It was in the British Sign Language (BSL) production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Deafinitely Theatre in May 2012 at the Globe that this reviewer faced the problem of ‘Shakespearean sensations’. The performers did not utter a single word; they signed all the lines in BSL, demonstrating that ‘spoken’ language is inseparable from bodily expressions in Shakespearean drama. When the performance ended, some of the audience cheered and clapped, while others used a ‘deaf applause’ sign by waving their hands. Those different audience responses formed a distinctive sort of ‘visual’ soundscape. These multiple sensations are often created by both performers and an audience, and can seize theatregoers, whether in striking or much subtler ways.
Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England is a collection of essays that may help articulate the multi-sensorial enjoyment of dramatic or literary texts many theatre lovers have encountered. Since Caroline F.E. Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us was published in 1935, Shakespeare’s imagery has posed challenging questions, and this book offers a new insight into these questions by placing sensations, or ‘feelings (in body or in consciousness) caused by the operations of the senses as they perceive objects in the world’ in historical contexts (Craik and Pollard, p. 8). As the editors state in the Introduction, this book considers the enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays and poems as a material and physiological experience that caused a great impact on the recipients’ bodies, minds and feelings, noting the interdependence of bodily responses and reasoning prompted by them. Therefore, the mindsets of playgoers and readers in Shakespeare’s time are highlighted in extensive accounts of his contemporaries’ works on medicine and literature, which indicate what the early modern notion of sensations was like. Some essays also contribute to further understanding of English Renaissance poets’ techniques to manipulate the audience’s sensations, which could effectively work in the present century.
The first section, ‘Plays’, deals with the use of senses in Shakespearean drama and its effect on audience response. Allison P. Hobgood’s essay deftly highlights similarities and differences between the theatre now and then. In her analysis of Macbeth, she demonstrates how the play presented an early modern notion that fear was both a sickness and the response to the diseased body/mind. Fear, presented as a contagious disease, thus made its audiences exposed to a dangerous infection. Hobgood’s discussion is mainly on seventeenth-century England, while the notion of fear as an infectious disease in Macbeth would also make sense to twenty-first-century playgoers who know little about the Galenic humoral theory. This analysis holds good for many other modern plays and films designed to drive their audience to horror or anxiety. The next two essays, by Allison K. Deutermann and by Douglas Trevor, focus more on the differences between past and present audiences, discussing early modern religious and medical customs and feelings inspired by them, which twenty-first-century playgoers may not understand at a glance.
Playwrights’ audience manipulation techniques are a central motif in the second section, ‘Playhouses’. Some contributors are interested in metaphors. Tanya Pollard points out Hamlet’s covert aspiration for femininity by associating the protagonist’s speech about his ‘unpregnant’ state with the avian metaphors about hatching and brooding, as well as linking this speech with allusions to Hecuba, a tragic mother figure in Greek mythology. That leads to her reading of Hamlet as a hybrid encounter of a male-centred Senecan revenge tragedy and a more female-centred Greek tragedy. According to her, the audience in Shakespeare’s London, moved by the play’s ‘subtle, fragile tragic effects’ (p. 100), may have considered it as ‘a new model of tragedy’ (p. 100). Given the fact that the performance history of Hamlet is marked by actresses who hoped to and did play the title role, Pollard’s reading will also help performers and playgoers reconsider the protagonist’s ambiguous relationship with femininity. This section also includes articles more focused on playgoers’ physical experiences. Matthew Steggle’s essay on early modern applause describes the soundscape of English Renaissance theatre created in a series of interactions between performers and audience members. Hillary M. Nunn reviews the correlation between the depictions of food in drama and the consumption of playhouse refreshments, which is deemed to be an early example of product placement.
Although each article in the third section, ‘Poems’, provides an insightful analysis of sensations in the act of reading poetry, this part seems like a sideshow in support of the previous two sections, for it contains only three articles devoted to this complex topic. Despite Bruce R. Smith’s summary in the Afterword that the contributors share interests, this reviewer is not convinced that the section on poetry is adequately connected to the sections on theatre.
As a whole, this book shows that Shakespeare and his contemporaries recognised the power that poetry and drama had to affect their bodies and emotions to a certain extent. Poets and playwrights tried to handle sensations skillfully, and playgoers and readers enjoyed their works both intellectually and emotionally. Topics often regarded as ‘serious’, such as alchemy, theology and medicine, and topics associated with popular entertainment, such as food in theatre and applause, are analysed from the same angle. This tendency to tie intellectual reasoning and playful enjoyment through sensations invites a well-balanced critical discussion of English Renaissance culture. Not only Shakespeareans but also historians of human physiology can benefit from this book, because it offers a glimpse of how people of various backgrounds in early modern London enabled a cultural sphere where these two seemingly separate factors functioned interdependently through the use of senses.
