Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture. Simon Smith, ed. Arden Shakespeare Intersections. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020. xvi + 384 pp. £117

The filmmaker John Waters is well known for elevating bad taste to something of an art form. For his 1981 film, Polyester (and with a nod to William Castle's Smell-O-Vision in his 1960 film, Scent of Mystery), Waters designed scratch-and-sniff Odorama cards to be distributed so that audience members could scratch in designated places during the film to experience the odors that Francine (played by drag queen Divine) experiences with her keen sense of smell. In a similar vein, Bruce R. Smith's brilliant hermeneutical perspectives on how Orsino's sensual opening speech from Twelfth Night is framed in the First Folio leave us with some open-ended questions about where the actual is in such a sensory experience. Or, on second thought and one provoked by the Odorama designed by John Waters, perhaps we might occasionally still wish to leave off actual sense and be more content to maintain portions of our investigations in the secondary realm of perception and imagination.