The smell of Macbeth

Shakespeare Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 465-486

  Harris, Jonathan Gil ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649700823     PISSN: 00373222     EISSN: 15383555     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2007.0062     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, in The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, 4 vols., ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:vii-xii, 1-117; esp. 2:83, ll. 115-16.
2. Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fair, ed. G. R. Hibbard (London: Ernst Benn Limited, 1977), 13 (Induction, 1. 154).
3. Richard Lovelace quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 221.
4. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, Manchester UP, 1993), 169 (3.2.28);
5. the stage direction is found in the A-text (see note to 3.2.28.1 sd). See also Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), s.v. "squib."
6. r.
7. Quotations of Shakespeare's works follow Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed., The Norton Shake-speare, Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
8. The conventional wisdom has been that thunder was produced on stage by rolling a can-nonball on the floor, as Ben Jonson alludes to the "rolled bullet" in the prologue to Every Man in His Humour, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (London: Ernst Benn Limited, 1966), 7 (l. 18). Significantly, though, this "bullet" is an afterthought to the "nimble squib" to which he refers in the previous line, which suggests that the two practices may have been used in tandem.
9. Andrew Gurr notes, "Fireworks or rosin for lightning flashes were available at the amphitheatres but unpopular at the halls because of the stink"; see "The Tempest's Tempest at Blackfri-ars," Shakespeare Survey 41 (1988): 91-102, esp. 95.
10. Macbeth's date of composition and early performance history remain speculative. The earliest date for which we have a record of performance is 1611, but the play is usually regarded as having been written and first performed in 1606. This is largely because of the Porter's joking reference to "an equivocator" (2.3.8), which most editors regard as an allusion to the recently executed Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, who had authored a treatise defending equivocation for persecuted Catholics. For a discussion of the play's date of composition and first performance, see Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to Macbeth in the Norton Shakespeare, 2555-63, esp. 2555-56.
11. Bruce R. Smith first called on critics to undertake a historical phenomenology in"Premod-ern Sexualities," PMLA 115 (2000): 318-29.
12. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 276.
13. See also Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002).
14. For a study of lighting illumination in the original performances, see R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage 1567-1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999).
15. For a thorough study of theatrical lightning and other special effects, see Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998).
16. See Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994);
17. Mark S. R. Jenner, "Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture," in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 127-44;
18. and Hans J. Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992).
19. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud provides what has been arguably the most influential account of the devaluing of smell over the centuries; he roots this transition in evolutionary biology, arguing that as primitive humans began walking upright, they could no longer smell themselves or their potential mates; hence, the sense of smell became devalued and erotic stimulation became more a function of vision. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 21 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 21:99-107.
20. See, for example, Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986);
21. and Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. and intro. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
22. For a useful discussion of the relations between smell and memory in Proust, see Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (New York; Rout-ledge, 2004), 151-212.
23. Scientific studies of the proximity within the amygdala of synapses connected to olfaction and memory include R. S. Herz and T. Engen, "Odor Memory: Review and Analysis," Psycho-nomic Bulletin and Review 3 (1996): 300-13;
24. and Tony W. Buchanan, Daniel Tranel, and Ralph Adolphs,"A Specific Role for the Human Amygdala in Olfactory Memory," Learning and Memory 10 (2003): 319-25.
25. For an important discussion of recent neuroscientific understandings of olfaction and memory and how these might help frame research on early modern experiences of smell, see Holly Dugan,"The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005), introduction.
26. Smith, Acoustic World, 276.
27. The play's unusual disruptions of time have attracted much critical attention; see, for example, Tom F. Driver, "The Uses of Time: The Oedipus Tyrannus and Macbeth," in The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Columbia UP, 1960), 143-67;
28. Kiichiroh Nakatani, "Expressions of Time in Macbeth," Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 19 (1973): 45-63;
29. Maurice Abiteboul,"La temporalité dans Macbeth," in Aspects du théâtre anglais 1594-1730, ed. Nadia Rigaud (Aix-en-Provence, France: Université de Provence, 1987), 11-22;
30. and Philippa Berry, "Reversing History: Time, Fortune and the Doubling of Sovereignty in Macbeth," European Journal of English Studies 1 (1997): 367-87.
31. For a discussion of how Macbeth problematizes the conventionally linear-and lineal-temporality of succession, see Jonathan Goldberg, "Speculations: Macbeth and Source," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 242-64.
32. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Holling-dale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
33. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
34. Benjamin quotes from Untimely Meditations at the beginning of Thesis XII (260).
35. I have written elsewhere on this tendency. See Jonathan Gil Harris, "The New New Historicism's Wunderkammer of Objects," European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 111-23;
36. and "Shakespeare's Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture," Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479-91.
37. Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 400-402, esp. 400.
38. William B. Barlow, quoted in Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's "Macbeth" (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 21.
39. Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons by the Right Honourable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, 5 vols. (Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1865), 4:207.
40. Rebecca Lemon, in"Scaffolds of Treason in Macbeth," Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 25-43, notes other texts that, in the immediate wake of the Gunpowder Plot, use the formula "fair and foul"; see 33-35.
41. Barnabe Barnes, The Devil's Charter: A Critical Edition, ed. Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980), 43.
42. v.
43. Shakespeare employs the logic of inversion with his parody of apocalyptic prophesy in King Lear, where the Fool predicts a time"When priests are more in word than matter; / When brewers mar their malt with water; / When nobles are their tailors' tutors," etc. (3.2.80-83). The genre's most famous instance is the medieval "Merlin's Prophecy," which appeared in many guises; see Lesley Coote, "Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon: A Tradition of Popular Political Prophecy," New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 117-37.
44. U.S. 'on the way down,'" CNN.com International, http://edition.cnn. com/2006/WORLD/americas/09/20/chavez.un/index.html, posted 21 September 2006 (accessed 26 October 2007).
45. J. R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 392.
46. Ben Jonson, "The Vnderwood," in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 8:212, 1. 202;
47. v.
48. See David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), 302-3. I am grateful to Kurt Schreyer for this reference.
49. The Castle of Perseverance, in The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (London: Oxford UP, 1969), 1.
50. On devils and fireworks, see James J. Paxson, "Theorizing the Mysteries' End in England, the Artificial Demonic, and the Sixteenth-Century Witch-Craze," Criticism 39 (1997): 481-502;
51. and Barbara D. Palmer, "The Inhabitants of Hell: Devils," in The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 20-40.
52. For a thorough survey of representations of the devil on the English stage, see John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
53. and Thomas Hey-wood, The Silver Age, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols. (London: John Pearson, 1874), 3:64-164, esp. 3:159;
54. For a discussion of the medieval echoes in this scene, see Glynne Wickham, "Hell-Castle and Its Door-Keeper," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 68-74.
55. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1980; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 380.
56. r.
57. The poem is printed in slightly different form, under the title of "For the Kinge," in The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. L. E. Kastner, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1913), 2:296-99.
58. George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974), 185-86 (ll. 13, 15, 19-21, 22-24).
59. Oxford English Dictionary (OED), J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, prep., 20 vols., 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), s.v. "essence" (n.), 7, 10. The movement of the word from an onto-logical to an olfactory sphere was in large part enabled by sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus, who applied the term to "solutions containing the volatile elements or 'essential oil' to which the perfume, flavour, or therapeutic virtues of the substance are due";
60. Ulrich von Hutton, quoted in Philippe Braunstein, "Toward Intimacy: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in A History of Private Life, gen. ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1987-91), 2:535-630, esp. 2:539.
61. Mary Floyd-Wilson, "English Epicures and Scottish Witches," SQ 57 (2006): 131-61, esp. 142.
62. r.
63. Danielle Nagler, "Towards the Smell of Mortality: Shakespeare and Ideas of Smell, 1588-1625," Cambridge Quarterly 26 (1997): 42-58.
64. v.
65. Michel de Montaigne, "On Smells," in The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 352-54, esp. 353-54.
66. For a detailed discussion of the history of incense and censing from the ancients to the nineteenth century, see E. G. Cuthbert F. Atchley, A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Worship (London; Longmans, Green and Co., 1909).
67. Certaine Sermons or Homilies, Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-1571), ed. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), fols. 11, 71.
68. v).
69. Richard Palmer, "In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century," in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 61-68.
70. See also Galen, On Anatomical Procedures: The Later Books, trans. W.L.H. Duckworth, ed. M. C. Lyons and B. Towers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962), 186, 195;
71. and Bruce Stansfield Eastwood, "Galen on the Elements of Olfactory Sensation," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie n.f. 124 (1981): 268-90.
72. Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. Charlies Barber (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969), 5.2.14.
73. Gary Taylor,"Divine []sences," Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 13-30, esp. 26.
74. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 119.
75. Nevill Coghill, "Macbeth at the Globe, 1606-1616(?): Three Questions," in The Triple Bond: Plays Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1975), 223-39.
76. r.