This “common sense” may appear tangential to the antitheatricalist usage, which more closely follows Galen’s concept of sunaisthēsis as a sensation “that reaches a single body all at once, while consisting, in effect, of multiple physiological affections.”67 However, the idea of the communal extant in Aristotle’s formulation lingers quietly in antitheatrical discourse, particularly in its presentation of the theater as a force capable of rapidly generating spontaneous (if highly unstable) forms of community. Steven Mullaney has recently argued that the early modern theater “embodied thoughts, contradications, and social traumas of its audiences—and that could serve as a catalyst for the making of various publics and counterpublics, imagined communities, and collective identities.”68 Like many arguments about early modern audiences, particularly those focused on unearthing early modern spectatorial responses, Mullaney’s glosses over the discursive history of this narrative. The antitheatricalists seek refuge in the spectator’s discursive past at this historical moment precisely because of social concerns about the theater as a heterogeneous physical space in which different classes and genders mingle indiscriminately and an imaginative space in which individual viewers merge into a potent, affectively connected entity. The sensory fluidity expressed via the multisensory metaphor allows for the expression of a (recurrent) historical anxiety over the spectator’s supposedly unbounded involvement in what she or he sees. At the same time, it attempts to represent the “effects” of the professional theater on those who watch it, one of which is articulated, via the multisensory metaphor, as a state of imaginative and affective rapture.
Regardless of whether early modern theatergoers were inclined toward synaesthesia at the theater or otherwise, the multisensory metaphor’s discursive circulation becomes apparent when one considers the ways in which both antitheatricalists and playwrights engage it. For every naysayer, there is a proponent who responds in kind:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. 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, not his heart to report what my dream was.69
Bottom’s much-discussed bungling of Corinthians 2:9 aptly demonstrates the synaesthetic metaphor’s discursive saturation; as Jennifer Waldron states, “Shakespeare cleverly manipulates the same kind of perfectionist Protestant tropes as did these antitheatrical writers.”70 When Northbrooke speaks of visual gluttony, Gosson of feeling ears and hearing palates, or Shakespeare of hearing eyes and speaking hearts, they may not literally suggest that the theatrical spectator experiences sensory substitution, fusion, or confusion. Rather, they participate in a discursive tradition, one newly invigorated by the early modern professional theater. But, as with other antitheatricalist tautologies, this one should not be dismissed as simply a colorful turn of phrase that becomes a rhetorical banner under which early modern cultural critics and proponents of the theater mobilize. While these articulations of multisensory experience remain deeply rooted in a discursive tradition, they also demonstrate innovation in honing their subject by focusing on a particular cause of synaesthesia (the professional theater) and in deploying synaesthesia as a literary device.
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All three tenets discussed above illustrate another, related strain extant in sixteenth-century spectatorial discourse. Like the play between active and passive (or violent and complacent) and communal and individual that the theater supposedly facilitated in the spectator, the multisensory metaphor similarly suggests the possibility of movement between phenomenological (what one sees and hears) and associative (other sensory experiences seeing and hearing can invoke) modes of experience. In doing so, it exposes another space where theater’s detractors understood the spectator as particularly vulnerable. Not only was the theater understood to erode the boundaries between perceptory modalities; it facilitated a possible further categorical breakdown between real and imaginary. Religious and civic voices alike echoed this particular complaint against playgoing, claiming that life, in truth, often imitated art. In addition to addressing the problem that the theater lured men away from their work and their God, a lord mayor’s petition against playgoing, dated February 25, 1592, states, “The youth is greatly corrupted and their manners infected by the wanton and profane devices represented on the stages.”71 Earlier critics such as Plato and Augustine believed that the theater cultivated undesirable tendencies in the spectator because it enacted mimesis: its aim was simply to imitate the already less-than-absolute or ersatz world created by man. Sixteenth-century commentators, however, feared that the theatrical experience could (and ultimately would) cause the spectator to lose the ability to separate the factual (the social order as it existed) from the fictional (the world as it might otherwise be). And, while these anxieties were consistently posited through language that emphasized the spectator’s vulnerability and intellectual and moral frailty, such phrasing often was juxtaposed with the language of agency and imaginative fecundity. Anthony Munday’s A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters illustrates this paradox of the spectator as an entity both vulnerable to influence and willful in her inscription of individual desire:
This inward fight hath vanquished the chastitie of manie women; some by taking pittie on the deceitful teares of the stagelovers, have bene mooved by their complaint to rue on their secret frends, whome they have thought to have tasted like torment; some having noted the ensamples how maidens restrained from the marriage of those whome their frends have misliked, have there learned a policie to prevent their parents, by stealing them awaie; some seeing by ensample of the stage plaier one carried with too much liking of an other man’s wife, having noted by what practise she hath bene assailed and overtaken, have not failed to put the like in effect in earnest, that was afore showen in jest.72
It is the inward fight that vanquishes, the imaginative self, gestated through acts of playgoing, that battles the moral one established and reified through forms of sociocultural discipline. The chaste woman becomes a whore in an instant; the jest written for a simple laugh turns deadly. Like Nashe’s half-ludic, half-horrific image of the bleeding Talbot, Munday’s account shows a world where the impossible can occur in a moment’s time and sometimes even the participants are not entirely aware of what they do. It is no accident that Gosson, himself a former playwright, references the Christian doctrine of free will in his refutation of stage playing. Chastising those women who display themselves in the dangerously public space of the theater, he warns, “Thought is free: you can forbidd no man, that vieweth you, to noate you, and that noateth you, to judge you, for entring to places of suspition.”73 While his anxiety about women’s mobility outside the patriarchically controlled sphere of the home is not unique, Gosson’s opening gambit of “thought is free” articulates a new danger generated by the collision of theatrical spectacle and spectator. It is no longer free will that leads “the simple gazer” astray but “free thought” or interpretive license.
That the theater could open up a space of phenomenological instability was an idea shared by theater’s proponents. While the antitheatricalists understood this potential as one that placed the spectator in spiritual and sometimes physical jeopardy, those on the opposing side claimed this quality was what made the theater an ideal mechanism for disseminating social, moral, and civic values to a wide audience. Replying to Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, Thomas Lodge claims that the long-standing aim of theater is to provide a mirror through which men are shown their worldly infirmities, and in doing so, it opens the door for self-rapprochement and reform: “For sayth [Horace] ther was no abuse [depicted in plays] but these men reprehended it. a thefe was loth to be seene one there spectacle, a coward was never present at theyr assemblies, a backbiter abhord that company … a harlot woulde seeke no harbor at stage plais, lest she shold here her owne name growe in question: and the discourse of her honesty cause her to bee hated of the godly.”74 Philip Sidney offers a similar defense of the theater, stating that its mimetic powers naturally created analogies between the macrocosm of character typologies and the microcosm of spectator as individual-in-the-world: “The Comedy