Imagine. An actor stands on a stage, holding a stage property. Let’s assume, just for the moment, that he’s holding a skull and that we are watching from an audience’s perspective. What happens in that very first moment of seeing? Can such an encounter be purely visual? How does what we see affect what we feel and sense, and what parts do our individual memories and experiences play in shaping our response? From our moment of birth, we explore the world through our senses, registering a constant stream of experiences that become embedded within our minds and bodies. When we see an object we have encountered before, we intuitively know how it will feel to touch it. We might appreciate a sense of its weight and density, particularly if our intention is to pick it up. If we gaze at a blanket, lying folded on a bed, we may register its colour, but we also sense its texture: how rough or soft it will feel against the skin. If I hold my clenched fist above a wooden table, with the intention of striking the table’s surface with my hand, I anticipate the sound my action will make, and how it will feel in my body . Each experience evokes tactile memories that may be utilised by the imagination, so that what we have seen, felt, heard and sensed in the past can help us to anticipate future experiences within an instant. We are thus intuitively equipped to survive in the world. This complex perceptual ‘toolkit’ that is part of our being prepares us to encounter countless objects in our everyday lives; we unconsciously rehearse such contact, every time we pick up a mug or cup to make coffee, for example; catch a ball speeding towards us; or curl our fingers around the stem of a wine glass. Our encounters with objects can never be purely visual; they are phenomena that fuse sensory-motor experiences of the past with the anticipation of present or future contact, so that we are constantly prepared for action. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes, ‘[o]ne sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 267).

To some degree, this phenomenon can be explained by cognitive science. Shaun Gallagher, for example, writes that in our encounters with the everyday ‘things’ that surround us, ‘the visual observation of such objects automatically evokes the most suitable motor program required to interact with them’ (Gallagher 2005, 8). In other words, when we see an object, our minds immediately prepare us for potential contact with it. Bruce McConachie observes that we have ‘mirror neurons’,¹ or ‘networks of brain cells in the neo-cortex that “light up” in response to intentional motor action’ (McConachie, Theatre and Mind 2013b, 15–6). Furthermore, as Gallagher notes, these neurons ‘are activated either by the subject’s own motor behavior or by the subject’s visual observation of someone else’s motor behavior’; a fact that ‘shows a direct and active link between the motor and sensory systems’ (Gallagher 2005, 9), and could explain why, when we watch an actor using an object onstage, we intuitively ‘anticipate’ actual contact with that object in an embodied sense. Yet even with growing scientific evidence on how the brain and body function, we still find it a challenge to fully explain the complex fusion of thoughts, impressions, emotions, conjectures and memories that we experience when we perceive or imagine an object. It is with that perceptual experience, and the way it can be shaped, enhanced or transformed by a skilful writer, or vividly recalled and ‘re-run’ as a blended experience in the embodied mind, that this book is concerned.

Merleau-Ponty calls us ‘sentient subject[s]’, each containing ‘sediments left behind by some previous constitution’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 248–9), on which we draw to inform our experience. Our experiences of an object’s properties or ‘essence’—what makes it uniquely what it is, however—seem to be more than simply ‘stored’ and recalled, but etched in the body as a ‘lived’ scenario. It is this highly intricate yet unconscious yield that we draw on to help us navigate our everyday lives: to judge the speed and fall of that ball hurled at us across a tennis court or the weight of that cup of coffee. We not only anticipate where the ball will fall, in order to place our bodies in exactly the right place to catch it, we also sense its weight and volume and know how it will feel and sound as our fingers close around it. This extraordinary ability can be partly understood in terms of what Gallagher calls our ‘body schema ’: ‘a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring’ (Gallagher 2005, 24),² and partly by our memories of previous contacts with objects that shape our spatial and kinaesthetic awareness, and allow us to recall sensory experiences in order to anticipate others. It is unconsciously at work when we watch an actor onstage or read a script. And it is a phenomenon that Shakespeare uses to shape our perception of objects in his plays.

This book was initially inspired by a study of stage properties in Shakespeare. What quickly became apparent, as I approached the texts, is that in Shakespeare’s writing, there is a far more fluid relationship between the material and the imaginary, and between subject and object, than we understand today. In our post-Cartesian world, we see ourselves as central, with objects in our exterior orbit, as it were. And yet, Shakespeare’s plays reveal a world in which the plays’ language conjures objects in a richly visceral sense. Bodies morph into objects and their essential essences are absorbed into and become part of the material of the text itself. Words seem designed to reach into our bodies as well as our minds, prompting movement, cueing the senses. Shakespeare thus lures us into the world of his plays, seeking to engage with us on every possible level. The strategies he uses to connect with us in this way are his ‘special effects’—although it might be said that in our technologically advanced world, we no longer recognise them as such. Therefore, to separate Shakespeare’s objects from the language that embeds them in his plays—from the atmospheres and moods that enhance our perception of them—is to leave untapped the strategies that create and shape our experience. With that thought in mind, I return to my opening discussion of a skull, held by an actor onstage.

Objects presented to our gaze can trigger a myriad of thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions, however, fleeting. Some of these will be intensely personal, some more general, shared experiences. For an audience of modern-day playgoers, familiar with Shakespeare’s work, seeing a skull onstage might well call to mind one of his most famous lines: ‘[a]las poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio’ (Hamlet, 5.1.156–7).³ As Andrew Sofer remarks, this line is ‘just something that everyone knows, whether or not they have ever read or seen Shakespeare’s play’ (Sofer 2003, 90). Even those relatively unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s plays will often equate an actor holding a skull with the character of Hamlet. As an audience member perceiving a skull onstage, we might feel discomfort, or even repugnance; not of the object itself, but of what it signifies: the unfathomable yet undeniable certainty of death. As Sofer points out, as the ‘physical remains of the deceased human subject’, skulls ‘fascinate because of their sheer uncanniness, their disturbing ability to oscillate between subject and object’ (Sofer 2003, 90).

But what happens when the actor holding this object begins to manipulate it in his hands: holding it aloft, feeling its weight, running his fingers over the cold, mud-caked bone? There is a sense in which we shadow the actor’s perceptual journey: an experience that can be enhanced through that actor’s particularly intense focus on an object. Watching Juliet reach tentatively for the vial of sleeping potion, held out to her by Friar Lawrence, for example, in Romeo and Juliet, we can accurately gauge the amount of space its physical mass will take up, even without holding it ourselves, for we ‘grasp’ it in an embodied sense in the imagination. In effect, we ride the same perceptual wave as the actor we are watching. The experience may lack the intense immediacy of first-hand contact, but it nevertheless acts as a perceptual conduit between actor, object and audience that makes us feel closer to the action and can trigger empathy. McConachie explains such an actor/audience connection in cognitive terms as ‘sensorimotor coupling ’ (McConachie, Theatre and Mind 2013b, 16): an innate response that can be used to advantage in theatre, drawing us in to engage with a play on an intuitive level. The actor’s physical and emotional response to an object can also strengthen that journey. In very large theatres, of course, an audience member sitting some distance from the stage might be unable to ‘read’ subtle facial expressions. Indeed, early modern playhouses managed to pack in audiences of around two thousand people (Gurr 1992, 127),⁴ many of whom would have had a restricted view of the action. One sure way of reaching all individuals however—of creating a shared yet individual experience that could draw each and every one into the world of the play—was through evocative description. What we hear acts as a perceptual trigger to enhance visual perception.

Consider, for example, Hamlet’s words as he takes Yorick’s skull from the Clown (gravedigger) in 5.1:

Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times – and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. (156–60)

As Hamlet struggles to reconcile pleasurable images prompted by happy memories with the stark immediacy of what he sees and touches, his words begin to descant on the visual score playing out onstage. The skull becomes a strange fusion of object and subject, of tender memories and tactile experience. It is, in Lina Perkins Wilder’s words, ‘a physical revenant’ (Perkins Wilder 2010, 128): an embodiment of Hamlet’s memories of his beloved childhood friend. But there is also a sense in which words and object are in conflict with each other: tender memories are distorted in Hamlet’s imagination, as the physical presence of the skull—the undeniable work of death—overwhelms them. This conflict manifests itself in a bodily sense, as Hamlet’s ‘gorge rises at it’, as though the memories themselves are to be heaved up and expelled from within by his overwhelming horror. Interestingly, we are given no clear description of the living Yorick: the skull remains our overwhelming perception of him. What we initially learn about this dear friend is his love of life; his laughter; his kindness; and his cheerfulness. This brings us closer to an appreciation of Yorick’s spirit, as Hamlet relives and remembers it. It is Shakespeare’s choice of active verbs that gives the speech its visceral intensity. To be ‘borne’ on an adult’s back, rather than carried, might suggest a particular surge of bodily energy to any child who has ever ridden this way: a rush of motion felt in the body yet not caused by one’s own body ; a feeling of adult strength and energy coursing up through the child’s being; or triumphant freedom tinged with fear at the unpredictability of this precarious ride.

Hamlet’s words draw us into the scene, exploring the skull like verbal fingers, in a carefully crafted perceptual journey: ‘[h]ere hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft’ (160). Shakespeare’s choice of ‘hung’ is significant here: it evokes the macabre image of the fleshy lips as extra appendages drooping from the skull; there is theref...