Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture

Description

Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds and his stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch and taste in early modern life, literature and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline. Cover Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Series preface Acknowledgements A note on the text Introduction Simon Smith Part One Theorizing sensation 1 Framing Shakespeare’s senses Bruce R. Smith 2 Admiring the nothing of it: Shakespeare and the senseless Steven Connor 3 The classical tradition Tanya Pollard Part Two The early modern sensorium 4 ‘Sweet above compare’? Disputing about taste in Venus and Adonis, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida Elizabeth L. Swann 5 Hamlet’s visual stagecraft and early modern cultures of sight Simon Smith 6 The smell of a king: Olfaction in King Lear Holly Dugan 7 ‘Amorous pinches’: Keeping (in)tact in Antony and Cleopatra Jennifer Edwards 8 Hearing at the surface in The Comedy of Errors Katherine Hunt Part Three Entangled senses 9 Sense, reason, and the animal–human boundary in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Natalie K. Eschenbaum 10 Sense and community: Twelfth Night and early modern playgoing Jackie Watson 11 Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline Darryl Chalk 12 Pinching Caliban: Race, husbandry, and the working body in The Tempest Patricia Akhimie Part Four Sensing Shakespeare 13 Shakespeare and the seven senses: Scenes from the twenty-first-century stage Erin Sullivan 14 Parted eyes and generation gaps in twenty-first-century perceptions of screen Shakespeare Diana E. Henderson 15 The senses and material texts Adam Smyth Further reading Index