“Sweet airs” and “Smelling music”: Healing through Synaesthetic Sense Perception in Pericles and The Tempest
Résumés
Cet article cherche à mettre en lumière comment la scène théâtrale, loin d’être uniquement un lieu de contagion, utilisait les sens comme moyens matériels pouvant engendrer une symbiose de guérison physique et psychique au niveau individuel et social, à travers des effets de catharsis, conçus pour les personnages dramatiques tout comme pour les spectateurs. En analysant les interrelations synesthésiques, le déplacement d’une perception d’un sens vers un autre, ou même la suppression d’un sens, il montre comment le traitement des expériences sensorielles dans les pièces de Shakespeare permet au dramaturge de mettre personnages et spectateurs sur la voie de la guérison.
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Mots-clés :
Shakespeare, romances, sens, synesthésie, guérison, contagion, théâtre de la première modernitéPlan
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1The particular environment of the early modern theatre (specifically the Globe theatre) induced a comprehensive stimulation of the five senses of the audience. Primarily, of course, hearing and sight, but smell and taste were also solicited considering the theatre house’s “loaded” atmosphere in which body odors might mingle with the stench of the nearby tanning industry and diverse stage materials such as blood. The thrust stage and the promiscuity of the groundlings crammed in the space close to the stage would even enable “touch” experiences both of their close neighbours and, perhaps, of an actor’s clothes. Accessory eating and drinking completed the sensorial experiences during the play, adding to those emanating from the stage. The theatre was undeniably a multisensorial experience.
- 1 See Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson, and Amy Kenny (eds.), The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558– (...)
- 2 Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, “Introduction: Imagining audiences”, in K. A. Craik and T. Po (...)
- 3 Elizabeth F. Hart, “Cerimon’s ‘rough’ music in Pericles, 3.2”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51.3, 2000, p (...)
- 4 Oxford English Dictionary, “synaesthesia”: “as in coloured hearing […] A form of synaesthesia in wh (...)
2Critical literature devoted to the senses in Shakespearean drama mostly focuses on the different uses the author endows them with – literally and metaphorically – in the framework of the largely conflicting (philosophical, medical, religious) discourses of the early modern period on the topic.1 In the present study, I wish to pursue this enquiry and call special attention to the ambivalence of the pharmakon in Shakespeare’s portrayal of the senses – that is both as poison and medicine. This portrayal of the senses mirrors the contrasting discourses, held principally by the Puritan antitheatricalists, on the one hand, and the Humanists of classical inspiration, on the other. Though Shakespeare does not endorse a consistent and explicit theory of catharsis,2 the cathartic impact of the theatre is broached indirectly by his nuanced tackling of healing through the senses. While critical considerations of his plays illustrate,3 more often than not, the role of the senses in healing processes through the influence of music on the “distemper[ed]” (Pericles, 5.1.25), this paper will more particularly dwell on the emphasis Shakespeare himself lays on the full involvement of the senses in the processing of a cure – which frequently entails the senses’ synaesthetic merging. Synaesthetic and near synaesthetic experiences of the senses – such as concurrent stimulations, interactions, displacements or impairments – as well as rhetorical synaesthesia feature extensively in Shakespearean drama. While the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of synaesthesia points to an involuntary stimulation of a sense by another,4 as a figure of speech, synaesthesia only makes use of terms specifically associated to one sense to relate to or describe another sense (Ariel: “I drink the air”, The Tempest, 5.1.104; “the taste of fears”, Macbeth, 5.5.9).
- 5 John Fletcher: “A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it w (...)
3In what follows, I intend to discuss the senses’ comprehensive solicitation and implication in healing processes as illustrated by the experience of the characters of Shakespeare’s plays and implicitly advocated for theatregoers. The first part of this article presents elements of contextualization: I discuss the ambivalence of the senses in Shakespeare’s drama as a reflection of the epoch’s disputes concerning their uses and dangers. I briefly look at opposing discourses on the senses in early modern England in relation to the theatre, primarily in respect to the healing or infectious processes they entail, in order to subsequently analyze what Shakespeare makes of them. I then elaborate on the simultaneous solicitation and interaction of several senses, involved in the healing practices of characters and audience alike, as expressed or suggested in two of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies (or romances), Pericles and The Tempest.5
The Senses and Early Modern Theatre: Infection vs. Healing
Theatre, Disease and the Corruption of the Senses
- 6 See, for instance, Caliban’s dispelling of Stephano’s and Trinculo’s fears of music coming from an (...)
- 7 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christ (...)
- 8 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres the one whereof was so (...)
- 9 William Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters wherein is plainely described the manifold vices, &c spotted (...)
4In the early modern period, the playhouse was considered by its opponents as a site of physical contagion. This idea was supported by the actual shut-downs of theatres during the bubonic plague and other contagious diseases. In the eyes of the antitheatricalists, whose inflated discourses Shakespeare enjoys poking fun at and deriding,6 it was also, however, considered as a locus of psychic corruption. Stephen Gosson, for instance, claimed that: “stag plaies are the doctrine of the Deuill; the Counsell of the vngodly; the way of sinners, the chaire of pestilence […] they were suckt from the Deuilles teate, to Nurce up Idolatrie”.7 Anthony Munday also underscored the theatre’s “infection”: it “pollute[s]” not only the actors, but also “the beholders, or the hearers […] Onlie the filthines of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors and the beholders giltie alike”.8 And William Rankins, in his 1587 work A Mirror of Monsters, considered the theatre players’ art as a “poison [that] spreddeth it selfe into the vaines of their beholders”.9 The infection, or “vitious exercise” of the actors, was deemed to come in through the spectators’ sight and hearing. In his School of Abuse (1579), Stephen Gosson suggests that the theatre infects all five senses:
- 10 Stephen Gosson, School of Abuse, Containing A Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Je (...)
There set they [dramatists] abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence; and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust […] [which] by the priuie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.10
5Gosson illustrates the theatre’s influence on body and mind by conflating the physical attack through the senses with the spiritual “gunshotte” that “gauls” the mind. He condemns both tragedy and comedy, alleging that their impact on the audience induced a kind of moral “subjection” or “erosion”:
- 11 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions, op. cit., sig. C5v-C6r.
The beholding of troubles and miserable slaughters that are in Tragedies, driue vs to immoderate sorrow, heauines, womanish weeping and mourning, whereby we become louers of dumpes, and lamentatiõ, both enemies to fortitude. Comedies so tickle our senses with a pleasanter vaine, that they make vs louers of laughter, and pleasure, without any meane, both foes to temperance, what schooling is this?11
6Gosson appears to draw from classical sources like Plato, who had already warned against the “effeminate” effect of tragedy (however admitting the attraction that “tragedians” exert on the audience):
The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast – the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most […].
- 12 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888, X.605, p. 320 (...)
But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality – we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.12
- 13 William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragædie […], London, E[dward] A[lld (...)
7Similarly, in his later attack on the theatre, William Prynne claimed that in the theatre “both by the eyes, and by the eare, a disease may proceed to the very soule itself”, generating “contagious persons” who “swarme so thicke of late on the streets of our Metropolis”.13
- 14 Thomas Dekker, The seuen deadly sinnes of London drawne in seuen seuerall coaches, through the seue (...)
- 15 Amy Kenny, “‘A Deal of Stinking Breath’: The Smell of Contagion in the Early Modern Playhouse”, in (...)
- 16 Ibid, p. 53.
8Smell too was described as liable to the pestilent contagion. Thomas Dekker affirmed that “their [play]houses smoakt euerye after noone with Stinkards, who were so glewed together in crowdes with the Steames of strong breath, that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene perboylde”.14 Unpleasant smells are mirrored in plays such as Julius Caesar, where the commoners are said to have “uttered such a deal of stinking breath […] that it had almost choked Caesar” (Julius Caesar, 1.2.246-248). Indeed, according to pre-Cartesian models, breath was thought to affect and infect the brain.15 In addition to the repulsive smells of the people, the theatre’s loaded atmosphere was due to the use of various artifacts, such as gunpowder used for special effects (such as pyrotechnics or squibs), which created a smoky atmosphere, or the use of other malodorous materials, such as sheep’s blood, used to stage bloody scenes.16 The offensively multi-odorous environment of the playhouse implied contagion, and appeared to break down social boundaries through the circulation of smells, fueling the Puritans’ fear of the noxious effects of the stage.
- 17 Qtd. in Emma J. Wells “Making sense of things”, History Today, 69.5, 2019, p. 40-50, here p. 42-43.
- 18 Ibid.
- 19 Qtd in M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, op. cit., p. 203.
9Antitheatricalists of the 1580s and 1590s, as well as those of the 1640s, were in fact building their arguments against the theatre on the long-lasting Christian condemnation of the senses, despite the fact that earlier Reformers, such as John Bale, had found that drama (particularly morality plays) could be a useful way of teaching biblical knowledge and supporting Protestant propaganda. John Drury, the medieval priest of Beccles, had forewarned, when writing (c. 1434): “Just as nothing can enter a city except through the gates, just so may nothing enter your soul, good or bad, except through one of them”.17 “Badly” used senses could lead to sins and thus the “gates” should be kept shut in order to avoid them18. For Calvin, the senses were “unfytte” to “seeke and fynde trueth”, as they were the entry gates that had determined humanity’s perversion and fall and had drawn it towards “errore & deceite”.19 The Protestant Church stressed the dangers of vision in particular. Thus the preacher John Northbrooke emphasized the threat of theatre plays on the sense of sight citing Church Fathers:
- 20 John Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vain (...)
Saint Ambrose vpon these wordes, calleth Stage playes, Uanitie, wishing that he coulde call backe the people which runne so fast thither, and willeth them to turne their eyes from beholding of such Playes and Enterludes. The lyke saying hath Saint Augustine. Lactantius sayeth, that the eyes are divers and variable, which are taken by the beholding of things, which are in the vse of men, nature, or delectable things. Vitanda ergo spectacula omnia, All suche spectacles and shewes (sayeth he) are therefore to bee auoyded.20
- 21 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast Portrait of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres, op. cit, p. (...)
10By the same token, Anthony Munday wrote: “There cõmeth much euil in at the eares, but more at the eies”.21 A few decades later, the priest and poet George Herbert similarly invited his readers to perform a willful external/internal redirection of their own sense of sight, so as to reveal the sinful images that may have been perceived.
- 23 Ibid.
- 24 Romans 10:17. All references to the Bible are given from The Bible Authorized King James Version, e (...)
11The remaining main sense then, hearing, would be open to the word of God, thus enabling the connection with the divine: “those doores being shut, all by the eare comes in”.23 Or as Saint Paul asserts: “So then, faith cometh by hearing”.24
- 25 “So glozed the Tempter, and his proem tuned; / Into the Heart of Eve his words made way”. John Milt (...)
12Yet, we also know from Hamlet, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost,25 that poison and contagion, for early moderns, could just as easily work their way in through the ear. In both texts, evil takes on the form of poison that is poured into the ear:
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body, (Hamlet, 1.5.63-67)
- 26 Antitheatricalists like Gosson and Munday however attacked not only the theatre but extended their (...)
13Shakespeare further expounds on the idea that the ears can become a gateway for dangerous infection with the displacement of the violent wounding touch of “daggers” to hearing – “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (Hamlet, 3.2.385). Words turned into sharp aural weapons can assault and hurt one’s psyche perhaps as deeply as a physical blade can wound one’s body. Hearing becomes more generally uncontrolled in the play in the form of rumours that “Rankly abuse[d]” “the whole ear of Denmark” (Hamlet, 1.5.38, 36). The displacement from one suspect sense – be it sight or touch in the quoted examples – to the sense of hearing was therefore to little avail in durably warding off infection or pain. The world of the stage, based both on visual and aural illusion, could hardly avoid the dangers of the infectious senses.26
Cathartic Reparations through the Senses
14Yet the stage, as defined by the classical tradition already, and its sixteenth-century reworkings, also contained its own remedies – both sensorial and cognitive – to the faults of the senses. Medical theories and dramatic theories coalesced in Elizabethan England, turning the stage not just into a space of learning and symbolical healing but also of physical healing for those who supported it.
- 27 Falstaff literally mentions Galen: “It hath it original from much grief, from study, / and perturba (...)
- 28 Anne Sophie Refskou, “Compassionate Perception and Touching Experiences in Shakespearean Drama”, Cr (...)
- 29 The “things not naturall” are “six in number: Ayre, Meat, and Drinke, Sleepe and watch, Labour and (...)
15As is well-known to cultural historians, early modern medicine was still mainly based on Hippocrates (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) and Galen (AD 129 – c. AD 216).27 According to these theories, disease was conceived of as the consequence of the disruption of the internal humoral balance, caused by exposure to a certain environment, physical or psychic. The Galenic four humours – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm – corresponded to the four different temperaments of melancholy, choler, sanguine, and phlegmatic, which were also closely linked to the four elements – earth, fire, air and water.28 In other words, the four humours were seen both as physical fluids circulating in the body and as temperaments. The latter were considered as innate, but also influenced and modifiable by the six non naturals.29 Humoral imbalance could proceed from an external source, as Timothy Bright noted, in his Treatise on Melancholy:
- 30 Timothie Bright, A treatise of melancholie. Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange (...)
First occasion riseth from outward things, wherin we either take pleasure, or wherewith we are offended: this obiect is caried to the internall senses from the outward which if it be a matter sensuall onely, the minde vseth to impart it to the hart, by the organicall internall senses, which with ioy embraceth it, or with indignation, and mislike refuseth it;30
- 31 “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit f (...)
16Because of this correspondence between the external and the internal senses, physical healing was thus intimately associated with psychic regeneration. Both operated through the re-establishing of the humoral balance. Music was one means of reaching an improved state. Indeed, musical therapy was known since ancient times to aid in recovering harmony in a body suffering from “distemperature” (Pericles, 5.1.25), as also alluded to in The Merchant of Venice.31 Music was not just thought to heal because it “alleviated” one’s spirits through its softness. It was believed to act on the entirety of soul and body.
- 32 “the story should be put together in such a way that even without seeing the play, a person hearing (...)
- 33 Aristotle, Politics, ed. Richard Kraut, coll. Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford, Oxford University (...)
- 34 Ibid., VIII 5, 1340a6-7.
- 35 Ibid., VIII 7, 1342a8-11.
- 36 Where moral reparation is attained not only through the expression of violent passions but also thr (...)
- 37 Charles Schmitt argues and demonstrates the presence of some of Aristotle’s works in the Renaissanc (...)
- 38 Thomas Heywood, “3. The true use of their quality”, in An apology for actors Containing three brief (...)
- 39 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, John Lichfield and James Short for Henry Cripps, (...)
- 40 Ibid, p. 373.
17This was true, already, of Aristotle’s definition of theatrical catharsis, which, most particularly in tragedy, had conjoined physical purgation to a positive psychic effect – purification through pity and fear.32 Aristotle defined drama and music as means of collective healing and regeneration through the senses. Music, he stated is “a kind of cure for the pain caused by one’s exertions”.33 He argued that “music contributes in some way to character and the soul”.34 And that “under the influence of sacred melodies, […] that induce in their souls a religious ecstasy, we see that they are calmed, just as if they were receiving a medical treatment and a purification”.35 While Aristotle’s influence on Elizabethan tragedy is debated, and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for instance, bears the mark of a Senecan brand of catharsis,36 his later tragicomedies seem more indebted to Aristotle’s idea of healing through empathetic pity.37 Many Elizabethan playwrights addressed such individual and social healing processes by means of the multifarious staged events and through the power of the particular sonorities – verbal and non-verbal – emerging from the stage, associated to vivid images (rich costumes, directed movement and gestures). Also appealing to the senses of smell, touch and taste, the theatre created an encompassing synaesthetic experience for the audience. It could teach through the senses those who had no access to literature and its moral effects. In his attempt to defend the theatre, Thomas Heywood wrote that it “taught the vnlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot reade in the discouery of all our English Chronicles”.38 Robert Burton underscored the beneficial effect of comedies too, that “purgeth the blood, confirmes health, causeth a fresh, pleasing fine color, proroges life”, affirming that catharsis was not an exclusive function of tragedy.39 He particularly praised “divine Musick”, arguing the “excellent power it hath to expell many other diseases, and considered it “a soueraigne remedy against Despaire and Melancholy”, that would “drive away the Devil himself”.40 Shakespeare appears to make his own these considerations when affirming the close association of health and theatre (here comedy), using medical terms to describe the effects of the theatre on the audience in The Taming of the Shrew:
Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment,
Are come to play a pleasant comedy.
For so your doctors hold it very meet,
Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood.
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.
Therefore they thought it good you hear a play
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life. (Induction 2, 125-132, my emphasis)
18“Mirth and merriment” will cleanse the drunkard Sly’s psyche of melancholy and heat his “congealed […] blood” thus restoring his bodily and mental balance, in accordance with the humoral model. Such examples show that, rather than explicitly taking sides, Shakespeare’s plays reflexively stage conflicting discourses, leading the audience to feel and experience within the theatre space, the power and agency of the senses.
Ambivalent Senses as Pharmakon
- 41 As music was expected to be “seen” as well as heard, the source of sound being normally visible.
- 42 Thomas Wright had asserted the paradoxical influence of music: “it moveth a man to mirth and pleasu (...)
19The contradictory perceptions of the theatre and its use of the senses are represented in many of Shakespeare’s plays, in particular in his romances or tragicomedies, such as The Tempest and Pericles. Indeed, both plays use this ambivalence to question the role of the senses in relation to theatrical illusion and memorial processes of reparation. In The Tempest, sound may be alternatively good or evil, helpful or deceitful. Caliban, who is completely “charmed” (4.1.178) and entranced by Ariel’s music, emboldens Stephano and Trinculo who are frightened by the music played “on tabor and pipe” by invisible Ariel. They seem to perceive the music “played by the picture / of Nobody” (3.2.128-129) as some trick of the Devil.41 Caliban poetically expresses his musical sensibility when telling Stephano and Trinculo: “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.138-139). This can be interpreted as the playwright’s own attempt to reassure his audience concerning the powerfully “potent art” and “rough magic” (5.1.50) of the theatre, the purpose of which is to please and thus to “give delight and hurt not” (3.2.139), perhaps suggesting a collective means of healing. Though they are no Puritans for sure, Stephano and Trinculo’s fear of Ariel’s “marvellous” (3.3.19) music can be seen as parodying the antitheatricalists’ anxiety concerning the entrancing power of the theatre. Indeed, this penetrating potential of the theatre was seen by antitheatricalists as a sort of synaesthetic “infection” leading to the corrosion of the audience’s mind through a charming of the senses. Thus, the sense of hearing, with respect to the same sounds, endows different characters with contrasting feelings.42
- 43 This ancillary interpretation relates to Shakespeare’s habitual presentation of opposed and or mult (...)
20In Pericles, the eponymous protagonist’s musical trope of the “fair viol, […] / [Which] being play’d upon before [her] time, / Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime” (1.1.82, 85-6), regarding Antiochus’s daughter, has the “viol” resonate throughout the play in antagonistic stances. The metaphor can accessorily be read as a mirroring of the early modern antitheatricalists’ equation of music played in theatres to psychically noisome music of Hell. For them, the theatre itself echoed the “chime” of the Devil and “poisoned” the audience’s ear by those “foul” entrancing “noises, sounds and […] airs” on the stage. While music is primarily used in the play as an efficient healing method – Thaisa’s “healing viol / vial” – the poisonous aspect, denounced by early modern Puritans, is perhaps also subtly alluded to thanks to Pericles’ metaphor of music as the “harsh […] chime” of Hell.43
- 44 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Robin Waterfield, coll. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Pre (...)
- 45 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s pharmacy”, Dissemination [1972], trans. and ed. Barbara Johnson, London, (...)
- 46 W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, op. cit., 2.2.23-2 (...)
21Shakespeare adopts a complex and nuanced approach to the senses, drawing on the tradition of the ambivalent notion of pharmakon as cure and poison at once. This notion is derived from the ambivalent effect of writing on memory in the Egyptian legend of Theuth and Thamos as recounted by Socrates – where writing is praised for its role in “reminding” but criticized by the same token for “[i]t will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources”.44 The pharmakon conjoins opposed ideas (“good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing”) and suggests the constant flux from one to the other.45 Shakespeare often refers to the concept of pharmakon in quite explicit terms, as in Henry IV, Part II – “in poison there is physic” (1.1.137) – or in Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Laurence says: “Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power”.46
- 47 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, ed. Henry Morle (...)
22Shakespeare’s understanding of the role of the senses owes much to Montaigne’s subtle approach. While Montaigne claims in his Apologie for Raymond Sebond that “all knowledge is addressed unto us by the senses; they are our maisters”, that the senses are “the Soveraigne maisters of his [man’s] knowledge”, he also ambivalently and skeptically affirms in the same text that “the uncertaintie of our senses yeelds what ever they produce, also uncertaine: for they are uncertaine and falsifiable to all circumstances”, and that “things [relative to the senses] [are] so uncertaine and full of controversie”.47
23While Shakespeare’s portrayal of the senses reflects the controversial discourses of the epoch, we may investigate if the concurrent stimulation of several senses as opposed to the preponderant use of one sense only (to the obstruction of the others) is delineated in the same ambivalent manner, more particularly in the process of healing.
Shakespeare’s Portrayal of the Senses on Stage
The Interweaving of the Senses
- 48 E. J. Wells, “Making sense of things”, art. cit. p. 49.
24Not only does Shakespeare prove interested in the ambivalence of sense perception, and the difficulty of distinguishing infection from remedy, but his plays also testify to an intermingling of the senses, a sort of rippling out effect of one sense perception upon another. The interweaving of the senses was alluded to in Antiquity by Aristotle through the harmony of sounds and colours, and explicated by Pythagoras who affirmed that “sound could be seen in colour”.48 Shakespeare’s special interest in synaesthetic transfers may be seen as responding to and counterbalancing the Reformers’ efforts to erase, or at least, downplay sense experience in worship, transferring its enjoyment to the world of the stage. The encompassing sensory experience in Catholic churches is summarized by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester in 1544, when he states the consequences of radical Reformation:
- 49 Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, Gardiner’s Lost Tract against William Turner, qtd in E. J. (...)
They wold we shuld smel nothyng in memori of Christe, and therfor speak they against anoyntyng and hallywather. They wold we shuld taste nothyng in memory of Christe, and therfore they cannot away with salt and holy brede. A supper they speak of, wich they wold handle lyke a dryngkyng. Finally they wold have all in talkyng, they speak so myche of prechynge, so as all the gates of our sences an wayes to mannis under standynge shuld be shut up, savyng the eare alone.49
- 50 Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth of famo (...)
- 51 Queen Elizabeth, in the 1559 Injunctions, maintained choirs, polyphonic music, psalms as part of th (...)
- 52 However, rather than a complete elimination of the senses’ role, the Reformers tended towards a saf (...)
25The popular and pragmatic view of the church environment underscoring the believers’ persisting dependence on the senses is mockingly represented in the reformed 1563 Book of Homilies, when the author imagines a woman’s comment to another: “Alas, Gossip, what shall we do at Church, since all the Saints are taken away, since all the goodly Sights we were wont to have, are gone; since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chaunting and playing vpon the Organs, that we could before”.50 This cutting depiction does however point towards the prominence of aurality within the reformed religious practices (with the use of vernacular scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer), and to the avoidance of images, relics, liturgical robes and even music,51 that could distract the senses and obstruct the interaction with the divine.52
26Thus, from the multisensorial experiences in Catholic churches, Protestant England tended to proceed to a limitation of religious imagery and environing polyphonic music, shunning of relics, so as to refocus on hearing the preaching of scripture. This narrowed down the senses directly involved in the interaction with the divine within religious institutions, as sensory experiences were considered to lead into sin. Eschewing simplistic discourses on the advantages and dangers of each of the senses taken separately, Shakespeare’s plays frequently allude to and/or employ synaesthetic perceptions.
- 53 Underscoring the complexity of touch, Carla Mazzio notes that “the word ‘touch’ […] signified both (...)
27While Shakespeare most often couples hearing and sight, he also extends the blurring of the senses and sensorial information to smell, taste and touch – whether these are processed literally or metaphorically. In The Tempest Miranda is both “touched” by having seen “a brave vessel [...] / Dashed all to pieces!” (1.2.6-8),53 and heard sounds – “the cry”, which, “did knock / against [her] very heart” (1.2.8-9). These simultaneous perceptions induce her suffering “with those that I [she] saw suffer” (1.2.5-6). The audience at the play would also have synaesthetically participated through the concomitant action of sight and hearing that mimetically aroused their compassion.
- 54 1 Corinthians 2:9.
- 55 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the fiue senses with a pithie one vpon detraction. Continued vvith (...)
28The notable suggestion of simultaneously solicited senses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream appears complexified through the use of rhetorical synaesthesia and a simultaneous negation of the processing of the senses. Bottom’s lines on apparently synaesthetic perceptions, “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” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.207-210), can be traced to a chaotic reminiscence of a Biblical quotation: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him”.54 But they may suggest a meaning akin to Richard Brathwaite’s assertion that “(the common sort […]) haue their eares in their eyes”, implying that a “neere affinitie” of sight and hearing is a sign of vulgarity.55 Bottom’s seemingly absurd comment and confusion may in fact faithfully translate his own baffled senses and the complex processing of information after the wild dream he has been subjected to. Beyond that, the first two associations “the eye […] hath not heard, the ear […] hath not seen” may point to the simultaneous stimulation of the senses engaged in theatrical illusion – even if spelled out reversed – due to a blundered processing of his senses. Yet it is through these rhetorical transpositions the stage operates that it can make the eye hear and the ear see. I would now like to argue that it is precisely in the synaesthesia, displacement, or even impairment of the senses, that the stage steers its audience to overcome conflicting discourses on the senses and lead to unexpected forms of healing.
29Synaesthetic Healing in the Romances
30Multisensory healing is suggested in several of Shakespeare’s plays, frequently through an ambivalent reading of the administrated cure. Concurrent stimulations of the senses sustain physical and psychic healing processes as evidenced, for instance, in Pericles’ revival through Marina’s intervention. Music’s omnipresence and healing power are particularly emblematic of Shakespeare’s romances, devising it as a self-standing part of the dramatic performance. The Tempest and Pericles award music a prominent role as a powerful pharmakon, pointing, on the one side towards the divine harmony of the “music of the spheres” (5.1.223), and, on the other side luring into “toothed briars, sharp furzes” (4.1.180).
Pericles
31From Gower’s first “Chorus” lines, the synaesthetic “restorative” experience of music is stated, as one that is both heard and seen:
To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man’s infirmities,
To glad your ear and please your eyes,
[…]
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives. (Prologue 1-8, my emphasis)
- 56 Aristotle, Politics, op. cit., Book VIII, 1342a8-11.
32Both music and singing are suggested as the powerful regeneration remedy for Thaisa. Cast up in her coffin by the sea, she is revived by Cerimon through “rough and woeful music” (3.2.85-6). This reminds us of Aristotle’s “tunes that violently arouse the soul, […] as if they [these persons] had received medicinal treatment and taken a purge”.56 Catherine Dunn suggests that the “rough music”
- 57 C. M. Dunn, “The Function of Music in Shakespeare”, art. cit., p. 396.
meant strongly rhythmic music, that its tempo approximated the pulse beat of Thaisa's heart, and that by means of sympathetic vibration her heart began to beat again. Thus the viol, the symbol of order and harmony, induced the order and harmony of life once more into Thaisa's being.57
33The subsequent pun on “air”, “I pray you give her air” (3.2.88) conveys a synaesthetic intertwining of the senses of hearing, smell and taste as Cerimon enacts Thaisa’s restoration to life with music and/or “air” (or oxygen). The alternative spelling of and resonant homophone “viol/vial” in “The viol once more” (3.2.87) suggests a second pun in respect to the musical instrument and the medical container of the infusion (or liquor) to be administrated as medicine. Thus it implies a synaesthetic cure – merging a physical cure sensed by taste and smell with a psychic one, a harmonious musical environment informed through hearing. Even if Cerimon’s name sounds the “ceremony” of healing and his quoted remedies recall typical medieval cures and beliefs, “blest infusions that dwells / In vegetives, metals, stones” (3.2.32-33), his particular healing method for Thaisa remains ambivalently sensorial and synaesthetic.
- 58 In order to support the use of “temper” in its musical connotation as the term used for body and so (...)
- 59 “Temper” in the sense of “tune, adjust the pitch of (a musical instrument)” is recorded from c. 130 (...)
34Marina tries to sing Pericles out of his sorrowful abandonment by her “sweet harmony” (5.1.40). However, music failing, Pericles will eventually react to Marina’s words, her encompassing “sacred physic” (5.1.70). From a state where Pericles’ senses are voluntarily impaired, aiming perhaps in this way at an illusory healing, hearing and sight are re-opened through Marina’s intercession. The actual healing then can be fully accomplished only through unobstructed senses that enable access to body and mind. Synaesthetic healing thus comes to Pericles by listening to Marina’s words, “Tell thy story” (5.1.131) and looking at “Patience […] smiling extremity out of act” (5.1.135-136), as he is reminded of “My dearest wife [who] was like this maid” (5.1.102). His revival will elevate him towards the “music of the spheres” (5.1.223), leading him to the vision of the goddess Diana in his dream – a supernatural synaesthetic experience – and the subsequent family reunification. It is to be noted that Pericles’ illness is termed a “distemperature” (5.1.25),58 which, etymologically, refers to a pitch being “out of tune”,59 thus anticipating his healing through the concerted stimulation of the senses of sight and hearing.
The Tempest
35Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, most particularly stresses the importance of sounds and hearing: with its framework of an island “full of noises, / sounds and sweet airs” (3.2.138-139), where “heavenly music” (5.1.52) exerts its powerful entrancing charms, suggesting a synaesthetic intertwining of hearing, touch, smell and taste. From its first stage direction “Thunder and lightning heard” (1.1) in the first Folio, The Tempest ambiguously addresses synaesthetic perceptions, mingling sight and hearing.
- 60 Contrarily, a revenge tragedy like Hamlet represents hearing as uncontrolled (involuntary) and torm (...)
36But the island is also the locus where tales that “would cure deafness” (1.2.106) are told – i.e. wielding such an in-depth cathartic impact that even an impaired sense would/could be restored. Hearing is conceived on two levels: the open ear that lets everything in, that absorbs all surrounding sounds, and the active listening that Prospero requests from Miranda and that Shakespeare expects from his audience. The full listening requested by Prospero at the beginning of the play, where involuntary hearing is imposed on almost all (characters and audience: with the loud sounds of the sea tempest) evolves throughout the play to a recognition of the fact that the characters’ and even the audience’s listening has to be “kindly” engaged.60 Whereas Prospero initially orders his daughter (and the audience with her) to “ope thine ear” (1.2.37), by the end, he formulates an affable invitation to King Alonso to listen to “the story of my life” that will make the time “go quick away” (5.1.308). In the inflexion of his own attitude towards the act of listening, Prospero paves the way for the envisaged psychic healing and a general reconciliation.
- 61 The Tempest represents hearing ambivalently even when it implies a more controlled process, as when (...)
37The irrepressible or involuntary hearing can also have destructive effects. Sebastian’s words are meant to “wound” his brother Alonso, king of Naples, who mourns the (apparent) loss of his son, when telling him: “you may thank yourself for this great loss” (2.1.129). The effect of this accusation is metaphorically commented on by Gonzalo, who associates the hearing of such hard words to the sense of touch: “You rub the sore / When you should bring the plaster” (The Tempest 2.1.143-144).61 The synaesthesia is here made apparent by the merging of a literal aural perception of the dagger-like hurting words and a metaphorical tactile sensation of “rub[bing] the sore” instead of healing it.
38Disease, in The Tempest, appears to be physical as well as psychic through Caliban’s curses at Prospero and Miranda that a “plague” (2.2.161) take them both for having deprived him of his island. And Caliban’s complaints that Prospero sends spirits to physically and psychically torment him, assailing at least three of his senses, touch, hearing and sight, with “adders […] that hiss [him] into madness” (2.2.13-14), “apes that mow and chatter at me / And after bite me” (2.2 9-10), […] hedgehogs, which […] mount / their pricks at my footfall” (2.2.10-12). In this way, Caliban passes through three layers of sounds: sounds that molest and torment him like those inflicted by Prospero:
For every trifle are they set upon me,
Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness. (2.2.8-14, my emphasis)
39But Caliban is also environed by sounds that psychically heal him through synaesthesia, merging hearing, smell, taste and touch – like the “noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs” (with a pun on “air”) “that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.138-139), the “marvellous sweet music” (3.3.19) of his isle acting as an aural healing vial. The sounds of “a thousand twangling instruments / […] and sometime voices” (3.2.140-141) stir up colourful images in Caliban’s mind: “The clouds […] would […] show riches / Ready to drop upon me” (3.2.144-145), enhancing the synaesthetic association with this layering of sight upon sound.
- 62 “Operating through seduction the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual pa (...)
- 63 It is interesting to note that this literary synaesthesia appeals to a sense that seems less easy t (...)
- 64 This sensory impairment may remind us of Timothy Bright’s statement that “in vehement contemplation (...)
40However, this same apparently “healing” music played by Ariel, is also endowed with the poisonous role of the pharmakon.62 In Jacques Derrida’s definition, the pharmakon “[o]perating through seduction […] makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws”. The musical pharmakon is thus used to entrance Caliban, as if he “smelt music” (4.1.178).63 It synaesthetically ensnares and lures him into “toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns” (4.1.180) and then “i’ th’ filthy-mantled pool beyond your [Prospero’s] cell” (4.1.182) whose “foul lake / O’er-stunk their [Stephano and Trinculo’s] feet” (4.1.183-184). Thus cast again into pricking, hurtful, foul-smelling and tormenting elements, his vision, smell and touch are momentarily impaired – in a preventive punitive response to his plan to murder Prospero.64
41Yet this pre-emptive punishment appears as the sine qua non condition for future social healing: Caliban’s deliverance from slavery and his acceptance by Prospero as “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278-279). In other words, an impaired sense, and displacement towards another mode of feeling, may serve as a direct (or indirect) pathway to a craved healing.
42Caliban’s himself foresees his punishment for his murderous plot when he declares “I shall be pinched to death” (5.1.276), a punishment that associates a painful touch (“pinching”), with psychic chastisement. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the play, Caliban remembered better times, when a more affectionate touch was associated to mental improvement – “Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me […] and teach me […]” (1.2.332-333) – testifying to an involution from “healing” to “diseasing” touches. The sustained “pinch[ing]” of Caliban on Prospero’s command aims to ensure his obedience and acceptance of his slave-like state – coercing him thus to renounce his birth-right on the island.
43The alleviating effect of music on the human psyche is also emphasized in Ferdinand’s response to the “sweet air”, when his “passion” – meaning his suffering for the loss of his father – is “allayed” similarly to “the fury of the water”. The almost supernatural influence of music is represented through a kind of synaesthetic effect combining hearing, smell, touch, perhaps even taste in Ferdinand’s lines:
Where should this music be? I’ th’ air or th’ earth?
It sounds no more, and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o’ th’ island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. (1.2.388-394, my emphasis)
44When reading these lines in the light of the pharmakon, Ariel’s song to the shipwrecked Ferdinand appears as a sort of synaesthetic healing at the beginning, but the second part of the song comes as a traumatic and eerie reminder of King Alonso, Ferdinand’s father’s, death: “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (1.2.401).
45The curative effect of “solemn music” (2.1.189) is also illustrated through the sleepiness that affects the “good” characters like Gonzalo or Miranda, enabling them to psychically regenerate from the recent upsetting events. Nonetheless, Alonso appears to envy the relief that sleep may bring, with his lines “I wish my eyes / Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts” (2.1.196-197) in a synaesthetic intertwining between hearing and sight, but also cognition. Sebastian and Antonio, on the other hand, are unaffected by music; they remain awake and plot their vicious schemes echoing Lorenzo’s lines in The Merchant of Venice:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. (5.1. 83-85)
- 65 As sight was considered closer to (awareness and) memory “Nothing entereth in more effectualie into (...)
46Prospero also states the restorative effects of music in recovering the humoral balance – curing affected brains into reason – when he addresses his enemies: “A solemn air, and the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains” (5.1.58-59). But Prospero’s own healing of his vengeful desires is also envisaged. Ariel indeed suggests that Prospero’s “affections would become tender” (5.1.18-19) if, in addition to hearing the description of the shipwrecked’s misfortunes, he saw (witnessed directly) their suffering. Involving two senses – sight and hearing – Prospero’s own synaesthetic healing would be advanced – through compassion.65 This may be taken to allude to the theatre’s own function of “healing” through a complexified interweaving of the senses.
47The theatrical apparition of Ariel as a “harpy” functions as a physical threat synaesthetically assaulting sight and hearing, “I have made you mad; / And even with such-like valour men hang and drown their proper selves” (3.3.57-58). The purpose is clearly cathartic and operates on a psychic level: “heart’s sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing” (3.3.81-82, my emphasis).
48When, in the epilogue, Prospero requests to see and hear the applause from the audience – “release me from my band / With the help of your good hands” (Epilogue 9-10) – this can be perceived as a symbolic “healing” of the actor/director “freed” from his artistic “burden” (project) “Which was to please” (Epilogue 13). The idea of the audience’s collective healing implicitly appears through Prospero’s verse “As you from crimes would pardoned be” (Epilogue 19), mirroring that of the characters in the play. Through its appropriation of religious vocabulary the epilogue also suggests that the playhouse has become in effect a space of sensorial healing, a type of healing that was less promoted in religious worship in the reformed Church.
- 66 As quoted above (see reference in footnote n°10).
- 67 Stephen Gosson, School of Abuse, op. cit., p. 15.
49Antitheatricalists, drawing on the Christian denunciation of the senses as instruments of perversion and fall alerted to the dangers of the sensorial experiences in the theatre,66 that “slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde”.67 Contrastingly, the supporters of the theatre underscored its healing effects, when pursuing the classical tradition. While the multisensory religious experience in the Catholic churches tended to be relegated towards a single sense – hearing – during the Reformation, Shakespeare’s characters exert their senses, on the contrary, as entry-gates enabling physical and psychic healing and a restoration of the humoral balance. The synaesthetic healing of the characters on stage mirrors the multisensory and complex experiences of the audience in the theatre – which Shakespeare appears to envisage as the locus and means of individual and social remedy – illustrated through the characters and expected to be reciprocated by the audience.
- 68 As in the case of Caliban, for instance, who appears “tortured” and “healed” through the same sense (...)
50Synaesthetic healing in Shakespeare’s romances is often supported by music in an ambivalent sensory interweaving of the reception, perhaps in order to ensure the desired result – as two or more senses may support each other in the processing of the cure. Whether illusory or real, the emphasis on synaesthetic perceptions allowed Shakespeare to supplant antitheatricalists’ and reformists’ discourses on the senses and eschew in a way the outright interdictions and warnings against the dangers of the senses, turning them into the tools of a restorative process. On the other hand, sense displacements or impairments may suggest a parody or criticism of the antitheatrical and religious considerations on the topic of the senses, by showing that deliberate sense relegation towards hearing is futile as the “dangers” still persist. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s discourse on the senses draws on the ambivalence of the pharmakon. While healing is prominently suggested as a synaesthetic (or concurrent) stimulation of the senses, the use of one sense only (mostly hearing) or even that, synchronous, of several senses, is devised as ambivalent.68 Shakespeare, it seems, has decided to leave it open to the audience to choose what they make of their sense perceptions by using their own (common) sense.
Notes
1 See Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson, and Amy Kenny (eds.), The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015; Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, London, Ashgate, 2011; Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (eds.), Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Simon Smith (ed.), Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, London, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020; Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Lowell Gallagher, and Shankar Raman, (eds.), Knowing Shakespeare, Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Holly Dugan, “Shakespeare and the Senses”, Literature Compass, 6.3, 2009, p. 726–740. On the specific topic of the role of the senses in the construction of gender, see Les Sens dans la construction du genre (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles / Gender and the Senses (1500-1800), Etudes Épistémè, 34 (2018), in particular Aurélie Griffin, “Taste and Touch as Means of Coercion in The Taming of the Shrew”.
2 Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, “Introduction: Imagining audiences”, in K. A. Craik and T. Pollard (eds.), Shakespearean Sensations, op. cit., p. 1-25. Shakespeare engages with the notion of catharsis indirectly, in metatheatrical scenes, by looking at the emotional and physical impact upon the characters of the plays within the play. In The Tempest, for instance, the emotional turmoil of the characters when witnessing Ariel’s appearance as a harpy (an appearance that is evocative of masques) weighs on their guilty conscience – suggesting for the audience the notion of moral purgation through spectacle. In Hamlet, the first player’s emotion is echoed in Hamlet’s own, while the Ghost’s words – “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood” (Hamlet, 1.5.16) – might suggest the physical effect of the actor’s speech upon the audience. Catharsis through pity and fear may also be suggested by Shakespeare’s frequent use of the verb “purge”. He endows the word with the sense of bodily cure: both individually (“find her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health”, Macbeth, 5.3.50-51) and metaphorically as related to the social body (“pour we in our country’s purge, / Each drop of us”, Macbeth, 5.2.28-29; “We would purge the land of these drones, that rob the bee / of her honey.”, Pericles, 2.1.43-44). He also uses the term in the sense of a spiritual cleansing: both in life (“from his bosom purge this black despair!”, King Henry VI, Part 2, 3.3.23; “to purge his fear”, King Henry VI, Part 3, 5.6.88; “my soul is purged from grudging hate”, King Richard III, 2.1.9) and after death (“the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away”, Hamlet, 1.5.13). References to Shakespeare’s plays will be given parenthetically in the essay. All references are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Second Edition), eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, Oxford, Oxford University Press (1986) 2005, except for Pericles. In this particular case, references are taken from William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, eds. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, coll. New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, for this edition makes convincing arguments in favour of the first quarto and contains a useful division into acts and scenes.
3 Elizabeth F. Hart, “Cerimon’s ‘rough’ music in Pericles, 3.2”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51.3, 2000, p. 313-331; Catherine M. Dunn, “The Function of Music in Shakespeare’s Romances”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 20.4, 1969, p. 391-405; Nan Cooke Carpenter, “Shakespeare and Music: Unexplored Areas”, Renaissance Drama, 7, 1976, p. 243-255.
4 Oxford English Dictionary, “synaesthesia”: “as in coloured hearing […] A form of synaesthesia in which the hearing of a sound is associated with a sensation of colour; psychology: production, from a sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind”.
5 John Fletcher: “A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy”, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Florence Ada Kirk, New York, Garland, 1980, To the Reader, l. 22-26.
6 See, for instance, Caliban’s dispelling of Stephano’s and Trinculo’s fears of music coming from an invisible source as discussed below.
7 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christian common weale, London, Thomas Gosson, 1582, sig. B7r-B8r.
8 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres the one whereof was sounded by a reuerend byshop dead long since; the other by a worshipful and zealous gentleman now aliue: one showing the filthines of plaies in times past; the other the abhomination of theaters in the time present: both expresly prouing that that common-weale is nigh vnto the cursse of God, wherein either plaiers be made of, or theaters maintained. Set forth by Anglo-phile Eutheo., London, Henrie Denham, 1580, p. 3.
9 William Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters wherein is plainely described the manifold vices, &c spotted enormities, that are caused by the infectious sight of playes, with the description of the subtile slights of Sathan, making them his instruments. Compiled by Wil. Rankins. Séene and allowed, London, John Charlewood, 1587, p. 17.
10 Stephen Gosson, School of Abuse, Containing A Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &C., London, Thomas Woodcocke, 1579, p. 15.
11 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions, op. cit., sig. C5v-C6r.
12 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888, X.605, p. 320 (my emphasis).
13 William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragædie […], London, E[dward] A[llde, Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes] and W[illiam] J[ones], 1633, p. 431, 149, 500.
14 Thomas Dekker, The seuen deadly sinnes of London drawne in seuen seuerall coaches, through the seuen seuerall gates of the citie bringing the plague with them. Opus septem dierum. London, E[dward] A[llde and S. Stafford], 1606, p 27.
15 Amy Kenny, “‘A Deal of Stinking Breath’: The Smell of Contagion in the Early Modern Playhouse”, in D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, op. cit., p. 47-61, here p. 48.
16 Ibid, p. 53.
17 Qtd. in Emma J. Wells “Making sense of things”, History Today, 69.5, 2019, p. 40-50, here p. 42-43.
18 Ibid.
19 Qtd in M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, op. cit., p. 203.
20 John Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes [et]c. commonly vsed on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers. Made dialogue wise, London, H. Bynneman, (1571) 1577, p. 62.
21 Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast Portrait of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres, op. cit, p. 95.
22 George Herbert, “The Church Porch”, The Poems of George Herbert, to which are added selections from his prose, and Walton’s “Life”, ed. Ernest Rhys, London, Walter Scott, 1885, p. 15.
23 Ibid.
24 Romans 10:17. All references to the Bible are given from The Bible Authorized King James Version, eds. Robert Caroll and Stephen Prickett, coll. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.
25 “So glozed the Tempter, and his proem tuned; / Into the Heart of Eve his words made way”. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard, London, Penguin Books, 2000, IX.549-550.
26 Antitheatricalists like Gosson and Munday however attacked not only the theatre but extended their criticism to “prayer book worship” in church services, alerting to the dangers of the eyes and ears that would lead the faithful astray from prayer. The “devilish distraction” of the surplice, for example, could disrupt the focus on the sermon”. M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, op. cit., p. 336.
27 Falstaff literally mentions Galen: “It hath it original from much grief, from study, / and perturbation of the brain. I have read the cause of his / effects in Galen. It is a kind of deafness” (King Henry VI Part 2, 1.2.117-119). Falstaff mentions both Hippocrates and Galen: “He has no more knowledge in Hibbocrates (sic) and / Galen” (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.1.61-62).
28 Anne Sophie Refskou, “Compassionate Perception and Touching Experiences in Shakespearean Drama”, Critical Survey, 27.1, 2015, p. 60-84, here p. 63.
29 The “things not naturall” are “six in number: Ayre, Meat, and Drinke, Sleepe and watch, Labour and rest, Emptinesse and repletion, and affections of the minde”, Thomas Cogan, The haven of health Chiefly gathered for the comfort of students, and consequently of all those that have a care of their health, amplified upon five words of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, cibus, potio, somnus, Venus. Hereunto is added a preservation from the pestilence, with a short censure of the late sicknes at Oxford. By Thomas Coghan Master of Arts, and Batcheler of Physicke, London, Anne Griffin, (1584) 1636, sig. A4r.
30 Timothie Bright, A treatise of melancholie. Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the physicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as haue thereto adioyned an afflicted conscience, London, Thomas Vautrollier, 1586, p. 81.
31 “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils” (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.83-85).
32 “the story should be put together in such a way that even without seeing the play, a person hearing the series of events should feel dread and pity. This is what someone would feel when hearing the story of Oedipus” (my emphasis), Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 1453b.
33 Aristotle, Politics, ed. Richard Kraut, coll. Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, Books VII and VIII, here VIII 5, 1339b18.
34 Ibid., VIII 5, 1340a6-7.
35 Ibid., VIII 7, 1342a8-11.
36 Where moral reparation is attained not only through the expression of violent passions but also through violent retribution.
37 Charles Schmitt argues and demonstrates the presence of some of Aristotle’s works in the Renaissance, in Greek or bilingual editions, in translations into Latin and/or Italian: Aristotle and the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., London, Harvard University Press, 1983. According to Sarah Dewar-Watson, Aristotle was present in “mediating sources” like Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595): “Shakespeare and Aristotle”, Literature Compass, 1.1, 2004, p. 4. Even if Aristotle’s direct influence on Shakespeare is not proven or Shakespeare’s acquaintance with some of Aristotle’s works is still hypothetical, Shakespearean drama does provoke “purgation” for “the mimesis between play and audience encourages the audience to see the staged purgations as their own”: Thomas Rist, “Catharsis as ‘purgation’ in Shakespearean drama”, in K. A. Craik and T. Pollard (eds.), Shakespearean Sensations, op. cit., p. 140. Stephen Orgel, in “Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama”, Critical Inquiry, 6.1, 1979, p. 107-123, here p. 117, considers the therapeutic effect of the theatre on the audience as an early modern “notion”, not formally sourced in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy.
38 Thomas Heywood, “3. The true use of their quality”, in An apology for actors Containing three briefe treatises, London, Nicholas Okes, 1612, sig. F3r.
39 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, John Lichfield and James Short for Henry Cripps, 1621, p. 375.
40 Ibid, p. 373.
41 As music was expected to be “seen” as well as heard, the source of sound being normally visible.
42 Thomas Wright had asserted the paradoxical influence of music: “it moveth a man to mirth and pleasure, and affecteth him with sorow and sadnesse; it inciteth to devotion, and inticeth to dissolution: it stirreth up souldiers to warre, and allureth citizens to peace […] musicke in like manner eleuateth the mind to deuotion and pietie, and abaseth the soule with effusion & leuitie”. He tried to explain this by the different kinds of music that “are more apt to one passion than another”, but also associating this to “the naturall disposition of a man, his custome or exercise, his virtue or vice”. Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall. Corrected, enlarged, and with sundry new discourses augmented. With a treatise thereto adioyning of the clymatericall yeare, occasioned by the death of Queene Elizabeth, London, Valentine Simmes, 1604, p. 163, 117 and 172.
43 This ancillary interpretation relates to Shakespeare’s habitual presentation of opposed and or multiple aspects of the same issue – enriching it with multivalent meanings. At the same time, Shakespeare’s plays cover a multitude of aspects of his epoch, antitheatricalists’ discourses being perhaps one of them – as supported by their presence in several plays (among them, The Merchant of Venice).
44 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Robin Waterfield, coll. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, 275a.
45 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s pharmacy”, Dissemination [1972], trans. and ed. Barbara Johnson, London, The Athlone Press, 1981, p. 61-171, here p. 127.
46 W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, op. cit., 2.2.23-24.
47 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, ed. Henry Morley, London, George Routledge and Sons, 1886, p. 301, 304, 307, 308.
48 E. J. Wells, “Making sense of things”, art. cit. p. 49.
49 Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, Gardiner’s Lost Tract against William Turner, qtd in E. J. Wells “Making sense of things”, art. cit., p. 49-50. Nevertheless, fasting and feasting practices maintained in a way the use of the senses of smell and taste in relation with the divine. While not specifically noted in the epoch’s documents, incense and candles use appeared to perdure in the church. See M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, op. cit., p. 314, 319.
50 Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory and now reprinted for the use of private families, in two parts, London, George Wells, 1687, p. 368.
51 Queen Elizabeth, in the 1559 Injunctions, maintained choirs, polyphonic music, psalms as part of the religious service. Stained glass in churches were also preserved as Queen Elizabeth opposed their removal – thus, “religious imagery persisted within Elizabethan churches”. Church architecture was also preserved following Queen Elizabeth’s wishes to distinguish between the chancel and the nave through “the partition”. M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, op. cit., p. 329-330.
52 However, rather than a complete elimination of the senses’ role, the Reformers tended towards a safe control of the sensorial experiences within the limits of true faith. Ibid., p. 4.
53 Underscoring the complexity of touch, Carla Mazzio notes that “the word ‘touch’ […] signified both affective and physiological forms of receptivity”, also citing Thomas Cooper’s 1578 thesaurus. Carla Mazzio, “Acting with Tact: Touch and the Theatre in the Renaissance”, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, p. 160, qtd in Darryl Chalk, “Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline”, in S. Smith (ed.), Shakespeare / Sense, op. cit., p. 245-268, here p. 256.
54 1 Corinthians 2:9.
55 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the fiue senses with a pithie one vpon detraction. Continued vvith sundry Christian resolues, full of passion and deuotion, purposely composed for the zealously-disposed, London, E. G[riffin] for Richard Whittaker, 1620, p. 9.
56 Aristotle, Politics, op. cit., Book VIII, 1342a8-11.
57 C. M. Dunn, “The Function of Music in Shakespeare”, art. cit., p. 396.
58 In order to support the use of “temper” in its musical connotation as the term used for body and soul harmony and health, we can also refer to the “temperate nymphs” – who represent harmony within the pageant in The Tempest (4.1.132).
59 “Temper” in the sense of “tune, adjust the pitch of (a musical instrument)” is recorded from c. 1300 in the Oxford English Dictionary.
60 Contrarily, a revenge tragedy like Hamlet represents hearing as uncontrolled (involuntary) and tormenting with Hamlet’s dagger-like words, rumours that “Rankly abused” “the whole ear of Denmark” (1.5.38, 36) and even the physical poisoning through the ear of old King Hamlet by Claudius.
61 The Tempest represents hearing ambivalently even when it implies a more controlled process, as when Gonzalo opts for a biased hearing, punning on “dolour” for “dollar” (2.1.19-20), in support of his King.
62 “Operating through seduction the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws”. J. Derrida, “Plato’s pharmacy”, art. cit., p. 76.
63 It is interesting to note that this literary synaesthesia appeals to a sense that seems less easy to “shut off”.
64 This sensory impairment may remind us of Timothy Bright’s statement that “in vehement contemplations, men see not, that which is before their eyes: […], nor feele, which at other time (such bent of the minde being remitted) they should perceaue the sence of, with pleasure or paine”. Timothie Bright, A treatise of melancholie, op. cit., p. 35.
65 As sight was considered closer to (awareness and) memory “Nothing entereth in more effectualie into the memorie, than that which commeth by seeing; things heard do lightlie passe awaie”. A. Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters, op. cit., p. 96.
66 As quoted above (see reference in footnote n°10).
67 Stephen Gosson, School of Abuse, op. cit., p. 15.
68 As in the case of Caliban, for instance, who appears “tortured” and “healed” through the same senses (hearing, touch, sight). Sense impairment (of all the senses but hearing), however, stages a kind of “purgatory” for Caliban from which he emerges forgiven and accepted: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (The Tempest, 5.1.278-279).
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Élisabeth Szanto, « “Sweet airs” and “Smelling music”: Healing through Synaesthetic Sense Perception in Pericles and The Tempest », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 46 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 mars 2025, consulté le 14 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/20487 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13juv
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