Sensory experience and the metropolis on the Jacobean stage (1603-1625)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Hristomir Stanev argues, ideas about the senses became part of a dramatic and literary tradition in England, concerned with the impact of metropolitan culture.

Drawing upon an archive of early modern dramatic and prose writings, and on recent interdisciplinary studies of sensory perception, Stanev here investigates representations of the five senses in Jacobean plays in relationship to metropolitan environments.

He traces the significance of under-examined concerns about urban life that emerge in micro-histories of performance and engage the (in)voluntary and sometimes pre-rational participation of the five senses.

With a dominant focus on sensation, he argues further for drama?s particular place in expanding the field of social perception around otherwise less tractable urban phenomena, such as suburban formation, environmental and noise pollution, epidemic disease, and the impact of built-in city space.