The body as the locus of investigation in early modern medical, artistic and literary discourse has, in recent years, been the attention of historical and literary critics. Within this realm of scholarship, focus is placed on how corporeal experience can inform how past societies viewed the senses. In the last twenty years, the study of the history of the senses has gained traction through critics’ analysis of the significance of touch regarding bodily boundaries and emotions. Generally, critics tend to identify with touch either in terms of how it governs relationships between bodies in early modern society or, and as well as how it is represented in literary and artistic means. This literature review will examine how tactility has been explored through historical means then moves towards a study of how critics have evaluated touch in early modern theatre. Ultimately, what critics from both fields tend to agree is that touch can be communicative, simultaneously active and passive and is crucial to human bodily experience as a catalyst of both physical and emotional sensation.
It is necessary to look at touch’s function within Renaissance society in order to look at how bodies communicated through and later in how they interpreted and represented touch. Laura Gowling concentrates on a social history of touch through the use of judicial records which give insight into the social dynamics of seventeenth-century England. Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power (2003) explores touch as a gendered physical act; while acknowledging the history of medicine regarding tactility, Gowling positions power relations within early modern environments that are respectively intimate and social where “gender and power were embodied in touch, sex and violence” (2). Touch is conflated with the exercise of power over another body in a primarily violent way. Of particular importance, Gowling’s chapter “The Politics of Touch” delineates that “[e]arly modern culture defined women as constitutionally unable to keep their own boundaries” which accentuates that female bodily experience was intrinsically linked with the belief that they were “open” to be touched (52-3). Female bodies were determined by (un)chastity, marriage and socioeconomic status (53) placing women in the domestic service at inherent vulnerability to their master’s touch (65). Touch therefore was a way that people could communicate authority over individuals because of societal perceptions. Gowling’s argument that differentiation between biological sex and cultural gender breaks down in the Renaissance (3) provides an interesting feminist lens regarding touch. Here, the body is rendered as passive or active depending on how the body itself communicates to society. The sense of touch is a way for the active, hierarchical body to communicate its power over its passive counterpart.
More recent scholarship has concentrated on a broader assessment of touch through its representations rather than its operation within society as seen above. Elizabeth Harvey reinvigorates her history of the sense after her edited collection Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (2003), with her article “The Portal of Touch” (2011) where she positions touch through early modern art, literature and medical writings. Documenting that while physically the skin is a boundary, she reinforces that the active and passive nature of touch formulates a permeable membrane allowing communication between bodies. Gowling understands touch through power dynamics, for Harvey touch also has the power to shape the our relationships because bodies can both express and receive. With reference to quasi-psychoanalytic discourse, Harvey makes specific links to the sense of touch as imbued with emotion—something that is not considered by Gowling. Her analysis of The Allegory of Touch (1617) is the climax of her investigation where she argues that visual and haptic senses combine. This allows her to anatomise how touch was regarded in the period: the skin as a corporeal boundary, emphasising the hand’s “expressive capacity” as a “bridge between soma and psyche, body and reason, gesture and heart” (396) essentially linking touch with a communicative function that is both physical and emotional. Harvey avoids placing her study in the realm of gender studies enabling her to look at the intricacies of the sense on the body as well as having a larger scope in the investigation of its history. Her focus is the tension between what is physical sensation and interior feeling which signals that touch is both an active and passive process.
The most recent historical study, Joe Monshenska’s Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (2014), also uses a multiplicity of early modern interpretations to explore the sense. Devoting different chapters to examine the ways “in which the sense of touch came to the fore, and was debated, denounced, or celebrated” (4). He instigates a conversation by explicitly linking touch with early modern apprehensions in the wake of the Reformation. Monshenska takes Harvey’s overview further by underpinning his chronological investigation with the argument that “the ubiquity of touch in language and the resistance of touch to language—do not conflict with one another so much as they establish two rich sets of connections between touch and metaphorical expression” (4-5). In this sense, touch as a physical act that has been infused with emotional feeling can communicate and determine relationships between selves with the same effectiveness as using the lexicons of touch and “touching”. His discussion of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is contextualised by his account of the classical and Christian notions of touch and the sense’s relationship with the divine: he argues that Spenser was “persistently concerned with touch as an integral part of human interaction and sociability” (13). In this way, Monshenska’s approach to touch is emphatically rooted in the linguistic, demonstrating that less emphasis is placed on visual representations. For Monshenska touch’s linguistic properties are essential for human communication.
The critics above have demonstrated that the history of touch has been explored through its representation in a multitude of forms to show how it operated in early modern society. The sense has been regarded in both physical and metaphorical ways in the study of early modern drama. Carla Mazzio questions the “lexicon of touch, of tactually imagined emotions” in the early modern period when “tact” meant “the sensation of touch and when the word touch . . . signified both affective and physiological forms of receptivity” (160) in her chapter in Sensible Flesh. Thus, building on Harvey in both her introduction to the collection of essays and her aforementioned article, Mazzio infuses the sense with emotional feeling. Touch, for Mazzio, defies conceptualisation also explained by Monshenska, but it is this that gives “life” of this sense on the stage (160). By looking particularly at revenge drama and antithetical discourse Mazzio analyses social interaction and emotional affect. Mazzio offers more psychoanalytical explanation to the sense of touch by articulating the idea that “touch can seem all the more alluring and powerful when objects are held at a distance” (165) denoting that it is often not considered when the transgression of bodily boundaries is not achieved and how this catalyses the emotion of desire within the active person who touches. Mazzio signals that looking at touch through the language of drama from the early modern period immediately conflates it with emotion. Using the lexicon of touch to describe emotion whilst also viewing the physical act as inherently emotional demonstrates the ability of the sense to communicate emotion through both linguistic and physical means on the early modern stage.
Farah Karim-Cooper’s study of hands in Shakespearean drama becomes part of the scholarship that focusses on how part of the body are part of broader concepts. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (2014) argues that through poetic and dramatic representation the hand signifies the self (5). As essential to communication, the hands are “the principal organs of the sense of touch” (3), Karim-Cooper’s exploration of touch therefore stems from this link: the hand is “the chief sign and performer in the active sense” (8). Thus, the hand is crucial to theatrical performance, harking back to Harvey’s evaluation of the hand’s “expressive capacity” (Harvey 396). Like Mazzio, the use of anti-theatrical discourses are used to support her investigation and following Monshenska, her study emphasises that the movement towards studying the sense linguistically. Limiting her study to the hand’s power of touch demonstrates the influence of the sense on anti-theatrical discourse: the theatre as a “dangerous place of touch” not only in what is performed on stage, through language or theatrical means, but also “revealing a fear at what people might do with their hands” (159). The anxiety surrounding the sense of touch moves beyond the boundaries of performance, tactility pervades through all systems of social connections; between the players on stage and between the spectators. What is most important in the study of the sense in the theatre as demonstrated by both Mazzio and Karim-Cooper is that Renaissance theatre “was characterised as having the capacity to touch playgoers corrosively” (158) which was more than metaphorical with the spread of disease. She locates the metaphors of touch in a physical embodiment that are enabled, like language to communicate as well as receive physical and emotional sensation.
The tension between the active and passive nature of touch is discovered most prominently by the critics who focus on gender and power relations. However, this seems to be a field that recently has been left in the background. Touch has continued to be prominent in historicizing the senses by moving to discover the elusiveness of touch in language. This is not to say critics denounce the significance of the physical act but portrays the trend of concentration on the capacity that the language of touch can catalyse in the communication between bodies as it aptly expresses corporeal experience. While some critics outline the similarities in modern human experience to the early modern experience most have failed to acknowledge the wealth of modern theoretical ideas about the skin and touch and how these can theorise its significance in the Renaissance period.