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

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 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.Ph