ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that in Jacobean urban drama, the senses often figure as multilevel gateways to a mimetic and rhetorical domain of accumulated forms of urban knowledge. At once imagined and available in the material environment and social setting of playhouse space, the sensory constructions of metropolitan representation appear to have helped to configure the city in more immediate terms that sometimes blurred the boundaries between the stage and local units of topography and cultural exchange. While playwrights did not engage the senses to instill a form of metropolitan paranoia, their often ambivalent representation of the agency and role of perception in reconstructing and negotiating the urban terrain leads us to conclude that on stage the city and the senses would considerably complicate each other's business. Dekker, Middleton, and Webster's odiferous message to Paul's patrons further implies that Jacobean dramatists significantly began to rely upon sensation to channel concerns about some of the more nebulous.
