Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline

Simular proof and senseless feeling: Synaesthetic overload in Cymbeline

Cymbeline is filled with moments where characters are forced to process complex sensations. In these instances of intense sense-awareness, standard sensory experiences overlap and become confused, challenging in particular the veracity of the ‘surest sense’: sight. Touch, hearing, and taste regularly supplant seeing as modes of determining the legitimacy of objects or events. Innogen, upon waking from her drug-induced coma, which has been “murd’rous to th’ senses” (4.2.330), and finding what she thinks is the headless corpse of Posthumous, cannot believe what she sees—her “dream” (299) must be “felt” (309) as she touches parts of Cloten’s body to confirm the seeming “shape” (311) of her beloved. The “simular proof” (5.6.200) concocted by Giacomo to falsify Innogen as an adulterer, a “picture, which by his tongue being made” (175), dupes Posthumous into seeing what he only hears: a synaesthetically confused vision of the false Italian “tast[ing] her in bed” (2.4.57). The play features repeated images of the senses pushed to their limits: eye-strings crack, ears are infected or wounded, taste is overwhelmingly bitter or poisonous. Becoming ‘senseless’ (the term appears more frequently in this play than in any other by Shakespeare) is a frequent response to such sensory overload as characters are seized by sleep or dream states and the desire to be unfeeling. With such ideas in mind, this paper will examine Cymbeline’s intricate sensorium, reading its synaesthetic perceptions in the context of emerging early modern thinking about the embodied mind’s interaction with the world in treatises concerned with medicine, disease, and the passions.

I suggest that these moments produce cognitive rupture, upsetting the process of perception so that normally distinctive and heirarchised senses blur, morph into, or stand in for, one another in ways entirely consistent with contemporary ideas about perception and the potentially fraught relationship between the five senses and the imagination. Synaesthesia need not necessarily always be evidence of perceptual confusion or sensory impairment, of course. As Jennifer Waldron has shown (by way of Daniel Heller-Roazen) it can simply be a way of explaining the complex multi-sensory way in which an individual encounters any object. Derived from the earlier term sun-aesthesis, it can mean both ‘sensing with’ and ‘joint perception’, suggesting that it is impossible for most human actions and interactions “to be tied to one sense”. Early modern discourses on the senses confirm that the embodied mind’s engagement with the world is indeed always-already multi-sensory, but they also repeatedly suggest how easily this process can be corrupted. In Cymbeline, sensory overlap becomes a constant and troubling emblem for duplicity, misperception, and emotional excess.

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