partner at the critical defence juncture. The Massey community of graduate students
and senior fellows was a constant source of inspiration and academic nourishment. I
greatly value George Logan and Maggie Kilgour as mentors, role models, and
friends. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to all my friends!
Finally, I must acknowledge my greatest debt of all – that to my supportive
family. My husband, Travis Chalmers, has been a pillar of support throughout my
graduate studies, helping me though his patience, good humour, and steadfast love. I
am immensely grateful to my father, Ralph McDermott, who nurtured my love of
literature, who made me believe that anything is possible if I put my mind to it, and
who reminded me, with wisdom, to “enjoy the ride.” Above all, I wish to thank my
mother who listened to me read aloud every word of this dissertation, and who gave
me the strength to find my voice in writing by living as such as strong example
herself. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Patricia McDermott, my “better
ear” (AC 2.1.31).

vi
Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

LIST OF FIGURES viii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 26
“Palpable to Thinking”: Palpation, Cognition, and Webs of Touch in Othello

CHAPTER TWO 75
A Taste for the Exotic: Incorporation, Colonisation, and the Double Tongue
in Antony and Cleopatra.

CHAPTER THREE 125

“The Smell of Blood”: The Olfactory Atmosphere of Macbeth

CHAPTER FOUR 182
“Amaze Indeed the Very Faculties of Eyes and Ears”: Sensory Intelligencers in Hamlet

WORKS CONSULTED 236

vii
List of Figures

Figure 1 “Tactvs” woodcut by Georg Pencz 37
from the series The Five Senses (1544).
By permission of the British Museum.

Figure 2 The Rainbow Portrait (1600) by Isaac Oliver. 182
By permission of the Marquess of Salisbury,
Hatfield House, England.

viii
INTRODUCTION

“[The senses] have always been, and remain now, among the most difficult to understand of all things
human. Because they are the medium through which we perceive, they cannot easily be perceived
themselves. Being our conduit to reality, they stand somehow apart from, behind, above, or around reality,
never visible on its surface. We can look through the spectacles, but when we take them off to examine
them, we become too blind to see them” – Mark Caldwell

How is reading Shakespeare a sensory experience, and how does his language
evoke sensations that change an understanding of the play? This question is the starting
point of my dissertation, which examines the role of the five senses in Shakespeare’s art.
My project has a twofold aim: revivifying the historically- and culturally-specific
associations carried by each sense that shaped play meaning for his earliest audiences
and exploring how those bodily sensations continue to resonate with us today as they
materialise on the page and in performance. Indelible physical impressions are left as
marks within the play-texts just as a phonograph records sound or as a fingerprint
registers touch.1 For example, the practice of reading Shakespeare’s words aloud begins
to recover a heard past through the cadences of lines, the rhythm of meter, or the way
vowels and consonants combine to place particular demands on our lungs, diaphragm,
and vocal chords in delivery. Listening to these acoustic cues, however, provides only
one piece of the full sensory puzzle. I contend that traces of early modern touching,
tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing survive in Shakespeare’s lines, expressing
themselves as metaphor and in its subtending figures of synecdoche and metonymy.
Attending to the sensations archived within Shakespeare’s metaphors provides a means
of access to embodied experience in the past, and further generates new meaning when
these metaphors become actualised onstage for audience perception.

1 On Shakespeare’s plays as a type of acoustic recording technology akin to a phonograph that allows
readers to not only listen to history but to listen “through history as well” (Folkerth 6), see The Sound of
Shakespeare.
1
That sensation is realised by metaphor is in many ways a longstanding belief.
Both of the most popular rhetorical guides in Shakespeare’s day, namely George
Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and Angel Day’s The English Secretary
(1599), define metaphor with reference to sensing: “For what els is your Metaphor,”
Puttenham attests, “but an inuersion of sence” (128)?2 While his term “sence” puns on
both mental connotation and physical perception, he soon clarifies the relationship he
sees between the two: a metaphor is – in his words – a “sensable” figure that appeals to a
greater range of senses than the “auricular” figures he discusses that engage the ear alone
because it compares two things in “cross-naming” or “transport” so as to “affect the
minde by alteration of sence” (148). Day’s definition is a little simpler. He explains that
“metaphora” is “when a worde from the proper or right signification is transsferred to
another neere vnto the meaning, as to saie: We see well, when wee meane wee
vnderstande well, or to call them eaters […] who vndo the poore, or […] as if we should
say, the ground wanting wet, doth thirst for raine” (77-78). Notably, each of the examples
Day provides returns to the body, and specifically to the senses in seeing and tasting, as
the basis for metaphor. Puttenham likewise summons taste, hearing, and touch in his list
of primary examples, such as “the man of law said, I feele you not, for I vnderstand not
your case” (148). Given that metaphor is typically understood as a rhetorical device that
arbitrarily links terms, why is it that Shakespeare’s contemporaries consistently turn to
the body in order to define its function?
Recent research into neurology offers one possible answer. George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson argue in Metaphors We Live By that conceptual metaphors arise from the

2 I preserve original spelling for all primary citations, except for the long [s].
2