The filmmaker John Waters is well known for elevating bad taste to something of an art form. For his 1981 film, Polyester (and with a nod to William Castle's Smell-O-Vision in his 1960 film, Scent of Mystery), Waters designed scratch-and-sniff Odorama cards to be distributed so that audience members could scratch in designated places during the film to experience the odors that Francine (played by drag queen Divine) experiences with her keen sense of smell. Of course, the smells included feces—it's John Waters—but also flowers, pizza, glue, and gas.
The John Waters example foregrounds two unavoidable conundrums in this otherwise superb collection of articles edited by Simon Smith. The first has to do with taste, not as a sense but as a critical standard. It would be in bad taste here to single out the articles from this edition that most intrigued this reviewer, because the next reader might be drawn to completely different themes, given the diverse, often trenchant, and sometimes vexing range of analyses presented. Not all of these articles are for everyone, but anyone interested in sensory studies, even beyond Shakespeare, will find their own selections from this collection highly valuable for research and teaching.
Along with the introduction by Smith, this edition includes fifteen essays on a wide variety of topics concerning the senses in Shakespeare—and yes, taste and smell are included. There are four thematic sections. The first section (with articles by Bruce R. Smith, Steven Connor, and Tanya Pollard) probes into sense in theory, including the sensory experiences of Shakespeare on the framed page, the senseless in Shakespeare, and the Platonic warnings against how seductive to the senses the theater can be. The second section (with articles by Elizabeth L. Swann, Holly Dugan, Simon Smith, Jennifer Edwards, and Katherine Hunt) provides analyses on the early modern sensorium in Shakespeare, a menu of examinations of what are traditionally considered the five senses (although we are reminded in this section that modern science argues for many more). The third section (with articles by Natalie K. Eschenbaum, Jackie Watson, Darryl Chalk, and Patricia Akhimie) explores sensory entanglement in analyses of one particular Shakespearean play each, and the fourth section (with articles by Erin Sullivan, Diana E. Henderson, and Adam Smyth) examines sensory interactions with Shakespeare on the contemporary stage, screen, and page. Each article in this edition presents a distinct argument in splendid fashion, and it is indeed a matter of taste which areas a given reader might find the most edifying.
The second conundrum, also one that cannot be helped, is the more convoluted issue of how much we can or might even wish to actualize sensory experience when analyzing sense. In sensory studies, readers are a suspended from the immediate act in this case of reading a Shakespearean work or viewing a Shakespearean performance. Particularly in such metasensory analyses, the question arises as to how well we can close in our perceptions on sense, given that the erudite pith of these analyses mandate far more than a simple scratch-and-sniff card to narrow the sensory gap.
In a similar vein, Bruce R. Smith's brilliant hermeneutical perspectives on how Orsino's sensual opening speech from Twelfth Night is framed in the First Folio leave us with some open-ended questions about where the actual is in such a sensory experience. Smith ultimately leads the reader to a view across an open range of potential paratextual and metacritical sensory interpretation that is yet to be explored. Still, the frame in which we encounter the image of the folio page in Smith's article is framed again by the edition the article is in, an environment that cannot precisely recreate the view or sense of an actual First Folio page and one that will ultimately enter the variable frames of the shape-shifting digital universe (as has the First Folio).
This point should not deflect from Smith's exquisite perspectives here or in his other pioneering efforts, nor should it demean in any way the fine work of any of the contributors to this edition. Perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, when VR technology catches up with scholarship on the senses (if it has not already), we might be afforded the opportunity to read such analyses in a VR sensorium, one designed to bridge the gap between the perception of sense and sense itself. Or, on second thought and one provoked by the Odorama designed by John Waters, perhaps we might occasionally still wish to leave off actual sense and be more content to maintain portions of our investigations in the secondary realm of perception and imagination.
