Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture(Arden Shakespeare Intersections)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I – Theorising Sensation 1. Framing Shakespeare's Senses; Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California, USA) 2. Admiring the Nothing of It: Shakespeare and the Senseless; Steven Connor (Peterhouse, Cambridge, UK) 3. The Classical Tradition; Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA) Part II – 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 (Durham University, UK) 5. Hamlet's Visual Stagecraft and Early Modern Cultures of Sight; Simon Smith (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK) 6. The Smell of a King: Olfaction in King Lear; Holly Dugan (The George Washington University, USA) 7. ‘Amorous Pinches’: Keeping (In)tact in Antony and Cleopatra; Jennifer Edwards (Shakespeare's Globe, UK) 8. Hearing at the Surface in The Comedy of Errors; Katherine Hunt (The Queen's College, University of Oxford, UK) Part III – Entangled Senses 9. Sense, Reason, and the Animal-Human Boundary in A Midsummer Night's Dream; Natalie K. Eschenbaum (University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, USA) 10. Sense and Community: Twelfth Night and early modern playgoing; Jackie Watson (Oxford, UK) 11. Simular Proof and Senseless Feeling: Synaesthetic Overload in Cymbeline; Darryl Chalk (University of Southern Queensland, Australia) 12. Pinching Caliban: Race, Husbandry, and the Working Body in The Tempest; Patricia Akhimie (Rutgers University – Newark, USA) Part IV – Sensing Shakespeare 13. Shakespeare and the Seven Senses: Scenes from the Twenty-First-Century Stage; Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK) 14. Parted Eyes and Generation Gaps in Twenty-First-Century Perceptions of Screen Shakespeare; Diana E. Henderson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) 15. The Senses and Material Texts; Adam Smyth (Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK) Further Reading Index

About the Author :
Simon Smith is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, UK.

Review :
[A] stimulating collection of essays … this volume not only consolidates the centrality of sensory scholarship, but also succeeds in offering new inroads, methodologies and concepts … Readers will find themselves returning to its stimulating and careful treatment of sensory studies.