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The Winter's Tale is rife with allusions to the eye, including the reference to Mamillius's "welkin eye" (1.2.135), the spider in the cup presented "to his eye" (2.1.43), and the 'sight" of Paulina's "poor image" (5.3.57) at the play's end. The final scene has often been associated with idolatry, a sin of looking (O"Connell 2000; O"Conner 2003; Jensen 2004). However, this privileging of the visual in the play itself — and in the critical commentary upon it — has led to a neglect of other sensory modalities, and especially of the complex relationship between vision and touch that the play explores. Touch has long held an ambiguous place in the senso- rium; Aristotle conceived of it as the 'sense of all senses," primary and indispensable (1995: 413b). Unlike the other senses, the organ of touch (skin) is extensive rather than locatable, standing precariously "betwixt us and our dissolution," as the passage from Helkiah Crooke quoted by Patricia Cahill elsewhere in this volume reminds us. Moreover, touch is always dependent upon proximity (Harvey 2003: 3). Yet the primacy of touch also leaves it vulnerable to associations with the bestial and the erotic, and it was often classified as the lowest of the senses, at least in Western Europe (Harvey 2003: 1; Howes 2003: 12–13). Carla Mazzio suggests that in the Renaissance "touch was either neglected or conspicuously disruptive" (2005: 92). Elizabeth D. Harvey deftly summarizes the double nature of touch in the early modern period: "Although touch is usually associated with the surface of the body, it becomes a metaphor for conveyance into the interior of the subject, particularly the capacity to arouse emotion. … Touch evokes at once agency and receptivity, authority and reciprocity, pleasure and pain, sensual indulgence and epistemological certainty" (2003: 2).

DOI: 10.1057/9780230299092_4

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