When the sense of the exotic, or of non-Englishness, appears in those early modern dramas that were written for the English stage, the descriptions are sometimes characterized by an olfactory element. Titania’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one example, evoking a distant and romantic foreign landscape as she recalls the “vot’ress of [her] order” whose changeling child she does not wish to relinquish to Oberon. As a whole, Titania’s speech, both in this instance and throughout the play, seems redolent with a romantic sense of what critics often describe as “the other”, which remains in keeping with both her character and with the fairies as a whole. The fairies’ manner of speaking, their descriptions redolent with a kind of immersion in the natural world, underscores the fact that they are not human, as their own consistent differentiation substantiates.
The fairies’ separate nature, as another tribe of sentient beings who seem to be variously magical, surfaces again and again in their language. Catherine Belsey’s statements that “Shakespeare’s fairies talk like no others”, and that “their voices, unique in the play itself, assume a direct access to a more vital world” (which have been touched on in previous blog posts here) seem to be particularly keenly observed.* Yet, the idea of fragrance, of Bottom’s “flowers of odious savours sweet” (3.1.78, in which he mistakes ‘odious’ for ‘odorous’), still strikes us as particularly evocative. Even in Oberon’s famous line, where scent isn’t mentioned specifically, the description seems distinctly evocative of fragrance, conjuring the scent of a profusion of herbs and blossoms:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.248-52)
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine
Upon hearing Oberon’s words, we can almost smell the night breeze. It comes over our ears “like the sweet sound/ That breathes upon a bank of violets”.** Orsino, Twelfth Night‘s lovesick Duke, seems to conflate the auditory and olfactory senses in a single phrase. Oberon’s line does the same by describing something that appeals to the senses of both sight and smell, and which may have an auditory component as well if we imagine that we can hear the night breezes that prompt the violets to nod by bobbing their heads. Such language presents a listening audience with a sensory experience that burgeons on all fronts, and in terms of all the senses. Passages that conjure the idea of scent, which can be most evocative of memory***, in the case of drama, tend to establish and reinforce the text’s visceral links to an audience in performance.
The text of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set on a mysterious island, offers us a banquet of potentially fragrant exotica, including Caliban’s “sweet airs”, the spirit Ariel’s “Bermoothes” or “Bermudas”****, along with a host of similar embellishments.
The sprinkling of sensory cues throughout the text not only renders the text more immediate to an audience, but also imbues a sense of romanticised exotica, if not of the exotic itself. Drama has always done this though, just as motion pictures and television series do now. By setting the action in a setting foreign to the supposed general audience, writers give their writing an additional element of shape and dimension, imaginatively transporting the audience geographically while also transporting them into the circumstances of other lives.
Dimensions like fragrance supply foundational elements to the very essence of story, in effect, to take the audience somewhere new, or to transport them in a new way. Yet, how easily we forget this, although, or perhaps because we are so constantly immersed in it–in the ongoing processing of human experience as story. As Jonathan Gottschall describes it, “Human Life is so bound up in stories that we are thoroughly desensitized to their weird and witchy power.”*****
The early modern dramatists knew this, of course, as did their predecessors across the world. Shakespeare’s plays famously feature locations like Cyprus and Verona while ranging through temporal settings from ancient Greece and Rome to pre-medieval Roman Britain, but he and many of his most effective contemporaries also repeatedly remind audiences of the immediacy of human senses in their dramas. This reinforces not only accessibility, by linking audience sense memory with that of the onstage characters, but also reinforces the experiential veracity of the ongoing drama, underscoring the “suspension of disbelief” with a kind of sensory feedback loop, where senses meld together in a way that further supports a temporary fictional reality. ******
The air redolent with exotic spices is not unique to Shakespeare, but pervades the literature of the day. In John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, the character Armusia, who has recently arrived in the islands of the play’s setting, waxes rhapsodic:
We are arrived among the blessed islands Where every wind that rises blows perfumes And every breath of air is like an incense. The treasure of the sun dwells here. Each tree, As if it envied the old Paradise, Strives to bring forth immortal fruit – the spices Renewing nature, though not deifying; And when that falls by time, scorning the earth, The sullen earth, should taint or suck their beauties, But, as we dreamt, for ever so preserve us. Nothing we see but breeds an admiration. The very rivers, as we float along, Throw up their pearls and curl their heads to court us. The bowels of the earth swell with the births Of thousands unknown gems and thousand riches. Nothing that bears a life but brings a treasure. The people they show brave, too: civil-mannered, Proportioned like the masters of great minds.*******
Armusia’s description leads the audience on a tour of abundance from the olfactory to the visual, to the philosophical, painting a land of fulsome happiness and satisfaction.
Not that the conflation of the sensory need always lead to either the pleasant or the lush. Thomas Middleton opens A Game at Chess with the ghost of the founder of the Jesuits, portraying Ignatius Loyola as a cold and manipulative would be tyrant whose senses seek input as information:
IGNATIUS LOYOLA appearing, ERROR at his foot as asleep. Ignatius Hah! Where? What angle of the world is this, That I can neither see the politic face Nor with my refined nostrils taste the footsteps Of any of my disciples, sons and heirs As well of my designs as institution? I thought they'd spread over the world by this time, Covered the earth's face and made dark the land Like the Egyptian grasshoppers.********
In this case, the character’s disapproving disappointment is underscored by a marked absence of sensory input. He “can neither see…Nor with [his] refined nostrils taste the footsteps”. Like a man in a cave whose eyes begin to blind themselves seeking for non existent light, Loyola’s entire sensory array seems crammed into a single seeking, which for the moment returns a null set. Of course, the ‘lack’ in this case remains in keeping with the character himself, obliquely reflecting his lack of morality and human concern. His will to world domination is also underscored by the metaphorical vision of his “designs as institution” being like a plague of grasshoppers that cover the surface of the earth.
That our language (used loosely in terms of our linguistic and our visual representations) necessarily derives directly from our thought and understanding, also means that our expression remains inextricably interwoven with our experience. This remains apparent in our literary and other artistic renderings, and most pointedly in the ways in which we may artistically manifest our inner landscapes in our outer world. In these presentations, one sense may effectively represent all of the senses.
Colour may be ‘felt’ as well as seen. The effect of any sense may overlap another, in some cases, making the visual somehow as palpable as that which might actually be touched. The visual and the olfactory have been widely linked to mood, and the whole of experience may not be as distinctly compartmentalised as we might have it.
Even if we limit the discussion solely to early modern literature, examples of integration are legion, as Bottom’s famous instance of synesthesia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream readily indicates:
When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep? I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
(4.1.199-217)
As much as this passage relates Bottom’s momentary confusion, his receding memory of his experience with the fairy queen, with a muddled Bible verse smacking of his momentary contact with the divine, it also indicates the totality of his experience, as a whole that falls outside of typical human expression. Words cannot contain the wonder of it. It really is “past the wit of man” to say what dream we really live.
Nonetheless, we continue to try to describe it. To encapsulate it. To catalog it. Our creative efforts also put forth new efforts of integrated experience every day. It is not only Shakespeare or his contemporaries who transport us to enchanted islands which are full of “noises,/ Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (The Tempest 3.2.129-30). The contemporary example of Monsterstorm’s Crab Rave is case in point:
In a deeply troubled world, it behooves us to remain vigilant–to be both aware and involved. We continue to define our world as we continue to strive to improve both it and ourselves. We must learn, and we must also care for ourselves, if only for our loved ones, and to be able to continue our efforts for justice and a better tomorrow.
Right now, while many of us remain confined, it is also wise to dance upon occasion. The video posted above represents a good place to start. We should not give up the fight for a better world, but we must also dance when we can. ‘Stop and smell the flowers’ may be an old idea, but “gather ye rosebuds while ye may”******** is no less valid for that. May your weekend and fortnight be full of tropical islands, music, and sweetly scented air.
*Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 96.
**Twelfth Night 1.1.5-6.
***https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120312-why-can-smells-unlock-memories
****Some critics have noted that the “Bermoothes” may have been the name of an early 17th century London quarter reknowned for taverns, which might have given Shakespeare’s audience an additional laugh at the idea that Prospero would have sent his spirit servant, Ariel, to gather “dew” from the “still vex’d Bermoothes”.
*****Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Mariner Books, 2013, 1.
******For those with library access, a useful discussion may be found in: Walton, Kendall L. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1 (1978): 5-27. doi:10.2307/2025831.
******Fletcher, John. The Island Princess. Edited by Clare McManus. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017, 122-3. (1.3.16-33)
********Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess. Edited by T. H. Howard-Hill. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. (1.1.1-8)
*********Herrick, Robert. His poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, may be read here: https://poets.org/poem/virgins-make-much-time