ABSTRACT

This chapter examines forms of tactile, as well as olfactory, sensations integral to its rhetoric in drama and in Jacobean urban culture. Both Coriolanus and Timon of Athens become increasingly interested in demoting rival articulations to their Aristotelian sensory medium, air. Martius, in fact, regards the Roman citizens as pathogens that emanate rotten breath long before his banishment takes place. In parsing out the anatomy of urban internecine disease, author perhaps unsurprisingly, end up reconsidering the fundament of the city and look at the infectious purgatives prescribed in Timon of Athens as cleansing agents meant to avenge the lapse of urban social and political relations, particularly the failure of the city to take care of its protectors and benefactors. Timon of Athens exhibits an even greater affinity to pestilential language that transforms communication in the play into an infectious medium that 'may merely poison'.