A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
and uncleane playes.”54 His use of the idiomatic expression “feede our eyes” is particularly apt considering the subject matter. After all, Christ himself used a gastric metaphor to express the most profound of metaphysical transformations, when he tells his bewildered disciples, “Take, eat; this is my body.”55 In describing the flock’s departure from Christ’s altar to feast on the epicurian pleasures offered by the professional theater, Northbrooke draws attention to the communal nature that both the liturgy and the theater were understood to share but positions them as antithetical.56 The fellowship offered at the modest table of Christ is, in effect, broken by the desire to feast in gluttony at the trough of the professional stage. At the same time, Northbrooke plays off a sensory prejudice extant since antiquity, which considers sight and hearing as “higher” planes of sensory experience while taste and smell are “lower” forms.57 By aligning theatrical and gustatory experience, Northbrooke reinforces his initial condemnation of the theater. Not only does it lead one away from the divine realm and into the merely appetitive, but it does so by appealing to the lowest rungs of the sensory register.
In conflating high (sight) and low (smell and taste) sensory experiences, Northbrooke initiates a mixed metaphor that becomes something of a touchstone in antitheatricalist discourse. Stephen Gosson offers a more elaborate version in his 1579 The Schoole of Abuse:
There setchey 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. Therefore of both barrelles, I iudge Cookes and Painters the better hearing, for the one extendeth his arte no farther then to the tongue, palate, and nose, the other to the eye; and both are ended in outwarde sense, which is common too us with bruite beasts. But these by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.58
Like Northbrooke, Gosson begins with a common sensory idiom to begin his metonym. He also brings together taste and sight by yoking together cook and painter in order to emphasize the theater’s power to appeal to man’s baser sensory appetites. There are, however, two key differences between the metaphors. The most immediately obvious is the extreme to which Gosson takes his comparison; it is a synaesthetic maelstrom compared to Northbrooke’s brief and tidy idiom. In Gosson’s account, sight and hearing are nearly personified: melodies “tickle” the ear, the sense is “ravished,” and sight is lent a sort of consciousness in that it can be “flattered.” Later, he claims, “I judge cooks and painters the better hearing,” a somewhat bewildering (if surprisingly playful) way of describing a rather puritanical anxiety about the theater as a sort of Hamlet-like poison poured into the ear. Less immediately apparent is Gosson’s downgrading of sight in the sensory hierarchy to a rung somewhere closer to the ones that taste and smell occupy. Claiming that those arts directed at taste, smell, and sight have, as their end point, the stimuli of the “outward sense” at which they are directed, Gosson states that it is drama’s use of language that makes it particularly dangerous. In targeting the ear, playwrights wield a weapon that is far more subtle, as it is through this orifice that they gain access to the deep recesses of the spectator’s heart and mind. Whereas Northbrooke understands the eye as the primary portal through which temptation and corruption enters the spectatorial vessel, Gosson sees the ear as the more vulnerable aperture.
Perhaps these discrepancies result from the different foci of the two passages. Northbrooke expresses a distinctly religious concern posited through Christian imagery, whereas Gosson addresses a more nationalistic and gendered set of anxieties through secular terms: “Our wrestling at arms is turned to wallowing in ladies’ laps; our courage to cowardice; our running to riot, our bows to balls, and our darts to dishes. We have robbed Greece of gluttony, Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride, France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing.”59 Perhaps they are related to Gurr’s claim that the late sixteenth-century stage was a place where English culture began transitioning from one that was equally sensitive to audial and visual stimuli, to one that, at least within the realm of the theater, privileged sight over sound. Neither of these explanations, however, adequately addresses the way in which these two writers commingle sight and hearing with taste, smell, and touch in order to illustrate the mechanisms of engagement the theater exploits. Rather than describing the theatrical experience as one that pulls the spectator between the poles of audial and visual experience, Northbrooke and Gosson imagine it as a site of sensory interplay, even chaos, one that Carla Mazzio aptly designates as a kind of synaesthetic disorder.60 Although the antitheatricalists do imagine this sensory intermingling as a sort of malaise fostered by the theater, they do not imagine it as a distressing experience for the spectator. Instead, it seems they see it as an encounter that allows for a vertiginous loss of self in a somatic tangle, one they fear the spectator finds uniquely pleasurable.
Mazzio reads this sensory phenomenon as related to the overlooked significance of touch in early modern scholarship, claiming that touch “disrupted the boundaries between the senses themselves.”61 Making the argument that Gosson’s metaphor can be unpacked if we consider touch as its connective tissue, Mazzio contributes to a larger scholarly discourse surrounding sensory hierarchies in the Renaissance, which have gone some way toward excavating the ways that the “lower” senses of touch, taste, and smell dictated lived experience in the early modern world.62 These studies provide a useful corrective to the often a priori scholarly assumption that one’s worldview in the early modern period (as well as in our own) is dictated mostly by what one sees. But it also leads to a phenomenological question: was the synaesthesia described by Northbrooke and Gosson a sensation they had actually experienced while at the theater? Did they understand the combination of verse, singing, costume, gesture, vocal inflection, stage properties, live bodies, and that elusive thing we call imagination as conspiring to create a truly multisensory experience? If not, what is it about the multisensory metaphor that for many of the antitheatricalists at least, captures something essential about what happens to the spectator when he or she engages with a play?
Difficult to parse, the multisensory metaphor can function on both the figurative and literal planes. The word metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, means “to transfer,” and in this sense, the antitheatricalist metaphor functions straightforwardly in that it transfers the sensibilities of one organ of perception to another: the ears feel, the eyes taste.63 In this respect, Mazzio’s claims about touch are persuasive: the senses become so close that they actually make linguistic and (perhaps) experiential contact. Metaphor, however, is more than a mere figurative conduit; it is often used to express evanescent, difficult, or as yet unarticulated concepts, or as one critic puts it, “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language.”64 This innate ambiguity makes metaphor an especially apt vehicle for describing an event that cannot be seen but can only be intuited or felt. If the antitheatricalists are trying to put into language—to make visible—what occurs within the theatrical spectator when he or she watches a play, this interaction can only be represented, hence known, through approximations.
The work performed by the multisensory metaphor in late sixteenth-century accounts of the theater, then, happens somewhere between what it allows for figuratively via substitution and what it allows writers to express about what specifically is unique about the early modern theatrical experience. Like much of antitheatrical discourse, synaesthesia has a long history in Western thought; like much of the antitheatricalists’ rhetorical and conceptualizations, this one is indebted to its classical precedents. While the Oxford English Dictionary cites 1891 as the term’s first use in psychology, and 1901 in literary criticism,65 Daniel Heller-Roazen traces synaesthesia back to classical philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s concept of the “common sense”:
The distant origin of the modern “synaesthesia,” the Greek term was no neologism when the thinkers of late Antiquity bestowed upon it a technical sense in the doctrine of the soul. In the classical varieties of the language, admittedly, the noun appears to have constituted something of a rare expression; but it is not without significance that the verb from which it was drawn, sunaisthanesthai, can be found in two passages of Aristotle’s own treatises. Formed by the addition of the prefix “with” (sun-) to the verb “to