The Early Modern English Olfactory and Literary Imagination

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Comparisons Are Odorous: The Early Modern English Olfactory and Literary Imagination

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

Colleen E. Kennedy, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Christopher Highley, Advisor

Dr. Richard Dutton

Dr. Hannibal Hamlin

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Colleen E. Kennedy

2015

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Abstract

My dissertation elucidates olfactive discourses in early modern literature. I argue that an understanding of the smell-scape of the early modern world deepens our analysis of literary texts as familiar as those of Shakespeare, Donne, Dekker, Herrick, and Milton.

Personal and bodily odors cannot be dichotomized into simple binaries of foul and fragrant, but rather were experienced as a complex and heady bouquet of competing scents. My analysis proves that personal and symbolic aromas seep into and affect the conventions of early modern literature in ways not previously recognized. Scent then, as now, functioned to conceal odors, to remove or obscure smells that might otherwise betray the wearer’s all too human imperfections, and to create alluring personal aromas.

For this reason, animalistic scents—such as the popular perfume civet—occupy a complex place in early modern England because they mimic body odors that one might normally try to hide, yet were highly regarded scents. With the strong associations of scent with morality, artificial scent arouses suspicion, no matter how sweet the fragrance.

By following the whiff of civet in early modern literature, I complicate the stereotypes of ! the perfumed courtier and the diseased prostitute, finding the olfactive language used to describe their stenches surprisingly does not differ that much from the royal scent of the monarch or the aroma of sanctity.

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Despite great interest in the early modern body and sensory studies, there is still a dearth of critical literature on the sense of smell, and this is why I find early modern olfaction such a fresh area of scholarship. This phenomenological approach allows us to consider how early modern writers experienced their own and others’ bodies. My analysis calls for a return to the text, as writers must grapple with metaphors as they attempt to define and describe something as elusive, ephemeral, and yet affective as an odor. As I explore the complexities of aromatic discourse, I recover a lexicon of olfactory imagery and stereotypes, challenge modern assumptions about early modern stench and hygienic practices, and suggest new ways of gaining access to the early modern cultural imagination. My dissertation is interdisciplinary, both in the broad range of literatures encountered, but also in my approach that brings together the processes of the literary scholar, the cultural historian, and the anthropologist.

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Dedication

For Jay

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Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Dr. Christopher Highley, my dissertation chair and advisor. When reading Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day for a dissertation workshop, Dr. Bolker expresses the ideal dissertation advisor: “a mentor, an expert in your field, a coach, an editor, and a career counselor.” She then laments, “There are, however, very few beings who can fill that entire job description.”

Dr. Highley, however, is exactly that sort of ideal dissertation advisor. I want to thank him for his years of guidance, support, patience, mentorship, and friendship.

I would next like to thank my other committee members: Dr. Hannibal Hamlin and Dr. Richard Dutton. Dr. Hamlin supported my initial larger research inquiries— smells are important to Renaissance literature and we need to know more about them— knowing that a more nuanced argument would eventually emerge. He also made sure that

I created a literary study rather than the cultural history that this project might have become. Dr. Dutton is an encyclopedia of early modern literature and culture, always making sure I finessed my points, and had my historical details correct. He also was very supportive of my professionalization, but encouraged me to stay on task with the dissertation. Both professors are also genuinely kind, supportive, and offered a lot of detailed feedback in the final revisions of the draft.

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The Ohio State University has been very good to me and there are honestly too many people to thank them all. I have benefitted from all the OSU Renaissance faculty’s collegiality, support, and conviviality. Dr. Alan Farmer offered great advice as I prepared for my candidacy exams and always challenged my thinking; Dr. Jennifer Higginbotham, a fellow-perfume lover, was supportive in many personal and professional aspects, and I especially enjoyed the week together at Stratford-upon-Avon; I looked forward to running into Dr. Luke Wilson at our neighborhood café to chat about the periphery of

Renaissance theory, and for our annual drink at the SAA reception; Dr. Elizabeth

Kolkavich was a discerning reader during our Renaissance dissertation meetings, and became one of my favorite conference friends; while Dr. Sarah Neville entered OSU as I was leaving, she offered advice as I transitioned onto the job market; and Dr. Eric

Johnson, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts, always kept me abreast on OSU’s extensive and relevant holdings for my project, and was a wonderful co-instructor in

Introduction to Shakespeare. The Medieval andRenaissance graduate students were also instrumental in offering comments on my dissertation in progress, sending along relevant articles and “smelly” quotations from plays and poems, and, most importantly, offering moral support: especially Jonathan Holmes, Evan Thomas, Victoria Muñoz, Rachel

Waymel, and Travis Neel.

My MA advisor at University at Buffalo, Dr. Barbara Bono, remains one of my most steadfast supporters and I cannot thank her enough. Dr. Jim Holstun, my undergraduate honors thesis director at University at Buffalo, informed me of the realities of graduate school and the job market but encouraged my applications, nonetheless, and has continued to support my work. Dr. John Taylor and Dr. Christopher Madson, old

! vi! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! college friends from UB, have always been encouraging, loyal, inspiring friends. Dr.

Scott Oldenburg, who remains a wonderful mentor, thank you for your continued advice.

Amanda Davis: we have made this arduous journey together as we worked toward our graduate degrees, and I thank you for your comfy couch, cold beer, warm pets, and love of good music. You are the single hardest working graduate student I have ever met, like the James Brown of anthropology.

At OSU, there were many people who were especially helpful in my last year, for technical, teaching, and financial help. I want to thank Dr. Amanpal Garcha, a wonderful

Director of Graduate Students and a true advocate for graduate students; Dr. Debra

Moddelmog, Chair of the English Department, who sent me my first welcome letter to

OSU when I was accepted and has continued to be warm, welcoming, and a strong leader for the department; Dr. Sandra Macpherson, a truly inspiring and much-needed mentor and all around empowering friend and colleague; Mike Bierschenk, who was always willing to help me with a technical issue; Eddie Singleton, who let me teach from afar my last semester, making my life much less complicated; and Kathleen Griffin, a gifted

Academic Program Coordinator, a friendly face, and always a calming presence during any of my many, many frequent anxious questions: thank you all.

As a collector of perfumes, I like to find notes that are initially light and floral, but over time, develop a complex sillage. I have likewise collected a whole assortment of wonderful friends during my time at OSU, each beautifully fragrant in his or her own complex and heady ways: Dr. Kate Collins, Ann Glaviano, Dr. Cecily Hill, Dr. Erin

Kelly, Dr. Niamh O’Leary, Dr. Chelsea Phillips, and J. Brendan Shaw. From tea-time study dates to wine-and-cheese nights, from seeing Shakespeare’s plays to dancing to

! vii! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! vinyl records, from zoo visits to spending an afternoon at the museum (or bar) during a conference weekend—you all kept me (relatively) sane, safe, and feeling loved. Thank you.

During my time at OSU, I was lucky to have the financial support and fellowship funding to allow travel to international and national research archives, the funding to present at conferences, and support for writing without teaching duties. The Presidential

Fellowship offered me a year of financial support to focus only on research and writing, and I thank my dauntless advisor Christopher Highley for his work in gathering letters from my committee members as well as outside readers Dr. Bruce R. Smith and Dr.

Holly Dugan, whom I thank for their support, especially Dr. Dugan, who has consistently offered advice, produced letters on my behalf, and introduced me to some wonderful perfume scholars.

Spending two summers in the UK and a year’s worth of weekends at the Folger

Shakespeare Library allowed me to work in the archives with tangible and olfactive objects, which cannot be studied or encountered through interlibrary loans or by viewing webpages—pressed flowers, perfume bottles, pomanders, and manuscript recipes. This travel was made possibly by funding from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Coca-Cola, and numerous units from within the The Ohio State University, including Alumni Grants for Graduate Research, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Council of

Graduate Students, and the multiple awards and generosities of the English Department.

During my stays in London, Ali and Jim Bennett opened their home to me. I enjoyed coming ‘home’ in the evening to have strawberries and cream, and to discuss our day’s

! viii! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! adventures. I cannot thank them enough for their hospitality, and for Ali’s personalized tour of London’s historic sites.

It sometimes feels as though it takes a village to write a dissertation. Many people have read various incarnations of chapter drafts or sent me smell articles and passages. I am thankful for their help from these readers: the faculty and graduate students of the

Renaissance Dissertation Group at Ohio State University; the dissertation-writing class readers, under the pragmatic direction from Professors Chad Allen and Frank Donoghue; and the Folger Dissertation Seminar participants, under the guidance of Professors Peter

Lake and Nigel Smith. There are also numerous “accountability” and writing group colleagues; the many people who offered feedback and asked questions as sections were presented at conferences; and my fellow dissertating friends and baristas, who all worked so hard and kept me company at Cup o’ Joe’s in Clintonville. There are many helpful early modern souls haunting Twitter and Facebook and I thank them for answering queries, helping with shorter translations, and checking over manuscript transcriptions.

To the brilliant and generous group of early perfume and gardening scholars I have been lucky enough to work (and shop for fragrances with!)—Holly Dugan, Emily Friedman,

Cheryl Krueger, Amy Tigner, and Alyssa Harad—I send you thanks and sweet smells.

My mom, Debra Wendt, and my dad, Robert Kennedy, receive my deepest gratitude and love for their dedication and support. You have both encouraged me in various ways in my literary and creative pursuits throughout my life, but you both expressed your confidence in me during my final and very trying semester.

Last but not least, to cite King Lear, I want to thank my greatest supporter, a good listener, a stern taskmaster, a fine editor, and my love, Jason.

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Vita

February 5, 1979………………………………………...Born in Niagara Falls, New York

1997-2002…………………………………………………………..B.A. English, Classics University at Buffalo.

2002-2005…………………………………………...M.A. English; University at Buffalo.

Publications

“Qualmish at the Smell of Leek: Overcoming Disgust in Henry V.” Disgust in Early Modern English Literature. Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll, eds. Farnham, Ashgate Press, 2015.

“Performing and Perfuming on the Early Modern Stage: A Study of William Lower’s The Phaenix in Her Flames.” Early English Studies Vol. 4: Spring 2011. Web.

“‘Do You Smell a Fault?’: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor.” Appositions: Studies in the Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture. Vol. 3: June 2010. Web.

“The Old Woman in the Cave of Lust: Edmund Spenser’s Silenced Feminine Voices in The Faerie Queene.” FORUM: The University of Edinburgh’s Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts. Vol. 9: Autumn 2009. Web.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Graduate Minor: Theatre and Performance

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Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………...…iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Vita……………………………………………………………………………..………….x

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Attending to another “O-Factor”………………………………………………….9

Analyzing Early Modern Theories of Odours…………………………………...24

The Immaterial Archive………………………………………………………….29

The Smelling Statue and the Goddess of Scent ………………………………....32

Organization……………………………………………………………………...35

Chapter 1: Comparisons Are Odorous…………………………………………………...41

Reclaiming the “Mute Sense”…………………………………………………....43

“Upon a Bank of Violets”: a close reading of an olfactive passage……………..59

The Smell of Books……………………………………………………………...65

The Nose-Wise Renaissance……………………………………………………..75

Shakespeare’s “Comparative Encounters”……………………………………....77

Chapter 2: The Paradox of English Civet in Shakespeare and Donne…………………...95

Introduction: Smelling perfumes in Henry IV…………………………………...96

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Smelling Civet………………………………………………………………….106

The Civeted Courtier in Renaissance Drama and Poetry……………………….112

John Donne’s Erotic Perfumes……………………………………………….....124

King Lear’s Therapeutic Civet……………………………………………….....134

Donne’s Sublime Perfumes……………………………………………………..140

Chapter 3: The Nasal Ethics of Thomas Dekker’s Plague Writings……………………148

Defining Nasal Ethics…………………………………………………………..154

Dekker’s Anti-Miasma Theories……………………………………………...... 158

Dekker’s London Smellscape…………………………………………………..167

Dekker’s Collapse of Space and “Special Air”…………………………………177

The Royal Exchange……………………………………………………178

All the World’s a Stage…………………………………………………179

The Grave……………………………………………………………….182

Runaways, Perfumes, and the Fresh Air of the Countryside…………………...188

This Booke is … yet somewhat infected……………………………………….194

Chapter 4: The Olfactory Erotics of Robert Herrick’s Poetry………………………….208

Wrapping Spices…………………………………………………………...... 212

Hesperides: the plotting of a garden……………………………………………216

The Aromas and the Argument of His Book………………………………...... 228

Perfuming and Composing Julia, Piece by Piece……………………………….235

Herrick’s Olfactive “Epigram of Praise”……………………………………….249

Of (Im)materiality and (Im)mortality…………………………………………..258

Chapter 5: Smelling Sanctity in the Later Renaissance ………………………………..269

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Introduction: William Lower’s political incense……………………………….269

The King’s Nose: To Smell Well……………………………………………….278

The King’s Perfume: To Smell Good…………………………………………..283

The Chrism of Charles I………………………………………………...284

Charles I and the Use of Liturgical Incense……………………...... 291

The Perfumed Martyrdom of Charles…………………………………..296

Charles and Tobacco……………………………………………297

Charles as Perfumed Martyr……………………………………299

Charles and Lamentations 4:20…………………………………301

Eikon Basilike and the Aroma of Sanctity……………………...304

The Stench of Cromwell………………………………………………………..307

Destabilizing Odours …………………………………………………………..313

Milton’s Holy Scents…………………………………………………………...319

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...328

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...... 336

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Introduction

In the second act of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the exiled Edgar disguises himself as a beggar, Tom Bedlam, by removing his noble attire, covering himself in mud, and tangling his hair. His disguise is so convincing that when Edgar spends time with his godfather, King Lear; his fellow nobleman, the also-disguised Earl of Kent; and even his own father, Earl of Gloucester; his identity remains undetected. While Edgar obviously alters both his appearance and voice, I find that there is another implied and less studied aspect of his concealing outfit: his newly acquired body odor. After Edgar has been restored to his noble attire, he describes his costume, as “madman’s rags” that even the

“very dogs disdained” (5.3.186, 187). As dogs do not discriminate based on regional dialects or coarse fabrics—the disguise noble Kent uses—I would suggest that the dogs must disdain Edgar’s scent, not his voice or appearance. Lear even notes Tom’s lack of niceties, including the lack of perfume: “Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume” (emphasis added, 3.4.96-97).

Naked, without clothing or a proper scent, Edgar cannot be detected as the young nobleman he once was. Edgar, to be convincing, cannot just look like and speak like a beggar, but he must also become an odoriferous actor; he must embody and smell the part of Tom. Edgar accomplishes this by deodorization: removing his clothing, most likely scented with sewn-in sachets of dried flora and herbs, wiping away scented powders from

1 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his hair, and rubbing away traces of his strong musk perfume. Secondly, Edgar must properly odorize: “My face I’ll begrime with filth,/ Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots” (2.3.9-10). Applying mud, stagnant water, and possibly manure to his skin and hair, and eating foul smelling foods (3.4.118-127), he acquires a new and revolting olfactive identity. While in his fetid disguise, Edgar, as Tom Bedlam, quotes from a ballad about Jack-the-Giant-Killer, which unsurprisingly concerns the human scent:

Child Roland to the dark tower came,

His word was still “Fie, fo, and fum;

I smell the blood of a British man.” (3.4.171-172).

What this line implies is that ethnicity and gender are olfactive cues and can be smelt out.1

In Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s romance, The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play with many aromatic resonances, there is another olfactive disguise.2 The escaped noble prisoner Palamon is still wearing his shackles and is without food. His cousin and romantic rival Arcite offers to bring him necessities, so that he may convalesce before their appointed duel:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 In fact, there are several other moments throughout King Lear that refer to the odor of men, mostly servants—from Goneril’s speedy messenger that Kent describes as “reeking… and stewed” to the heap of insults that Kent throws at Oswald, some of which 2 The play is rife with olfactive imagery. Hymen’s wedding songs that commence the play and lists the sweet odors of different flowers: “Roses, their sharp spines being gone,/ Not royal in their smells alone, But in their hue;/ Maiden pinks, of odour faint, daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,/ And sweet thyme true”(1.1.1-6). The song nicely lists flowers in a hierarchy from most fragrant to inodorous while differentiating between flowers as visual or olfactive enjoyments, possibly linking this to the Doctor’s later suggestion that the Gaoler’s daughter was first struck by Palamon’s beauty, which has confused her other senses: “That intemperate surfeit of her eye 2 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

…I will be here

With wholesome viands; these impediments

Will I file off; you shall have garments and

Perfumes to kill the smell o’th’ prison. (3.1.84-87)

The perfumes restore Palamon’s spirits just as the food restores his body to health. The perfumes deodorize the deadly miasmas of disease associated with the prison and restore his status not as lowly prisoner but as a young perfumed nobleman.

This romance also contains one of Shakespeare’s bed trick scenes, but part of how this particular substitution works is through the reproduction of Palamon’s distinctively sweet smells. The unnamed Gaoler’s daughter has fallen in love with Palamon and helps him escape but goes mad when she believes he has perished in the woods, or worse, abandoned her. To cure her of her madness a doctor instructs her former wooer to disguise himself as Palamon to seduce the maiden and cure her of her love melancholy:

This you must do: confine her to a place, where the light may rather seem to steal

in, than be permitted; take upon you, young sir her friend, the name of Palamon;

say you come to eat with her and to commune of Love; … Sing to her such green

songs of love as she says Palamon hath sung in prison; come to her, stuck in as

sweet flowers as the season is mistress of, and thereto make an addition of some

other compounded odours, which are grateful to the sense. All this shall become

Palamon, for Palamon can sing, and Palamon is sweet and ev’ry good thing.

(4.3.63-74)

While her wooer is an earnest lover, he is not versed in the niceties and noble education that Palamon is; he admits, for example, that he cannot sing well (5.4.13-15). With her

3 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! senses confused, and with the suitor obscured in shadows, and especially by applying the same sweet perfumes that Palamon might wear, he is able to properly play her intended lover. Palamon is “becoming,” that is, fetching, but “all this shall become Palamon” also suggests Palamon is just a collection of affectations: just a collection of perfumes and a nice singing voice, and that anyone who can do mimic these attributes can play his part as well as the original. The Gaoler’s daughter dreams of making him “nosegays” and when she kisses her Palamon-wooer, she wipes his kiss off onto her skin claiming, “Tis a sweet one, /And will perfume me finely against the wedding” (5.4.87-88). It is not only the marriage and consummation that restores the love-sick girl to her senses, but the whole ambient environment suggested by the doctor from dim lighting to sweet love songs and the prescribed aromatherapy. While many scholars have compared Shakespeare and

Fletcher’s cure to the sexual healing suggested in Robert Burton’s treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, the causes and cures of such “love-melancholy” are not only erotic, but have other physical and sensuous origins and may be elicited by diet, music, idleness, and sweet perfumes (III.58-132, 189-257). Jacques Ferrand, in Erotomania, or A treatise

[on…] erotique melancholy (1640), warns, “I would not suffer them to wear cloathes that are lined with Furres, Ermine, or Velvet; by reason that they heat the blood too much; as doe also all Odoriferous perfumes, as Muske, Civet, Amber [ambergris], Gallia Moschata

[French musk mallow], Alipta Moschata, and the like” (238).

Together these two brief examples begin to demonstrate the importance of personal aromas, body stenches, and perfumes in early modern literature. Because of the ubiquity of these references to odors and the consistency of types of odors associated with certain peoples and certain bodies a complicated, yet familiar, osmology emerges.

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Bodily aromas are signifiers of gender, class, occupation, ethnicity, and other markers of difference. Intimate effluvia arouse desire, disgust, fear, elation, and other intense emotions in the person who is smelling, judging, and critiquing the person emitting personal wafts.

The premise of my dissertation is simple enough: I claim that these most intimate odors form an integral component of many early modern texts, and therefore scholars need to pay more attention to how these odors are discussed, signified, and performed.

The representation and discussion of smells can be found in all genres of Renaissance literature. Michel de Montaigne provides a beautiful and deeply personal meditation “On

Smells,” with such wonderful phenomenological tidbits as his moustache retaining the odors of his favorite drinks. King James’ “Counterblast Against Tobacco” acts as a proscriptive tract against this harmful new import, but his keen nose also smells out the alleged treachery of the explorer and promoter of tobacco, Sir Walter Raleigh. Religious works, such as Roger Fenton’s response to the 1603 plague, “A Perfume Against the

Noisome Pestilence” creates a metaphorical aroma at a time that the best defense against the plague was to wear sweet perfumes; and holy incense and aromas of sanctity waft through the religious poetry and sermons of John Donne, Robert Herrick, Richard

Crashaw, George Herbert, and John Milton. Excremental odors become metonymically linked to larger issues of the moral hygiene of the state in scatological works as diverse as

Sir John Harington’s encomium of a flushing toilet, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, Ben Jonson’s mock-epic “On the Famous Voyage,” the anonymous “The Parliament Fart,” and the latter political doggerel on the “Rump

Parliament.” Fragrant perfumes are an integral component of Renaissance love-poems,

5 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and bad odors are used in many works to highlight otherness and class status in both poetry and on the stage.

Nevertheless, many scholars of early modern literature focus more on the visual and aural aspects so that the importance of the olfactory imagination is still relegated to the sensuous periphery. Danielle Nagler in her very strong overview of the philosophies and controversies concerning smell in early modern England notes “King Lear contains more references to smell, its synonyms and cognates than any other of Shakespeare’s plays,” but “whilst there has been much debate over the relative importance of sight versus hearing in Shakespeare’s work, discussion of olfaction has been almost nonexistent” (Nagler 55, 43). As Patricia Cahill notes in her overview “Take Five:

Renaissance Literature and the Study of the Senses,” “Renaissance scholarship … has for decades focused on vision to the exclusion of other senses” (1019).3 In the early modern sensorium, vision and hearing often vie for supremacy, and the aural sense has also been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 For examples, see Alison Thorne’s Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (2000), Stephen Orgel’s The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (1975), Barbara Freedman’s Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (1991), Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (2007), and Richard Meek’s Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009). This is only a partial list of the most established full-length works on English Renaissance or Reformation ocularcentrism and does not even consider individual articles published in peer-reviewed journals. The issue of iconoclasm and iconophobia in the early modern period is well-established and contains some of the most canonical of scholarship on sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. 2nd edition (Hartford: Yale UP, 2005); Ernest B. Gilman’s Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Kenneth Gross’s The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); James A. Knapp’s Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); John Phillips’ The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley: Berkeley UP, 1973); James R. Siemon’s Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Michael O’Connell’s The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) to name just a few. 6 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! well represented critically.4 The proximate senses of taste, touch, and especially smell are understudied.5 Cahill concludes her study of the recent trends in Renaissance sensory scholarship by listing several newer works that study the entire sensorium, but “with that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustical World of Shakespeare: Attending to the O-Factor (2003) deftly covers the auditory senses; Carla Mazzio’s The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (2008) focuses on the problems of speech (sometimes included in early taxonomies of the senses as a sixth sense), hearing, and communication; and Ramie Targoff, in Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) turns to religious aspects of aurality. A few brief references show the popularity of the musical and auditory in religious studies: Laura Feitzinger Brown’s “Brawling in Church: Noise and the Rhetoric of Lay Behavior in Early Modern England” (in The Sixteenth Century Journal 34.4 (Winter 2003): 955-972); Bryan Crockett’s “’Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear” (in Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 47-65); and Phebe Jensen’s “Singing Psalms to Horn-Pipes: Festivity, Iconoclasm, and Catholicism in The Winter's Tale” (in Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 279-306). There is another and relatively unattended “O-factor”: the olfactive world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. 5 Carolyn Korsmeyer, a scholar of aesthetics and especially the taste (one of the five sensations)/“Taste” (subjective appreciation of arts and culture) duality, explains: Since classical antiquity, our philosophical tradition has ranked two senses above the others, elevating sight in particular to the top of the list because of its role in the development of knowledge. Sight is the chief sensory means by which we make discoveries about the world, assess practical decisions, and achieve aesthetic insights. Vision and its companion hearing are philosophically, scientifically, and in common parlance considered the “higher” senses, while touch, taste, and smell are “bodily” senses, and by the long tradition that ranks mind over body, they are also considered “lower” senses. (217) Concerning the other two lower or proximate senses, touch and taste, there are more works than on smell: Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey (2002), Laura Gowing’s Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (2003), Joe Moshenska’s Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (2014) cover tactility and the haptic. Recently there have been several strong studies about taste, including Ken Albala’s Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002), Robert Appelbaum’s Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns (2006), David B. Goldstein’s Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (2013), Joan Fitzpatrick’s works Shakespeare and the Language of Food: A Dictionary (2011), Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (2007), and edited collection Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (2010), and in a more general tract (pun intended), Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson & the Digestive Canal (1997). 7 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said, I do think it would be a mistake for Renaissance scholars to move too quickly away from studies of the individual senses, for literary and historical investigations of smell, taste, and touch have just begun…” (1025).6

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 Together, Mark M. Smith’s Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (2007), Robert Jutte’s A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (2005), Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Constance Classen’s Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (1993), David Howes and Constance Classen’s Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (2014) and the very recently released six-volume set A Cultural History of the Senses (2014) offer a comprehensive overview of histories of the senses, each with strong subsections on the history of smells. The journal Senses and Society (founded in 2006) brings together social sciences and humanities approaches to contemporary issues of the sensate, often focusing on art and design innovations. The six-volume set A Cultural History of the Senses has one volume devoted to the Renaissance, 1450-1650, edited by Herman Roodenburg; the aforementioned journal Senses and Society devoted its March 2010 issue to articles focused on Medieval and Renaissance senses; and postmedieval: a Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies dedicated its Winter 2012 issue to “The Intimate Senses” (edited by Holly Dugan and Lara Farina). There have been several interesting works on the Renaissance sensorium recently, often combining the theories of the “sensual turn” (Howes, 2005) with the “religious turn” (Jackson and Marotti, 2004). Bodies and souls mingle in these studies that focus on the martyr, saint, and sinner’s sensory transcendental experiences, sensuous temptations, physically painful torments, ascetic deprivations of sensual delights, and the sensory details of religious rites. C.M. Woolgar’s The Senses in Late Medieval England (2006) is an astute study of both the ecclesiastical senses, but also a learned archaeological survey of the domestic sphere and the senses. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler have edited Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (2013), Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker turn to the arts (and not always visual arts) in their edited collection Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice (2012), and Mathew Milner’s The Senses and the English Reformation (2011). Milner’s much needed work complicates the usual (i.e. protestant) narrative that pre- reformed Christianity was overly sensual and the Protestant church was distinctly austere by proving that both sides charged the other with being too sensuous and misusing and abusing the senses, even while retaining and promoting certain sensate liturgical practices within their own services. He creates a continuum between medieval and early modern practices, noting obvious seismic shifts, but also highlighting continuities and smaller changes, too. Covering from the reign of Henry VII through the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Milner ably captures the many reformations that occur with the Tudor period. There are obvious reasons that I focus on the humanities (literary, historical) or social sciences (anthropology, sociology) approaches, rather than scientific approaches to studying the representations of smell in early modern literature. Constance Classen, one of the premier anthropological scholars of the senses, argues, “sensory perception is a 8 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Attending to another “O-Factor”

For olfactory explorations of Renaissance literature, there is still a dearth of critical study and this is why I find early modern olfaction such a fresh and exciting area of scholarship. Beginning with our contemporary ideas on the stinking early modern body, for example, this dissertation traces out different whiffs of the highly subjective past. Because of the paucity of critical attention paid to this nascent field of inquiry, and the overwhelming amount of references to odors in different early modern texts, in some respects this work begins with finding a focus within this richly fragrant field. Working broadly with the concepts that aromas have strong psychological effects and that body odors create sociological parameters, I hope to establish a historical phenomenological approach to early modern scents and sensibilities. My methodology is diverse, as sensory studies is itself very interdisciplinary, especially bringing together anthropological approaches to historical, cultural, and literary fields. In addition to the somatic work and sensory anthropology outlined by David Howes and Constance Classen (amongst others),

I will be incorporating the phenomenological philosophies of Michel Serres and Maurice

Merleau-Ponty to begin to consider how and why early modern people experienced odors, how they represented these odors, and what those odors represented for them.

Alain Corbin’s study of Enlightenment France and the birth of deodorization The

Foul and the Fragrant (1982) was the catalyst for olfactory studies and created a strong

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! cultural as well as a physical act” (“Foundations” 401). There have been some recent interesting and informative works on reading the senses in early modern works as physical acts, usually through cognitive science, such as Charles H. Frey’s Making Sense of Shakespeare (1999) offers an early scientific study of Shakespeare and somatic responses, with several MRI brain scans. Shankar Raman and Lowell Gallagher’s edited collection Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (2010) bring together sensory studies, cognitive science, and trauma theory. 9 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! microhistory of French perceptions concerning odors.7 Holly Dugan’s The Ephemeral

History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (2011) is the first monograph that brings together sensory/olfactory studies, material culture, and English

Renaissance literary studies. Until Dugan’s monograph, the major study on early modern smells was Danielle Nagler’s erudite article on the importance of smells in Renaissance culture, “Towards the Smell of Mortality: Shakespeare and Ideas of Smell 1588–1625”

(1997).8 Dugan’s work is a cultural history of a few key scents—incense, roses, sassafras,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 This work, an erudite exploration of early French attitudes toward smells—both the titular foul and fragrant—offered an interesting corollary to Foucault’s ocularcentric depictions of panoptic institutions: clinics, prisons, schools, etc. While Corbin creates wonderful analyses of changing attitudes toward smell, Corbin creates a teleology in which sight slowly replaces the importance of the proximate or lower senses. Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1986) fictionalizes Corbin’s study of Enlightenment France to create the most stunning depictions of the scented past as depicted through the hyperosmic Grenouille’s experiences. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott’s The Cultural History of Smell (1994); Jim Drobnick’s edited collection of essays The Smell Culture Reader (2006); and Jonathan Reinarz’ Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (2014) all cover smells over time and and across cultures, creating nicely constructed overviews that sometimes become too broad and sweeping. There have been some wonderful socio-cultural and literary studies for specific earlier time periods (Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2006) and those much later (studies of Victorian literature and the senses are especially prominent, such as Janice Carlisle’s Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (2004) and Hans J. Rindisbacher’s The Smell of Books (1992)) there is a real dearth of articles and essays in print concerning the smells of the English Renaissance. 8 In addition, there have been other literary or historical studies over the last several decades, for example on the motif of rotting odors in Hamlet and the corrupt body politic or concepts of Dutch cleanliness and their higher quality agricultural output, but such studies have been relatively isolated and regarded as microhistorical oddities. For example, see Richard D. Altick’s “Hamlet and the Odor of Mortality” (Shakespeare Quarterly 5.2 (Spring 1954):167-176) and Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom’s “The Economic Origins of Cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age” (Past and Present 205.1 (2009): 41-69). In addition to Dugan’s monograph and Nagler’s article, there have been a spattering of early modern olfactive histories and studies. Jonathan Gil Harris’ “The Smell of Gunpowder: Macbeth and the Palimpsests of Olfaction” from Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare considers the affect of a stage effect: the stench of the squibs, concocted of explosives and dung, used for the staged storm scenes in Macbeth are 10 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine—but her larger contribution to sensory studies and her thought-provoking approaches to social and cultural history assert that the smells of the

Renaissance should not be distilled, bottled, and packed into a cabinet of cultural curiosities, but more fully explored.9 While indebted to Dugan’s work, my own study is different from hers in that this dissertation is much more a literary study rather than a cultural or social history. Dugan’s monograph tends to focus on the objects and artifacts foremost and then she elides into her connections to literary texts. In my project, the socio-cultural, historical, religio-political implications of olfactive objects is present and vital, but the literary artifact takes precedence. I often read broadly across texts and genres, but to find the comparative attributes within the literature. Dugan’s perfumes situate the body in larger politicized spaces in early modern England—the theatres, pleasure gardens, the royal court, etc.—but this dissertation collapses the space around the early modern writer, reader, or audience member to a more intimate vicinity, namely the space between the person who smells (as a transitive verb) and the person who smells

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! conflated with the audiences’ recent memories of the Gunpowder Plot and King James’ nimble nose which allegedly smelt out the plot. Holly Crawford Pickett’s article “The Idolatrous Nose: Incense on the Early Modern Stage” studies the religious controversy over the use of the liturgical use of incense and the use of incense in Middleton’s Women Beware Women as well as in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. 9 Dugan’s book is nicely organized; each chapter focuses on a particular “scent ingredient” or perfume (broadly defined to include spices, flowers, herbs, and other ingredients intended to produce artificial odors), “a material object used to dispense it” (such as a pomander or church censer), and “an environment in which it was deployed” (the royal court of Henry VIII or the shut-in plague households) (16). Her text moves chronologically from the late medieval and pre-Reformation odors of sanctity to the scented boudoirs and pleasure gardens of the early Restoration. Another organizational motif is the focus on perfumed splendid bodies in the first two chapters (incense and roses), then the medicinal characteristics and social anxieties of her next two perfume ingredients (sassafras and rosemary), and finally turning to the luxury goods and commodification of odors in her final two chapters (ambergris and jasmine).

11 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(intransitively). Even more concisely, Dugan writes of things and places; I write of bodies and texts.

I argue that studying bodily smells and their literary representations allow us to examine the past in highly subjective and ephemeral moments; it allows us to consider how early modern people experienced their own and others’ bodies as well as how they created a spatialized and external subjectivity. Attending to how people wrote of their own bodies, senses, and feelings within the historical moment, I argue that smells of the body seep into and affect the conventions of early modern literature in ways not previously recognized. By exploring the complexities of aromatic discourse in early modern literature, I challenge modern assumptions about early modern stench and hygienic practices. This dissertation recovers a lexicon of olfactory imagery and stereotypes, and suggest new ways of gaining access to the early modern cultural imagination.

Mark M. Smith begins his concise but potent Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing,

Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (2007) with the proclamation, “It is a good moment to be a sensory historian” (1). Capitalizing on this “good moment” or “sensual turn” as the sensory anthropologist David Howes (2005) terms this movement “away from linguistic and textual paradigms” and toward the concept of the “knowing body”

(29), my dissertation enhances the vibrant critical conversation about historical phenomenology, embodiment, affect, and sensory history by following different whiffs of the highly subjective past.10 Smith explains: “Sensory history is less a ‘field’ of inquiry

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Martin Jay also covers the “sensory turn” nicely in “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” a special issue of American Historical Review devoted to the historical sensorium (2011). 12 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and more a habit of thinking about the past…. Thus, sensory history is more properly conceived of as a habit, a way of thinking about the past, and a way of becoming attuned to the wealth of sensory evidence embedded in any number of texts, evidence that is overwhelmingly apparent once and ironically, looked for” (4-5). While my project is a literary rather than historical study, I adopt this habit of looking for (or sniffing out) the many references to smell and especially body odors in early modern literature, thinking about these works olfactively, and offering new insights into how early modern writers represented bodies, desires, fears, and conceptions of self and otherness through these depictions of scent.

In one sense, finding how inclusive sensory/smell studies truly is meant generating a syncretic and idiosyncratic methodology that pulls from so many different theories. In one sense, this discovery was not unlike the recent art project entitled

“Everything: the Perfume,” a bottle filled with minute samples of all 1,400 perfumes initially launched in 2012.11 When all the perfumes were mixed together, the smells neutralized, and became a generic perfume counter smell (Morrissey). This project, however, has combined all of these many disparate parts and has tried to conserve the fleeting separate odors and ideas as distinct as possible. This perfume metaphor for a literary study of early modern perfumes suggests a more inclusive and promiscuous theory, in which all theories can be combined together in small doses, and in all hopes producing something more complex and interesting than a flattened generic perfume.

Below, I trace out how this project developed organically through the research and writing process, rather than moving chronologically through different theoretical turns.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 The Dutch artists Lernert and Sander mixed all the samples in a short video (available to watch via YouTube) and placed their mixture in a comically large glass perfume vial. 13 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I lightheartedly call for an “olfactive turn” in early modern literature, a distillation of the various methodologies outlined below to create this perfume of a literary study. I initially began with a walloping dose of anthropological, sociological, and psychological schools as a head note or the initial impression of the scholarship.12 Tempered with a variety of agreeable accords or scholarly “turns” for the middle note—corporeal, religious, material, affective, phenomenological, and sensory—these methodologies create the heart and body of this dissertation that considers the binary of foul and fragrant depictions of personal aromas.13 For this study, the solid base note, that perfume component that remains the longest—is the reminder that is first and foremost a literary study, considering (amongst other literary issues): the semantics and lexicons of ideas and abstract concepts (in this case, personal aromas); literary techniques, such as similes,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 The head (top) note of a perfume is the immediate and initial impression, often of a sweet savor, which evaporates quickly. The heart (middle) note of a perfume emerges as the top note fades, and is often the most well-rounded and hearty note of the overall composition. Finally, in a perfume we encounter the body (base) note, the depth and solidity, the lingering aftereffect of the perfume, which is often the most contradictory aspect, often both earthy and rich, yet haunting. For more on the jargon of perfumers, see Lucan Turin and Tania Sanchez’ Perfumes: The Guides (2008). 13 The 1980’s and 1990’s corporeal scholarship offers another type of material focus: on the human body. Many scholars consider the early modern body as a contentious site under different ecclesiastical, medical, gendered, and state-centered powers, but as the works of Gail Kern Paster and Carla Mazzio demonstrate, the body with all of its warts, oozes, and illnesses defies simple categorizations and defiantly challenges simple power hierarchies. I found myself even more drawn to discuss the personal odors and affects found in early modern literature. Paraphrasing Keir Elam’s list of recent scholarship on early modern bodies (as per the 1990’s when he compiled this list)—tremulous, single- sexed, double-natured, enclosed, intestinal, consumed, carnivalized, effeminized, embarrassed, sodomized, emblazoned or dissected, and disease-ridden (144), Mathew Wagner augments the list on the “corporeal turn” by adding post-1990’s scholarship on the body interiorized, gendered, fragmented, temporal, and indeterminate, as well as his own study of the body as “primary matter” (11-12). 14 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! metaphors, and analogies;14 the rhetoric of political pamphlets and church sermons;15 an appreciation for the recurring attributes of certain stock characters in drama; the aromatic carpe florem tradition of lyrical poems, blazons, sonnets, and anthologies; and the physical text as odoriferous object.16

Constance Classen, Rachel Herz, David Howes, Mark M. Smith, Alain Corbin, and Mark Jenner (et al) are the anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural historians whose work in the social sciences offered the top note for how to think about how smells create culture and are created by culture. As the most consistent and established sensory

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 Another response to both New Historicism’s focus on context over content and the study of material goods is the New Formalist approach, associated with scholars such as Heather Dubrow, which returns to considerations of genre and form, but still accounts for historical and cultural concerns. The olfactory imagery used to describe poetry, the acts of reading and writing, and the concept of wisdom all show that even smell, a sense we may not necessarily associate with texts and composition, did register and have resonance with early modern writers. 15 I considered the religious implications of certain odorants in the Renaissance. Following Kevin Sharpe’s call for an interdisciplinary approach to early modern religious studies that considers the “visual, sensual, and emotional experience” (cited in Jackson and Marotti 169), the olfactory rhetoric, affects, and artifacts of the Reformation drift through each chapter from the mention of “pomanders of prayer,” civet-perfumes mentioned in sermons, and most poignantly in the last chapter on the “smells and bells” of the pre-reformed and Laudian liturgical practices, to the aroma of sanctity associated with martyrs and saints. 16 I turned to textual materiality studies, thinking of the paper, ink, and bindings as potentially odorous sites. Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (1982), famously states the difference in phenomenological distancing between the visual and aural to comprehend interiority: “Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer” (71). In some ways, Ong’s work is already acting as a corrective to centuries of ocularcentric thought, but his dismissive attitude toward these senses is reductive. For both Ong and before him, his mentor Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenburg Galaxy (1962), the senses, cognition, perception, and the emotions are all altered by new media, which act as an extension of the senses. The textual and the sensual are intertwined; the sensible object (the book) and the sensing subject (the reader) are cultural interdependent, and both Ong and McLuhan create a teleogical narrative that begins in pre-literate oral/aural cultures moving to the literate ocularcentric model. The material and the corporeal elide when bodies write, produce, read, and perceive books as sensuous objects.

15 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! work has been written in the social sciences, this was the natural starting point. As Mark

Jenner has suggested in his brief sensate history and reception of garlic in English history, instead of creating an overarching study of smells in the Renaissance, it is more productive and honest to follow the whiff of a particular savor and its effects over a period.17 Therefore, instead of offering a metanarrative of early modern odors, I provide what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “thick descriptions” or micro-histories of interpreted cultures, describing how and why early modern English people experienced their olfactory environments and their odoriferous bodies, and how the sense of smell was important in mediating their cultural and literary experiences.18

The heart note is really a series of interconnected collection of post-New

Historicist theoretic approaches: embodiment, material culture, historical phenomenology, affect studies, and sensory studies, which truly incorporates aspects of all. Keir Elam writes that “the reaction against the linguistic turn and prophylactic sterilizing of the body has been what we might term the corporeal turn, which has shifted attention from the word to the flesh, from the semantic to the somatic; or rather has insisted on the priority of the somatic over the semantic” (144). Danuta Fjellestad, writing on the “olfactory landscapes” of smell, gender, and ethnicity in three contemporary feminist novels (Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), Jamaica Kincaid's The

Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 Jenner, Mark. “Civilization and Deodorization?: Smell in Early Modern English Culture.” Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas. New York: Oxford UP, 2000: 127-144. 18 In my anthropological interests, I am also deeply influenced not only by Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description” in The Interpretation of Culture (1973), but also Stephen Greenblatt’s examination and application of Geertz’ meaning-making to literary studies as the “touch of the real” (“The Touch of the Real” in Representations 1997). 16 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(1992)), complains: “Written large in recent critical discourse, the body has been gendered, raced, and classed, but it remains a strangely odorless body” (641). This dissertation re-odorizes the early modern body and reclaims the concept of the smelling mind as well. The physical objects of the pungent past that waft through each page of the dissertation—civeted gloves, perfume recipes, pomanders, cabinets of sweet household goods, diseased burial linens, incense burning in thuribles, and so on—define the bodies that wear, use, and smell these odorants.19

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 The works of Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Ann Rosalind Jones, Wendy Wall, and Catherine Richardson with their emphasis on material culture, consider matters of goods, such as articles of clothing and staged properties, as commodities that are circulated throughout London, from cloth workers to seamstresses from wealthy patrons to the stage where old clothes often ended up. Drawing on numerous theories and scholars, Jonathan Gil Harris challenges the fetishizing of the object apparent in end-of- the-century New Historicist studies in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare: “For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespearean scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing” (1). Harris, while decidedly invested in material culture and cultural materialism, makes a call for polychronization of the object, studying the time of the thing and its agency as well as broadening the definitions of material culture and temporality. Material culture should include some immaterial culture, such as smells and touch, as well as the blurring boundaries between object and subject, such as the actor’s physical body. For a brief overview of Renaissance material culture, see Catherine Richardson’s “Shakespeare and Material Culture,” Literature Compass 7/6 (2010): 424-38. Also, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Magreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass’ “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”; Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds. Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wendy Wall’s Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002) as well as many, many articles on domestic spaces and properties; Catherine Richardson’s Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling’s Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Culture and its Meanings (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010). Also, see James A. Knapp’s “Beyond Materiality in Shakespeare Studies” (2014) for another consideration of the shift toward the phenomenological. 17 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Early modern sensory history has been the meeting points of several interdisciplinary projects that examine diverse discourses of the body in medical, scientific, religious, legal, philosophical, and literary texts. Whereas I most often use the term “sensory studies,” this dissertation hinges on a series of interrelated turns (besides the aforementioned “sensual turn”) in Renaissance literary studies that connect multidisciplinary approaches to understanding early modern writings via the body and the emotions. The “corporeal turn” led to two other later sub-incarnations that are indispensible for this study—the “affective turn,” and maybe, most acutely, the

“phenomenological turn.”20 From Gail Kern Paster and Bruce Smith’s work on humoral theory and historical phenomenology, respectively, to the affective turn espoused by Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick and Katharine A. Craik, we know that early modern emotional responses began in the body.21 Bruce Smith explains that “instructed by Freud, we think

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 While the nuances of each of these turns and their increasingly diverse criticisms will not be articulated here studying the representations of smells can link together these different strands. The somatic turn often points to the medical writings and illustrations of early modern (and the lingering influences of Classical and medieval theorists such Aristotle, Galen, Ficino, etc.) thinkers such as Helkiah Crooke or Andreas Vesalius, as well as the modern history of medicine and the body as commenced in Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963). Michael Hardt articulates that the “affective turn” requires a synthesis of the body and mind “because affects refer equally to the body and the mind” and “because [it] involves both reason and the passions” (ix). As Patricia Clough explains in her formative introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social the genealogy of the study of affects may be traced to the early modern thinkers, such as the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Likewise, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first pub. 1621, but expanded and republished several more times throughout the 17th century) and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind (1601) both sophisticated early modern psychological treatises studies the emotions as perturbations created by the senses’ handling of external stimuli. 21 Silvin S. Tomkins first created the taxonomy of people’s emotional responses to various stimuli, which he termed Affect theory. Physical and biological responses could be observed and betray our emotions, and as we acquire awareness of our responses shame sets in, represented in nine hyphenated pairs, such as enjoyment-joy or fear-terror. That early modern playgoers felt differently and had different embodied experiences 18 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of emotion as an energy that acts on the material body; for Donne and his contemporaries, passion was a biochemical state that arises from the material body. An emotion is, for us, a response to an act of cognition; for Donne and his contemporaries passion was the impetus for an act of cognition” (Key, 4). Francis Bacon provides an early modern analogue to affect theory in his description of “Motion of Avoidance,” in which a person attempts to flee from an antipathetic body (II. 533).22 He elaborates:

For a fetid Odour is so repulsed by the Organ of Smell, that it even causes a

Motion of Expulsion, by Consent, in the Mouth of the Stomach. A bitter and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! from modern audiences is well-studied. Even more relevant for the study of audience response, is that Tomkins elaborates on his theory, by creating a “Script Theory.” In the “Scene,” the actor responds to the stimulus is a sequence of responses that seem almost scripted. See also Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (1993), Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004), and (co-edited with Mary Floyd-Wilson) Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004); Bruce R. Smith’s “Premodern Sexualities” (in PMLA 115. 3 (May 2000)), The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999), The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (2009), and Phenomenal Shakespeare (2010); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003); Katherine Craik’s Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (2007), and (co-edited with Tonya Pollard) Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013). 22 Bacon has many astute observations on odours, air, spirits, breath, and putrefaction— elements and categories that often overlap in ways I cannot cover here. Danielle Nagler succinctly states that the aim of Bacon’s Historie of Life and Death is to “stave off” natural entropy toward “rotting and putrefaction” (55). As a few brief examples of his own empirical philosophies of smell, he offers suggestions on the organization and planting season of gardens to offer the most fragrant offerings, including which plants perfume the air (violets, musk-roses, sweetbriars), which plants must be crushed underfoot (burnet, wild thyme, water-mint) (Essay XXIV: Of Gardens, 130). He especially loves the odors of violets, and tries to distill its essence to minimal success (Aphorism XLVI:235, 524-525). He writes of the recuperative and therapeutic aspects of aromatics (especially 123-127) in The History of Life and Death; he realizes that to describe Democritus’ atomic theory, he should not compare it to visible dust motes but rather the invisible yet perceptible odour molecules (“Thoughts on the Nature of Things,” 287-290). 19 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

horrid Taste is so repulsed by the Palate and Throat, as to cause, by Consent, a

particular Shake, or Shuddering of the Head. (II.534)

Bacon’s observation of the physical repulsion anticipates Thomas Tomkin’s twentieth century affect of “dissmell,” the physical response to smelling a bad odor, in which the person pulls back the upper lip, wrinkles the nose, and tilts the head away (Vol. III, 20-

24).23 Julia Kristeva introduces readers to her concept of the abject, the aversion of that which one does not wish to incorporate into the body, with the simplest, most universal of responses: disgust toward a particular food (in her case, “that skin on the surface of milk”).24 Like Bacon, Kristeva describes her bodily responses in similar terms—gagging, stomach spasms, perspiration, nausea, and balking (2-3). Immanuel Kant, too, in one of his last essays, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), will discover that

“taking something in through smell (in the lungs) is even more intimate than taking something in through the absorptive vessels of the mouth or throat” (§21).25 For Bacon, the universal reaction of disgust, dissmell, abjection, motion of avoidance, “negative conditions of well-being” (Kant §22), or however we wish to denote this, is an affect that calls for observation and contemplation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Tomkins distinguishes between disgust and dissmell. Expressing the emotion of disgust includes several well-noted and almost universally exhibited physical characteristics, the wrinkled nose, the protruding tongue, the curled upper lip, and the head pulled away from the object of disgust, all expressions that we could imagine exaggerated and played on the early modern stage for great effect. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen studied the physical characteristics of disgust amongst the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and Dario Galati, Klaus R. Scherer, and Pio E. Ricci-Bitti covered the expressions of disgust amongst people who were born blind; both groups found the same distinguishing characteristics as described above. 24 “Food loathing,” Kristeva argues, “is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (2). 25 Kant warns that as “others are forced to share the pleasure of it [i.e. a smell], whether they want to or not” “smell is contrary to freedom and less sociable than taste” (§21). 20 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kevin Curran and James Kearney, in their introduction to a collection of essays on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” state that “phenomenology’s remarkable intellectual diaspora… offers a language of speculation and inquiry dynamic enough to accommodate both historicism and theory, a common language that can speak as compellingly to questions of law, ethics, performance, and hospitality as it can to questions about feeling and sensation” (353).26 As de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass questioned the categories of reducing a subject to an object (reification, objectification) or promoting an object to status of subject (fetishization, idolization), there is such a blurring of subject and object when we read about early modern smells. First, it is often difficult to distinguish one’s personal aroma from the applied perfumes and aromatics worn, conflating the two and blurring boundaries of subject and object.27 Secondly, the bodies of the literary authors (as subjects)—the poet, the playwright, and the preacher— are quite “inspired” (ie. “breathed in; taken into the lungs in breathing; inhaled”) to write

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26 Of the twentieth-century phenomenologists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception speaks the most to the project at hand. Merleau-Ponty’s work is unambiguously empiricist, as the embodied mind is made up from bodily experiences, and the body has its own pre-verbal intelligence. Body (or his body-subject) and mind work in tandem, and while the sensible can be expressed as idea or through language, there is also an anti-Cartesian sense of the self that transcends language. Furthermore, he problematizes the object-subject divide, in which the object is the sensed and the subject is the sensing one, by considering the spatial as a connective thread between the two. 27 Herrick’s epigram “On a Perfumed Lady” questions this blurring of object (perfume, powders) and subject (the lady): You say you're sweet; how should we know Whether that you be sweet or no? From powders and perfumes keep free, Then we shall smell how sweet you be. (H-282) Herrick’s perfumed poetry is the basis of a later chapter, and I contend that it is near impossible to find the true subject of many of these poems, whether it is the fragrant mistress or her perfumes, and in his olfactive blazons he objectifies the mistress, reifying her to her different sweet accords. 21 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on the smells of others (de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass 3).28 The latter are the bodies which become “ob-ject” (“that which is thrown before” (de Grazia, Quilligan, and

Stallybrass 5)) as by releasing odors they become sensuous material, whether the desirable bodies of the beloved, the abject bodies of the diseased, the idolized bodies of the holy, or even the stereotyped bodies of staged character types.

Curran and Kearney further define historical phenomenology as it relates to and differs from the nineteenth through mid-twentieth century philosophical movement: “If phenomenology as a philosophical school can be broadly characterized as the study of sense experience from the first-person point of view, then historical phenomenology can be characterized more narrowly, as the study of sense experience during a specific historical past” (354). “Historical phenomenology,” Bruce Smith declares, “directs attention to the sentient body caught up in that situation, positioned among the cultural variables set in new historicism and cultural materialism. What historical phenomenology offers is an erotics of reading” (326).

In his vibrant and gripping essay “On Smells” (1580), Michel de Montaigne offers his own “erotics of reading” early modern odors. “Whatever the smell,” Montaigne writes, “it is wonderful how it clings to me and how my skin is simply made to drink it in” (Screech 353). His “thick moustache” captures and maintains the scent of his gloves, the perfume of his handkerchief, the regional scents of the places he visits, and then, moving into a reverie of erotic memories, he recalls how “those close smacking kisses of my youth, gluey and greedy, would stick to it [i.e. the moustache] and remain there for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 "inspired, adj. and n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015. 22 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hours afterwards” (353).29 He meditates on perfumed versus clean, but inodorous feminine flesh (preferring the latter); the miasmas of the plague (which he proudly reports he has been able to avoid, just like Socrates); the contemplative use of incense in church practice; famous royal chefs who create sumptuous smell-feasts; and how he loves both Paris and Venice for their architectural beauty but abhors their stenches. In this short essay, his writing flows not unlike the discovery of the different notes of a perfume or the associative and mnemonic aspects of scent, what we have termed after another author and lover of sweet smells, the “Proustian effect.”30 Montaigne’s delightful writing brings together the affective, the corporeal, the phenomenological, and the sensorial all through how he thinks, feels, experiences, and reflects upon the different aromas entrapped in his whiskers.

Returning to the smells of the body, the sense of smell, the emotions evoked by hedonic odors, as well as how writers were thinking about how they were experiencing and representing such odors blend together the sensuous, somatic, affective, and phenomenological into a heady and overwhelming perfume of significance. Rather than a flattened combination of all scents and theories devoid of nuance, such as in “Everything the Perfume,” this type of embracing, open, and syncretic smell studies allows for different theories, methodologies, and disciplines to work together for a fuller

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 Rachel Herz, a sensory (pop)-psychologist declares: “More than any other sensory experience, fragrances have the ability to trigger our emotions: to fill us with joy and rage, to bring us to tears and make our hearts ache, to incite us with terror, and to titillate our desires” (11). 30 On the “Proustian hypothesis of odor memory” (98), see Trygg Engen’s The Perceptions of Odours (1982) and more generally, his Odour Sensation and Memory (1989). Engen was one the world’s foremost chemosensory scientists, and had argued that while in the short term our visual memory is stronger, over an elapsed period we can more accurately recall a scent (170-175). 23 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! considertation of overlooked, undervalued, yet essential aspects of the literary. This dissertation, moreover, attempts to offer such “an erotics of reading” by trying to reconstruct how early modern writers were experiencing, remembering, and writing about how they experienced the scent of their own and each other’s bodies. The bodies that inhale the odors are often the bodies that critique, desire, or damn the bodies that smell sweetly or rankly. The olfactive turn, through its drifting, embracing metholodgies, demonstrate that early modern smells, rather than ever falling into any simplistic binary such as foul or fragrant, are inclusive, encompassing, engulfing, and impossible to contain or limit.

Analyzing Early Modern Theories of Odours

In this section, I briefly cover one of the more unpromising issues when trying to recover the early modern olfactory imagination: the conflicting philosophies of smell passed down from the Greco-Roman thinkers, which I read through the character of personification of smell, Olfactus, in a Jacobean comedy Lingua. The smells of the early modern body are hard to denote for many reasons: smell is ephemeral and difficult to identify and describe, and although the sense of smell is, of course, ubiquitous, it is dismissed at the same time, due to the problematic theories, philosophies, and controversies concerning smell from antiquity and into the present (Palmer 62-63).

Modern attitudes and philosophies of odor may be traced back to Kant’s flippant question at the end of the eighteenth-century: “Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most indispensible? The sense of smell” (§ 22).31

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31 The major anthropological, philosophical, and psychological studies pre-dating (and very much showing the needed correction of) Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant (1984) all discount smells as bestial and weakened in the modern, thinking ocularcentric man; 24 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Despite Kant’s trivialization of the sense of smell, there are philosophers who champion the importance of smell, even before Corbin’s groundbreaking history. Nietzsche, for example, swore, “My genius is in my nostrils” (132). The early modern philosophies of smell and sensation retain the sillage of earlier Greco-Roman works, such as Aristotle’s

De Anima and De Sensu, Theophrastus’ Concerning Odours, Lucretius’ De Rerum

Natura, and Galen’s On the Olfactory Organ.32 In these works, we learn of the usual number and traditional hierarchy of the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.33

There are discussions on exactly what an odour is and how we perceive and make sense of odours. There are debates on whether the nose or the brain is the true organ for the sense of smell. The sense is derided for being weaker in man than in other animals, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! associated with non-civilized or savage races (i.e. non-white, non-western, therefore lesser); or part of the sexual kinks of a few deviants. Darwin, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) both dismiss scorn smell as a primordial sense in pre-bipedal man that weakened as man stood upright and relied on his vision instead. Havelock Ellis fetishizes sexual odors in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1923). For a more thorough overview of the major philosophies of smell, see Annick LeGuerer’s. Scent: The Essential and Mysterious Powers of Smell (1994). 32 Sillage is a perfumery term for the ‘wake’ or “scented trail” of a lingering scent (Frolova p.pag.). 33 Sight is usually the highest ranking sense (although sometimes hearing takes precedence) and touch is almost always at the bottom, although the sense of touch is usually deemed the only sense man has better than most other animals. But there are exceptions to this hierarchy. There are also occasionally other theories and issues with the canonical five senses, such as all senses being reducible to touch according to Aristotle, or the inclusion of sixth (or even more) senses, such as common sense (the ability to make sense from the senses), synaesthesia, or speech, but I return to that last point in a later section on the language of smells. Susan Stewart offers an especially nice historicization of the sensorium (beginning with Marx’s assertion “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 141) (“Remembering the Senses” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 59-69)). 25 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! trigger for lust and gluttony, and is associated with bestial qualities. Yet, it is also the sense of truth and associated with divinity.

A brief reading of the character Olfactus helps situate these conflicting philosophies. Thomas Tomkis’ play Lingua: or, the Combat of the Tongue and the Five

Senses for Superiority (1607) was performed in Cambridge and Tomkis’ writing demonstrates in comic terms the current theories on the senses.34

In the course of Tomkis’ allegorical Jacobean comedy, each of the personified

Five Senses (prompted by the discordant Lingua, or Speech) must appear in front of a jury—consisting of Common-Sense and some of the inner five wits—in his attempt to win the crown and robe of the supreme sense. Olfactus (like all the senses) must describe where he resides in the body and how he benefits the body (Microcosm) and soul

(Psyche). In many of these early philosophical works, the nose is the conductor of air into the body but the brain is the true organ of the sense.35 Olfactus, in Thomas Tomkis’

Lingua, claims that this sense immediately acts upon and positively affects the brain:

Hence doe I likewise minister perfume

Unto the neighbor braine, perfumes of force

To clense your head, and make your fantasie

To refine wit, and sharpe intention,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 34 Carla Mazzio has written on the character Tactus (Touch) in this play in several of her essays, see for example: “The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England” (in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 85-105)). I have written about Olfactus’ olfactive props and the affects of incense in the Cambridge theatre in a short essay “A Perfumed Recipe on the Early Modern Stage (Part 1)” for The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Science, and Medicine. Web. Dec. 23, 2014). 35 I return to the theory of the brain, rather than the nose, as the true organ of smelling in a later section of this introduction. Briefly, the nose is only the conductor, but the smells enter directly into and immediately work upon the brain. 26 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And strengthen memory… (4.2).

Despite Olfactus’ declarations for his importance in rousing mental, creative, and spiritual acuities, his detractors state that they believe he will let the other senses fight to the death, as the middle (and middling) sense.36 Olfactus is mocked for his middling stance: “Olfactus politickly leanes to neither part, but stands twixt the camps as at receipt” (2.6). His detractors also mock Olfactus for the bestial nature of smelling, as well as the sinful luxury and deception of perfume scents. They argue that he will “feede his

Dogges, Hoggs, and Vultures upon the murdered carcasses” (2.6).37 The ennobled sense of smell is reduced to the stenches of death, and possessed by the lower order of beasts who hunt, root, and search for carrion purely by their noses.

When Olfactus presents his show to the assembled judges, he is accompanied by a group of seven boys all carrying sweetly scented items—two carry casting bottles, two more “with censors of incense,” and one boy each carrying flowers, herbs, and ointments; they are later joined by a personified Tobacco, as a representative of medicinal aromas.

Even with his perfumed entourage, however, Olfactus’ aromatic efforts are viewed suspiciously. His different scents fail to create a sweet ambience, but are accused of

“always jarring with their contraries, for none can weare Civet but they are suspected of a proper bad sent, where the proverb springs, he smelleth best, that doth of nothing smell”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 For the anatomist Helkiah Crooke, who refers to the above Greco-Roman philosophic and medical authorities, smell is the central sense due to both its placement on the face, above the mouth but below the eyes and ears (613), and (parroting Aristotle) that while sight and hearing “apprehend their objects by the interposition of an other” and “need a mean” (i.e. air), and taste and touch “worke by contaction” “performed without [a mean],” because “to smell perfectly, we hold our Noses close [to the odor source] (617, 664). 37 On the animal iconography of the senses, see Carl Nordenfalk’s “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art” (in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 48 (1985): 1-22). The above are all standard animal emblems of smell. 27 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(4.3).38 Sweet perfumes, in many Renaissance moralistic tracts and popular thought, are deceitful and potentially dangerous.

Odors, as Olfactus asserts, can refresh and sustain the body, mind, and spirit. That is the very paradox of the philosophy of early modern olfaction: it is both too bodily/beastly and it is also spiritual/divine. As John Davies notes in Microcosmos

(1605), there is a moral virtue or vice afforded to the senses, while his highest ranking vision is the most celestial and touch is too fleshy and vulgar, smell is a happy medium, engaging with both the spiritual and sensuous: “Smelling is light, and rightly more will grutch at unsweet savours, then in sweet will joye” (101). The sense of smell, Olfactus argues, is the most important sense as it “refines wit and sharpens invention/ And strengthens memory.” We can find a whiff of how perfumes provoke “memory,” like

Montaigne’s remembered mustachioed kisses of his youth or Ophelia’s “rosemary for remembrance” (4.5.173). 39

Richard Braithwaite’s 1620 Essaies Upon the Five Senses devotes his last essay to smell. Several of his major pronouncements on the worthiness of this sense begin with defending the sense of smell against its detractors, such as: “Some are of the opinion that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 38 This proverbial phrase is also used by Montaigne in his essay “On Smells,” in which he traces this back to Plautus’s The Apparition (“Mulier recti olet, ubi nihilo olet”), when Philematium, a music girl and mistress of Philolaches, the hero of this Roman new comedy, asks whether she should perfume herself and her bawdy maid Scapha states “By no means. A woman’s best smell is to smell of nothing” (1.3.156). Montaigne continues that only the old and undesirable wear perfume or cosmetics, and warns that “When once the sweat and perfumes mix, will stink/ Worse than the greasy compound, when a cook/ Pours all broth together. None can say/ Of what they smell, but only they smell ill” (1.3.159-162). The phrase was also adopted and used by Martial and Cicero (Warner 206). For more on civet, see my second chapter. 39 Smell psychologist Rachel Herz writes of modern day experiments linking smell and memory, or the aromatherapeutic effects of odors in The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (2007). Recent research has shown that sniffing rosemary can improve a person’s ability to remember an assigned task by 60-75%. 28 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this peculiar sence is an occasion of more danger to the body than benefit in that it receives crude and unwholesome vapours, foggie and corrupt exhalations, being subject to any infection” (585). Braithwaite concedes “it is true,” but tenders the positive attributes of smell, “But what especiall delights confers it for one of these inconveniences, cheering the whole bodie with the sweetest odours, giving libertie to the vitall powers…” (58). Braithwaite’s conclusions on the potency of odors are relatively standard in early modern tracks: smells can infect or cure the body, affect the smeller’s emotions (note here that sweet odors “cheer the whole body”), and influence the wellbeing of one’s soul: “As the Nose is the conduit by which wee receive breath so it should be the conduit by which we receive grace” (64). Montaigne, too, connects the sweet odours that affect his “animal spirits” (animus or pneuma) and a clear mind

(anima) dedicated to meditation. The use of liturgical incense, he realizes, from antiquity through his own Catholic mass, is “aimed at making us rejoice, exciting us and purifying us so as to render us more capable of contemplation” (354). Olfactus’ meditative and divine agency ultimately takes precedence over his sensuous or bestial attributes, and ultimately he is awarded the “chief priesthood of Microcosme, perpetually to offer incense in his Maiesties temple” (4.7).

The Immaterial Archive

In addition to the conflicting philosophies concerning early modern odors and the sense of smell, early modern perfumes and bodily odors are difficult to investigate in material studies. Holly Dugan proves in her cultural study of six key Renaissance perfumes that while some historical artifacts are “ephemeral,” “invisible,” and

(im)material this does not mean that they are culturally insignificant: “Many objects

29 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! were valuable in the Renaissance precisely because they were not meant to be seen; they were meant to be touched, tasted, heard, …or smelled” (7). The dual challenge and reward of her book, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early

Modern England (2011) is to find and define the ephemeral:

Early modern English scents are ephemeral in two key ways: as material objects

and as objects of historical investigation. Early modern smells, and any meaning

they once held, faded long ago. Likewise, their impact on cultural histories of

early modern England is almost non-existent. (3)

Incense, perfume, and other essential odorants are frustratingly difficult for the researcher of early modern literature and culture to define, represent, or catalogue. Scents oscillate between material and immaterial realms in ways that few other items do. On the one hand, we still have some material artifacts of some olfactive objects—thuribles, pomanders, and perfume bottles from this period—but on the other hand, because smell is so ephemeral, we don’t have many olfactory remains, such as the perfume or incense that would have once filled such containers. Kevin Curran and James Kearney, in their

“Introduction” to the “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” issue of Criticism (Summer

2012), remind us to historicize the phenomenological method, because “feeling and senses have a history. The way we feel sad is different from the way Shakespeare felt sad; the way we smell perfume is different from the way Queen Elizabeth smelled perfume” (354). Even if we had these perfumes, our modern noses have been trained to prefer light, clean, beachy scents (think Calvin Klein’s CK One) over the thick, heavy,

30 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! animalistic perfumes lauded during the Renaissance.40 Odors are often represented but are usually materially absent on the stage, serving figurative, poetic, or dramatic function but not associated with physical beings and objects on the stage.41 Scent, then as now, is connected with memory, passion, divinity, and other intangible and affective states of being, rather than as a simple material commodity. The editors of Aroma: The Cultural

History of Smell briefly offer several snippets of early modern “odes to odour”—by John

Donne, Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, William Shakespeare, Ben

Jonson, and Jonathan Swift—and announce:

These poems, better than any other historical data, show the hold smell had on the

contemporary imagination during this period. Rich and meaningful in popular

culture and backed by classical and theological tradition, olfactory imagery served

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 Barbara Herman, in her Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, is an unabashed lover of vintage perfumes—especially those “Difficult- Smelling Perfumes” (stinking of ‘civet, musk, rotten fruit, women’s underpants, dirty ashtrays, blood’)—and lamented the 1990’s turn toward “desexualized, clean scents” (which she also refers to as “water, water everywhere” (5, 9, 246, 209) but is optimistic about the current state of perfumery: “Whether by ‘queering’ perfume [État Libre d’Orange], creating scented that smell like things in the world [CB I Hate Perfume], emphasizing perfume’s decadent associations or imagining perfume’s function beyond the aesthetic—into the politically progressive—[various olfactive artists’ exhibits, new science] the following figures in the perfume world are nudging perfume in exciting direction” (232). 41 For representations of staged smells on the early modern stage, See Holly Crawford Pickett, “The Idolatrous Nose: Incense on the Early Modern Stage” in Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds. Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011; Holly Dugan, “Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 38:2 (Spring 2008); Colleen Kennedy’s “Performing and Perfuming on the Early Modern Stage: A Study of William Lower’s The Phaenix in Her Flames,” Early English Studies (4: 2011); and Jonathan Gil Harris’ Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 31 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

to evoke a whole range of emotions and ideas—from beauty and ugliness to moral

worth to God. (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 77)

The Smelling Statue and the Goddess of Scent

In both the later 18th century philosophical work of Condillac and in

Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis,” we can trace out how smell informed and reflected the early modern imagination. Both works create a thinking, desiring nose.

The French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac crafts a hypothetical statue and gives it only one sense—the sense of smell in his Treatise on the Sensations (1754).

He explains that he begins here, “Because of all the senses it is the one which appears to contribute least to the cognitions of the human mind” (Carr xxxi). The statue smells a rose, and cannot differentiate herself from the odor, until she becomes the smell of rose, herself. When the smell is gone, she realizes that she is separate from that odor of rose, that she has her own existence separate from the smell of rose. This separation causes first pain, and then longing; when the smell returns, she is filled with pleasure. Early on, she only exists in one of these two states—odorless/pain or odoriferous/pleasant—and each time it is the only moment of the world suspended in time, until from this longing she develops memory. If having only smelled rose before, the statue is exposed to a new odor, such as the flower pink (carnation), she can now compare these scents, which rapidly leads to her ability to discern and judge. When she first encounters the carnation smell, she is surprised, but then she can discern, judge, recall, and compare the different odors—formulating her first ideas. She remembers and imagines her favorite scents, infusing herself with imagination. And so on. Condillac concludes that from the sense of smell alone that over a period of time the statue is capable of “attending, remembering,

32 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! comparing, judging, discerning, imagining; forming desires, expressing passions, loves, hates, wills; that it is capable of hope, of fear, and of wonder” (Carr 45).42 F. Gonzalez-

Crussi, a professor of pathology and erstwhile medical memoirist, beautifully sums up how Condillac’s statue is even more poetic than philosophical:

The poets have never thought of a more beautiful apologue. [Condillac’s statue] is

so ethereal that it feels itself as a perfume of flowers for all eternity, and so airy

and insubstantial that—literally—it cannot conceive the idea of matter. Was there

ever a poet who thought of more delicate an image, or more romantic an allegory?

(74)

Condillac’s treatment of smell systematically imagines some of the theories already familiar to Renaissance writers and thinkers. Bacon’s concepts of disgust/dissmell is “comparing, judging, discerning”; Montaigne’s musings contain

“remembering, …imagining, desires, loves, hates, wills, fear, and wonder.” Below, I wish to end this introduction with Shakespeare’s eponymous goddess from his erotic poem

Venus and Adonis. In the poem, Venus desires the resistant young hunter Adonis, and attempts to seduce the youth in standard poetic conventions such as creating blazons and comparing the youth to a fragrant flower. This poem antedates Condillac’s smelling- thinking statue, and Venus’ olfactory poetics of tautological comparisons foregrounds the issues of the following chapters—the language of odors and the representation of odorous bodies.

Condillac’s statue, when exposed to the scent of rose and then the scent of pink, develops the ability to compare the flower’s odors, and when she is able to do this, she

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 He slowly adds the other senses (first focusing on a particular sense, such as hearing, and then combining smell and hearing), etc. 33 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! judges: “for when there is comparison there is judgment” (Carr 9). Shakespeare’s Venus reverses Condillac’s experiment that begins with only the sense of smell and slowly accumulates to the full human experience, but she uses the language of flowers, odours, and comparisons. While enjoying her lover’s body and creating a sensory blazon, she imagines stripping away her vision, then hearing, then touch, and realizes that even with only the sense of smell, she would have enough sense to enjoy her beloved:

Say that the sense of feeling were bereft me,

And that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch,

And nothing but the very smell were left me,

Yet would my love to thee be still as much;

For from the stillitory of thy face excelling

Come breath perfumed, that breedeth love by smelling. (Venus and Adonis (439-

444))43

In her very first words to the youth, she explicitly compares him to herself, “the field’s chief flower,” but finds him “thrice fairer” (7-8). When Adonis exhales into her face, she likens his moist breath to a “heavenly moisture, air of grace” and imagines “her cheeks were gardens full of flowers, /so they were bedewed with such distilling showers”

(64, 65-66). Venus is full of such comparisons: Adonis’ sweet breath can ward off the plague (510); she writes her own blazon (because the scorning youth will not) (140-145);

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43 Venus doesn’t quite reduce herself to the sense of smell, but then imagines tasting Adonis at a banquet, promptly faints, and then tries to overpower the youth when he attempts to awake her. The poem is full of synaesthetic and floral sensations. See also Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance (1992), in which she blends the philosophy of Condilliac’s statue (which remains genderless and unloved) with the Ovidian myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his creation, prays to Aphrodite for such a bride, and when he kisses his statue his own breath animates and warms the statue, until she awakens as a woman. 34 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! she compares the youth to a flower waiting to be plucked before it rots and dies (131-

132); she compares the stubborn Adonis to Narcissus, another Ovidian youth who was fated to become a flower (161-162); and in another self-blazon evoking The Song of

Songs, she compares herself to a hortus conclusus (229-240). Her frustrated attempts at seduction lead her to continuously invent ever more lovely and fragrant comparisons.

By the end of the poem, the youth is dead, gored to death by a hunted boar, and due to his white flesh, purple blood, and sweet aroma, his corpse is literally transformed into a flower, the anemone. “She bows her head the new-sprung flower to smell,/

Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath” (1171-1172). She mourns, weeps, and transforms the flower from lover to son, still continuing with her comparisons:

‘Poor flower,’ quoth she, ‘this was thy father’s guise—

Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire— (177-178).

In her initially olfactive fantasies, she reduces herself to all-inhaling and sensing nose and the youth to all airy fragrance, but by the end of the poem this fantasy has been realized, and she finds it all quite odious.

Organization

The dissertation moves in a relative chronological order, from the later

Elizabethan era (Chapters 1, 2, and 3), through the Jacobean era (Chapters 2 and 3), and considering Charles’ reign, the English Civil War and Commonwealth (Chapters 4 and

5), and ending with the Restoration (Chapter 5). Each chapter focuses on different fragrant bodies: Chapter 1: an overview of the different odorous bodies of Shakespeare’s characters; Chapter 2: the courtier, the prostitute, and the preacher; Chapter 3: the plaguey body: Chapter 4: the feminine body; and Chapter 5: the monarch’s body,

35 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! specifically, King Charles, and the Lord Protectorate, Oliver Cromwell. For many of these body types, there is a different odorant or aroma that defines the smell of the body discussed (Chapter 1 is the most broad; Chapter 2 is focused on civet; Chapter 3: the malodors of the plague and prophylactic pomanders; Chapter 4: feminine perfumes and domestic odors (especially ambergris and almonds); Chapter 5: incense and anointing oils). Each chapter ends with a particularly fragrant issue that is considered in further detail in the subsequent chapter.

My first chapter continues from Condillac’s statue and Venus’ endless comparisons. “Comparisons Are Odorous” approaches Dogberry’s famous malapropism from several different angles to analyze how comparisons are odorous/odious, as well as how odors are comparisons, too. I use his declaration to argue for a poetics of smell that is created from rich comparisons, whether similes, metaphors, or analogies. I then read

Duke Orsino’s opening passage “If music be the food of love…” from Twelfth Night through its historicized olfactory poetics that mingles all the senses together. From this affective language of smells and flowers, I turn to a consideration of poetry and the physical text. Both poems and books, I argue, are represented in a bouquet of fragrantly floral terms, both metaphorical and materially. I end by turning to two other considerations of the phrase “comparisons are odorous”: first, I question metanarratives of stench that create a false teleology that negatively compares a stinking, irrational, diseased past to a deodorized, reasonable, hygienic present; then, I conclude by offering a brief overview of some of Shakespeare’s salient “comparative encounters,” moments when one character comments on the personal aromas of another character.

36 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the second chapter, “The Paradox of English Civet in Shakespeare and Donne,”

I examine several “comparative olfactory encounters,” to create a socio-cultural history of civet, the ubiquitous and contested early modern perfume introduced to England during Henry VIII’s reign. Reading civet in terms of anthropologist Mary Douglas’

“dirt,” or “matter out of place” allows for an appraisal of the perfume as foreign luxury good, as well as debased and immoral “uncleanly flux of a cat”; in both instances perfume fails to create desirable odors and asserts Bill Brown’s “thingness,” the failure of the object. I examine several such “comparative olfactory encounters” to complicate the omnipresent stock character of the courtier. Moving from the general study of olfactive character types that concludes the previous chapter, this chapter uncovers the complexity of literary and cultural attitudes towards a particular early modern perfume. Civet is such a commonplace attribute of the London courtier that it has been taken for granted and glossed over in footnotes. This chapter turns to several canonical works to create a new appraisal of the perfume as foreign luxury good (as in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and As

You Like It), debased and immoral “uncleanly flux of a cat” (as in Donne’s “The

Comparison” and “The Perfume”), and yet exalted religious odor (in several of Donne’s sermons). This chapter focuses mostly on works from the late Elizabethan through later

Jacobean age reading broadly across drama (early Jacobean city comedies, Shakespeare’s plays), poetry (two of Donne’s elegies, several of Jonson’s epigrams, amongst other short satirical works) and sermons (Donne’s 1625 sermons, later Caroline sermons) alongside recipe books, bestiaries, and other non-fictive practical guides. This reading of one of the most common early modern perfumes forces us to reconsider how we approach early

37 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! modern culture, taking into consideration a variety of voices and sources, but especially considering the object in all of its affective and sensuous denotations.

Chapter Three, “The Nasal Ethics of Thomas Dekker’s Plague Writings,” imagines how early modern Londoners made sense of the plague. Here I begin in the situation that ends the previous chapter: as John Donne preaches to his plague-afflicted parishioners in 1625 in the first chapter, this chapter reads across the major plague years of 1603-1610 and 1625. Employing Salman Rushdie’s concept of “nasal ethics” to illuminate the ways early modern writers of plague pamphlets grappled with their own olfactive metaphors of disease, especially miasma theory, or the concept of polluted air as catalyst for disease, this chapter focuses on the works of the astutely “nose-wise” Thomas

Dekker. Dekker’s several plague pamphlets alternately utilize, reject, or subvert the vocabulary of odors shared by physicians, ministers, and politicians. While foul stenches and stagnant airs were considered the cause of plague, both scented pomanders and perfumed prayers were offered as correctives. This new formalist reading finds that

Dekker plays with content and form in his pamphlets to replicate and challenge the common social responses to the plague—to flee the polluted air or to contain the diseased bodies away from the shared general air of the public. Dekker offers his own poetic cures—the power of poetry and the redemptive value of seeing theatre together. The chapter ends by moving away from the metaphorical to the material, referring back to the concerns of the first chapter, by considering the olfactive properties of the book as either diseased object or potential panacea.

My Fourth Chapter, “Olfactory Erotics of Robert Herrick’s Poetry” continues from the material aspects of the text that concluded the previous chapter by considering

38 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the afterlife of Herrick’s book as domestic wrapping paper for spices. I read his

Hesperides through his own olfactory erotics and nasal poetics. Herrick’s status as a

Royalist poet, writing covertly on issues of the Civil War from his rural exile is well- studied. This Herrick is nostalgic for a pastoral vision of an idealized Caroline England, and scholars read his works as politically coded, as the poet asserts his masculinity in both his liberal adoption of Classical modes and genres from the great political Roman poets and his subjugating male gaze. But, to create such an argument, critics cherry-pick poems that explicitly refer to King Charles, Laudian high church practices, or other scenes of religio-political tension, ignoring the hundreds of poems written about fragrant flowers, aromatic nymphs, incensed altars, sweet-smelling households, and other olfacto- feminine objects of desire. If there were a poet laureate of smell it could only be awarded to Robert Herrick, but the male sniff is much more fluid and unstable than the male gaze.

Therefore, I offer a feminist and queer reading of Herrick’s overarching and olfactive organizational mode based on his own title—Hesperides—to consider the influences of early modern gardening manuals, and other domestic guides, such as recipe books.

Ultimately, this argument still casts Herrick in the same light as the many New Historicist readings, as an anxious author in a time of political and religious crisis, but reclaims some of the lesser and more feminine poems to create such an argument.

The Fifth Chapter, “Smelling Sanctity in the Later Renaissance: The Aromas of

Gods and Kings,” offers a brief olfactive history of representations of holy scents during the Caroline and Commonwealth periods. I show how the use of incense became a highly charged issue in arguments about ecclesiastical ritual and the identity of the Church of

England. As an ambiguous aroma, both Biblical and pagan, foreign and familiar, exotic

39 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and homely, ancient and contemporary, incense and its implications permeate works from

Milton’s Paradise Lost to William Lower’s neglected Caroline tragedy, The Phaenix in

Her Flames. I follow whiffs of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, and the Rump Parliament

(with its endless scatological puns). In my analysis of these and other religio-political works I uncover the importance of the martyred Charles I as an aromatic saint. More unexpectedly, I determine destabilizing adoption of a shared lexicon of smells by both major factions, and that similar terms were used to describe Cromwell. The chapter ends with a consideration of Milton’s incense as redemptive and instructive aroma.

My brief “Conclusion” reiterates the importance of attending to early modern smells, offering a close reading of one particularly fragrant sonnet.

40 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 1: Comparisons Are Odorous

The title of this dissertation is borrowed from Shakespeare’s constable Dogberry who claims, “comparisons are odorous” (3.5.14). While he distinctly means “odious,” this malapropism is key for several of the major arguments of my dissertation as will be outlined below. John William Severin Gouley explains that that phrase works doubly: first, of a “purely satiric meaning” to highlight Dogberry’s ineptitude, but secondly, the phrase “is figurative as well as satiric; comparisons being odious are odorous, that is to say they are in bad odor” (131). Willis Goth Reigier, in his study of the various forms, uses, and abuses of quotations, categorizes “Dogberry’s fragrant phrase” as

“simultaneously a quotation twist, a character quotation, a mangled quotation from memory, and a malapropism” (44). That is, Dogberry’s turn of phrase is not just a simple slip of the tongue by a simple-minded character, but rather a rhetorically complex set of ideas from the mind of a great writer.

Comparisons may be odorous as Dogberry claims, but odours are usually described in terms of comparisons, too. First, from the most basic categories of foul or fragrant to complicated metaphysical conceits, odors are represented as or through various types of comparisons. On the most basic level, we hedonically relegate almost all discernible odors into categories of good or bad based on cultural or personal preferences.

Our richest vocabulary for odours is created through the comparative poetics of smell, outlining the ways that odors are signified through similes, metaphors, and analogies.

These olfactive comparisons extend to the writing and reading processes, and I pluck out 41 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the most common floral and aromatic metaphors used to describe reading, writing, and thinking in the early modern period. Much of the overall arc of my dissertation is to challenge the notions of the simple binaries of foul and fragrant; instead, the piquant metaphors of smell drift through each chapter.

In the chapter’s closing section “Shakespeare’s Comparative Encounters,” there is an overview of evaluative moments when one character comments on another’s aroma. In the Introduction, we have already smelled out the olfactive disguises of both Edgar and the wooer for the Jailer’s Daughter. In such instances, characters can smell out one another and make judgments based on comparing that person’s aroma with the smell of others’ bodies. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are in their “imagination all compact” according to Duke Theseus (5.1.9), but Edgar’s madman and the Jailer’s Daughter’s wooer (and his olfactive double Palamon) are distinctive olfactive actors.

Odors allow for comparisons, and some of these are indeed odious. Regier traces the early modern genealogy of the phrase “comparisons are odious” (and its variants), finding that in several of these instances, the odious comparison was between women.44

In the next chapter, I consider Donne’s aptly named “The Comparison” which ends with the line: “She and comparisons are odious.” His elegy “The Indifferent” also creates an odious comparison, in which he will woo any woman: “I can love her, and her, and you, and you, / I can love any, so she be not true” (8-9). Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, like his Much Ado counterpart, also comically confuses odious and odorous in his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 He cites examples from Heywood, Lyly, and Burton, noting that for the last that Burton makes comparisons throughout Anatomy of Melancholy, but reserves the odious label “as if it were just this kind of comparison that were hateful” (44). Marjorie Garber notes that even though the literary comparisons “in their more elegant guises as similes, metaphors, and conceits were, indeed, such stuff as poetry was made on,” by the end of the sixteenth century, the Petrarchan catalogue of beauty was considered dull and loathsome (174). 42 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! blazon: “Thisby, the savours of odious flowers sweet” (3.1.70).45 In this example, we again have a failed comparison as the beautiful Thisby (played by the not-at-all-beautiful

Francis Flute, a bellows-maker) is olfactively compared to flowers, flowers that smell both “odious” and “sweet.”46 Bottom’s mangling of Pyramus’ seductive verse simultaneously replicates and undermines the conventions of Petrarchan verse.

Comparisons are also odious, in a very different sense, when the hygienic practices and cosmetic rituals of the past are assessed by our own deodorized and antiseptic preferences.

Reclaiming the “Mute Sense”

Italo Calvino, in his short story “The Name, the Nose” envisions an anaesthetic, deodorized future:

Epigraphs in an undecipherable language, half their letters rubbed away by

the sand-laden wind: this is what you will be, O parfumeries, for the noseless man

of the future. You will still open your doors to us, your carpets will still muffle

our footsteps, you will receive us in your jewel-box space, with no jutting corners,

the walls of lacquered wood, and shopgirls or patronnes, colorful and soft as

artificial flowers, will let their plump arms, wielding atomizers, graze us, or the

hem of their skirts, as they stand tip-toe on stools, reaching upwards. But the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 Marjorie Garber points out that Bottom and Dogberry were both originated for Shakespeare’s famous early clown William Kemp, and she argues that by the repeated insults of Dogberry as an ass and Bottom’s transformation, “we might imagine that spectators would make this connection” (389). While we cannot expect audience members to necessarily to recall such a slip as substituting odious for odorous, this just further cements the meta-reference, and must have been an enjoyable inside joke amongst the company. 46 Hermia, Helena, Titania, and Hippolyta would have all been played by boys, but in this particular play, only the masculine body of Bellows is seen and described as such before he adopts the costuming of Thisby. 43 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

phials, the ampules, the jars with their spire-like or cut-glass stoppers will weave

in vain from shelf to shelf their network of harmonies, assonances, dissonances,

counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas: our deaf nostrils will no longer catch the

notes of their scale. We will not distinguish musk from verbena: amber and

mignonette, bergamot and bitter-almond will remain mute, sealed in the calm

slumber of their bottles. When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many

words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless,

inarticulate, illegible. (Calvino 67-68)

When it comes to the representations of odors, all we have are the words—even if the language of olfaction often sometimes seems deficient: “Absent word and sealed jar; living language and unstoppered jug” (Serres 210). While the corporeal and sensual turns in anthropological and especially literary studies are often read as a turn from philological concerns, both the affective and phenomenological attempt to reconcile the body and mind. Therefore, some critical works also reconcile the somatic (body) and semantic (mind) even as other works underscore the pre-semantic or the inability for words to represent bodily experience and embodied knowledge.

Juliet famously asks her love, upon learning that he has the surname of her familial foes, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (2.2.43-44). Juliet is not holding a flower as she states this line, but every audience member realizes that the “essence” or quiddity of a rose is its fragrance and not its arbitrary name.47 The modern French philosopher Michel Serres would wish to know

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 “Essence” refers (now obsolete, but in usage during the early modern period) to “fragrant essence; a perfume, scent” ("essence, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015.) 44 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not only what variety and color of rose, but if it were from Verona or some other locale, blooming in June or September, etc. as “the scent of roses never stops changing” (190).

“We could not know how to inhale or smell the idea of the scent of the concept of rose.…

The name of the rose has no fragrance” (190).48 For Serres, empiricism and phenomenology cannot be properly expressed through language.49 For early modern thinkers, however, language is often one of the additional senses.50 Therefore, language does not need to be read purely as the destruction of our sensuous experiences but can be read in communion with the early modern sensorium. Language, Shakespeare, eloquently asserts in his many sonnets is the only way to preserve the ephemeral.

Jeffrey Masten, in his sensate and affective genealogy of the term “sweet” as used in homoerotic and homosocial verse, calls for early modern scholars to think through language to recover meaning:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48 While Serres is dismantling Condillac’s theory of the sensing statue—imbued with only the sense of smell, the statue learns pleasure and pain, consciousness, memory, judgment, and desire—he may as well be challenging one of Shakespeare’s most famous similes. 49 He argues that our “first tongue” (language) silences our two other and more important tongues: the “second tongue” (taste and smell) and the “third tongue” (love) (Serres 152- 157). This division between the speaking and tasting tongues, however, is almost mirroring the very same Cartesian divide that he wishes to demolish. This is in direct contrast to Merleau-Ponty, who argues that we must make meaning of our perceptions, and writing or speaking allows us to express our thoughts and give them embodied form. 50 It is a foreign concept to modern sensibilities to include speech as one of the senses, but C.M. Woolgar posits that we must historicize senses according to earlier works: “To our notions, speech is immediately different giving out information, rather than receiving it, but we must set aside that preconception: in medieval terms, too, other senses could act in this way” (11). He points out that speech was often a sixth sense or combined with “taste” as “the mouth” (12). Mathew Milner writes on the sense of speech as the voicing of the soul (30). Carla Mazzio also covers the tongue as sensory organ, both importer/receptor (taste) and exporter (speech), and especially in her reading of Tomkis’ play Lingua in “Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England” (see my previous chapter for a reading of the sense of smell, Olfactus, in this same play). 45 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can a smell, or a taste, be remembered, evoked, brought back to life from

memory? Scientific opinion is divided on this question. Can the history of a

taste’s or a smell’s accumulated meanings or associations be reconstituted in the

present? An aspect of my argument in this essay is that in our study of the erotic

and affective past, we have not sufficiently attended to etymology—the history of

words (the history in words).51 I do not mean that we need to occupy ourselves

with the pursuit of “word origins” or of etymology for its own sake, but rather to

be more carefully attuned to the ways that etymologies, shorn of their associations

with “origin,” persist in a word and its surrounding discourse as a diachronic

record of practice in the midst of language as a synchronic system. (Masten 374)

Part of this project is to attempt is to reconstruct such etymologies, to recover Calvino’s

“precious lexicon” and to make sure that our scholarship on early modern literature is not

“speechless, inarticulate, illegible” when it comes to the olfactive imagination (Calvino

68). In other words, the “name of the rose” and the “scent of the rose” (whether it is

Condillac’s or Juliet’s rose) are not as distanced when read analogously through the historical phenomenological lens.52 The sociologists Dennis D. Waskul and Phillip

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51 In the 2015 SAA seminar New Histories of Embodiment, director Gail Kern Paster began by stating that etymologies provide us a necessary type of history of embodiment, that change in usage of words overtime is important for our discipline, and she pointedly asked: Why aren’t we doing more etymologies? 52 Serres interweaves common sense with touch/feeling in his first chapter “Veils.” Speech is often a sixth sense, or when we have common sense as the sixth, speech can add to the number, (complicated, of course, by the internal wits). For example, see Thomas Tomkis’ allegorical Jacobean comedy, Lingua: or, the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (1607), Carla Mazzio’s work on language and speech in early modern literature (The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and C.M. Woolgar’s chapter devoted to speech as a sense in The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 46 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vannini claim that every time we inhale, like Condillac’s statue, we make evaluations, even if it is only to find the odor foul and turn away in disgust, or to declare the scent as sweet and lean in for another whiff. This “somatic work” or “the diverse range of reflexive symbolic, iconic, and indexical sense-making experiences and practical activities” becomes so much more poignant when we think through the complexities of the early modern “olfactory alphabet” (Waskul and Vannini 54, Calvino 68).53 That is, the phenomenological and philological work in tandem when we carefuelly consider the imaginative and literary processes of the past.

English, alas, seems to lack a smell-vocabulary. The modern “natural historian”

Diane Ackerman laments, “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation” (6). Some other cultures, such as Jahai speakers of Malay Peninsula, do indeed have abstract words, such as “p÷ih” (to have a bloody, meatlike smell) or “cNe s”

(to have a stinging smell like bat droppings or petrol), in their sophisticated olfactive language, suggesting that the possible vocabularies for scent is culturally and not biologically constructed (Majid and Burenhult 269). In contrast to the ways we can describe visual perceptions, sounds, even tastes, we cannot articulate our perceptions of smell. The ways we often describe odors, as explained below (on a somewhat sliding scale of abstraction), consists of simple identification, hedonic binaries, terms employed from other senses, and then more complex literary techniques such as metaphors.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53 “Poignant” is one of those sensate terms that now often refers to a state of mind as stimulated or bitter-sweet, but has tactile and gustative roots (sharp, pointed, prickly, biting, stinging, jagged, (in figurative use) wounding, cruel, piercing, penetrating, harsh, sharp tasting” (etymology) ("poignant, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 April 2015.) 47 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Most simply, smells are usually dichotomized on a simple hedonic good/bad dichotomy, established when Aristotle claimed: “For man smells badly and perceives none of the smell-objects except the painful and pleasant ones, as his organ is not accurate” (180). Alain Corbin, creates a fascinating and complex microhistory of

France’s efforts to control stench and promote public hygiene through institutionalized deodorization, yet the English translation of his title The Foul and the Fragrant (1986) creates a false binary of odors.54 The original French title Le Miasme et la Jonquille

(1982) better captures the elusive essence of scents as diseased air and the daffodil (the literal English translation) as it hints at foul and fragrant but is more subtle and elusive, like an odor itself. Writing on the depictions of Enlightenment English odors, Clare Brant writes on these binaries: “Plato thought there were only two kinds, good and bad, an idea reinforced by Corbin’s categories of foul and fragrant, made the more powerful, I think, by their echoing of Lévi‐Strauss’s binary of the raw and the cooked.55 You know where you are with binaries” (Brant 446).56

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 54 “Generally, the term fragrant can be divided into two subgroups—the smell related to nature and the smell related to people. Identical to all of them is that fragrant never occurs negatively connoted” (Salzinger 75). 55 For Lévi-Strauss, however, there is not the binary but rather “the culinary triangle”: the raw, the cooked, and the rotten. There is a dichotomy, still; food is consumed in one of two states: unaltered (raw) or altered either by nature (rotting) or by culture (cooking), and from there Lévi-Strauss constructs a whole hierarchy of meat preparations (boiled v. roasted). While not the focus of his argument, we can imagine the differences in smell, taste, texture. Likewise, although Plato (in Timaeus) created the pleasant and unpleasant binaries of smell, his pupil Aristotle creates a more refined taxonomy in De Anima: sweet, acrid, bitter, sharp, and greasy, borrowing from the taste vocabulary (II. 9, 421b). Aristotle’s own successor, Theophrastus, further complicates and enhances the ideas of smells—considering the mixture of scents to create a mingled new odor; the mutability of odors, for example, the stronger odors of an animal in rut, the blooming phase of flowers and garlic (even when cut), the disintegration of perfumes, and so on—dismissing those who create binaries (“Concerning Odours” 64-69). Theophrastus does not create a 48 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is another type of binary, the separation of “the sacred and the profane” odors, with which this dissertation contends.57 As scholars from Durkheim to Mary

Douglas have argued, sacred does not always correlate to ‘good’ (or in our osmology,

‘fragrant’) and profane does not necessarily mean ‘foul’ or ‘evil.’ I argue that these binaries are reductive and manifestly proven false when we really spend time reading how early modern writers experience, delight in, reject, ponder over, and describe smells.

In the instance of liturgical incense, the smell was revered by Catholics, such as

Montaigne, but its history and reception is decidedly more complex in the English

Reformation and Counterreformation movements. During the reign of Charles I, there was a decided faction within the Anglican Church concerning the reincorporation of highly sensuous rituals. Charles I and his Archbishop Laud supported these beautification projects while ascetic Puritans found some of these ceremonies and niceties to be too idolatrous. Part of the Ceremonialists’ re-beautification of the church involved the reintroduction of “smells and bells,” sensual rituals that were previously deemed as pagan-cum-Catholic theatrics.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! taxonomy at all, because of the variability of odors, but we can see how quickly, even among a few generations of the ancient philosophers, the philosophies of the sense of smell develops. 56 In another non-Western example of extended smell semantics, in Maniq, a language spoken by nomadic hunter–gatherers in southern Thailand, smells do fall roughly into the “pleasant” or “dangerous” category, but they have over a dozen categories for smell, that are neither synæsthetic nor odor-source naming (Wnuk and Majid 127). 57 The dichotomy of sacred and profane does not align with good and evil, but is a more complex notion of religious ritual outlined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). I consider it more often from the viewpoints as expressed in the collections of The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature (edited by Mary A. Papazian, 2008) and Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature (edited by Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and Alasdair MacDonald, 1996). 49 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Because of our inadequate lexicon, when odors are described in terms beyond foul or fragrant, most odors (sensate or mental representations) are identified simply as the odorant (the entity in the world), and they are named as such (Dubois and Rouby 49).

For example, violet will smell of violet. The artist Clara Ursitti, who employs scent in her installation art pieces, argues that she does so because scent evades language but triggers emotional responses. She explains,

There are no words for the sensations we smell. Only metaphors and crude

dichotomies. If I were to give you a red ball, we would both probably say it was a

red ball. If I were to give you a scent, we would probably not agree on what it

was, and if we did, we could not find a word for it. We would say it smells like

orange or coffee. (7)

Another way to think of this odor-source naming is metonymically, as soaps, candies, cosmetics, perfumes, linens, and anything scented with orange-like odorants also smell of orange, reduced or distilled to the most recognizable odorant. Many of the terms we do coin to describe odors is just an adjectival noun-form of the odor source: orangey, woody, fruity, musky, mossy, etc. (Lawless and Cain 336).

The semantics of smells may have slowly dissolved over time as Holly Dugan argues, “early modern English had a precise language of olfaction” (Ephemeral 4).58

Dugan gives an extensive list of evocative and archaic terms (objects “smeeked,”

“endulced,” and “civited” and smell-objects were described as “napche,” “marechal,” etc.) (Ephemeral 5). Many verbs in English, whether from the 13th c. “sneve” (“to smell

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 58 Although earlier than this study, C. M. Woolgar provides a nice overview of the sensory lexicon in the principle languages of medieval England: Anglo-Norman French, Latin, and Middle English (5-7). 50 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! at”) to the mid-twentieth century neologism “snog” (“engagement in light, amorous play, esp. kissing and cuddling”), also have a shared sn- phonestheme, a part of a word that carries a connotation based on its shared sound rather than etymological connections

(Cuskley and Kirby 879).59 Snaffle, snarl, snarfle, sneer, sneeze, snicker, snigger, sniff, sniffle, snift, sniggle, snirt, snite, snivel, snoach, snoke, snope, snoot, snooze, snore, snort, snuffle, snurl, snuzzle, etc. are all medieval and early modern verbs relating to the nose and/or snobbishness, including inhaling air, breathing loudly or through blocked nasal passages, wiping the nose, emitting mucus, etc. Daniel McDonald notices “For whatever reason, there is also a strong association between sn- and the upper-respiratory tract”

(n.pag.). The “whatever reason” is embodied and onomatopoeic. Onomatopoeically, the initial consonant blends of sn- (and to a lesser extent, sm-) engages both the hiss of an inhalation on the “s” and as the air is blocked from leaving the mouth on the “n” when the tongue touches the upper palate, the air is pushed through the nose. The sn- phonestheme with its implication of snobbishness recalls the “dissmell” reaction discussed in the previous chapter: upon smelling an offending odor, the head pulls away and the nose moves up into the fresh air.60 To wit, when we say “smell” or “sniff,” we make a sound very similar to pronounce the words as when we perform the action. These

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 J. R. Firth first wrote on phonesthemes in 1930, revising and expanding his theory until his death in 1960. (See “sneve ("† sneve, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015.) and “snog” ("snogging, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015.) 60 Dissmell (and disgust), as affects, are closely related to shame and contempt: see Tomkins and Demos (162-165). William Ian Miller also provides two chapters on “disgust’s close cousin, contempt,” which he defines as “the emotional complex that articulates and maintains hierarchy, status, rank, and respectability” or more simply, “the claim to relative superiority” (206, 217, 214). Miller also touches on the similar facial gestures of disgust and contempt (218-220). 51 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! verbs may not have a smell but they force the speaker to inhale as though we were smelling, and by extension could make the speaker smell a nearby odoriferous object.

C.J. Woolgar notes that late medieval English writers borrow descriptive aromatic terms from other senses, notably taste, “for example, sweet, bitter, or acrid” (117).61 For example, the aforementioned violet is commonly described as “sweet.”62 The senses of smell and taste are so intertwined that it is not surprising that their vocabularies are shared.63 Woolgar suggests the synaesthetic connotations of many Middle English words

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 61 In her rather priggish and pedantic shaming of college students’ “dogberrian vices,” Carol Hovious points out the “basis of the ‘malapropism’ is an auditory or visual confusion of words: ‘odious’ and ‘odorous’ both look and sound somewhat alike” (161). Although it is not her aim here, Hovious nicely shows the synæsthetics of sensory formation and representations. 62 I used the keyword search feature on EEBO (within the year range of 1595-1623), and after excluding references to the color violet (usually in description of clothing, ecclesiastical, royal, and historical), I looked quickly at how violet was described in the first ten pages of hits. The etymology of “sweet” and its varied definitions demonstrate that this particular term registers as pleasant across the sensorium (excepting possibly touch): “Sweet,” “Sweet” (OED), adj. 1a. “Pleasing to the sense of taste; having a pleasant taste or flavour; spec. having the characteristic flavour (ordinarily pleasant when not in excess) of sugar, honey, and many ripe fruits, which corresponds to one of the primary sensations of taste. Also said of the taste or flavour. Often opposed to bitter or sour (so also in fig.senses)”; 2a. “Pleasing to the sense of smell; having a pleasant smell or odour; fragrant. Also said of the smell or odour”; 4a. “Pleasing to the ear; having or giving a pleasant sound; musical, melodious, harmonious: said of a sound, a voice, an instrument, a singer or performer on an instrument”; 5a. “Pleasing (in general); yielding pleasure or enjoyment; agreeable, delightful, charming a. to the mind or feelings” and 5b. “ (a) to the senses; esp. to the sight = Lovely, of charming appearance.” Also, see Jeffrey Masten’s essay “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship.” 63 As noted earlier, there is more scholarly works on the gustative sense (which still usually pulls in descriptions of the tempting aromas of lavish feasts) and many early modern sources link the two senses as complementary and interdependent (for example, Crooke 613-617). The sense of taste is a combination of multiple senses—taste (taste buds discerning different flavors—sour, sweet, bitter, salty, (and the inclusion of the non- Western umami or savory), touch (food texture or mouth feel, as Floyer realizes), and smell. While our sense of taste is rather dependent on our sense of smell (Gilbert 90-110) we do not consume many of the objects we find most fragrant and pleasant—flowers, 52 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! still used today; for example, that “savor” and “flavor” (as well as the obsolete “smak” and “smacchen”) could refer to tastes as well as smells (6). Helkiah Crooke offers several types of odors (or “sapours”) using a mostly synæsthetic classification: sweet (saffron, honey), sharpe (thyme), sour, acute, and fat, although he frustratingly does not offer examples of the last three (617). Constance Classen points out that while tactile or gustatory terms can often to be applied to odors (pungent, bitter, sour, sharp, sweet, etc.), visual and auditory terms do not lend themselves easily to smells. Classen convincingly argues that smell is “curious in that it is so resistant to cross-sensory application. Basic olfactory terms such as ‘stinking’ and ‘aromatic’ simply cannot be applied to any other sensory experience” (Worlds 54).

John Floyer’s bizarre Pharmako-Basanos, or the Touchstone of Medicines:

Discovering the Vertues of Vegetables, Minerals, and Animals by Their Tastes and Smells

(1687) creates a comprehensive taxonomy of the tastes and smells of most plants native to England.64 A decided empiricist, Floyer spent four years traveling the British Isles, tasting and smelling different plants found growing in his country. His descriptions of taste are very thorough, realizing that taste is actually engaging three senses: taste, touch, and smell. Because of that, Floyer’s olfactory vocabulary is often synaesthetic, beginning

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! perfumes, each other. William Miller also notes that while ‘disgust’ is etymologically based in the sense of taste, “smell gets there long before” and prevents us from eating the rancid, foul, or poisonous based on our natural aversion to certain odorants (“Darwin’s Disgust” 343), except for culturally accepted or revered foods that smell malodorous (cheeses, cabbage, fish, etc.). 64 Floyer insisted that one should never trust physicians who “cause their patients to swallow what they dare not taste themselves,” and so he catalogued anything he could get close enough to sniff or eat, including several known poisonous plants. Floyer was not just some crackpot; he was a physician who was an early proponent for regular bathing, he discovered how to measure a pulse, and was one of the first to properly diagnose and understand emphysema. 53 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with the “cool” and “hot” properties we associate with Galenic humoral theory. Cool plants smell earthy (51); temperate smells are pleasant, “being mellow-sweet” (52); and hot smells could be either agreeable—“terebinthinates” (turpentine), “aromaticks,” or

“fragrant smells”—based on the oil qualities—or offensive—“quick pungent smells,” fetid smells, rank (“like garlic”), “rancid oily smells,” narcotic smells, and nauseous smells (52-55).65 Floyer’s osmology, while beginning with the humoral categories of

“hot, moderate, or cool” smells which correspond to the equally Galenic dry or wet tastes expands into undoubtedly more complex categories.

In Calvino’s epigraph given earlier, he writes poetically of the “deaf nostrils”66 unable to enjoy the synaesthesia of smells and sounds: harmonies, assonances, dissonances, counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas. This blurring of the olfactive and auditory, this synesthetic attempt to capture the essence of perfumery in the more developed vernacular of music, was proposed by perfumer George William Septimus

Piesse (1857) who claims that “there is an octave of odours like an octave in music” (25) and that the proper arrangement of “bouquets” or “nosegays” “produce an agreeable and characteristic odour—an effect upon the smelling nerve similar to that which music or the mixture of harmonious sounds produces upon the nerve of hearing, that of pleasure”

(Piesse 204). Michel Roudnitska, a legacy perfumer and co-founder of Art et Parfum

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 65 Seventy years after Floyer (1752), the Enlightenment’s great taxonomist, Carl Linnaeus introduced a framework of seven odour categories also based on flora: aromatic (carnations), sweet-scented (lilies, jasmine), ambrosial (musk, civet), garlic-like (garlic, asafetida), goat-like (orchid), putrid (tagetes (marigolds), dill), and nauseous (stapelia flowers (carrion flowers)) (Curtius 62-63). 66 Michel Serres also points out our vocabulary for those lacking other senses—blind, deaf, mute, “even insensitive to describe the loss of sensitivity. But there is no word to describe the loss of taste… Technical discourse only speaks of anosmia, and even more rarely of ageusia” (193). 54 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! writes that “a perfume, like a piece of music, can be composed on paper without the help of any other sensorial references than those to be found in the mind or memory, the senses being used only afterwards as the means of checking up” (qtd. In Holley 23). It is easier to utilize terms and ideas from the richer and more familiar musical vernacular— octaves; top, middle, and base notes of perfume; composing a perfume; chords—than to employ the unfamiliar, vague, simplistic, or arcane olfactive terms. In an analysis later in this chapter of Orsino’s famous opening lines in Twelfth Night, I read through

Shakespeare’s earlier auditory-olfactory connection.

Our language for odors is greatly expanded when we include various literary techniques, such as similes, metaphors, analogies, and conceits. Woolgar writes that we most often rely on analogy to describe odors: “things ‘smell of something,’ such as roses or decay” (117). Holly Dugan stresses the importance of reading these literary techniques thoughtfully:

Metaphors can function as a historical archive of sensation. This is not to say

metaphors should be interpreted literally or that they render themselves

meaningful only through shared cultural histories. Rather, they reveal how

individuals react to cultural and physical events. (5)

This merges the metonymic (a rose petal does smell of rose), the simile (something else, for example, a blushing bride, smells like a rose), and, because of the myriad connotations of rose—associated with Christian and pagan religious rites, virginity, youth, beauty, purity, fertility, love, desire, etc.—broadens and complicates the metaphorical (a rosy, sweet, blushing bride) as the socio-cultural, historical, and personal

55 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! associations of the smell of rose eclipse the literal smell as referent.67 A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, indeed!

Memoirist Alyssa Harad explains that despite her doctorate in literature, she needed to learn a whole new language when she began her foray into perfume blogging.

Beyond metaphors, similes, and terms borrowed from the other senses, “we all have a private internal vocabulary of smell, a collection of memories that we can conjure up at will” (24). Describing an odour is always an exercise in both phenomenology and philology, as socio-historical (i.e. ethnic, religious, gendered, etc.) customs combine with our “internal vocabularies” and the more familiar ways of speaking about odors to produce meaning from the immaterial. Avery Gilbert speaks of the two distinct “voices” available to modern perfume makers: “Ingredient Voice” (the actual list of and proportions of ingredients) and “Imagery Voice” (“atmospherics, the drama of seduction, passion, and mystery”) (15). Serres fears that the “language of perfumes is vanishing, chased away by the specializations of algorithms; the chemistry of perfumes aligns calculations and molecules” (211). That is, he laments the lexicon of ingredient voice; it is in imagery voice, however, that the poetic emerges.68 Gilbert borrows from the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 See Constance Classen’s pivotal chapter “The Odour of the Rose: Floral Symbolism and the Olfactory Decline of the West” for an extended reading of the olfactory meanings of rose from antiquity to modern times in the Western world. Holly Dugan, in her second chapter “Casting Selves: Rosewater, Casting Bottles, Court” begins with a well-known premise—the iconography of the Tudor rose—but she creates a new reading of this most familiar symbol by considering the olfactive rather than visual aspects. Dugan recreates the rich bouquet of competing accords of the scent of roses for Henry VIII, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth I, creating a novel yet well-studied recreation of Henry’s rosewater scented court as the king appropriates the Catholic associations of rose fragrances for his own political, religious, and sexual self-fashioning. 68 Serres, of course, is writing after the exquisitely delicate trifles of Herrick’s perfumed lyrics and before the beautiful prose of contemporary perfume blogs (which, I contend is the most enthralling non-fiction prose on the web). For example, see Bois de Jasmine, 56 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lexicons of literary genre (drama, mystery, and romance, via “passion”) to describe the affect of smelling perfumes. Imagery voice consists of those literary techniques—simile, metaphor, analogy, etc.—that we employ when we discuss or write about odors. If odors are represented metaphorically, Dogberry beautifully describes how our olfactive vocabulary operates as he aptly captures “imagery voice”; truly describing a smell always calls for analogous and affective responses through a series of ever more elaborate comparisons.

Clare Brant argues that there is a particular poetics of smell, “one that looks to metaphor to diffuse beyond its limited and unstable lexicon, and metaphor may focus or widen or filter the world of smell” and more specifically, she uses the Romantic theory of the sublime, with its focus on escaping from and returning to the body in an aesthetic transcendental state, incapable of full articulation (546, 548). This is what happens to poor Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his synesthetic description of his dream, and this sublime transcendence becomes apparent in how each chapter of the dissertation considers the sacred alongside the profane associations of different bodily effluvia.69

Kristeva, likewise, explains that the sublime is the overwhelming of all perceptions and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Scent Notes, Perfume-Smellin’ Things, Now Smell This, and The Scented Salamander; Gilbert argues that perfume blogs add yet another third type of voice (or rather a clamber of voices). Chandler Burr’s The Emperor of Scent (2004), Barbara Herman’s Scent and Subversion (2013), and especially Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’ indispensible Perfumes A-Z Guide (2009) are some of the best books written on perfume that capture the sublime beauty of imagery voice. I discuss Herrick’s poetry in my fourth chapter. 69 “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” (4.1.204- 207). Also, see Jennifer Waldron’s “‘The Eye of Man Hath Not Heard’: Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology” in Criticism 54.3 (Summer 2012): 403-417. 57 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sensations, a moving beyond rational thought into “bottomless memory” together, creating a “cluster of meaning,” a “secondary universe of “delight and loss”:

Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime

is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both

here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible

bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination. (Kristeva 12)

Even Michel Serres, who challenges language’s ability to begin to capture the transcendence of everyday joys composes continuously and stunningly in such comparisons and metaphors. He writes in and of the (olfactive/gustative) sublime in a description of a bottle of 1947 Yquem as the world is contained within a sip until

“invaded by this cloud, our body learns or achieves transubstantiation into spirit” (182).70

Simply put, Serres loves language and may state that the sensuous transcends the word— but he gives us such an aromatic poetics of smell even as he denounces his own weak first tongue. In the overwhelming of the senses, the terror, the threat of death associated with the sublime, we also find the early modern poetics of smell, in which even the most beautiful and seductive of scents may be deadly.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 70 When describing the different layered bouquets in his beloved 1947 Yqeum and the smellscape of its aromatic region, he may begin with the top (vegetable) notes we recognize “here are spring flowers, dog rose or lilies, peaches, pears, apples” (157) but then he as he descends into the middle (animal and mineral) notes, his own prose ascends at once both into the abstract and yet the more concrete and tangible at the same instance “here are truffles in their in the greyish humus, … animal fragrances, musk or amber, damp fur or the scent of copulation” (157). The bottom notes or “third bouquet” are more “difficult” and so he turns to imagery voice: “[the third bouquet is] like pizzicati heard beneath and orchestral storm, like cross-hatching through floral-print fabric… now here is disequilibrium, the outer edge of expanse, or ocellated tail, its instability or catastrophe” (emphasis added, 157). We do not fault Serres for turning to his first tongue, but we drink in and share in the joy of his “variegated lists” (Connor 5) as he compiles, taxonomizes, discerns, judges, and compares the sensations given to his second tongue. 58 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Marshall McLuhan argues that language itself is metaphorical in the “sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode to another. …But the principle of exchange and translation, or metaphor, is in our rational power to translate all of our senses into one another. This we do every instant of our lives” (5, emphasis added). Diane

Ackerman devotes her final chapter “Synaesthesia” of A Natural History of the Senses to the synaesthetic writings of major writers. The book cover designer Peter Mendelsund, in his wonderfully bizarre What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology with

Illustrations (2014), argues that readers cannot smell an odour that they have read about, but that they “smell the idea of a smell” (338). He asks a neuroscientist friend, who concurs that this is an “intellectual” rather than “visceral experience” (340). Yet recently, neuroscience has found that there may be a direct correlation between reading about and experiencing strong odors (Murphy Paul n. pag.).71 In another study on the bidirectionality of smell metaphors, exposing participants to a fishy odour caused suspicion, but inducing suspicions in participants also allowed them to better identify fishy odorants (rather than neutral odorants) when compared to their non-suspicious peers

(Lee and Schwarz). While I do not want to spend too much time on contemporary theories linking olfactive and linguistic processes, the cognitive science validates for those who may otherwise find synaesthetic metaphors just the flights of fancy of the poetic mind in a neurological basis.

“Upon a Bank of Violets”: a close reading of an olfactive passage

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Murphy Paul offers this example: “Words like ‘lavender,’ ‘cinnamon,’ and ‘soap,’ for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.” 59 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The poetics of smell is extremely rich and piquant, and an extended analysis of a well-known literary passage demonstrates the complexity of representing early modern odors. Turning to Duke Orsino’s famous opening lines of Twelfth Night, we can follow the waft of violet as it transcends from a pleasurable or “sweet” odor to a complex bank of meaning, when we perform the necessary and historicized “somatic work.”72 Since the dominant metaphor here connects (metaphoric) gustatory and auditory (literally, as he is listening to music as the play commences) pleasures and excesses with lovesickness, it is easy to forget to stop and smell the bank of violets embedded in this speech. This synaesthetic moment elides the gustative, auditory, and olfactive into the dual emotions of love and melancholy.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall.

O, it came so o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more.

‘Tis not so sweet as it was before. (1.1.1-8)

Violet is both a particularly problematic odorant and yet a perfectly emblematic figure for the metaphoric and memorable qualities of a scent, and ultimately a paragon of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 Holly Dugan’s article “Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Early Modern England” highlights the olfactory references to desire and disease, especially as they pertain to Olivia as Orsino’s love object. She reads Orsino’s “confusing, synaesthetic metaphor” as both his particularly “narcissistic experience of love” as “only painful longing and loss” but also more largely that desire is “both capricious and contagious” (242). 60 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! imaginative faculty. The sense of smell has been proven to be closely associated with both memory and emotions due to their intertwined connections in the limbic system

(Herz 3, 13-15). This is complicated by violet’s chemical compound and its effect on the sense of smell. Violet produces a particularly sweet and beloved aroma, due to ionones, a chemical compound found in floral ketones, but one that is also more fleeting and ephemeral than other floral odors as it causes a sensory overload and temporary anosmia.73 The discovery of violet’s anosmic chemical properties were not properly understood until the late nineteenth century, yet, I argue that the affective and physiological (melancholic), mnemonic (its associations with temporality and impermanence), and synesthetic affects (violet as music) were all very real experiences for early modern writers, such as Shakespeare, who attempt to distil and capture the essence of violet in distinctly beautiful terms.

Much of the language in Orsino’s lines that applies to music or love is equally applicable to the sensation of smelling violets. There is “excess” and “surfeiting,” used in

King John’s “perfuming the violet” as “wasteful and ridiculous excess” (4.2.12, 15).74

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 It was not until 1903 that Gustav Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm Haarmann and Karl Ludwig Reimer (noted early producers of artificial vanillin) separated the isomers of methyl ionone in order to synthetically reproduce violet odor without the high costs of producing the perfume naturally (Turin 63). Ionone stimulates our olfactive receptors, then binds to them, in such a way to temporarily anaesthetize the receptors causing transitory anosmia. After a few minutes, the soporific properties wear off and the smell of violets reasserts itself again (Inglis-Arkell n.pag.). 74 The aesthetic implications of an odor (or taste or touch) is a touchy (pun intended) subject for some philosophers; for Kant and Hegel, smell cannot be an aesthetic sense (Le Guerer 174-178). Francis J. Coleman argues that these sensual pleasures may be aesthetic pleasures. One of his proofs exists in observing someone enjoying either music or a fragrance, and noting their similarities: “We shall find much the same quiet and receptive resignedness, the same sweet tranquility of expression” (324). He uses this phenomenological intuiting of someone else’s enjoyment to reflect that it is difficult to discern which are intellectual versus sensuous enjoyments, and that some music or art is 61 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The hedonistic excess of a pleasurable sensation leading to aversion, this “surfeiting,” recalls Laertes’ warning of Hamlet’s fickle love as the scent of violet “sweet, not lasting, the perfumes and suppliance of a minute; no more” (1.3.7-10). The violet “stealing and giving odour” educes the “sweet thief” of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 99,” and the anaesthetic effects of ionone.75 Diane Ackerman describes this effect:

Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower

continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it. Wait a minute

or two, and its smell will blare again. Then it will fade again, and so on. … (9-10)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! visceral or sensuous while the lower senses may be aesthetic senses under certain conditions. See also Mâdâlina Diaconu’s essay “Rebellion of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Phenomenological Aesthetics of Touch, Smell, and Taste” (in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Ed. Cheung, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribane, and Hans Rainer Sepp. 2003). 75 In “Sonnet 99,” Shakespeare’s reworking of Henry Constable’s “Sonnet 17” from his sonnet sequence Diana (1592), the Poet also describes the sweet scent of the violet. Unlike Constable’s work where the lady inspires the flowers to mimic her vertues, the Youth in Shakespeare’s sonnet is so lovely that the flowers have stolen his attributes in order to resemble him. The Poet begins by speaking directly to the violet, the first flower of spring, and “chide[s]” the “sweet thief.” The violet has stolen its sweet scent from the Youth’s breath: “The forward violet thus did I chide: Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love's breath?” (“Sonnet 99” 1-3) Recalling the many amorous youths turned into flora in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (and of course, Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”), what is more interesting in this instance is again the assertion that the violet is the most sweetly scented of flowers—so much so that there seems something artificial, excessive, or violent about the odor. Like Laertes’ depiction of the hot and lusty Hamlet, the violet is not, in our modern parlance a shrinking violet, but rather “forward”—“presumptuous, pert; bold, immodest”; “ardent, eager, spirited, zealous”; or at the very least, “ready, prompt, eager (in an action or a cause) to (do something).” 62 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The “dying fall” of the sad tune is like the melancholy aspects of the violet, evoking impermanence, ephemerality, transience, and death.76 Ophelia, in her nadir of madness, associates the violet with mourning and faithfulness: “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died” (4.5.179-180). Laertes, at Ophelia’s grave, again thinks of the flower of mourning and commemoration:

Lay her i’ th’ earth;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring! (5.1.221-223).

These emblematic depictions of the violet as the flower of loss and remembrance are commonplace (Kerr 45-47).

Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Gardens,” links pleasurable odors and sounds:

“And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air” (198). His language blends terms that apply to both senses: air, breath, sweet. While he does not explicitly state violet in this multi-sensorial quotation, this is the same passage where he lists the most fragrant of flowers and claims “that which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet” (198).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 76 For example, perfume blogger Normand Cardella, in his review of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris, a modern (1983) perfume with a “bi-polar” combination of rose and violet, muses on the smell of violet: “So… what does a violet note smell like? Well… it’s powdery, a little sweet and decidedly sad. Musically, a violet note in perfume would be a minor chord” (Cardella n. pag.). Cardella’s metaphoric language is tactile (powdery), gustatory /olfactory /auditory /visually /affective (a little sweet), and emotive (decidedly sad). He lingers a little longer on the auditory/olfactory analogy. The “sad” scent of violet is like the “sad” minor chord. 63 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even Orsino’s command to stop the music and that it no longer gives the same pleasure is like the anesthetic properties of ionone. As Orsino complains though, the scent, the song, the sensations, and so on is “not so sweet as it was before.” This “sublime transcendence” (Brant) or this “cluster of meaning,” a “secondary universe of “delight and loss” (Kristeva), or the “disequilibrium, the outer edge of expanse, or ocellated tail, its instability or catastrophe” (Serres 157) is what Orsino calls for here—a cyclical examination of each pleasurable sense to the point of excess and satiety. Shakespeare inverses the usual ordering of smell as metaphor, and instead creates an analogy with another sense (hearing) and another object (music) likened to smelling violets. That is, there is a sweet air in this passage that is both musical and fragrant.77 A rhetorical syllogism is created that ends in petitio principia: Desiring is equated with listening to music is likened to eating too much is likened to smelling violets (which must be likened to something else, as we have seen previously, often listening to a sad and sweet song).

The violet, then, does smell sweetly and pleasurable, but for early modern writers, it also transcends simple hedonics, and becomes a sad (affective) and musical

(synaesthetic or multisensate) aroma. If the brain is acutely affected by odors, and the violet emits a particularly sweet and sad aroma, a fragrance evoking ephemerality, death and rebirth, an especially virtuous scent that revives the spirit and restores health, and a perfume that recalls forlorn music, then with all this in mind, the botanist and herbalist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 77 This blurring of the olfactive and auditory, this synesthetic attempt to capture the essence of perfumery in the more developed vernacular of music, was proposed by perfumer George William Septimus Piesse (1857) who claims that “there is an octave of odours like an octave in music” (25) and that the proper arrangement of “bouquets” or “nosegays” “produce an agreeable and characteristic odour—an effect upon the smelling never similar to that which music or the mixture of harmonious sounds produces upon the nerve of hearing, that of pleasure” (Piesse 204).

64 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

John Gerard’s regard for the violet’s olfactive and affective properties should not be surprising:

[Violets] haue a great prerogative aboue others, not onely because the minde

conceiveth a certaine pleasure and recreation by smelling and handling of those

most odoriferous flours, but also for that very many by these Violets receive

ornament and comely grace …And the recreation of the minde which is taken

hereby, cannot be but very good and honest: for they admonish and stir up a man

to that which is comely and honest… do bring to a liberall and gentle manly

minde, the remembrance of honestie, comelinesse, and all kindes of vertues.

(Chapter 312: “Of Violets” 849-850)

Gerard nicely summarizes the memorable, virtuous, affective, symbolic, and olfactive properties of the violet that we have been sniffing out in Orsino’s inaugural speech.

The Smell of Books

Smelling the early modern bank of violets allows modern readers to begin to understand how the meanings of early modern scents were created through language.

And the language of odors and sweet flowers informed the vocabulary of writing, reading, and books as well. For Bruce Smith, it is not just the content of the poem, but the surrounding context in which the poem is read and the immediate materials which ultimately causes the “state of ambient swoon… between the body and the world-at- large” (131).78 I would argue that similar somatic and sensual appropriations and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 Bruce Smith, in Phenomenal Shakespeare, recreates for modern readers the physical and sensate experience of the early modern reader. For Smith, the difference in size between a quarto which could comfortably be held by the reader in both hands, an octavo, small enough to be held by one hand as an easel, or the larger folio, which needs to be laid upon a table to be read, affects the experience of reading. This physicality of 65 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! influences happen between the olfactive world and the literary object. The smell of books is an important and sensuous appreciation of the text as object or thing, part of the corporeality of the book. Before we delve into intricate plots or fascinating characters, we begin with the physical object.

Marshall McLuhan creates another sort of sensory hierarchy; in his analysis, the ratios of the senses change by the addition of technological advancements, which extend the senses, acting as a sort of prosthesis. In pre-literate societies, there was a “tyranny of the ear” (28), but with the invention of the alphabet and manuscript culture, there was a balance and interplay of all the senses (and emotions, too): “the manuscript world puts empathy and participation on all the senses” (28). Yet, “it was not until the experience of mass production of exactly uniform and repeatable type, that the fission of the senses occurred, and the visual dimension broke away from the other senses” (54). In

McLuhan’s narrative the “cool visual detachment” of print culture displaces the synæsthesia of manuscript culture, but in the Renaissance, manuscript culture, especially in the coterie of “sweet” handwritten verses existed alongside print.79 Katherine Craik and Tonya Pollard, in their introduction to Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing

Literature in Early Modern England call for a considertation of the full sensorium in analyzing early modern readers’ reception: “Reading and playgoing were not only visual and auditory experiences, as we might expect, but also tactile, gustatory, and even

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the book, in Smith’s example, of the different editions of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and the surrounding Tudor environment, complete with Venus & Adonis inspired wall hangings, bed coverings, storage boxes, playing cards, etc. all work together to affect the way the readers read this poem. 79 For example, see: Julia Boffey’s “From Manuscript to Print: Continuity and Change” (in Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476-1558) and David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (2005). 66 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sometimes olfactory” (8).80 They continue: “Poetry could be tasted, ingested, touched, and held as well as seen and heard, so that the intellectual processes involved in absorbing words becomes inseparable from ‘sensual encounters with material forms’”

(Kraik and Pollard 16-17). Poetry, of course, could also be smelled, if not always literally, at least metaphorically.

“Poesy” was the common term used for the art of writing poetry, as in the titles of

Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy (c. 1580), George Puttenham’s The Art of

English Poesy (1589), Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesy

(1602), etc. In these works, which offer the genealogy of poetry, defenses of the forms, lyrical contents, and social contexts of poetry (with criticisms of lesser poets and scurrilous works), and instructions on how to create poems according to meter, rhyme, content, etc., the language of gardening and flowers flourish. The modern critic R.W.

Maslen maintains that there are two conflicting metaphors in Sidney’s work, both that

“the poet is master of infinite space, vaulting from earth to heaven… evading the physical and historical constraints that govern other disciplines…” and Sidney as “a kind of second Adam, tending an imaginative earthly garden to rival Eden” (44).81 The sweet airs

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 80 The collection of essays, which is split into three sections—“sensations aroused in the playhouse” (affective), “sensations evoked in the playhouse” (sensate), and “sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems” (literary representations)—is more concerned with the physical and sensate manifestations of affect (for example, Allison Hobgood’s “Feeling Fear in Macbeth”), but still focuses more on touch, hearing, taste, and common sense or the interior senses than on smell in these spaces (“Table of Contents”). In the “Index,” “smell” only warrants two mentions. 81 Maslen offers a biographical explanation for Sidney’s recurring gardening metaphors: Sidney’s practical interest in gardening is attested by his correspondence with the eminent French botanist Charles de l’Ecluse, whom he met in Vienna; and horticultural metaphors abound alongside metaphors of flight thought the Apology: from the garden of Apollo, which the philosopher Plato raids for the poetic ‘flowers’ that decorate his 67 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of a perfume link together these two contrasting metaphors, as the scents of the earthly garden are the only (im)material essences to vault heavenward.

The metaphorical garden of verse filled with sweet poetry and the literal flowers with all their fragrant charms are etymologically and poetically linked. “Poesy” can also be defined as “a bunch of flowers, a nosegay,” and its variant form “posy” likewise has both poetic (“fig. A collection of pleasant poetry or rhetoric”) and floral connotations (“a small bunch of flowers, freq. for holding in the hand or wearing as an ornament; a nosegay or small bouquet. Also fig.”).82 The titles of many poetry collections play with a floral pun on “posies” (as both flower and poem), such as: Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet

Nosegay or Pleasant Posy (1573); Nicholas Breton’s A smale handfull of fragrant flowers: selected and gathered out of the lovely garden of sacred scripture, fit for any

Honorable or Worshipfull Gentlewoman to smell unto (1575); Humphrey Gifford’s A posie of gilloflowers eche differing from other in colour and odour, yet all sweete (1580);

Samuel Clarke’s the Saints Nosegay, Or, A Posie of 741 Spirituall Flowers both Fragrant and Fruitfull, Pleasant and Profitable (1642); and the anonymous Fasciculus florum, or,

A nosegay of flowers (1636); and the titles of several works by George Gascoigne:

Hundredth Sundry Flowers (1573), The posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1577), and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! philosophical dialogues, to the garden of the poet’s golden world adorned with ‘pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers’… (Maslen 44). 82 A “poet,” Sir Philip Sidney, informs us derives from “poiein, which is ‘to make,’ wherein… we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him a ‘maker,’” creating a haptic sense of the poet as a type of mechanic, sculptor, etc. (8). Poesy can also refer to the poem materialized (possibly punning on both the original meaning of “to make” as well as the emblematic definition found for “posy”) from a short epigram or motto usually carved onto a ring. (See “poesy, n.” (OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015) and “posy, n.” In the example of Juliet’s quote, and more tellingly woven throughout Shakespeare’s Sonnets, we learn that the quiddity of a rose was not in its visual beauty, but rather in its essence, its sweet scent. (OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015.)) 68 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Whole Workes of George Gascoigne Esquire: newlye compyled into one volume, that is to say: his Flowres, hearbes, weedes, the fruites of warres… (1587).83

Most of these works are “anthologies,” or “a collection of the flowers of verse, i.e. small choice poems, esp. epigrams, by various authors; originally applied to the Greek collection so called.”84 Many of these titles explicitly state the “sweet,” “pleasant,” and

“fragrant” “odours” of the posies gathered together. Heather Dubrow contends that these collected posies (especially when grouped as lyrical “airs) “exemplify the paradoxes lyric so often involves: carried to ward off the plague, posies of flowers were hence both an index of and antidote to illness” (38). Leah Knight also argues the titles of these works as having implied aromatherapeutic benefits. She suggests that in the authors’ instructions to their readers to “smell it well,” these poets taught their readers that “there were then not just good and bad smells to contend with in early modern England, but good and bad smellers—as with good reads and good readers” (59).

Paul A. Winckler sensualizes the twentieth-century novelty of seeing one’s own work in print and the joy of the perfumes of the physical text, and fantasizes that the same experiences would have been just as sensually gratifying for early modern published authors:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 83 Gascoigne’s full title extends the floral conceit: A hundreth sundrie flowres bounde vp in one small poesie Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish gardins of Euripides, Ouid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by inuention, out of our owne fruitefull orchardes in Englande: yelding sundrie svveete sauours of tragical, comical, and morall discourses. Heather Dubrow relates these titular references to gardening and bouquets as distilling the “evanesce of beauty, while the carpe florem tradition also hints at connections between poetry and the rhetorics of seduction” (37). In the fourth chapter, I return to the floral titles of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides as a garden of verse and as the guiding organizational principle for his collection. 84 “anthology, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 January 2015. 69 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is impossible to believe that the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries did not feel sensuous pleasure at the sight of their work in print, as their

twentieth-century successors do. …The authors of an earlier day would, it is true,

have titivated their nose with vellum and leather, odours which nowadays can

only be savoured among the aromatic shelves of a great library where the gold

and calf exude incense, even if it is only saddle-soap and insecticide. (Winkler

17)85

The metaphorical aromas of posies, anthologies, and nosegays and the authentic leather smells of bound books fetishized by Winckler contrast with the stenches of bad and sophistic writing, poor publishing standards, and the pungent materiality of the text.

Writing should be elegant, relaxed, and graceful; otherwise, it becomes “insipid.”86

Discerning readers might notice that verse that is too practiced and rigid “smells of the candle, lamp, oil, etc.”87 Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Mind (1601) devotes a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 85 Winkler further rhapsodizes on the aromas of modern works: The smell of the paper, the ink and the glue have not (thank heavens) been distilled and bottled in Paris or New York and one can still discriminate between the scent of a woman and the perfume of a new book: yet the ensuing sensations can be of the same invading wholeness. (17) Winkler, writing in the 1970s, could not anticipate the many paper and book-scented perfumes now popular: Demeter Paperback; Commodity Goods Book for Men, Paper for Men, and Paper for Women; Byredo M/Mink Eau de Parfum; CB I Hate Perfume In The Library; Tokyo Milk Paper & Cotton 17 Perfume; Paper Passion perfume by Geza Schoen and Gerhard Steidl; Biblioteca de Babel by Fueguia; etc. Many of these perfumes are quite recent, and I wonder how many are fetishizing the smell of books as an old- fashioned luxury in the age of electronic readers. 86 “insipid, adj. and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 April 2015. See definition 3. “Devoid of taste, intelligence, or judgement; stupid, foolish, dull” and 1a. “Without taste, tasteless; also, having only a very slight taste; without perceptible flavour or flavour sufficient to gratify the palate.” 87 “smell, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 March 2015.See definition 9 c. “Of literary work, in the phrases to smell of the candle, lamp, oil, etc., to show signs of being laboured and artificial.” 70 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! chapter to how different types of speech, such as the speech patterns of the taciturn or overly talkative man, betray the passions, and when he discusses “affectations in speech” he claims

Some have a peculiar manner of parley, they speake in print, hunt after

metaphors, coyne phrases, and labour extremely that their words may smell of

subtilitie, elegancy and neat delivery, in such affected sort, that for the most part

they leave nothing behind them, but a scent of foolish affectation & verball pride.

(111)88

He returns to this metaphor several times, even as he contradicts himself when he argues that metaphors stink: “To use many Metaphors, Poeticall phrases in prose, or ink-pot tearmes, smelleth of affectation and argueth a proud childish wit” (141). Ben Jonson fears that by ignoring his creative principles and writing for the patronage of a “worthless lord” that his artistic worth has been compromised (LXV “To My Muse” 2). After firing his

Muse, he embraces poverty and hopes to “write/ Things manly, and not smelling parasite” (13-14).89 Sidney defends poets (and the ancient philosophers who extolled poetry), and contrasts those heads he wishes to “engarland” with sweet laurel with the

“ill-savoured breath of wrong-speakers” who denounce poetry (41).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 88 Wright further adds that “their words smell of presumption and arrogance” (112). Later, he may employ a mixed metaphor as the permanence of the ink as it leaves the vial and is written onto the page, distils and preserves the authors’ thoughts as though it were perfume: “Yet would I have men not to blab out their conceits without meditation, or good digestions, because, if in actions it concerneth greatly a means demeanour, to effectuate them with deliberation and ripenesse; so, much more in writing, which no man hasteth, being distilled drop by drop from the pen, and of it selfe permanent, not as words communicative to some few preset auditors, but blazed to the world, and sent to all posteritie” (142). 89 In his closing couplet, however, he recants and wishes to be paid: this epigram is couched between his two poems of praise for Earl of Salisbury and Sir Henry Cary. 71 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bad publishing practices tainted even the best of texts. David Scott Kastan, writing of the often negative reputation of Elizabethan stationer John Danter, who published early so-called “bad” quartos of Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, warns contemporary critics not to anachronistically judge Danter’s output. Kastan challenges D.

Allen Carroll’s 1991 malodorous characterization of the stationer: “‘The odor which attaches itself to the name of Danter may not be the fetid scent of fraudulence or incompetence but only the homely smell of workmanlike activity” (Kastan 36).90 Carroll writes metaphorically of the bad odor of Danter’s imperfect publications; Kastan writes literally of the smells of the printing house. Aldus Manutius, the sixteenth century printer famous for both his innovations (printing in Italics) and his preservations (early printings of Classical texts), felt scandalized by piratical reprints of his eminent Aldine series.91 He grumbled: “These fraudulent volumes, printed and sold under my name prejudice friends of letters to my sorrow and discredit. The paper is inferior, and even has a foul odor; the type characters are defective, and the consonants do not align with the vowels” (cited in

Orcutt 251).

Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass in the seminal essay, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” asks us to consider the permeable and ink-stained paper as a site of “labor practices and metamorphoses”:

In Shakespeare’s time paper owed its existence to the rag-pickers who

collected the cloth (itself the residue of sheets and clothes) from which it was

made. In the sheets of a book, bedsheets began a new life, after the rags had been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 90 Kastan playfully inserts several such olfactive judgments in his essay, such as when he complains of the “sensitive olfactory organs of the new bibliographers” (36). 91 These pirated texts even lifted his colophon of the anchor and dolphin; Doubleday Books retains a version of this colophon today. 72 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

turned into ‘stuff’ and then into paper by vatmen, couchers, and layers. And it was

commonplace for Elizabethan authors to anticipate another use when the pages of

the book were returned to serviceable paper—paper to wrap groceries or to light

tobacco. (280)

Shakespeare’s immortal words are no longer disembodied and floating in a pure æther, but are considered as a series of material events, practices, and products. Early modern paper then is always, no matter at the point in its lifecycle, an object imbued with olfactory meaning and memory. From the nutty smell of the flax plant, to the linen clothing perfumed or sweat soaked, to the pulpy pages soaking in the greying vat waters, to the musky incense of the book bound in leather or the ignominious afterlives of the discarded book to “wrap groceries or to light tobacco” (or even worse, to wipe an arse), the life cycle of early modern paper can be defined by its form, use/misuse, and smell at every stage.92

The printing house ink included several strong but not unpleasant odoriferous ingredients: turpentine (an anise piney odor), linseed oil (strong, olive-oil like smell that becomes fishy when it goes rancid) (Bloy 6-7), rosin (made from pine resin, and retaining a slight pine odor) (14), and lampblack (created from burnt fat, oil, tar, or resin) (18, 42-

47), traditionally boiled with bread and onions (which absorbs some of the oil grease, but must have added the familiar odors of lunch, too) (13).93 The grinding of the ingredients in a muller was hard work (51); the boiling was hot, dangerous, and took a long time (48-

49), so the printers must have been soaked in their own sweat, while they drank their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 92 The previous olfactory lives (as bedsheets and funereal linens) and afterlives (as grocery wrappings for spices) of paper are integral to my arguments in chapters 3 and 4. 93 Bloy notes that on the ink-making days, special linseed soaked rolls were baked and eaten (8). 73 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! small beer. The ink balls used to spread ink across the press, made of sheepskins, stuffed with wool, and attached to wooden handles, were dismantled and cleaned nightly: “the pelts were softened by currying them and soaking them in urine; the smell is said to have been revolting” (Gaskell 126).94 Altogether, Bloy claims that “such practices, along with other equally noxious substances, combined to make an early printing house a most unhealthy and stinking place in which to work” (51). The rancid odors of animal skins and fats, the charred odors of burnt materials, the pong of human urine, the piney aomas of plant materials, and the gustative aromas of foodstuffs, were all blended together in the printing house, muddling the separate odors of subject/object and producer/product.

The physical text is the figurative container for the wisdom of the author, and as such, the metaphors of body and soul are common. Recalling that “essence” refers to both the fragrance and very nature of a thing, the olfactory language helps to define the book as (im)material (in)substantial object. Ben Ehrenreich, writing on the supposed demise of physical books in favor of eBooks, states: “Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as well be human” (para. 1). Ehrenreich is decidedly dualist: the book as object

(body) and the book as words (soul) are two separate entities. Yet, for John Milton, the monist, the book is body and soul, corporeal and spiritual/intellectual, and therefore indivisible. This also explains how the two represent the book as body. If Ehrenreich’s books appear like an elderly and feeble man, Milton’s books are man at his zenith, filled with vitality and energy: “Books are not dead things, but do contain a potency of life in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 94 Also, see de Grazia and Stallybrass 281-282. 74 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them” (720). In

Areopagitica, Milton turns to the metaphor of distillation (either perfumery or alchemy) to describe received knowledge as a type of extraction, refinement, and concentration.

Books become a ‘vial’ of ‘potent’ perfume, all ‘extraction,’ ‘preservation,’ distillation, the very essence of the author’s soul.

The Nose-Wise Renaissance

The intricate poetics of smells, the multifaceted lexicon of odors, extended conceits, never-ending comparisons, and the shared fragrant vocabulary of books, bodies, and botany show that early modern thinkers are truly homo sapien sapien, both “wise, wise man” but also “savouring, savouring man.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online’s

Historical Thesaurus records a slew of compound terms that entered the lexicon during the 15th through 17th centuries for those with a keen sense of smell such as sharp-nosed

(1561), quick-nosed (1561), well-nosed (1568), high-nosed (1548), well-scented (1579), and quick-scented (1590). These adjectives, as noted in the OED’s historical quotations could be applied literally to describe the acute olfactory sense of hunting hounds and figuratively to describe people who are attuned to their environments, who can pick up on social cues, or who can dig deeper than superficial appearances. These polysemous terms link intellectual acuity and olfactive perceptibility. The late Elizabethan term nose-wise

(used by Thomas Nashe and John Taylor the Water-Poet, amongst others), which meant

“conceited, esp. with regard to one's intelligence; (also) quick-witted” as well as the

“having a keen sense of smell” indicates how very important the sense of smell was in the

English Renaissance, and how much it figured as an intellectual sense.

75 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The term sagacious, now commonly used to mean “intellectually shrewd” did not acquire that meaning until the latter part of the 1600’s; previously it referred to an “acute sense of perception, especially smell.” Sapient, too, once meant “having a taste or savour” in addition to our concept of “having wisdom.” Woolgar notes that for late

Medieval writers, the Latin sentir (“to sense”) “could also be employed for ‘to think,’ ‘to taste,’ or ‘to smell’ (scentir was a variant form”) (Woolgar 6). According to generally accepted Galenic medical theory, the true organ of smell was not the nose but rather the brain itself (Palmer 62).95 Condillac knew that when his statue could smell the difference between rose and carnation, discerning, distinguishing, judging, and choosing her preference, moving into a world of imagination. Unlike the other senses and their respective organs, “in smell alone the brain was the primary organ of perception” (Palmer

62). Quite simply, before Cartesian dualism, to think (to read, to write) was to sense, to smell.96

The early modern (and yes, maybe even our contemporary) language of smells is rich and redolent. Even the binaries of foul and fragrant hint at personal and cultural responses, while the more esoteric comparisons and abstract literary techniques more fully capture the experiences, memories, desires, and disgusts associated with certain odors. Language may be the stoppering of the bottle of wine, but it is also the distillation and preservation of the essence of smells and tastes that would be otherwise lost. In

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 95 Danielle Nagler points out the many references in dramatic works in which characters claim that they can “smell out the plot” devised by the antagonist (43). 96 Imagining our primordial beginnings as some sort of primeval sea creature, Lyall Watson, writing on the mysterious “nose-brain” otherwise know an Jacobson’s Organ (after its discoverer), claims that “smell was our first sense. It is even possible that being able to smell was the stimulus that took a primitive fish and turned a small lump of olfactory tissue on its nerve cord into a brain. We think because we smelled” (12). 76 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Sonnet 5,” Shakespeare tells the youth to marry and procreate to preserve himself as though his very essence were being distilled and bottled as a perfume. Yet, it’s not the youth, or his memory that is retained ultimately, but the beauty of verse and its ability to evoke and transcend the sensuous:

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. (5. 13-14).97

Shakespeare’s “Comparative Encounters”

Possibly the most difficult task for the early modern scholar working on odors and their literary representations is not combing through sources to create an olfactive archive of immaterial artifacts, understanding confusing philosophies of the early modern sensorium, or recovering the early modern lexicon of odors, but rather overcoming the transhistorical comparison between our contemporary deodorized bodies and a scholarly metanarrative of stench. In such instances, comparisons are indeed odious. Recently, the feminist newsblog Jezebel posted a short article by Dodai Stewart entitled “Tudor

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 97 Richard Halpern offers a queer reading that argues that this distillation is really a type of a poetics of sublimation of same-sex desire and sexual practices into an early aesthetics of the sublime. Sodomy and sublimity are linked together as the process of alchemical transformation. Jeffrey Masten attempts to re-historicize Halpern’s reading of sodomy as art, by attending to etymologies of “distillation,” “sublimation” (finding the two at odds, the first as a dripping down and the latter as a moving upward), and “sweet” (with its multisensate meanings), to consider the circulation of sonnets between aristocratic men as a type of procreation in and of itself. Wendy Wall complicates both readings by arguing that the distillation (at least for the perfumes) we have in this poem is historically women’s work, and so she reinserts the female/motherly body. In a post- dissertation paper, I hope to restore the olfactory and sensuous aspects (of writing and sharing poetry, of sex, of the process of distillation) into a reading of this sonnet. I am still working out my own response to Halpern. Despite his references to other early modern perfume poems, such as Donne’s “The Comparison,” I think he oversimplifies early modern olfactory aesthetics and creates an almost anesthetic reading. I am more in agreement with both Masten’s consideration of the language of the sonnets and the homoerotic setting of the coterie and Wall’s consideration of distillation and sublimation as praxis and the historical setting of the kitchen. 77 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fashion: Pretty, But Best Not to Think About the Stench.” The article highlighted a portraiture exhibit of 16th and 17th century nobles In Fine Style: the Art of Tudor and

Stuart Fashion at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (2013). The article cites at length noted art historian and stodgy old codger Brian Sewell’s musings on the stenches beneath the bombast and slashed sleeves, the malodours caught in the layers of velvet and satin, and the pong of not wearing underclothes (“In Fine Style” (rev.) para. 5). Many

Jezebel readers questioned early modern English hygienic practices and several cited familiar reeking anecdotes. One reader wondered:

I have always thought this about the hygiene during those years. If you don’t

wash your hair after a while it smells downright rank. And what about brushing

your teeth? Cleaning your pits? When did these people bathe?

While the opening example from Jezebel is for the lay reader, even many scholars make such assumptions. I hope to challenge prevailing beliefs and misconceptions about early modern bathing practices and hygienic rituals to trace out different whiffs of the past as they are represented in literature. It is generally assumed that everyone in

Renaissance England was flagrantly stinky, but if this were universally true, then certain classes could not be described and represented as smelling worse, or at least, smelling differently, than others’ bodies. Shakespeare and his contemporaries did represent specific types of bodies as emitting certain types of odors. While the dominant discourse implies that during the early modern period, class and social difference were not olfactive performances, but the ubiquitous references to others’ bodily effluvia in early modern literature implies otherwise. In William Cartwright’s The Ordinary (1651), a city comedy in the style of Ben Jonson, we learn the depicted odors of a few foreigners:

78 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Dutch come up like broken beer; the Irish

Savour of Usquebaugh [i.e. Whiskey]; the Spanish they

Smell like unto perfume at first, but then

After a while end in a fatall steame--- (1.4)98

This is a set of quick stock character sketches, portrayed olfactively (and gustatively, too). What this tells us is that the Dutch and Irish are both stereotyped as drunkards (but with their own native liquors), and the Spanish smell like the perfume- style (heavy on the ambergris) famous in “Spanish style gloves.” All three are also foreign imports into the London market. As the sociologists Gale Largey and Rod

Watson reasoned in their 1972 cutting-edge essay “The Sociology of Odors”: “Odors, whether real or alleged, are often used as a basis for conferring a moral identity upon an individual or a group” (32). We see this “moral identity” negatively applied to the foreigners in Cartwright’s play, and we also see this also conferred “moral identity” when we create a teleology that differentiates our own evolved, enlightened, hygienic times from the wretched, uncivilized, stinking past.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 98 While staged Dutch characters are distinctive by their comical linguistic differences, the Dutch are also represented as an olfactive other through their fastidiousness. See for, example, Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom’s “The Economic Origins of Cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age” (Past and Present 205.1 (2009): 41-69), in which that they argue that their cleanliness led to a larger and higher quality butter yield (butter being another smell associated with the Dutch in Renaissance literature). Usquebaugh is the Celtic phonetic pronunciation of ‘aqua vitae,’ (the water of life) or whiskey. On the Irish language as cultural barrier, see David J. Baker’s “Wildehiririssheman: Colonialist Representations in Shakespeare’s Henry V” English Literary Renaissance 37-61. Also see the final chapter of Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the o-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1999. On “Spanish style gloves” see Holly Dugan’s “Oiled in Ambergris: Ambergris, Spanish Gloves, London’s Luxury Markets” in The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. 79 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My intervention here is based on the historian Mark Jenner’s nuanced approach to early modern hygienic practices and the histories of smell; while I am questioning the modern metanarrative of stench and the lack of bathing, I embrace the conflicting descriptions of body odors found in these primary sources.99 I am reading against the dominant theory of olfactory history which would posit that in earlier (Egyptian, Greco-

Roman) worlds of highly perfumed bodies and in the later, post-Enlightenment European periods described by Alain Corbin and Janice Carlisle, these comparative encounters were common, but not in the Renaissance. For many scholars, the millennia between the

Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Enlightenment is so diseased, stench-filled, rotting, and disgusting, that the possibility that early modern English people could and did notice each others’ distinctive odors amongst all the atmospheric stench seems highly unlikely.

Katherine Ashenberg cites the French historian Jules Michelet’s claim that the closing of the later medieval public bathhouses led to “a thousand years without a bath,” but she diminishes this scope to a “more accurate four hundred years,” which includes the time period of this particular study (12). Emily Cockayne’s delightfully disgusting and well- documented Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England 1600-1770 (2007) depicts

Londoners as unhygienic, crude and demonstrably stinky people.100 These works appeal broadly because they begin with a pre-conceived narrative, a simplified version of

Corbin’s olfactive–to-ocular continuum: to focus on the filth, the malodorous, and the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 99 See Mark Jenner’s “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories.” American Historical Review 116. 2 (2011): 335-51. 100 Katherine Ashenburg’s The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (2007) offers a similar, albeit less scholarly, narrative of bodily stench and lack of bathing as the norm. 80 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! unsanitary.101 Two revisionist studies of cleanliness were published the following year.

Virginia Smith’s Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity covers the entire history of sanitation, from Neolithic to contemporary times, and from a variety of archaeological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Kathleen M. Brown’s

Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009) is a feminist history of “body work” or how early modern women overcame negative depictions of the unclean body and focused on domestic and personal purity. It may be because smell is a chief aspect of disgust yet overlooked as an aesthetic sense that scholarly histories of the foul are more popular than studies of the fragrant.102

Beyond the sometimes extant architectural and archaeological evidence, we can turn to the myriad publications on health, hygiene, and bodily odors: dietaries, recipe books, medical treatises, plague pamphlets, as well as in plays, poems, and prose. What we find in hygienic manuals and recipe books is knotty, as different ancient, medieval, and early modern theories are tested, lauded, or criticized. This is very different than a lack of bathing; rather there is no clear consensus on bathing practices. The Jezebel article and the readers’ comments just perpetuate modern Western attitudes toward deodorization and bathing that often create a simplistic metanarrative of stench, but bathing in the Renaissance could be a fragrant and languorous event, especially for a lady

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 101 I offered my own own (albeit) brief corrective to the metanarrative of stench for the Recipes Project “Dipping Your Toes in the Water: Reconsidering Renaissance England’s Attitudes Toward Bathing” (The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Science, and Medicine. Web. July 1, 2013). 102 There are many popular and non-academic books on perfume histories, Shakespeare’s flowers, or other delightful little aromatic trifles. But again, there are still many more popular works on the foul. Even the medical historian Mary J. Dobson, who composed the erudite Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (1997) is probably better known for her collection of children’s illustrated scratch’n’sniff books Smelly Old History, with titles such as Reeking Royals (1998) and Tudor Odours (1997). 81 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with her own herbal garden (or the extra money to buy spices, flowers, and herbs) and some free time.103

Beyond bathing, the use of perfumes was en vogue and undoubtedly stronger than our modern preferences. The body was often perfumed with the then fashionable caprylic, or animal-based, odors: musk, civet, or ambergris, often compounded with other vegetable (flowers, spices, or herbs) accords. Ambergris, an excretory product of whales, has an “earthy” aroma “with seaweed qualities”; musk, secreted by deer, is described as

“slightly ammoniacal”; and civet, from the perianal glands of the civet cat, has a

“disgusting odor, but when diluted it is very attractive” (Douek 223-224).104 Not only was the skin perfumed, but hair and cosmetics were also scented. The authors of Aroma remind us of the ubiquity of early modern scented personal items—clothes, gloves, and even jewelry: “Not only would the body be perfumed, however, but virtually everything worn on the body as well” (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 72). The end result, due to natural bodily effluvia (if between baths or linen shifts), strong animal-scented perfumes, and the plethora of aromatic apparels would be overwhelming, and most likely offensive, to the modern nose. But the same could be true for the early modern nose as our reactions to certain odorants are highly idiosyncratic.

Shakespeare, for example, often writes disparagingly of civet—a popular perfume ingredient; Robert Herrick, possibly the poet most attuned to sweet perfumes, never

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 103 I cover some of the most aromatic bath recipes in two short posts for The Recipes Project: “A Sweet Bath and Sweating: Renaissance Ladies and Bathing “ (4 July 2013) and “Dipping Your Toes in the Water: Reconsidering Renaissance England’s Attitudes Toward Bathing” (1 July 2013). 104 As the next chapter details, civet was an especially ambiguous and contested perfume ingredient; this denouncement of perfume becomes a common trope of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literary works. 82 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mentions civet, but instead often praises ambergris; John Donne writes several poems on perfumes, but never mentions ingredients or accords by name. This may tell us something of regionalized preferences and accessibility to such goods; it may tell us about the social class of the characters wearing the perfumes; it may even inform us of the personal preferences of these authors. We can read such works alongside one another—along with depictions of these materials in medical discourse, recipe books, herbals, religious sermons, and polemical tracts—remembering that these smells have important functions first and foremost within the text and tell us something distinctive about the character who smells and the character being smelled.

While I could turn to any number of early modern writers to survey the importance of the smells of the human body, I offer this overview of Shakespeare’s works as Holly Dugan notes, “In the archive of early modern material and metaphoric sensation, Shakespeare looms large” (Dugan, “Shakespeare and the Senses” 729).

Shakespeare’s works are filled with such “comparative encounters,” a term coined by

Janice Carlisle in her study of High Victorian fiction to describe “meetings between two individuals of unequal status whose differences are registered when one of them perceives an odor” (3) or “more or less explicitly setting two characters in evaluative relation to each other, such a meeting declares one the superior of the other” (10).105 A reading of these “comparative encounters” is important to fully understand how

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 105 Carlisle’s survey of eighty novels (all published in the 1860s) provides a thorough, though much later, groundwork for my own study, and she notes that despite the dissimilarity of the novels surveyed that they are “remarkably consistent in their equivocation of smells… so dependable are such references that they came to have a predictive power” (9). Constance Classen offers a wide-ranging overview of this “olfactory codes and cultural categories” covering different time periods, nation-states, and cultures to find some recurring instances of the smell of the other in Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. 83 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Renaissance English writers represented the bodies, class, gender, health, and morality of those around them by implementing something as ephemeral and as enigmatic as particular odors.

As early as 1939, in her seminal book Shakespeare’s Imagery, Caroline Spurgeon noted that Shakespeare was sensitive to disagreeable odors, especially the stenches of the human body: “Shakespeare has clearly a very acute sense of smell, and is peculiarly sensitive to bad smells; the two he specially names and dislikes being the smell of unwashed humanity and of decaying corpses, both of them common enough in

Elizabethan plague-stricken London” (Spurgeon 78). Spurgeon’s “smell of unwashed humanity” is definitely a frequent, pungent trope in Shakespeare’s works. While many sensory historians believe that the Enlightenment is the beginning of the establishment of

“the odor of class—and the class of odor” (Smith, Sensing 66) the concerns over class odors predate the hygienic efforts of the eighteenth century and are a recurring trope in

Shakespeare’s works.106

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 106 In George Orwell’s meditations on twentieth-century England’s caste systems and its disdain for its own productive workers, the author notes, Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West--the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell” (127). For many sensory historians, this is often cited as an exemplar of class-consciousness, an early critique of the sociology of odors, because the stench of the lower class could only truly exist in an industrialized, modernized, deodorized West. Orwell’s extended meditation is complex, as he is self-reflective about his own “lower-upper-middle class” British upbringing with all of its myriad prejudices, but he must also contend that the coal-miners’ bodies probably did stink more due to hard labor, lack of luxury goods (fresh linen or a bathtub), and want of leisure time (just a quick cleanse before the day of dirty work). William Ian Miller devotes his last chapter of the Anatomy of Disgust to “Orwell’s Sense of Smell,” in which he argues that despite Orwell’s democratic 84 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the most part, however, masculine odors are only described if the men are socially marginalized, or to contrast the individual (and his personal aromas) as distinctive from the larger community. In Shakespeare’s works, the stench of the common people is most effectively and atrociously represented metonymically as a reeking and unruly mob, smelling of the sweat of their labors (often in their sweat-soaked caps) or their breaths redolent with the stench of their foodstuffs (most commonly garlics and onions).

In Coriolanus, a play that refers often to the body politic as the grotesque body personal, Menenius’ fable of the “good belly” (1.1.137), in which the Senators act as belly digesting food and redistributing needed nutrients, fails to placate the literally hungry citizens who rebel as “mutinous members” (1.1.138). One citizen asks “Who is the sink of the body?” (1.1.111) to which Menenius labels that citizen as the “great toe,” the foremost of the lowest, basest, and poorest part of the body politic (1.1.144-146).

Whether toe or the “sink” (the defecating rectum), the lowest citizens are represented as the most offensively stinking bits of the body. For the annoyed Coriolanus, the citizens are not even functioning digits of the body, but rather only a monstrous, stinking, devouring mouth. Repeatedly, Coriolanus, a singular individual, depicts himself in opposition to the plebians whom he reduces to a hydra of halitosis. Coriolanus curses his

Roman troops (1.4.30-42). The plebeians are first dismissed as “the mutable, rank- scented meiny” (3.1.70) and then feared as a “Hydra” (3.1.96). He can smell their

“stinking greasy caps” (4.6.139) and the horrid “breath of garlic eaters” (4.6.102). When

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! socialism, he cannot escape his own class-based prejudices, ultimately maintaining class- based hierarchies, even as he attempts to dismantle them.

85 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coriolanius is banished, and revolts by banishing Rome from his presence, his tirade is a series of foully smelling insults:

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

As reek o’th’ rotten fens whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air: I banish you. (3.3.124-127)

The breaths of the plebeians are likened to the “reek o’ the rotten fens,” the corruptible and marshy air so often named as the site of contagion in plague literature. The putrid stench of “dead carcasses of unburied men” also “corrupt[s the] air” and Coriolanus compares this to the fickle and detestable love of the plebeians. What is important to note is that these workers and commoners do not comment upon their own laboring bodies as stinking; it is only a removed figure, such as the class-conscious Coriolanus, who makes the olfactive decision that these others stink. Casca, in Julius Caesar, dismisses the commoners who cheer Marc Antony and Caesar as wearing “sweaty nightcaps” (1.2.244) and having “stinking breaths” (1.2.245). Bottom reminds his fellow laborers in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream not to eat onions or garlic before their performance for the

Duke in order to have sweet breaths for their sweet comedy (4.2.36-39).

Not only do the lower classes or mobs reek, but ethnic, religious, and racial

“Others” give off perceptible stench. The medieval myth of an innate Jewish stench persisted in religious tracts despite the lack of a Jewish presence in England. While neither Shakespeare’s Shylock nor Marlowe’s Barabas are depicted as exhibiting the foetor Judaicus, Barabas wittily twists this anti-Semitic myth by pointing out that he

86 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! could smell the stink of the Catholic friars (2.3.46-49).107 Sir Thomas Browne, an early empirical scientist, in his Pseudodoxica Epidemica (1646), a collection of essays that disprove persistent “vulgar errors,” tackles this particular issue. After his empirical observations of walking near a synagogue filled with temple-goers, Browne states that not only did he not notice a Jewish taint, but Jewish people with their much stricter adherence to hygienic and dietary laws were probably cleaner and less foul-smelling than most of their Christian detractors (Book 4. Chap. X “Of the Jews,” (226-230).

In their essay on “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” Max

Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, write that in the myth of civilization Jewish people remain scapegoats and objects of contempt due to a myth as baseless as the stench of the

Jew:

Of all the senses the act of smelling, which is attracted without objectifying,

reveals most sensuously the urge to lose oneself in identification with the

Other…. When we see we remain who we are, when we smell we are absorbed

entirely. (151)

Beyond anti-Semitism, Horkheimer and Adorno’s wording hints at the larger and more deadly implications of smelling others’ bodies, especially in pre-modern times. In a period when smells immediately affected the brain, body, and emotions, it is potentially annihilating to breathe in and become “absorbed entirely” by a foreign or threatening

Other. That is, Jews, foreigners, the elderly, unruly mobs, laborers, or other undesirables

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 107 James Shapiro covers the myth of foetor Judaicus in Shakespeare and the Jews, citing from several plays as well as Thomas Browne’s rebuttal (37-41). Bejamin Aldes Wurgaft also writes on the 20th century persistence of this mythical stench and kosher dietary restrictions in “Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension.” 87 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! stink, but the average “Tom, Dick, or Francis” is comparatively inodorous (Shakespeare,

1 Henry IV 2.5.7-8).

Similarly, we might consider Native Americans and the Welsh as two other groups represented as (mal)odorous Others. Caliban, who blurs together Native

American, Muslim, and African geographical and ethnic traits, emits an offensive fishy- odor (2.2.23-35), and King James finds tobacco as particularly offensive because he believed that the Native Americans’ introduced his people to both tobacco and syphilis, respectively olfactory and tactile sins.108 We can identify Shakespeare’s Welsh characters because of their odoriferous dietary choices, just as easily as we can by their stage dialect. The Merry Wives of Windsor’s Sir Hugh Evans’s diet seems to consist only of cheese, which his English friends gently mock throughout the play. In Henry V, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 108 “Fish odour syndrome” is a symptom that can indicate any number of dental, hygienic, or urinary tract infections, and a recurring metabolic disease (Trimethylaminuria) that affects the kidneys and liver as well as causing a strong fishlike odor is often cited in the medical literature by referring back to Shakespeare’s Caliban as possibly the most famous sufferer (Christensen 316). On Caliban’s different ethnicities or nationalities, Leslie Fiedler’s The Stranger in Shakespeare remains a strong starting point and close reading. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Caliban: A Cultural History also explores this topic at length. Much has been written about the introduction of tobacco into early modern England, and as the suggestive title of her history of early modern tobacco demonstrates, Sarah Augusta Dickson’s Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth-Century Literature (1954), opinion has always been divided on the uses and abuses of tobacco. Dickson believes that many early modern writers were contemplative smokers and defended tobacco against King James I’s attacks. Jeffrey Knapp’s “Elizabethan Tobacco” offers a solid New Historicist treatment of the socio-cultural and economic implications of tobacco and how these ideas on tobacco manifest in Renaissance works (1988). Peter C. Mancall highlights the transformation of tobacco from a revered component of Native American rituals (and therefore too heathenish for European consumers) to an exoticized but familiarized commodity (“Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe” (2004), while Dennis Kezar reads oblique references to tobacco in Othello as a larger discourse on transgressive desires, abuses, and addictions (“Shakespeare’s Addictions” (2003)). Carla Mazzio covers the humoral aspects, ideas of contagion, community, and melancholy, while ending with a reading of tobacco in “The History of Air: Hamlet and the Trouble with Instruments.” (2009). 88 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Welsh soldier Fluellen wears a leek in his hat to identify his nationality (and following suit, the Welsh-born Henry V joins him to show British solidarity), but the English rogue- cum-soldier Pistol finds the oniony scent offensive. After a heated argument, Fluellen forces Pistol to eat the leek and ingest his Welshness.109 The Welsh diet of cheese and leeks identifies difference but not in the same degree as the markers of Judaism or Native

Americanism which are permanent and innate bodily odors.

A young, and usually unbearded, man more concerned with love and women than more masculine pursuits such as war, or is the object of homoerotic desire is fetishized and emasculated when described in the same conventionally aromatic and floral poetic terms as women. Notable examples include several of Shakespeare’s most famous youthful lovers, such as Adonis, Romeo, and the fair youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.110

Romeo’s father calls his son a closed rosebud in the first Act (1.1.139-146), even before

Juliet’s oft-quoted meditation on roses, names, and scents (2.1.80-91).111 In “Sonnet 54,” the external beauty of the rose reflects the outward beauty of the Fair Youth, but the

Youth’s internal virtues are manifested in the odor of the rose (54.1-4). In contrast to the true beauty of the Youth and the rose, the next quatrain introduces “canker blooms”

(54.5), which are both inodorous dog-roses and other lovely youths, who may be just as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 109 I have a forthcoming essay on the socio-cultural and affective properties of the leek “Qualmish at the Smell of Leek: Overcoming Disgust in Henry V” in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll (Farnham, Ashgate Press, 2015). 110 Jonathan Goldberg’s plays with the concept of comparisons to roses—Romeo’s; Juliet, who is also described in floral terms; and the ex-lover, Rosaline—to offer a reading that hinges on the importance of a series of homosocial desires, triangulations, and substitutions. Like my own reading of the continuous metaphors and circularity of the linguistic representations of odors, Goldberg asserts that the play is concerned that “names and words might be unmoored and uncontrollable, subject to accidents and to determinations that no artifice of eternity can secure” (272). 111 In my next chapter, I analyze Juliet’s phrase at length. 89 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! externally beautiful but lack any interior qualities.112 These inodorous roses lack a true essence, “but for their virtue only is their show” (54.9). “They live unwooed and unrespected fade”; the Youth, in contrast, will be wooed, respected, and not die to himself, but live forever in the poem, a perfume that “distils your truth” (54.14).113

Even the king’s body is represented as odoriferous. Again, it is not until the king’s status is in flux that the odor becomes prominent. For example, that the monarch is anointed with perfumed oils as part of the coronation ceremony is common knowledge and not elaborated. Although there are many kings in Shakespeare’s plays, anoint and balm are used most frequently in Richard II to indicate the sacred aromatic ritual which transfigures the king from mere mortal to God’s appointed monarch (and the difficulty in reversing the ritual). It is not until Richard II is threatened with deposition that he announces that “not all the water in the rough rude sea/ can wash the balm from an anointed king,” and when he abdicates/is deposed, he claims that only his own tears may wash away the balm. Richard’s demotion can be registered, at least in part, by his (lack of) regal accruements: crown, scepter, and, especially, the fragrant and sacred anointing oil (4.1.197-200). Similarly, after Marlowe’s weak king Edward II is deposed, he is forced to drink septic water and kept knee-deep in sewage. Edward’s body suffers a contrapasso punishment resembling his wallowing in his courtiers’ flattery (22.16-25,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 112 The Fair Youth of the Sonnets is likened to “beauty’s rose” throughout the sonnets, in his scent as well as in his lovely appearance (Sonnet 1.2). Just as desirable women may stink if they are unchaste, the poet warns the youth that “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (94.14). 113 In “Sonnets 5 & 6,” reproducing a son is compared to distilling and preserving his essence in a perfume vial (the wife’s womb). 90 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

24.1-12). His mortal body retains the strengths of the kingly body and is able to withstand horrid stench and torture.114

Many times in Shakespeare’s plays olfactory intrusion in the wrong setting causes tension and marks a man as an outsider. Hotspur dismisses Henry IV’s messenger because he enters the battlefield wearing silk and smelling like a milliner. This messenger would be the ideal representative for foreign courtly expeditions but his sweet smells are not appropriate when Hotspur is covered in sweat and blood. As soldiers, the bloody stenches of Hotspur, Coriolanus, and Macbeth do not allow them to make the olfactory transition needed for their political and courtly ambitions.115 In As You Like It, the clown

Touchstone contrasts courtly and rural customs with an old shepherd Corin. Corin will not let his hands be kissed because they are rough from labor and greasy from handling sheep; Touchstone states that the civet worn on courtier’s hands is more offensive as it is the “very uncleanly flux of a cat” (3.2.58). What is fashionably aromatic in the court is ridiculous in the countryside and the stench of blood standard in the battlefield is considered vulgar at court.

Master Fenton, a courtier from London, stands out from Windsor residents because of his luxurious trappings: he writes poetry, dances, dresses well, and “smells

April and May” (3.2.58). This does not necessarily mean the other residents stink, but rather that the use of costly foreign perfumes is not common practice amongst the citizens in this community. Two other residents of Windsor are also labeled as having enough

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 114 The final chapter focuses on the represented scents of the monarchical body, especially how Royalists and Parliamentarians depicted the odor of sanctity or the stenches of corruption in their depictions of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. 115 My second chapter more thoroughly analyzes the perfumes associated with King Henry IV’s courtier-messenger, Hotspur as soldier, Touchstone and Corin. 91 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! perceptible and different aromas that they contrast with the communal smells of Windsor: the aforementioned Welsh minister Sir Hugh Evans smells of his regional toasted cheeses, and the intrusive knight Falstaff who disrupts the sanctity of marriage within the domiciles of the Fords and Pages, stinks as badly as his corruption.

In stark contrast to Master Fenton’s sweet perfumes, Falstaff is not one of those

“lisping hawthorn-buds that come like women in men’s apparel and smell like

Bucklersbury in simple time”—the street in London that hosted apothecaries and perfume shops (3.359-61). Instead, the gluttonous old knight hides in a basket of dirty laundry with “foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins… that there was the rankest compound of villainous all that ever offended nostril” (3.5.79-81). It is a fitting punishment for a man attempting to destroy a marriage. In the Henry IV plays, as an obese and gluttonous old devil, he stinks of his gustatory excesses. For only one of the many, many examples of his gross intemperances that emits from his corpulent body, he reeks like a tallow candle, and “gravy, gravy, gravy” (2 Henry IV 1.2.145-149).

In the “Introduction,” I began with Bedlam Tom’s nursery rhyme “Fie, fo, and fum; / I smell the blood of a British man,” claiming that olfactive performances marked out gender, class, ethnicity, race, and other signifiers of difference (KL 3.4.171-172).

Because of these comparative encounters, we can see that the middle to upper class, masculine, Anglican, heterosexual, abled-bodied English might represent the whiskey odor of the Irish, the civet-scented gloves of the Spanish, the beer-reeking Belgium, the stench of the Machiavellian Jew, the garlic-breaths and stinking caps of exploited and disgruntled working class mobs, the repulsive fish odors of the exotic inhabitants of new colonies, and the toasted cheese and leek aromas of the Welshman, but wish to depict

92 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! themselves as inodorous. Michel de Montaigne goes so far to state, “the best characteristic we can hope for is to smell of nothing” (352) and even now in the modern

Western world “groups in the centre—politicians, businessmen—are characterized by a symbolic lack of scent” (Classen, Howes, and Synott 161). Patrick Suskind’s novel

Perfume: The Story of a Murder, however, proves that to be inodorous is an unnatural state; this is the dilemma of the bestial and inodorous Grenouille, who murders virgins to distill their personal essences to create his own body scent. Helen Keller found that an individual without a “distinctive person-scent” was unlikely to be “lively or entertaining”

(182).

Such body odors (or lack thereof) define the men and the Britain of Shakespeare’s

Second Henriad. The British men “smell” (intransitive verb) as they emit odors in these plays; they sweat, fart, bleed, have sex, and eat odorous foods, and these personal body odors have conflicting and layered accords. The men also “smell” (transitive verb) as they inhale the odors of each others’ bodies and comment on one another’s bodily effluvia in order to define themselves and create masculine hierarchies that are at least somewhat defined through the bestial sense of smell. From Richard II’s insistence of his anointed and sacred flesh to Hotspur’s disdain for Henry IV’s perfumed messenger, and from Falstaff to King Henry V the odors of the English male body are an important and recurring theme in the Second Henriad.

Ending this catalogue of Shakespeare’s comparative encounters, I wish to assert that close readings of these recurrent olfactive images can lead to richer readings of the plays. Read together, these whiffs create a teleology of British masculinity, by representing the English isle as an enclosed aromatic and therapeutic garden. To create a

93 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! unified nation-state, the ideal garden extolled in Richard II, means that the garden must be fruitful and well-ordered, comprehensive and diverse, and well-manured (despite its occasional malodors). It is no surprise then that the Archbishop, when describing Prince

Hal's conversion into good king Harry, compares the idealized King to the scent of nutritious strawberries emerging from manure, and in this scatalogical comparison, Hal's unsavory friends (most of whom will be dead before the end of Henry V) are likened to low-growing baser fruits (1.1.60-67). These comparative encounters begin to recuperate the concept of bodily aromas as socially constructed and culturally proscribed odors.

These smells certainly do have their own multifaceted literary, sensory, and dramatic history, revealing that “comparisons are odorous” indeed.

94 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 2: The Paradox of English Civet in Shakespeare and Donne

In this chapter, I examine several “comparative olfactory encounters” to create a socio-cultural history of civet, the ubiquitous and contested early modern perfume introduced to England during Henry VIII’s reign. Reading civet in terms of anthropologist Mary Douglas’ “dirt,” or “matter out of place” allows for an appraisal of the perfume as foreign luxury good, as well as debased and immoral “uncleanly flux of a cat”; in both instances perfume fails to create desirable odors and asserts Bill Brown’s

“thingness,” the failure of the object.

In the early modern period, lax personal hygiene habits, and lack of public amenities and sanitation services could make London’s streets and bodies stinky sites.

Because of this, the use of perfumed niceties was ubiquitous: hair and cosmetics were perfumed; floral sachets were sewn into clothing; men and women wore pomanders, scented gloves, and freshly cut flowers. Londoners also liberally applied caprylic, or animal-based, perfumes, such as musk, castoreum, ambergris, and especially civet, created from the odoriferous secretion from the perineal glands of the civet cat. Pleasant effluvia were signs of physical and moral well-being, while bad body odors were olfactory signifiers of spiritual corruption and the symptoms and causes of diseases.

Perfumes also delineated class status, so that sweeter smelling individuals exhibited the means to procure luxury-scented goods. Yet, when reading early modern texts, we can discover that cultural practices and literary representations parted ways; this is what I call

95 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the paradox of early modern perfume. Perfumes were repeatedly vilified in many early modern texts, especially the ubiquitous civet-based perfumes. I argue that perfume does not eliminate the stench of the unclean body, but rather becomes the malodor in these literary works, functioning metonymically to create an osmological shorthand for recurring undesirable stock characters, but also paradoxically royalty and divinity.

Introduction: Smelling perfumes in Henry IV

Instead of a metanarrative of early modern odors, I hope to create a moment of

“thick description” of how and why the early modern English experienced their olfactory environments (in this instance, civet), and how the sense of smell was important in mediating their cultural and literary experiences.116 Using Bruce Smith’s historical phenomenological term, I also offer an “erotics of reading” civet by reconstructing how early modern writers were experiencing, remembering, and writing about their attraction to or repulsion from the scent of civet. Looking broadly across late Elizabethan and early

Jacobean drama and poetry, and moving into extended analyses of a few key moments of civet-perfumes in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, and King Lear, and John

Donne’s poems “The Comparison” and “The Perfume” and several of his sermons, I argue that civet breaches boundaries and due to its inability to be properly classified is reduced to “matter our of place” or the ineffable “thing.” 117

The longest uninterrupted speech— at 40 lines—of Henry “Hotspur” Percy, the leader of the rebellion against King Henry, occurs early in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1977. 117 Bruce Smith, in Premodern Sexualities, reminds us that historical phenomenology “directs attention to the sentient body caught up in that situation, positioned among the cultural variables set in new historicism and cultural materialism. What historical phenomenology offers is an erotics of reading” (326). 96 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! he attempts to explain to Henry why he did not immediately turn his prisoners of war over to the King. Whereas we might assume that Hotspur’s longest speech would concern his two major preoccupations, honor or the mistreatment and disrespect he believes King

Henry has shown his family, in his very first speech of the play, he complains about something else entirely.118 Instead, Hotspur’s forty-line speech is an extended complaint about the King’s messenger, a “certain lord,” a “popinjay,” a man who is “neat and trimly dressed, / Fresh as a bridegroom,” and “perfumed like a milliner…” (1.3.33, 49, 33-34,

35).119 Robert Brustein extends the list of what is wrong with the messenger from

Hotspur’s perspective:

Here, in Hotspur’s heated account, are listed all the deficiencies of the carpet

knight: his pretentiousness, his ignorance about war, his battlefield-inappropriate

costume and barbering, his affected verbosity, his disrespect for soldiering, and

above all, his effeminate ‘waiting-gentlewoman’ behavior and appearance as

displayed in his ‘chin new-reaped’ beardlessness. (54)

Brustein contrasts Shakespeare’s disdain (or “effemiphobia”) for the “flattering courtier” with his respect for the “blunt soldier” or the “plain-dealer” (or pro-“machismo” attitude)

(53-54, 92-93). Brustein nicely identifies and extends upon an important recurring theme of this particular culture clash in Shakespeare’s works, but he gets the “above all” offense quite wrong.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 118 Hotspur’s second longest speech (at 53 lines long, but interrupted by Blunt at line 36) is his final speech about Henry’s exploitation of Hotspur’s family to secure his crown and then after deposing and killing King Richard II, he didn’t need the Percies any longer, driving away Hotspur’s uncle and dismissing his father (4.3.54-107). In contrast, Hotspur’s beautiful ode to honor is only seven lines long (1.3.199-206). 119 All Shakespearean quotations are from the Norton Shakespeare edited by Stephen Greenblatt except where otherwise noted.

97 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While Hotspur is offended by the messenger’s “behavior” and “appearance,”

Hotspur is repelled “above all” by the messenger’s ”so sweet” smell. Hotspur repeatedly notes the olfactive performance of the messenger:

He was perfumed like a milliner;

And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held

A pouncet-box, which ever and anon

He gave his nose and took't away again…

…he made me mad

To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet

And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman

Of guns and drums and wounds,--God save the mark!--

And telling me the sovereign'st thing on earth

Was parmaceti for an inward bruise… (1.3.35-38, 52-57, emphases added)

Holly Dugan, in her chapter on London’s luxury markets and ambergris-oiled foreign goods in The Ephemeral History of Perfume, claims that in his simile, “Hotspur objects to the presence of the unnamed lord on the battlefield, suggesting that his perfume smells luxurious, courtly, and foreign, more appropriate for an Italian perfumer than a soldier” (144). Marjorie Garber, in Shakespeare After All, upholds that the simile “like a milliner” is “typical Hotspur language; this scion of aristocrats has little regard for lords and nobles who do not behave with real nobility, and he lumps them uncompromisingly, with the middling commercial classes, in this case with a seller of fancy wares, hats, and women’s clothing” (322). The simile “like a milliner” therefore is “typical Hotspur language,” because Hotspur is intolerant of anyone or anything that might undermine his

98 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ambitions or his sense of honor, and his intolerance most emphatically manifests itself as an olfactive othering of those who are not like-minded soldiers. The messenger is loathed for his effeminacy, his foreignness, his luxury, and his bourgeois, all of which offends

Hotspur’s haughty nostrils. Yet, the soldier is most upset with the messenger’s smells of the court—which are noxious and unfamiliar—on the battlefield.

Smelling of perfumes, carrying a “pouncet [perfume] box,” talking of the healing properties of “parmaceti”—the aromatic digestive wax of the whale’s intestines—the messenger defies Hotspur’s expectations of what a soldier should smell like while he is on the battlefield because the messenger “smells so sweet.” A soldier, then, in Hotspur’s estimation, smells like sweat, blood, and his horse, but not of costly perfumes. Hotspur’s hotheaded defiance, and King Henry’s rash decision to believe the courtier-messenger’s account of the battlefield exchange, leads to a full rebellion with the Percys joining the

Welsh Owen Glendower. What if the king had sent an inodorous, plainly dressed messenger? Or better yet, a bloodied, sweating messenger? What if Hotspur did not have such a sagacious nose?

This olfactive encoding through the use of sweet perfumes becomes the standard shorthand to identify the courtier, and especially his difference from the soldier. Perfumes are supposed to do two simple tasks, according to sociologists Gale Largey and Peter

Watson: 1. deodorize, or “remove socially discreditable odors” and 2. odorize, or

“present the self with creditable odors through the ‘art’ of perfuming” (35). Repeatedly, in early modern English literary texts, however, the use of perfumes, especially civet, is seen as deceitful and potentially deadly, even at a time of infrequent bathing and incessant bouts of plague. Perfume fails to do what it is supposed to do. Civet-based

99 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! perfume does not remove “socially discreditable odors”: rather, it is the socially discreditable odor.

The reasons for this are twofold. First, civet-based perfumes are “dirty.” The anthropologist Mary Douglas argues in her seminal book Purity and Danger (1966) that the sacred and the defiled are intricately linked as they pertain to ideas of hygiene and the symbolic, that there is an order and anything that does not fit is deemed “dirty.” For

Douglas, “dirt” is “matter out of place”:

Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolate event. Where there is dirt there is a system.

Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so

far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us

straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obvious

symbolic systems of purity. (Douglas 44-45)

As we approach the confused descriptions of the civet-cat, the misperceptions over the civet secretion, and the general attitude of early modern English writers toward this new, foreign, luxury odorant, we will ascertain how and why civet is repeatedly referred to as “dirty” in these texts. Civet smells too animalic, both like the creature from which it is collected, but also too much like the human body in its more blatant and erotic stinks.120

Secondly, I argue that early modern civet-based perfume may be unique in that it makes the distinctions between subject, object, and thing quite tenuous. Bill Brown concisely explains “thing theory” as the difference between “objects,” revered by poets and analyzed by philosophers (3), and “things,” which are simply failed objects:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 120 “Animalic” refers both to perfumes made with animal odorants—ambergris, castorum, musk, and civet—but also perfumes that are aphrodisiacal (Vosnaki n. pag.). 100 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us:

when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy… The

story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a charged

relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less

an object than a particular subject-object relation. (4).

Civet-based scents always negotiate or fail in their objectiveness, because perfume can never truly make the subject inodorous, and by making the wearer “smell so sweetly” civet asserts itself as an artificial and contested odorant. I do not believe that there is a real reconciliation of civet-based perfumes as subject/object or object/thing in early modern England, but that it always remains “dirty” or “matter out of place,” to use Mary

Douglas’ term for ritualistic (im)pure substances. Perfume again becomes “object” during the Enlightenment when floral scents become popular and the obsession with civet dies away.121

Civet, or civetone, is the odoriferous, yellowish-brown unctuous secretions from the perineal glands of the civet cat used to mark its territory. The civet is a midsized, spotted, catlike carnivore found throughout Asia and Africa of the viverrid family suborder Feliformia. Karl H. Dannenfeldt tracks the “discovery” of civet for Europeans during expansion and trade routes along the west coast of Africa and India in the mid- fifteenth century (406).122 The inability to properly categorize the animal or to determine

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 121 The cultural historian Alain Corbin claims that the Enlightenment-era ushered in the ocularcentric modern era, as bodies and public areas were slowly deodorized. Corbin argues that animal-based scents fell out of fashion and were replaced by more “subtle and delicate” floral aromas (76). 122 Unknown to the Greco-Roman world, Dannenfeldt notes that Arabic and Chinese physicians had been using civet medicinally and for perfume much earlier than the fifteenth century, at least as early at the first century CE. 101 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the source of its sweetly scented secretion, caused the creature to be permeated with medical and mystical powers, and for its musk to be lauded as both panacea and derided as sinful.

The problem, then, is multifaceted: What is this creature? Where does its scent come from? And, most problematically, why does it smell so sweetly? The paradox of civet for early modern writers of biology and literature is the very indefinite and indefinable aspects of both the creature and her scent. Without classification, civet could be a cat, hyena, badger, or panther, “a wolf with a mane like a horse”—each imbued with its own humoral, astrological, and alchemical significance.123 If civetone were merely blood or seed or excrement, physicians could more readily determine the benefits or disadvantages of medically applying such an ingredient. Civet, then, like the “unclean” animals of the Bible becomes “dirty,” not because of any hygienic issues, but because it challenges the notion of “purity” as it is an animal that “does not conform fully to its class; [the] whole class itself confounds the general scheme of the world” (Douglas

69).124 No source seemed quite definite on what exactly it was that they smelled.125 Pierre

La Primaudaye thought that civet (i.e. the secretion) was the blood of the cat when in heat, and in his description, menstrual qualities are attributed to the male cat (836). Still others debated whether it was sweat (sometimes called “froth” or “foam,”), “seed”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 123 See Jonstonus 115-117 on the classification of civet; Agrippa von Nettesheim 55 on civet’s mystical powers and humoral qualities; and Dannenfeldt, more generally for other conflicting theories on civet. 124 Douglas does not refer directly to civetone and the civet-cat is not mentioned in the Bible, but if the creature were known to the early Israelites, we can be certain of its status as unclean. 125 Karl H. Dannenfeldt tracks the “discovery” of civet for Europeans during expansion and trade routes along the west coat of Africa and India in the mid-fifteenth century (406). Erica Fudge claims that civet is an “animal-made-object,” retracing the civet-cat’s role as ‘recalcitrant beast’ and laboring subject. 102 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(semen), the vague “corruption,” or, as was most commonly claimed, “excrement” (and its more colorful adjectives). Even now, myths of the power of civetone remain: “If inhaled undiluted, civet is so strong it can cause nosebleeds and sometimes death” (Kohl and Francouer 69). Civet smells “dirty” and its excremental origins mark the perfume as

“matter out of place” and its unaltered force is rumored to cause death.

While Dannenfeldt claims that “by the middle of the sixteenth century, with the publication of descriptions and illustrations by Belon and Gesner, Europeans had fairly accurate scholarly information about the civet cat and civet,” the above misinformation and dissemination of mystical attributes not only disprove this, but even Dannenfeldt notes that the civet was not properly classified until the tenth edition of Carolus

Linnaeus’ Systema naturae of 1758 (415). Yet, despite all of the confusion of the civet cat and misperceptions of its perfume, the civet was not an alien creature but considered well known in England. The French chemist Nicolas Lemery reported that the “best civet was produced in England” (Dannenfeldt 421). The English herbalist John Parkinson in his 1640 Theatre of Plants, devotes his last book to “Exoticae et Peregrinae Plantae, classis ultima,” but only gives a few brief paragraphs to the civet: “I shall not need to describe the beast unto you, which Clusius hath done in figure very exactly in his Curae

Posteriores, and is so frequent, not onely in our Land, with a great many that keepe them for the profit or use of the Civet, but in divers other Countries in Europe” (Parkinson

1614). To attribute the “thingness” or “dirtiness” of civet to its status as imported or luxury good is to ignore the evidence provided in the many recipe books in which civet is a common and (by the mid-seventeenth century), easily acquired, and relatively

103 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! inexpensive, domestic ingredient, used in perfumes, washing balls, recipes, cosmetics, and many household niceties.126

If none of this were confusing enough, the civet-cat was another source of speculation and bewilderment. Erica Fudge, who reads the producer (civet-cat) and product (civetone) as fungible, claims that “the first way to reconcile the apparent disjunction between an interest in animal stuff and an interest in animals as active presences in the world is to note that a living animal and animal matter are not separate categories. Like subject and object, they are utterly intertwined” (Fudge 42). Reading early modern texts, we note that “civet” is both the animal and the secretion, and in these bestiaries, it often takes awhile to know when the author has shifted from one sense to the other. This is complicated by the colloquial term “civet” used to describe a courtier drenched in civet-perfume.127 While I am in agreement with Erica Fudge’s reading of early modern civet (both the animal and especially its secretions) as “thing,” she furnishes the animal with an “active presence,” but I find that it is the perfume that truly

“asserts itself,” and demonstrates an affective and active presence in the imagination of

Renaissance writers (Fudge 44). Fudge, for example, affords only two paragraphs to the affective odors of the civet-perfume, while the rest of her compelling essay makes the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 126 For example, a 1654 recipe for “a sweet powder” lists the amounts and costs of each ingredient, and 20 grains of musk at three shillings four pence (or 20 d. for ten grains) costs the same as civet (“ten grains, 20 d.”), but more than the other ingredients (per weight). A grain is the weight of a barley grain, but because of the strength of musk and civet, a smaller amount is needed. The completed recipe of a “sweet powder” weighs over a pound (just over 19 ounces) and costs a total of eleven shilling five pence. As a sweet powder may be used cosmetically (on skin or hair), used to scent clean linen, burnt as perfume (when added to other materials), and does not spoil or lose its odour for a very long time, the initial cost of the materials does not seem too excessive (M.B. 225). 127 OED “civet-cat.” Also, the confusion in complicated by the fact that the term “musk cat” could be used for the musk deer, the civet, or disparagingly for a perfumed man. 104 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! case for animal studies approaches to Renaissance works. My chapter, on the other hand, only affords a few paragraphs to civet-as-animal as my focus turns to the historical phenomenological, affective, and sensate approaches to civet-as-perfume. Early modern writers were decidedly more interested in how the perfume civet defined their own bodies, genders, class status, and morality than they were interested in the animal producing their luxury goods.

In the Renaissance, determining the smell of the subject (the person) and the object (the perfume) was especially difficult when the preferred perfumes were created from animal secretions that mimicked or augmented human body odors, and this object

(civet-based perfume) asserts its very thingness when it fails to remove socially discreditable odors, but rather becomes such an odor. Why would Hotspur be so very offended by a sweet smelling messenger when so many others reeked of disease, poverty, poor hygiene, the stenches of their labour, and other corruptible stinks? The fear of perfumery stems from its ability to blur gendered and class lines, while also obscuring conceptions of physical health and moral purity. Shakespeare’s Hotspur beats the king’s messenger for wearing perfume onto the battlefield, a sign of not only effeminacy, but also a violation of hierarchical boundaries and the violation of established smellscapes, becoming “matter out of place.” The messenger’s ‘so sweet’ perfume causes him to fail at his objectives: he cannot convey his message because his perfume calls attention to his person in distractingly negative ways (his ‘thingness’) and the messenger will appear horribly out of place, so much so that Hotspur must dismiss him from the battlefield (his

‘dirtiness’).

105 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Smelling Civet

Regardless of different theories of the civet cat and its civetone, all were in agreement that the defining feature of the civet is its scent. So what does civet smell like?

Unlike something that is unequivocally “sweet” such as rose or violet, civet is mentioned in these early modern texts as an odorant, sometimes as “fragrant” and other times as

“foul” (to borrow Alain Corbin’s terms). Civet smells “dirty,” like urine, feces, or sweat according to modern sources, such as perfume reviews and blogs. A recent New York

Times article claims that a blotter of unadulterated civet “smells — quite simply — like anus” (Burr n. pag.). More abstractly, to the modern nose, civet smells musky,

“animalic,” or even “skanky” (i.e. odors produced during sex and/or a promiscuous woman). When we move into the language of “imagery voice,” the term used by modern perfumer Avery Gilbert to distill the “atmospherics, the drama of seduction, passion, and mystery” of a scent, that we move closer to the more detailed accounts of the aroma of civet (15).

Below, beginning with modern perfume blogs and reviews of contemporary civet- based perfumes and then moving backward to early modern depictions of civet, we can sniff out how this particular aroma was devastatingly “dirty,” “animalistic” (erotic), and yet associated with the divine and royal. While moving from early modern conceptions of civet and our own lack of olfactory vocabulary to modern perfume reviews may seem unorthodox and incongruous, Tove Salander suggests this methodology when analyzing the brands of perfumes used by female characters in several contemporary novels (305).

Again, unlike rose or violet, which when diluted just becomes a lighter or more thinned version of an already pleasant aroma, civetone varies greatly by whether or not it

106 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is diluted or mingled with other accords. The same modern source that suggested that smelling undiluted civet may lead to death (“If inhaled undiluted, civet is so strong it can cause nosebleeds and sometimes death”) also states “When properly diluted, it has a much more refined scent, more floral than musky” (Kohl and Francouer 69). Diane

Ackerman concurs: “Some smells are fabulous when they’re diluted, truly repulsive when they’re not. The fecal odor of straight civet would turn one’s stomach, but in small doses it converts perfume into an aphrodisiac” (14). Unfortunately, except when consulting medicinal or cosmetic recipes, we cannot determine the strength of the civet, and therefore the categories of foul and fragrant are not helpful. The courtier may wear robustly unadulterated civet and the fashionable gentlewoman may splash on a highly diluted civet tempered with rosewater, but they may still stink to the soldier or the shepherd.

For a modern example of how difficult it is to describe the affective essence of civet, we can consider the perfume Rose Poivrée (2000), chosen for this example as its compound is similar to some of the most highly regarded Renaissance perfumes. The first ingredient, which is also the middle note—Damascus rose—and the final ingredient, the base note—civet—are two of the most common sixteenth century perfume ingredients, and furthermore, are often blended together.128 The amount of Damascus rose used is impressive and so listed on The Different Company’s website as part of its description of the perfume: “It takes over one hundred pounds of precious Damascus rose petals to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 128 The head note of a perfume is the immediate and initial impression, often of a sweet savor, which evaporates quickly—the rose absolute, unlike rosewater, waxes and wanes a bit more. The middle note of a perfume emerges as the top note fades, and is often the most well-rounded and hearty note of the overall composition. Finally, in a perfume we encounter the base note, the depth and solidity, the lingering aftereffect of the perfume, which is often the most contradictory aspect, often both earthy and rich, yet haunting. 107 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! produce just one bottle of Rose Poivrée” (Lucky Scent n. pag.). Synthetic civet is much more common in today’s perfumes, as the harvesting of civet is considered unethical and cruel; the harvesting has not really changed in hundreds of years and involves scraping the perineum sac of the civet at least twice per month. This is a painful procedure and performed without any anesthetics. This seems quite at odds with the depictions of the civet asking the breeder to remove her flux as given in the early modern bestiaries.

Authentic civet was a key component of some famous twentieth-century perfumes, such as Chanel No. 5, which now also uses synthetic civet. Rose Poivrée, however, still uses natural civet.

Chandler Burr, formerly perfume reviewer for The New York Times, reviews several civet-based perfumes, including Rose Poivrée (2000), with its strong notes of rose absolute and civet:

The overall effect is akin to breathing in the warm, slightly fetid breath of some

immense, fur-covered animal. It is that moment in an Indian spice market when a

surge of sweltering, humid air, as if from the lungs of some morose god, drowns

you in spice and car exhaust. (Burr “Cat” n. pag.)129

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 129 Yet in another article on civet for The New York Times, Burr creates a different “imagery voice”: One of the more astonishing civet scents on the market today is Rose Poivrée, from the French niche house the Different Company. This is a rose absolute — rose absolute, F.Y.I., doesn’t smell like “rose”; it’s dark and musty. Its perfumer, Jean-Claude Ellena, resisted prettifying the rose and instead doused it with an animalic breath. Pungent with decay, Rose Poivrée is unsettling and gorgeous, the perfume that Satan’s wife would wear to an opening at MoMA. (Burr “Meow” n. pag.). In the second review, the divine is still there (“Satan’s wife”), but now gender is added (this is not Satan, but his wife), and the setting is not a crowded, developing country, but rather the elite of New York City’s arts scene.

108 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We can sniff out how a modern expert on perfume uses imagery voice to create a complex conceit of civet. In Burr’s review, Rose Poivrée is likened to first the breath of a beast, recalling the animalistic yet erotic characters of fairy tales, such as in “Beauty and the Beast.” Then, Burr exoticizes the scent, by moving the reader through olfactive space to the smellscape of the crowded and pungent streets of modern day Calcutta, mixing the lowly (exhaust fumes of vehicles) and the divine (“some morose god”). Another blogger insists on the importance of the “dirtiness” of the scent: “If you happen to come across a bottle that smells particularly dirty and unattractive, please...purchase it” (Dane n. pag.).

Even for modern professionals, the metaphors become mixed and confusing; the imagery is strong and evocative, but oscillates between the concrete and the abstract in perplexing ways. So, we can only imagine the difficulty of early modern writers to express how civet smelled or how they were affected by the smell of civet. Kevin Curran and James Kearney remind us that “the way we smell perfume is different from the way

Queen Elizabeth smelled perfume” (354). Yet, in Rose Poivrée, the two ingredients that resonate most strongly are civet and rose absolute, both essential scents in sixteenth century perfumery. It is not the disparity in time period that distinguishes the hedonic response to civet as much as concentration levels of civetone, the addition of other fragrant ingredients, and highly idiosyncratic preferences. While we may smell perfume differently than Queen Elizabeth, the affects of civet—as a powerfully erotic, “dirty,” divine, and yet, transcendent odor—are described in similar terms, whether in modern

New York City or Renaissance England

Civet’s introduction into England was a royal entry, as according to the OED,

“civet” entered the English language when the animal initially entered the royal court.

109 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First mentioned in King Henry VIII New Year’s gifts “given by the king’s Grace to these persons ensuing” in 1532, when a “gentleman” “Stephen Andrew, that gave a beast called a ‘shevet’” to both the King and his estranged Queen Catherine (Calendar of State Papers

686.327). In the recipe for “King Henry the eight his perfume, ” rosewater is combined with fine sugar, musk, ambergris, and civet (the last three ingredients are all musky, animal-based odorants) (A Closet 143).130 In this version of a pre-modern celebrity fragrance, we find Henry’s name attached as the perfume preferred by the King. The very title of this perfume hints at the royal (and possibly divine) aspects of this particular savor, and, by association with Henry, a sense of virility that Henry cultivated through his use of civet and rose perfumes, but was later exaggerated after his death with his history of wedding, bedding, and beheading.

These are aspects that Burr hints at in his review of Rose Poivrée. While wary of stating that these two different perfumes—especially with differences in ingredients, proportion, and maybe most importantly, distinctly different noses smelling these odorants—there is still a lingering affect that transcends time, space, and culture that makes the smeller link civet and rose (when combined) with divinity, sexuality, and animalism. Rose Poivrée’s website claims these very same associations: “A royal scent from exotic lands, this decadent essence mixes pure rose with a devilish pepper and spice,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 130 We find other civet and damask rose recipes that also refer to the court, such as Hannah Woolley’s “To make Court Perfumes” (90). Woolley, Hannah. The queen-like closet; or, Rich cabinet stored with all manner of rare receipts… London : printed for R. Lowndes: 1670. 110 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! a combination fit for kings, queens and all who seek the divine (with a touch of naughty) in fragrance” (The Different Company n. pag., emphasis added).131

It is fruitful to compare and contrast these two Elizabethan perfume ingredients: the familiar rose and the mysterious civet. In Holly Dugan’s second chapter on rosewater in the court of Henry VIII, she begins with the iconography of the Tudor rose and the importation of Damascus roses during Henry’s reign, Like the civet, both perfumes were introduced as gifts for the king, and both were adaptable to the English climate, yet the damask rose was gifted from the king’s royal physician Dr. Thomas Linacre, and the civet, from a gentleman courtier (44). Additionally, while the Damask rose was a relative new import into England, the Tudor rose, with its iconic white (Lancaster) and red (York) rose imagery, was already a beautiful blending of old English royal families, the ingredients complementing like a well-considered perfume. Civet, on the other hand, was a sometime foreign, exotic, mystical, and potentially dangerous beast, and her perfume was therefore subject to scrutiny. Dugan argues that Henry VIII repurposed the Catholic associations of the scented rose as a form of potent Anglicanism, English nationalism, and his own self-fashioning, so that the while previously a rose (related to the Virgin

Mary) was a “symbol of faith and purity that transcended earthly things like human bodily smell” it evolved into “an active, erotic engagement with the smells of embodiment” (58). The civet a novel import into Henry’s England was likewise

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 131 The rest of the description continues: “A royal scent from exotic lands, this decadent essence mixes pure rose with a devilish pepper and spice, a combination fit for kings, queens and all who seek the divine (with a touch of naughty) in fragrance. The true beauty of Rose Poivrée is its amazing turns—from the tangle of dark, luscious rose petals to the fiery spice-meets-green evolution, it never fails to captivate and enchant. A rare, costly and beautiful gem for the wild sensualists among you.” We will sniff out the divine, royal, and devilish aspects in Burr’s reviews, but it is interesting to note that the description lacks any references to the animalic qualities of the perfume. 111 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! introduced just at the perfect time to reflect upon Henry’s own virility, nationality, and religious standings. The civet-based perfume then is (as our metaphoric and imagery voice list grows): ambiguous, mystical, divine, royal, animalic, dirty, and highly aphrodisiacal.

The Civeted Courtier in Renaissance Drama and Poetry

This olfactive encoding becomes the standard shorthand to identify the courtier— and his cousin character types: the effeminate suitor, the ostentatious gallant, and the city gull—and especially his difference from the brave soldier. In Much Ado About Nothing, the soldier Benedick shaves his beard, begins wearing dapper clothes, and even composes a “halting sonnet” after returning from war (5.4.87). His friend Don Pedro remarks, “[He] rubs himself with civet. Can you smell him out by that?” (3.2.42-43). His comrade

Claudio explains Benedick’s novel usage of perfume: “That’s as much as to say the sweet youth’s in love” (3.2.44). The use of civet marks his return from his recent victorious military campaign and hints at his new battle: winning Beatrice’s love. While her younger cousin Hero enjoys her new love-token, a pair of scented gloves, Beatrice states that she has a cold and cannot smell them (3.4.52-55). Hero, the conventional romantic heroine, is susceptible to romantic scents yet the more stubborn and independent Beatrice cannot be moved by the scent of love, even Benedick’s civet-perfumes.

In a related example, Thomas Heywood’s The Royall King and the Loyall Subject

(c. 1602, pub. 1637) provides an allegory of a kind king who tests and separates his trusty subjects from capricious courtiers. In this play, we have a soldier turned courtier,

Corporal Cock, and like Hotspur, we can smell out the difference between soldier and courtier:

112 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why this is as it should be; now doe I smell Courtier already, I feele the Souldier

steale out of me by degrees, for Souldier and Courtier can hardly dwell both

together in one bosome. … Now farewell Gunpowder, I must change thee into

Damask-powder; for if I offer but to smell like a souldier, the Courtiers will stop

their noses when they passe by me. (Act 4. I1v).

The soldier here smells of gunpowder, and the courtier of damask-powder—scented body powders consisting of Damascus roses. The switch in personal body smells is decidedly a performance: “For if I offer but to smell like X” indicates that the same man could fulfill either martial or courtly roles by properly odorizing for the part, “present[ing] the self with creditable odors through the ‘art’ of perfuming” (Largey and Watson 35). Whereas

Hotspur stopped his nose at the sweetly scented messenger, now Cock is afraid that if he were to look and smell like a soldier, he would be excluded from the court.

Even more troubling for the rebellious and noble soldier Hotspur might be similarities between these antithetical stock characters, or what Mario DiGangi labels

“sexual types.” DiGangi points out, “Hotspur speaks copiously in denouncing the courtier for his copious speech” (4). Di Gangi argues, “Perhaps most telling in terms of Hotspur’s affinity with the courtier is his joke about the courtier’s nose taking the perfume box ‘in snuff’: a pun on ‘to snuff’ as ‘to inhale’ and ‘to take in snuff’ as to take offense at something. Diverted by his own wit, Hotspur indulges the same impertinent ‘holiday’ language of which he accused the frivolous lord (1.3.45)” (4). Hotspur, by enacting the role of this courtier and recalling his so sweet perfumes collapses the difference between effeminate courtier and stalwart soldier. Soldiers and courtiers are both masculine performances with set costumes, props, flourishes, actions, and even odorants.

113 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In James Shirley’s allegorical comedy A Contention for Honour and Riches

(1633), Lady Rich is courted by a bevy of stereotypical suitors—the scholar (Ingenuity), the country gentleman (Clod), the successful merchant (Getting), etc. Two of her suitors find themselves especially at odds with one another: Soldier and Courtier. Soldier refers to Courtier repeatedly as “Musk cat” and “Civet box,” the luxurious and olfactive elements of his self-fashioning. Likewise, in Solimon and Perseda (1592), Piston, the servant of the Rhodesian knight Erastus, mocks the braggart knight Basilisco for his trumped up battle boasts and protests that he smells like a courtier, rather than a warrior:

He might not wear no iron. He wears Civet,

And when it was askt him, where he had that muske,

He said, all his kindred smelt so. (B3r)

Ben Jonson offers several of his shorter epigrams on courtly stereotypes describing the failures of masculine perfume use. Three poems are dedicated to a “Sir

Cod,” whose name both denotes the testicles and a sweet bag containing perfumes.132 In these witty poems, the courtier-knight, despite or because of his flamboyant fragrances, fails at his intended ends. He cannot marry even a widow because “he woos with an ill sprite”; he is in bad spirits, a play both on his temperament (and therefore also his humoral makeup), but also his “essence” or “spirits” as the airy part of his composition imbued with his distinct scent (“On Sir Cod the Perfumed” 2). In the following epigram

“To the Same Sir Cod,” “Th’ expense in odours is a most vain sin, / Except thou could’st,

Sir Cod, wear them within” (1-2). His perfumes are both a sign of vanity and prodigality,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 132 OED defines “cod” (n1.) as a “civet bag, or musk-bag” (1b) or “the integument enveloping the testicles, the scrotum; improperly inpl. testicles. (Not in polite use.)” (4).

114 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and underscore his moral deficiencies. In fact, the sweetness of his perfumes only calls attention to the corrupt nature of his soul. This suspicion of civet-perfumes is the reason that Olfactus, the Sense of Smell, does not win the contest for supremacy of the Five

Senses in Thomas Tomkis’s allegorical comedy Lingua (1607): “None can wear civet, but they are suspected of a proper bad scent, whence the proverb springs, he smelleth best, that doth of nothing smell” (4.3.49). The use of perfume is considered deceitful, because it does not enhance natural scents, but deceptively attempts to obscure stench.

Yet, a state of inodorousness is impossible and unnatural.133 Early modern people, then, in a time before deodorants and antiperspirants, were especially dependent on perfumes to obscure stench, even if such odorants were demonized in contemporary literature.

The stench of civet extends outside of the fictive world of the play and into the world of the playhouse, in which playgoers are chided for their uncouth conduct.

According to Thomas Dekker, perfumed gallants and gulls who pay to sit upon the stage stink up the theatre as much as the poor groundlings. Holly Dugan observes “a sixteenth- century stage devoid of smell is anachronistic” (“Scent” 230).134 The stage would be a bouquet of accidental and unintended smells: body odors, such as sweat and the musky civet perfumes favored at this time; the smells of certain trades that clung to clothing, skin, and hair, such as the smells of tanning and leather work; the aromatics of certain clothing, such as sewn-in sachets, orange and clove pomanders, spiced smell-traps, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 133 Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume (1986), set during Revolutionary France, revolves around a serial killer with a highly developed sense of smell, yet no body odor of his own, who he hunts especially fragrant virgins to distill their sweet essence. 134 Without and around the theatre, we can turn to Holly Dugan’s work on the sites of particular theatres and their specific smellscapes, such as the Hope Theatre and the Rose Theatre, as especially foul locations. Holly Dugan’s “ ‘As Dirty as Smithfield and As Stinking Every Whit’: The Smell of the Hope Theatre” and in Ephemeral History, she focuses on the location of the Rose Theatre (pp. 60-69). 115 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! flowers worn in hats and on shoes; tobacco; the smell of the refreshments sold in the theatres, such as apples, nuts, and ale; and the musty smell of wet straw underfoot mingled with stale urine (Gurr 13-79). Tiffany Stern writes on the blurring of boundaries between actor and audience member in the smaller Blackfriars Theatre as both played their “parts,” and how playwrights attended to the “theatricality of place” (Stern 51).

Stern notes the synaesthetic contribution of audience members—especially the feathered, brightly dressed, flamboyant “certain lords” seated on the Blackfriars stage—which are worked into the dramatic imagery. Stern mentions that “the audience, too, were scented”

(45).135 Likewise, Andrew Gurr observes: “Apart from perfumes, the most distinctive smell at the indoor playhouses, and in the lords’ rooms at the amphitheaters, was tobacco” (48).

In his The Gull’s Hornbook, Dekker carps against the “New-found college of critics”:

You courtiers, that do nothing but sing the gam-ut a-re of complimental

courtesy, and, at the rustical behaivour of our country muse, will screw forth wore

faces than those which God and the painter has bestowed upon you; I defy your

perfumed scorn, and vow to poison your musk-cats, if their civet excrement do

but once play with my nose… (8).

Dekker associates civet-perfumes and tobacco smoke with the “good dry-brained polypragominsts” and “ordinary Gulls” (8), but differentiates their offensive odors from that of the “garlic-mouthed stinkards” (9). The civet-perfumes of the on-stage gallants

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 135 She continues: “Lenton describes the ‘rare perfum’d attires’ of one gallant, and Harison disgustedly depicted the spectators as ‘so adorned, so decked, so perfumed, as if they made a place the market of wantonesse’” (45). 116 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! contribute to the overall smellscape of the theatre, but these loud perfumes fail to sweetly scent the wearer, and instead mark the boorish gallants as a type of stinking stage prop.

A formerly civeted character could denounce his perfumes as a sign of redemption. Monsieur Civet joins a cast of other allegorically and humorally named city comedy characters in the 1605 anonymously authored (but attributed to Shakespeare) The

London Prodigal.136 Although he is initially dismissed by Flowerdale, the eponymous prodigal, as a “foole, but reasonable rich,” after receiving a large estate due to his father’s wise (and possibly unscrupulous) investments and business ventures, Civet leaves behind his wanton youth and prodigality to marry Frances, sister of the cautious spinster Delia

(B2r). After Civet convinces Delia that he will handle his finances and provide for

Frances, Civet insists the sisters call him by his first name (C4v-r). Like so many other civeted courtier characters, Civet is reduced to synecdoche, only represented by his luxurious scent. Rejecting his title and surname “Monsieur Civet”—coded as foreign, luxurious, prodigal, wasteful—Civet asks Frances and Delia to call him “Tom,” a familiar name, a Christian name, an emphatically English name.137 While speech prefixes remain “Civ.” throughout the play and other (male) characters continue to refer to him by his surname, Frances and Delia only call him by his English first name, thereby rejecting

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 136 Other characters include Weathercock (a “fantastical person”), Daffodill, Artichoke, and the love interest Frances Spurcock (“a well known name for a whore, and a stock character in the Commedia dell’Arte; her name means ‘free’ and (via her nickname ‘Franck’) also suggests a pigsty” (Bate and Rasmussen 426). In the new edition of The London Prodigal, the editors gloss Civet’s name as “substance with a strong musky smell, obtained from the anal glands of the African Civet cat, used in the production of perfume; its use was regarded as a sign of decadence” (426). 137 There is no mention of Monsieur Civet’s perfumes or aromas, but his very name implies that he is such a perfumed courtier-fop stock character. The first name “Tom” also hints at his virility as a tomcat. 117 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! any of the superfluous indulgences of his past, and encoding him as a reformed English gentleman and practical husband.

While Shakespeare’s aristocratic characters do often refer to social inferiors and foreigners as reeking, yet early modern “comparative encounters” do not move in a simple continuum with aristocrats on the fragrant side and peasants on the foul.138 Unlike

Carlisle’s hierarchical comparative encounters of Victorian novels, early modern osmologies are much more complex and fluid. Hotspur is a nobleman, a rebel against the king, and a valiant soldier, while the messenger is a courtier, a loyal servant to the king, and, at best, a “carpet knight.” Hotspur’s repugnance, as noted earlier, is not due to encountering a lower class man with some offensive or embarrassing body odor, but rather the incongruity of a sweet smelling man amongst others who are stinking of sweat and blood.

Before moving onto the ways that civet challenged ideas of bodily and moral wellbeing, it makes good sense and better scents to spend some time working through another significant “comparative encounter” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that again challenges the assumptions of class and status associated with sweet-smelling civet perfumes. Touchstone, the courtly clown, is not adapting well to his new bucolic setting, and philosophizes on the pros and cons of the pastoral versus courtly lifestyles. The shepherd Corin counters that “good manners” are highly subjective, declaring “Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 138 See the previous chapter for a survey of Shakespeare’s “comparative encounters,” a term coined by Janice Carlisle in her Common Scents, her study of High Victorian fiction. “Comparative encounters” describe “meetings between two individuals of unequal status whose differences are registered when one of them perceives an odor” (3) or “more or less explicitly setting two characters in evaluative relation to each other, such a meeting declares one the superior of the other” (10). 118 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! country is most mockable at the court” (3.2.39-41). Judy Z. Kronenfeld argues nicely that in As You Like It, “The debate between Corin and Touchstone is, then, an interesting version of the pastoral confrontation between high style and low, complexity and simplicity, as well as a variant on the debate between town and country values” (345).

The old shepherd is able to articulate clearly and succinctly the social norms of rural versus courtly life with a specific and bodily example: the courtly custom of hand- kissing. Corin states that the practice would be unhygienic, due to their constant contact with animals, the sheep’s “greasy” skins, and “tar” used to treat the sheep’s wounds.

Furthermore, in a decidedly unromantic depiction of the laborer’s body Corin is decidedly aware of his own rough and sweaty body, declaring himself, “a true laborer” in contrast to the “courtier’s hands… perfumed with civet” (3.2.45, 53, 63, 54-55).

Largey and Watson, while writing about modern sociology of odors, hint at the same types of olfactive performances and judgments present in this scene: “In

[contemporary] Western societies urbanites may be heard identifying farmers with manure or “earthy-dirty” work, while the farmer may label the urbanite as “‘artificial- smelling,’ perfumed, or factory smelling” (33). Touchstone, however, as Shakespeare’s clowns do, challenges binaries—courtier/laborer, royal court/forest, and even socially constructed conceptions of what specific groups of people should smell like. Corin states that his hands are “greasy” from handling sheep’s oily coats; Touchstone asks, “Why, do not your courtier’s hands sweat?” (3.2.47). That is, any human body exudes, leaks, creaks, sweats, and otherwise oozes, regardless of class or status. The courtier’s body is just as susceptible to the stench of sweat as the laborer’s body. Rather like the concept of the body politic and the body natural, the perceived or idealized courtier body does not sweat

119 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(partially as it is perceived not to labor which causes perspiration), but the physical body of the courtier does smell.

Touchstone also decries what obscures the natural odors of the courtier’s hand: the civet perfume. Whereas Corin describes his own hands as “hard,” “uncleanly,” and

“tarred over,” Touchstone notes the difference between idleness and employment, and between luxury and utility (3.2.50, 43, 53). The shepherd and a courtier both have hands covered in sticky animal unguents: on the one hand, tar and lanolin are both agents used by shepherds to cover and heal wounds; and on the other, civet, is a foreign-based animal-extracted odorant. Touchstone decrees, “Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat” (3.258-59). Simply put, civet is Bill Brown’s “thing”; it fails as perfume. Tar—a sticky, darkly-colored and viscous liquid made of burnt wood or charcoal noted for its “heavy resinous or bituminous odour and powerful antiseptic properties”—serves an occupational utility (unless one considers hand kissing as an occupational duty for the courtier).139 Lanolin, also called “wool wax,” “wool fat,” or

“wool grease” is the yellow, waxy substance that accumulates on sheep’s wool to protect the animals from the rain, but must be removed during the scouring process.140 Lanolin is a natural lubricant and is used for its healing and protective properties on human skin.

Corin’s hands are both defiled and protected by this ovine excrement. Either way, what becomes obvious in this exchange is that different bodily odors are identified with the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 139 “Tar,” n. 1. Oxford English Dictionary. Def. 1. 140 “Wool wax” and “wool fat” are both crosslisted with “lanolin”—“ The cholesterin- fatty matter extracted from sheep's wool, used as a basis for ointments”—and “suint”— “the natural greasy substance in the wool of sheep, consisting of fatty matter combined with potash salts” (“lanolin, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 27 June 2015). For “wool grease,” see “suint, n.” (OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 27 June 2015). All three terms are listed under “compounds” for “wool” (“wool, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 27 June 2015. 120 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! courtier and the shepherd, and that the smells of the court serve no utility in the countryside just as the smells of the countryside might be considered offensive in the royal court. Corin’s greasy hands are “hard,” “uncleanly,” and “tarred over,” yet they are only “dirty” (as in Douglas’ sense) when he is the presence of a courtier.

In her section on this exchange, Kronefeld concludes, “This shepherd’s content

[with his simple lifestyle], then, is not the courtier’s dream of content, nor is it content based merely on a recognition that it is best to accept limitation in return for not having to risk danger. It is the self-acceptance of an entirely separate and very English caste which would say that ‘comparisons are odious’” (347). While the discussion over the merits of civet and tar are only another example of Kronenfeld’s larger focus on Shakespeare’s more naturalistic pastoral and the limits of “traditional cultural relativism” (346), she nonetheless notes the very sort of “comparative encounters” or “sociology of odors” outlined above. When she ends with the well-known adage, she misses the opportunity to create the very sort of pun that such encounters assert over and over in Renaissance literature: comparisons are odorous.

Touchstone’s civeted hands are “dirty” in a different sense; the source of civet defies classification and is always considered foreign and potent, even after it has been introduced into everyday English culture. Likewise, while Hotspur and his soldiers may appear “dirty” to those of us concerned with germ theory and pathology—considering dysentery, typhus, malaria, gangrene, etc. that plagued soldiers living in cramped, unhygienic, and inclement conditions—it is the “so sweet” messenger who becomes the

“matter out of place” that stinks in such a military camp. In both the example from 1

Henry IV and more obviously in the example from As You Like It, we can determine that

121 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! perfume was an important and expressive determining factor in one’s self-fashioning and in creating an osmological hierarchy. Yet, unlike our own modern preferences for the deodorized body and the sweet smells of our favorite colognes and perfumes, we note that early modern bodies did not exist on a simplistic olfactive pH scale from foul

(physically or psychically unwell) to fragrant (clean bodies and pure souls) with a state of inodorousness as the middle neutral, but rather that foul bodies could be tolerated under specific conditions and fragrant bodies could be cause for alarm.

Like the conversation between Corin and Touchstone on the differences between country and courtly customs, or the argument between Hotspur and the king’s messenger, these masculine types are really olfactive performances. With such a complex bouquet of affects and associations, it is no wonder that this was the perfume of failed courtiers and potent kings, but also diseased prostitutes and immoral men. For early modern Puritans, especially, but those with more austere aesthetics generally, civet blurs class lines and gendered lines, causing more ambiguity and further establishing itself as “matter out of place.” While civet (as base note) with the same top and middle notes (often rose attar) were worn by both men and women, we find different vices and desires attributed to the different sexes as they wear civet. Women are accused of lechery, pride, and obscuring the stenches of sexually transmitted infections. Men are accused of courtly aspirations and effeminacy. Both are accused more generally with immorality and a corrupt soul:

“But as for them that lap up their bodies in the pleasant mists of aromaticke perfumes, let them withall swallow this Pill: Within a sweet and civet lurking body, often is imprisoned a loathsome stinking soule” (Du Moulin 124).

122 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The sixteenth century French essayist Michel de Montaigne distrusts perfumes, believing that they are deceptive: “The simplest and most natural smells seem to me the most pleasant; and this applies chiefly to the ladies” (135). The heavy, sweaty civet mixed with the earthy compound of rose attar would definitely upset Montaigne’s fastidious nose. Civet is “stinking before the face of GOD” in a Puritanical complaint about feminine vanity and pride (Stubbes 51). The divine Thomas Adams warns of the deceitful lures women use to seduce men and waste time in front of the mirror: “Pride is of the feminine gender; (therefore the more intolerable in a masculine nature:) much

Civet is unsavory: No bene olet, quae bene semper olet. She that breaths perfumes artificially, gives her selfe to have naturally corrupted lungs. This woman hath neither her owne complexion nor proportion: for she is both painted, and poynted together” (Adams

33). If a woman has sweet breath then her body and soul must be pure, but artificially sweetened breath indicates disease and spiritual corruption.

Civet, due to its excremental origins and animalic thrust provokes lust and yet disguises the stenches of disease. Sir John Davies writes of “Gellam,” “the filthiest wench in town,” that with cosmetics covering her pockmarked face, her satin gowns and velvets covering her diseased frame, and “perfumed with civet hot” “her valiant stinking breath confounds,” she becomes “no more / Than a sweet, filthy, fine ill-favored whore.”

None of the artificial layers of costly and foreign luxury goods can distract from her syphilitic and immoral state. “A New merry ballad…” from 1630 informs us that we might smell out a “Cauilléere” as stinking like “Cats’ turds” to obscure his worse stench

Morbus Gallicus, syphilis, the French disease. Whether odious or sweet, one of the charges against civet is that it is too animalic; its bestial source and scent is too

123 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! aphrodisiacal and provokes lust. Jonstonus warns that “Herein like our Civetta, whose

Civet makes not themselves onely prove to lust, but mankind also, if annointed with it”

(114), and Dannenfeldt offers several early modern European writers who claim that civet, when “smeared on a lover’s penis pleased the woman in coition” (425).

John Donne’s Erotic Perfumes

The “erotics of reading” civet, to use Smith’s term again, must involve some discussion of John Donne’s poetry, specifically as he both extols and derides civet due to its aphrodisiacal qualities and sexual essence. John Donne becomes the poet exemplar to explore how a particular Renaissance poet reworked ancient sources, challenged

Petrarchan notions of beauty and purity, and played with naming the unnamable—that is describing the sweet aromas and flagrant stinks of the female body through metaphysical conceit. In John Donne’s “Elegy VIII: The Comparison,” the poet describes his own mistress as beautiful and sweet smelling while his rival’s mistress is repulsive and filthy.

The poem’s real intensity lies in the extended metaphors of the fragrant and the foul.

When writing on the scopophilic qualities of Donne’s famous “Elegy 19: On His

Mistress Going to Bed,” Catherine Belsey argues that deferral of consummation in the poem becomes a series of substitutions: “Donne’s poem… offers inventive analogies in place of flesh, witty comparisons, not the thing itself. … Donne’s speaker is still exercising his rhetorical skills when the Elegy ends” (66). In the case of “The

Comparison,” olfactocentrism, and especially olfactophobia, displaces the scopophilic fantasy of “Elegy 19,” and because of the “inventive analogies” necessary to describe perfume and “witty comparisons” explicitly mentioned in the title, this poem becomes an ouroboros of rhetorical skills and displaced disgust/desires. Stanley Fish has beautifully

124 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! described it as “an amazing performance, a high-wire act complete with twists, flips, double reverses, and above all triumphs, triumphs at the expense of the two women who become indistinguishably monstrous when the poet makes it impossible to tell the difference between them” (159).

Donne’s “The Comparison” begins with an odoriferous ode to the poet’s sweet mistress, even more explicitly the aromatic sweat of her breasts:

As the sweet sweat of roses in the still,

As that which from chafed’s musk cat’s pores doth trill

As are the almighty balm of the early east,

Such are the sweat drops of my mistress’ breast. (1-4)

The first line refers to the distillation process of roses, but the process produces both the rose oil (“sometimes [with] a rotten, indolic quality” (Dane n. pag.)) as well as the more familiar and softly scented rose water. “Musk cat” is slang for a “prostitute or a courtesan,” conflating the poet’s own mistress with a perfumed whore, or comparing

(rather than contrasting) her with the rival’s own putrid mistress.141 The “almighty balm of the early east” is a Biblical reference to the balm of Gilead (Clements 54, n. 3), now linking the mistress’ sweat to divine healing agents. Because of the problem of describing odors through metaphors or imagery voice, the first three lines create the anaphora “As

[this odorant]…” with the payoff in the fourth line with the comparison to and the source of the odor, the “sweat drops of my mistress’ breast.” Just as civet is harvested, the sexual

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 141 Both Diane Ackerman and Alain Corbin affirm that many Indo-European words for “prostitute” and any member of the skunk family are related, and both refer to the earlier root word for “rotting” (Ackerman 21). In my article ““Do You Smell a Fault?’: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor,” I analyze Lear’s “fitchew,” another odoriferous animal/whore term. 125 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! odors are distilled from the excremental flux of his mistress. The mistress and the civet- cat are fungible, both producers of erotic and divine odors, and it becomes difficult to differentiate between the subject, object, and thing of the poem, but all are fetishized and odoriferous. Achsah Guibbory writes that in these coterie poems of the 1590’s, “the female body’s ‘openness’ subverts all attempts at permanent masculine control, and ensures that dominance will always be unstable and precarious” (“Politics” 34). The destabilizing affects of perfume—the odors, desires, and abhorrences which cannot be contained or even named—waft through Guibbory’s description of how the Elegies function.

The poet then turns to describing his rival’s mistress:

Rank frothy sweat thy mistress’ brow defiles,

Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils… (6-7)

In Donne’s anti-Petrarchan blazon, both mistresses sweat, but while one yields sweet perfumes and pearls, the other discharges stinking pus and worse secretions. “Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,” but the poet’s mistress’ sweat is likened to perfumes and “pearl carcanets” (8, 5). “Rank,” as Richard D. Altick points out in his essay “Hamlet and the Odor of Mortality,” is “luxuriant,” “stinking,” and “also used in the more specialized sense of ‘in lecherous heat’” (173).142 The civet’s name is also often given as “zibet” or “zibeth” in early modern texts, and the OED links “the [Arabic] word with zabada to cream, foam, froth… etc., as if originally applied to the secretion [of the civet-cat].” Donne’s wordplay, while creating a monstrous olfactive analogy of the rival- woman’s sweat, also recalls how early modern bestiaries describe the excretion of civet

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 142 Hamlet’s description of Denmark as “an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ possess it merely” (173). 126 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! as sweat, foam, or froth. The tenor of the following line changes when the rank sweat moves into simile: “Like spermatic issue of ripe monstrous boils…,” but even here this can recall the early zoologist La Primaudaye’s description of the male civet cat’s supposed menstruations.143 While the preferred mistress may have diluted her civet-like stenches with her combined rosy fragrances, in this initial olfactive “comparison” both mistresses still exude odors that have civetone qualities. That is, the disgusting, the abject, and the grotesque effluvia of the rival’s mistress are likened here to civet, and are therefore not unlike the poet’s mistress’ own civet-like aromas.

Donne’s poem ends with a promise to quit taunting his rival: “Leave her, and I leave comparing thus, / She, and comparisons are odious” (53-54). Fish writes that this final line is:

a moment of revulsion, not from the women for whose features he is, after all,

responsible, but from the act by which he makes of them (and us) whatever he

wills. Comparisons are odious because they are too easy. Given the requisite

verbal skill, it is impossible for them not to succeed, and … what pleasure can be

taken in the exercise of a skill if it meets no resistance? (Fish 16)

Comparisons may be too easy, especially when drawing upon models as commonly known as Ovid and Petrarch. Lynn Magnusson suggests that Donne mocks the very convention of poetic comparisons found in Elizabethan poetry: “Like Proserpine’s white

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 143 Pierre La Primaudaye thought that civetone was the blood of the cat, when in heat, and in his description the menstrual qualities are given to the male cat: When this beast is in rut, with the heat and rage that he then endureth, his nauell swelleth, and filleth it selfe with a certaine bloud, in maner of an impostume: which at length through much wallowing, and rubbing against trees, hee maketh to breake, out of which runneth this bloud, being halfe corrupted, which in tract of time becommeth very odoriferous. (La Primaudaye 836)

127 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! beauty-keeping chest” [from “The Comparison”], for example, might be a line from

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis or The Rape of Lucrece. That, however, is because

Shakespeare’s early poems participate in precisely the conventions of poetic diction and comparison that Donne is parodying in the diction and ‘odious’ comparison of this elegy”

(Magnusson 192). Yet the verbal gymnastics of Donne’s verse in describing an odor, that which is almost indescribable, demonstrates that there is more “resistance” in the English language than that for which Fish is accounting. Donne’s most astute reader may be

Shakespeare’s Dogberry, who knows that “comparisons are odorous” (3.5.14).144 This punning describes Donne’s poem wherein the smells of women (which are described in comparative similes) are compared to one another (creating a double comparison), and found to be both odious and odorous.

John Donne writes of perfumed desires and repulsions again in “Elegy IV: The

Perfume,” in which the narrator has been secretly meeting his beloved at her parents’ home for midnight trysts.145 The father, already aware that there is a flirtation between the two young lovers, bribes the younger brothers to spy and even hires a bodyguard. The mother examines the daughter’s body for costly gifts and early signs of pregnancy, sharing stories of her “own youth’s rank lustiness” (with all of the connotations of ‘rank’ as smelly as well as lecherous) to tempt her daughter to confide (24). The narrator, in all his finery, learns to walk silently through the house and even teaches his “silks their whistling to forbear” (51). The narrator and his mistress escape all of this scrutiny and are

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 144 See Chapter 1 for a fuller reading of Dogberry’s phraseology. 145 Helen Gardner notes “whether Donne himself was a rake or not he had a rake’s imagination and presented himself with gusto in such a light” (xxv, footnote i), and cites a case of seduction and a later sermon reflecting on his law school days (the assumed time of his composition for the Elegies), but for the purposes of this chapter, the biographical rake is not as important as the odoriferous and fevered “rake’s imagination.” 128 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! able to carry on their illicit affair, until one night when the narrator enters the parental household wearing his “loud perfume” (41). The father smells the narrator, catches the lovers in flagrante delicto, and the narrator laments that all of the daughter’s sexual exploits are laid upon him.

The Puritan Phillip Stubbes denounces perfumes in his chapter on women’s luxury apparels, linking perfume to feminine pride, highlighting the animalistic stench of civet/the stench of sex, and decrying the lingering base notes of the caprylic perfumes, which he asserts pollutes all that it touches:

Is not this a certain sweete Pride, to haue cyuet, muske, swéete powders, fragrant

Pomanders, odorous perfumes & such like, wherof the smel may be felt and

perceiued not only all ouer the house or place where they be present, but also a

stones cast of, almost, yea the bed wherin they haue layed their delicate bodies,

the places where they haue sat, the clothes and thinges which they haue touched

shall smell a wéeke, a moneth, and more after they be gon. But the

Prophet Esaias telleth them, instead of their Pomaunders, musks ciuets, balmes,

swéet odours and perfumes, they shall haue stench and horrour in the nethermost

hell. Let them take héed to it and amend their wicked liues. (Stubbes 51)146

Stubbes, in his diatribe, sounds like the beloved’s father, sniffing through the whole house, feeling for the warmth of the bed, searching for the stench of sex in the linens in

“the bed wherein they have laid their delicate bodies,” having erotic and aromatic fantasies of sexual indulgences, and smelling for lingering odors of concupiscence. Up to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 146 See Isaiah 3:24 (in the judgment against Judah and Jersalem): “And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.” 129 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! a month later, according to Stubbes, the odor remains, as does the memory of the erotic events. The sweet scents of perfumes and sex are confounded by the stenches of hell, and unlike the lingering, yet ephemeral enjoyment of fragrant aromas, the pits of hell reek forever. Yet, once caught and questioned by his mistress’ father, the narrator adopts

Stubbes’ puritanical prejudices against perfume.

Whereas the first fifty-two lines of “The Perfume” were addressed to the narrator’s mistress, from lines 53-70, the narrator addresses his own “traitorous” perfume in a parodistic apostrophe (54). The line between object and thing are even more blurred in this poem because the subject (the narrator) first addresses one object (his mistress) and then another object (perfume). The perfume also asserts its “thingness” as it fails (by calling the father’s unwanted attention); however, as perfume it is also subject, as it becomes difficult to differentiate the narrator’s and the perfume’s separate aromas. The narrator’s own beloved signature scent becomes the thing “that stops working for us” (to cite Brown again), as the odor stops the poet from achieving his desired ends, as he fails to consummate his desires even as he calls attention to his own illegal status within the house, as “matter out of place” (to retrieve Douglas’ definition of “dirt”). The perfume acts not as aphrodisiac, but rather as a blocking device that separates the two intended lovers; the perfume asserts its own agency or volition, or at the very least fails to do its sole job. The narrator can comically rail against his own perfume, his own scent, as his closest confidant or bosom friend (“whom I had laid/ Next me”) who betrays him to the father (“me traitorously hast betrayed”) while challenging notions of subject and object/thing (“and unsuspected hast invisibly at once fled unto him and stayed with me”)

(53-56).

130 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Previously, the narrator contrasted his own sweet perfume against the “bad smell[s]” emanating from the mistress’s father’s elderly and decrepit body—whether his stinking feet or bad breath. Now, the perfume even loses its sweet aroma and is reduced to its dirty origins as “base excrement of earth,” a deceitful odor that obscures the stench of the ill and/or makes the healthy reek so that they cannot be distinguished (56, 57-58).

Here, he derides the source of perfume as “excrement,” almost certainly referring to the beliefs about the civet-cat’s secretions (58). The continued diatribe moves into the conventional gendered attacks on perfume. He then lays first a standard misogynistic charge against perfume, that it obscures the stench of sexually transmitted disease: “By thee silly amorous sucks his death/ By drawing in leprous harlot’s breath” (59-60).

Then the narrator continues with the by-now familiar charge against perfumed men, especially courtiers:

By thee the greatest stain to man’s estate

Falls on us, to be called effeminate;

Though you much loved in the prince’s hall,

There, things that seem exceed substantial. (60-64, emphasis added)

Bill Brown writes “… things is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable” (5). The word “thing” “functions to overcome the loss of other words…” (4). What could be more about “the loss of words” than attempting to describe an odor? Perfume is always

“thing,” unnameable, unfigurable, unidentifiable, and dependent on comparisons, metaphors, and imagery voice to properly capture the affective qualities of the scent.

131 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Donne’s fear of “effeminacy” recalls Henry IV’s perfumed messenger, the soldier-cum-courtier Corporal Cock from Heywood’s The Royal King, and Jonson’s failure of the courtly knight Sir Cod in his lines. Helen Gardner persuasively argues that

Donne’s Elegies “give an overwhelming impression of masculinity” (xxiv), and in the narrator’s wearing of and later rejection of perfume shows that this masculinity is fraught and performative, including olfactive performances—that often fail. Perfume is shorthand for the worst vices of the royal court: effeminacy, emasculation, foreign and luxury goods, spiritual corruption, and vanity. The effeminacy may be attributed to a larger self-fashioning of sumptuous and outlandish costumes, but the civet-based perfume does not only smell musky and animalic; rather, the odor is often described as fecal or anal as well. Civet does not attempt to remove bodily stench as does soap, prevent it as does deodorant and antiperspirant, or disguise it as does floral or woodsy perfumes, but rather accentuates all the openly emitted effluvia of the human body. Smelling “skanky” or “like anus” (both modern descriptions of civet) or of “base excrement,” “uncleanly flux,” “rank sweaty froth,” “cats’ turds” (all early modern depictions), civet recalls the scents of the crevices and orifices of the erotic and fetishized human body—whether male or female.147

Freud expressed much anxiety about the sense of smell, the aromas of the genitals and anus, and sexual proclivities in Civilization and Its Discontents when he states that man became a visually-stimulated creature when he stood upright and quit sniffing other’s genitals, and he fears that there is still a fetishization of genital odors because of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 147 “Skanky” “base excrement” (Donne, “The Perfume”), “uncleanly flux” (Shakespeare, As You Like It), “rank frothy sweat” (Donne, “The Comparison”), “cat turds” (“A New merry ballad” (1630)). 132 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! our quadruped past: “Nor should we forget that, in spite of the undeniable depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in European peoples among whom the strong genital odors which is so repellent to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give them up” (Freud 63, footnote 6).

That is, the reason that civet-based perfumes devolve from erotic object to fetish to thing, is that civet reminds the smeller too much of the human body’s own wonderful and erotic stinks. Erica Fudge handsomely states:

Stable identity is shattered by odor, and perfume can thus be read as a self-

inflicted wound to that superior being called the human. “I think, therefore I am,”

it seems, is challenged by “I smell, therefore I am something else.” In these

instances—through choice and through loss of control—civet not only reveals its

own thingness; it also exposes the fact that the self can undo itself; that the will is

recalcitrant; that humans themselves are things. (Fudge 52)

What is most important in her quotation is that the person who wears civet smells of something (as purposefully vague as that is), which excites, titillates, and frustrates those who must smell such an odor. While Fudge attributes too much agency to the

“recalcitrant” civet-cat instead of the olfactive agency of the civet-perfume, as I have been arguing, the boundaries between such smells—whether civet-based perfume, civet as animal, human’s sexual and scatological odors, and/or other natural or artificial odorants—is much more unstable and difficult to ascertain, more fluid, and more likely to transgress boundaries. Boundaries of subject-(fetish)object-thing, or for more early modern cosmological concerns, the great chain of being—from the divine to royal bodies

133 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to courtier to whores to beasts—could be disrupted, confused, and made indeterminable by the scent of civet.

King Lear’s Therapeutic Civet

The strong smell of civet breaches boundaries and enters into the bodies of not only the wearer, but as Stubbes, Donne, and Hotspur all complain of, the smell lingers and can continue to be inhaled by others as well, possibly infecting or altering their own status, too. Civet-based perfumes, then, are always “thing,” that which forces the wearer- as-subject to confront his or her own body (as object) and its odors. Perfume is the substitute for the obscured, deodorized, or absent natural body odors, the unnamable essence of oneself. The decision for an early modern courtier or beloved mistress to apply perfume is to reconstruct and refashion the body’s natural state through a type of eroticized and fetishized prosthesis—enhancing, obfuscating, or eliminating natural odors—while making one’s own place in the early modern smellscape, precarious, liminal, “matter out of place,” but possibly also transcendental, sublime, royal, or divine.

Such perfumes affect not only physical health, but also the mind and emotion, for good or ill, and in the case of the ambiguous civet, this is especially true. Wearing perfume does not only alter the wearer, but affects anyone within proximity of inhaling the aroma. Michel de Montaigne in his essay “On Smells,” wishes “that doctors could make better use of smells than they do, for I have frequently noted that, depending on where they are they variously affect me and work upon my animal spirits” (353).148

Richard Palmer, in “In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 148 Burton alsos note the restorative powers of perfumes, simples, scented baths, but these cures are dispersed and not always and fully engaged with the sense of smell. 134 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century,” relates how the brain (and not the nose) was the organ of smell and for many philosophers and physicians smell was material (62-63).

The most familiar example of perfume used as therapeutic drug to alleviate psychological issues, “cleanse the head,” “refine wit,” and “revive sharp intentions” occurs in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Tomkis 4.2).149 After Lear curses his daughters and believes he has been polluted by their distinctly feminized, sexualized miasmas, Goneril and Regan shut their father out of doors to deal with the feminine Mother Nature and her tempest. All of this vitriol toward the female body and its effluvia becomes most apparent in Lear’s most elaborate and extended speech on the corrupted female body.150 The stenches Lear associates with the vilified female body choke him, so that he cries out:

Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,

To sweeten my imagination.

There’s money for thee. (4.6.126-129)

King Lear demands “civet” from an invented “apothecary” to “sweeten his imagination.”

Lear, undressed and removed from all the fineries and deceptions of the court—flattering daughters, rich silk gowns, and especially misleading perfumes—is not as lucky as the simple beggar because he still relies on and asks for civet. Erica Fudge, highlighting the animal-made-object, nicely argues that Lear’s insistence on civet demonstrates that Lear

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 149 See the “Introduction” for more on early medical beliefs of the brain as the sense organ of smell, and for an extended analysis of Tomkis’ personified Olfactus, who claims that sweet smells have positive effects on the mind. 150 See my article, “‘Do You Smell a Fault?’: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor” for more on the diseased stenches of Lear’s daughters, and the redemptive aromas associated with Cordelia.

135 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“still clings to his faith in humanity’s power over the natural world” (Fudge 55). Laurie

Shannon also reads this moment as the failure of human exceptionalism in the animal kingdom: “Instead of containing all creaturely capacities in a plenary way, Lear’s negative-exceptionalist man is a creature without properties, a natural-historical oxymoron … Beneath the ‘extremity of the skies,’ man is that unready animal who lacks a coat” (Shannon 196).

Both readings generate an animal studies focus of King Lear as a play that continuously describes man as “poor, bare, forked animal,” as “unaccommodated man,” the very “thing itself,” insufficient to survive in the post-lapsarian world, because the nude Bedlam Tom “ow’st the worm no silk… the cat no perfume” (3.4.94-101). By focusing on the absent civet-cat rather than called for civet-perfume, neither reading fully engages with the affective odor of the civet.151 Yet, that is what Lear explicitly calls for here. What is difficult to ascertain, however, is if the imagined civet that Lear demands will “sweeten his imagination” as a purely physical and sexual aid, or as a psychiatric cure. If in the former application, Lear may wish for the aphrodisiacal aromas to counter the stench of the imagined whores of his diatribe, to provoke himself with lust, and to become aroused. If he calls for the civet in this sense, to revive his “animal spirits,” to

“go to it” like a beast, then he is man-as-beast, but he seems to wish for a cure than is not physical, but psychological (4.6.110).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 151 Fudge does offer two really strong paragraphs on the affective aspects of the scent of civet, but as that is the very purpose of civet as far as early modern people are concerned, I am attempting to draw out the affective qualities and olfactory imaginations concerning this perfume. 136 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The early zoologist Jonstonius reminds us of the use of civet: “It hath a double use, the Druggists regard only the sent, Physitians the virtue” (Jonstonus 118).152 Lear seems to hope for the therapeutic effects described by Tomkis’ Olfactus, that is restoring

Lear to his sanity and a clear, sharp mind, rather than the cosmetic and aesthetic affects preferred by effeminate courtiers and disased prostitutes. Soon after this scene, Cordelia recovers her father, has a doctor attend to him, and he does temporarily regain his lucidity. Because the brain is acutely affected by odors, and civet is an especially potent, animalic, and yet royal and divine scent, it is the appropriate medicine to help restore

Lear to his kingly state of mind.153

One of the major writers on the civet-cat, La Primaudaye, finds the sweet scent of civet (despite its excremental origins) nothing less than an example of God’s mystery and

“marvell,” a chance to “admire the works of God”: “For from her [the civet] commeth an excrement so odoriferous, that as soone as it is smelt, doth pierce through all the senses and spirits, and serveth to compose very excellent perfumes” (La Primaudaye 836).

Likewise, Francis Bacon, in his work on putrefaction and excremental odors, is confounded by the sweet smell of civet and while he offers several scientific explanations, he lamely explains that,

The Reason may be, for that there passeth in the Excrements, and remaineth in the

Putrefactions, some good Spirits; especially where they proceed

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 152 See Holly Dugan’s essay “Osmologies of Luxury and Labor: Entertaining Perfumers in Early English Drama,” especially pages 73-75, for a brief history of England’s perfumers and their associations, disputes, and guildships with the Royal College of Physicians, the Worshipful Society of Grocers, and the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. 153 See my essay “Do You Smell a Fault?” for the steps Cordelia and the doctor take in their cleansing of Lear and application of perfumes to restore him to his senses in the following scene. 137 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

from Creatures, that are very Hot. But it may be also joined with a

further Cause, which is more Subtil; And it is, that the Senses love not to be

Overpleased. (Bacon 219)

Contrasting sources of odorants and their aesthetic affects (such as the smell of human urine as resembling his favorite odor violets), Bacon insists that some excrements may just have purer “spirits” or different humoral responses, or moving into a musical analogy, in which concords and discords work to create a more pleasing harmony, civet may be a complex and equally thrilling and revolting odorant. The early zoologist

Joannes Jonstonus also notes the affect of civet: “the sweetness of the scent shews it is no preternatural rottenness, but an exact concoction, and nature’s master-piece” (Jonstonus

117).

This ability to transcend, to become heavenly in aroma, is another puzzling piece to the paradox of civet. Mary Douglas reminds us that there is a type of “power in the inarticulate area, margins, confused lines, and beyond the external boundaries” (99).

Civet, as an odorant that blurs these lines, that is defiantly the inarticulate “thing,” that travels beyond boundaries, is also imbued with religious implications in Renaissance

England.154 The baseness and excremental sublimate into the transfiguration of civet’s sweet aroma to represent the pure soul. While “Civet-box” is a term of contempt for a perfumed courtier, demonstrating a costly façade and stinking interior (as in Shirley’s aforementioned play), “civet-box” is also appropriated by mid- through late seventeenth century religious poets and clergymen to represent that the body is only a container, but the retention of Biblical knowledge or good deeds is preserved within the soul as the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 154 See footnote 16. “Civet” is not a Biblical scent (unlike myrrh, frankincense, spikenard, etc.). I discuss the ingredients of religious incense in later chapters. 138 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sweet scent of civet. For example, the theologian Thomas Gataker, in his meditation on

Genesis 32:10—Jacob’s prayer before confronting Essau’s army—uses “civet-box” in this way: “Wee should be in this regard (to use the Heathen mans comparison) like civet- boxes, which though the Civet be taken out of them, yet retaine still the sent of it: The sweet sent of Gods mercies and gracious deliverances should remaine still in our minds by a faithfull and carefull remembrance of them, even when the act it selfe is over”

(Gataker 5).155

Likewise, the Restoration-era non-conformist preacher William Jenkins, in his sermon on Exodus during the funeral of fellow ejected Presbyterian Lazarus Seaman, teases out an osmology of men’s souls (while questioning the motives of conforming

Anglican clergy). Jenkins writes of man’s good name as “his Perfume to posterity” and a bad reputation as “rotting”; that “the places where we lived like the Civet-box” and the good deeds linger like the sweet scent of “Civet” “to savour of our holy Endeavours when we our selves are gone from and out of them” (44). Robert Groves, bishop of

Chichester, found the sermon not only too incendiary against the Anglican clergy, but also thought that Jenkins’ rhetoric savoured too much of Catholicism: “And so you see that he pulls out his Civet-Boxes and such things, so very often, that a Man would imagine he intended by this to preserve his People from the infection of Heresie, which he supposes to be the raging Disease of the Times. And he seems so mightily delighted with Ointments and Perfumes, that I wonder how he could endure the smell of very many of his own Expressions” (35). My larger purpose in this chapter is not to write on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 155 Genesis 32: 10: “I am not worthy of all thy Mercies, and all thy Truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy Servant: For with my staffe came I over this Iordan; and now am I become two troopes.”

139 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! religious dissension amongst Restoration clerics, but rather to demonstrate that civet and civet-boxes held contested religious connotations, rather than just associations with fragranced courtiers and loose women.156

Donne’s Sublime Perfumes

Returning to Donne’s “The Perfume,” the poem does not end with the negative affective essences of perfume. After decrying perfume’s “base” origins, its ability to provide olfactive disguises for diseased whores and to render male wearers effeminate, the poet moves away from the current debates concerning civet in early modern England, and ends, instead, by moving backward in time to the burning of perfumes in earlier religious rituals. The poet swears that perfumes are “loathsome all,” and that the gods only enjoyed the sacrifice and destruction of perfumes rather than their sweet scents:

“Gods, when ye fumed on altars, were pleased well, / Because you were burnt, not that they liked your smell” (67, 65-66).157 Erasing thousands of years of Judeo-Christian,

Greco-Roman, and near Eastern religious rituals based on the burning of sweet incense to placate God, the poet likens perfume instead to a religious miscreant burnt at the stake to appease angry gods.158 Donne’s narrator asserts perfume’s link to divinity only to rewrite thousands of years of ritual as a negation, rather than celebration of sweet odors.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 156 The final chapter, however, directly engages with the religiopolitical arguments over certain liturgical odors. 157 According to the OED, fume’s first definition is “the volatile matter produced by and usually accompanying combustion; smoke” (1a); following this are several definitions pertaining to odor: “odorous smoke” (1b), “something used or prepared for producing aromatic vapor” (1c), “odor or odorous exhalation (either fragrant or offensive) emitted from a substance, flower, etc.” (2), “vapor or steam given out by bodies when heated” (3), etc. 158 For examples of sweet odors in early Christianity, see Suzanne Evan’s “The Scent of a Martyr” Numen 49.2 (2002): 193-211 and Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Scenting Salvation: 140 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yet, thirty years later, as the libertine Jack grows into the reverend Doctor, Donne still refers to perfumes and even civet in several of his sermons.159 Not only does the late date of publication of the Elegies, collectively printed in 1633, two years after the death of Donne, link the anti-perfume poems, “The Comparisons” and “The Perfume” chronologically to his sermons, but the fragrances waft through both his religious and secular works and still retain their ambiguous significance.

Donne only explicitly mentions civet once, in his “First sermon preached to King

Charles, at Saint James, April 30, 1625.” Working with the most “ambiguous” and variously translated Psalm 11:3 “If the Foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Donne’s instructive sermon warns the new king to avoid bad counsel and false flatterers, reminding the king that he is Godlike but wicked counselors are merely

Idols: “They haue Eyes and see not, Eares and heare not, Hands and strike not; nay, (as hee addes there) if they haue Noses and smell not” (Donne “First” 9).160 Donne, in the above passage, cites Psalm 135, a familiar iconoclastic passage, and then continues with an ode to God’s synaesthetic vastness, writing on God’s panoptic omniscience (“Gods eyes are open vpon all our wayes; alwayes open, and hee cannot chuse but see…” (10) and God’s ears “so open, so tender, so sensible of any motion” to prayer (11)).161

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 159 The literary and personal biography of John Donne has been covered extensively, by John Carey in John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art; Izaak Walton’s The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotten, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert; Edward Le Comte’s Grace to a Witty Sinner; and Bald’s John Donne: A Life, amongst others. 160 Donne calls this passage “ambiguous” and “must necessarily receive such an Exposition” as he allows in his sermon (202). 161 For example, see James Simpson’s Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo- American Tradition for a fuller reading of iconoclasm, idolatry, and the persistence of this quotation from Psalms. 141 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As God’s divinely elected ruler on Earth, Charles must also keep his senses pure and unadulterated: “And then, if the Magistrate stop his Eares with Wooll, (with staple bribes, profitable bribes) and with Cyuet in his wooll, (perfumes of pleasure and preferment in his bribes) hee falsifies Gods Word…” (11). Civet here is mixed with wool

(the exotic and luxurious contaminating the utilitarian), the unguent dampening the wool so that no sounds of true entreaties can enter the magistrates’ ears, and the “perfumes of pleasure and preferment in his bribes” are the stench of political corruption and wanton excess.162 The civet-soaked wool along with bribery and greed all stinks too much like

Henry IV’s brazenly perfumed and flamboyant messenger—all flash and fume, but no substance, or even worse, the stench of corrupt and extravagant governance.

Donne returns to an extended aromatic conceit in his sermon for Easter Day,

1626. Meditating on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, “Else what shall they do that are baptized for dead? If the dead rise not at all, why are they then baptized for dead?” (1 COR. 15.29.), Donne ruminates on the body/soul divide, considering issues of multiple deaths (physical and spiritual), reason versus faith, the gluttonous and abstemious bodies, the glory of the resurrected body and the grace of the soul, and especially the mystery of the Resurrection. For Donne, the resurrection culminates in the reunion of soul and body, and the body is reconstituted and reconstructed. Ramie Targoff, in her John Donne, Body and Soul, writes on Donne’s fear of death, and fixated concerned with the separation of body and soul that permeates all his genres of writing.

“His obsession with the subject of our posthumous fate” is not only concerns over the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 162 Sheep husbandry and wool manufacturing was England’s major economic exportations at this time. Thomas More’s Utopia parodies the enclosure acts and wool production strategies during Henry VIII’s reign. 142 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immortality of the soul (and the possibility of eternal damnation), but extends to the horrors of the dead and rotting body, the abjectedness of decomposition and the

“noisome” stench of putrefaction (Targoff 164, 166-167).

After physical death, the “dead body falls by putrifaction into a dissolution, into atoms and graines of dust,” which is further degraded as “this dust falls into a dispersion, and is scattered unsensibly, undiscernibly upon the face of the earth” (206). From

“putrefection” and “dispersion,” the molecular remains of the dead body return to the

Adamic dust or dirt, but are also described not unlike how a scent is dispersed, travels, and disappears. The soul is the breath of God, and the spiritual death is permanent and damning, unlike the physical death all must experience.163 This spiritual death stinks even worse than rotting flesh: “Lazarus in the Gospell, that was dead; Domine jam faetemus, & quatriduani sumus, Lord we stinke in thy nostrils, and we have beene buried foure dayes”

(208).

From this point on in the sermon, Donne enters into an extended meditation of bodily aromas, perfumes, and man’s olfactive perceptions that remains a prominent theme in his discussion of the Resurrection and his return to the quotation from

Corinthians. After the fall in Eden, man lost both his personal sweet savor and also his ability to apprehend God’s grace through divine odors: “Perdidimus nardum nostra~, We have lost the sweet savour of our own Spikenard; for so the Spouse saies, Nardus mea dedit odorem suum: My Spikenard hath given forth her sweet savour. There was a time, when we had a Spikenard, and a sweet savour of our own” (208). If this loss of sweetness

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 163 There are a few who live to the time of the Rapture and their bodies and souls are only separated momentarily as the bodies are perfected. Donne fantasizes this type of Resurrection for himself (Targoff 118-119). 143 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! were not punishment enough, Donne turns to another passage from The Song of Songs, to demonstrate our debased postlapsarian scents and sensibilities: “We have not only lost Nardum nostram, The use of our own faculties, in originall sin, But we have lost also

Vnguentum Domini, The sweet savour, and the holy perfume of that oyntment which the

Lord hath poured out upon us” (208-209).

Donne’s performances as preacher—his pronuntiatio et actio—attend to his congregation, firstly as auditors, and secondly, as spectators, but in his elaborate sensuous imagery, especially his numerous references to putrefaction and sweet perfumes, Donne’s olfactive rhetoric may have an occasional valence.164 Scholars such as Carla Mazzio and

Jonathan Gil Harris suggest that we consider other sensory terms for bodies brought together in early modern theatrical spaces, assemblies (touch) and “olfactors” (smell), respectively. These bodies, packed together in St. Paul’s Cross—both reeking and perfumed, garlic-breathed or in freshly laundered linen—would contribute to the overall synaesthtic environment, creating a complex smellscape.165 In 1626, shortly after the end of an especially bad plague outbreak (the great plague year 1625), the stenches of burst buboes, rotting flesh, and unburied victims, along with the threat of the miasmas of the plague would still linger in the nostrils of his congregation.166 Donne’s various allusions to his olfactors’ Nardum nostrum and Vnguentum Domini had to have special resonance

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 164 Peter McCullough nicely outlines not only Donne’s rhetorical flourishes, but also his performative (volume and pitch, tone, and rhythm of voice; gestures and facial expressions; etc.) skills in creating highly effective and affective responses in his congregation. 165 Mathew Milner writes of parishioners pissing themselves at Saint Paul’s and the rotting scents of the buried dead, especially the high numbers in mass graves during plague years, under the nave and in the nearby graveyards of many churches justified the use of incense and sweet aromas (121). 166 I return to the smells of the plague in the following chapter. 144 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! at this particular moment. He compares the perfumes of repentant sinners to life-saving herbal aromas:

So the Lord of Heaven… may have smelt from us the savour of medicinall

hearbes, of Remorse, and Repentance, and Contrition, and Detestation of former

sins, And the savour of odoriferous, and fragrant, and aromaticall hearbes, works

worthy of Repentance, amendment of life, edification of others, and zeale to his

glory… (209)

The perfumes here may not be the civet-based perfumes discussed earlier, but they are still fragrant, and now imbued with healing, redemptive, and spiritual value. Yet, when

Donne reminds “the soule may be the forme of man, for without that, Man is but a carcasse,” his words anticipate the religious connotations of civet-box adopted by later preachers (208).

By following the whiff of a particular savour, here the popular civet-based perfumes, the complex and heady bouquets of different contested, reviled, and desired bodies—courtiers, kings, prostitutes, plague victims, and the reformed bodies of the

Elect—can be recovered. Jim Drobnick, in his introduction to The Smell Cultural Reader, notes that “the sense of smell is mired in paradox. Considered earthy and animalistic, scents have nevertheless served as long-standing component in spiritual practices” (1), and this description is especially apt for civet. Civet, in these literary representations, is the socially discreditable odor when worn by courtiers or women. While the wearer believes he or she smells “so sweet,” critics will find the perfume as stinking, of debased origins, highlighting rather than deodorizing personal stench, obscuring disease, provoking lust, making men effeminate, and all the other failures which denotes civet’s

145 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“thingness” as “matter out of place” in the early modern London smellscape. Despite all of the above offenses, civet nevertheless also becomes a divine, redemptive, and healing scent in the early modern imagination, sweetly scented with the promise of eternal resurrection.

146 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 3: The Nasal Ethics of Thomas Dekker’s Plague Writings

In the previous chapter on the conflicting accords and overdetermined connotations of civet, I concluded with an analysis of Donne’s Easter Sermon, performed in St. Paul’s in 1626, imagining how the previous year’s devastating plague may have influenced Donne’s meditation on the putrefying body and the sweet perfumes of redemption. In this chapter, I move away from the scent of civet-based perfumes to analyze the stench of decay and the healing aromas of pomanders by focusing on the olfactive metaphors of plague writings from 1603-1625. I begin with an overview of miasma theory and link it to a working definition of “nasal ethics,” the metaphoric depiction of smelling out virtue and vice. The playwright and pamphleteer Thomas

Dekker’s “nasal ethics” creates an innovative topography of infectious disease that condenses London’s salubrious air to the intimate spaces of the reader reading about disease and the comforting crowds of the London playhouse. I analyze Dekker’s plague pamphlets thematically rather than chronologically to focus on stabilities and contradictions in his writings. Moving topically through such issues as miasma theory versus divine origins of the plague, governmental ordinances to contain the plague, wealthy Londoners fleeing to fresher rural airs, and the recuperative powers of shared laughter, I end with an extended analysis of his initial, boldest, and most pioneering plague pamphlet—The Wonderfull Yeare (1603).

While the Yersinia pestis bacteria—carried by the infected flea found on the common black rat—is our modern understanding of the plague source, ecological, 148 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! theological, and biological concerns were all linked together in the early modern period by stench. The plague was a multisensory disease as the preacher Roger Fenton, writing during the 1603 plague, explains in his several sensate etymologies. He states that

“pestilence” is linked to the verb “to speak” and because the people have not listened to

God, “he will speak with us” (A4r-A5v). Likewise, he argues that the word Moses used for “plague” meant “to smite” so “since we would not hear Him, we shall now feel Him”

(A5v, emphasis added). For Fenton, the plague can be felt, heard, and spoken.167 As the title of his theological treatise on the plague informs his readers it is most importantly an olfactive disease: A Perfume Against the Noysome Pestilence. There were not clear distinctions between the literal and figurative when it came to the power of odors, and because of this, the plague, despite its etymological connections to the senses of speech, vision, and touch, should be read as Renaissance writers and readers read it: as an olfactive disease of bad air. Miasma theory, the theory of corrupted air—whether environmental stinks, such as ones associated with dunghills and stagnant water, or personal malodors, such as reeking breath or the putridity of open sores—was the dominant early modern medical understanding of plague contagion.168

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 167 The term “plague” comes from the classical Latin plāga, a “stroke or wound,” and the OED’s etymology informs us that in post-classical Latin the term meant “affliction, illness, plague, especially one interpreted as divine punishment,” linking spiritual illness and corporeal punishment. Ernest B. Gilman’s erudite Plague Writing in Early Modern England (2009) begins with this shared etymology (speech and pestilence) to offer a convincing argument for reading the plague as a discursive event, and the importance of plague writing as a form of self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating trauma therapy. 168 Annick LeGuérer dedicates a chapter to miasma theory in his Scent: The Essential and Mysterious Powers of Smell (1992), but following Corbin, the focus is mostly on France and post-Enlightenment (39-101). Margaret Healy, noting how often the plague was attributed to bad air, interweaves occasional discussions of air and smells in Fictions of Disease (2001) (35-37, 109-110). Rebecca Totaro writes throughout her monograph Suffering in Paradise (2005) on miasma theory and (Suffering 31-32 (and public 149 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In an early Elizabethan plague pamphlet, Pierre Drouet explains, “The Pestilence is a contagious ayre, not being the disease it self, but the neerest and most principall cause thereof, either raised with in the bodies, or caught abroade, suddeinly weakning the spirites, & the powers which gouerne the body” (6). Droet’s description is of malaria, bad air.169 In the plague’s deadliest manifestation, pneumonic plague victims often lacked the telltale disfiguring buboes but exhibited malodorous breath as their very lungs rotted from within.170 This was a “special” case of miasma located within the body and in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sanitation), 51 (and humoral theory), 106-108 (and Timon of Athens), 127-131 (and Francis Bacon’s writings), 146-147 (and Margaret Cavendish’s writings), and especially in her final chapter “The Rectification of Air and the Pursuit of Paradise” (the last great plague of 1665). Paul Slack also covers miasma theory and contagion in great detail in Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985) (especially 24-36, 230-235). I am most obliged to Holly Dugan’s concise but thorough overview of miasma theory in Ephemeral History of Perfume (96-125). 169 The term “malaria” would be anachronistic linguistically but not ideologically as the ideal descriptor of the early modern plague. Entering the English lexicon in the mid- eighteenth century to describe “an unwholesome condition of the atmosphere attributed to marshy districts of Italy and other hot countries [or] any febrile disease thought to be caused by this” (“malaria” n.1 OED), malaria was the term for any fevered disease caused by damp and fetid air. Malaria, unlike pneumonic plague, is not an airborne illness at all, but rather originates in the bite of the mosquito infected with plasmodium. The common mosquito was ignored, and instead the warm, humid conditions that result in perfect breeding grounds for mosquitos was blamed instead. 170 The plague manifests itself in the body in three distinct ways: bubonic plague, which targets the lymph nodes and causes the eponymous swollen buboes; septicemic plague, which poisons the blood; and pneumonic plague. While all three forms originate with the bite of a flea infected with yersinia pestis, pneumonic plague is the rarest and most deadly form. The Center for Disease Control explains that only this type of plague is transmittable between people “through the air. Pneumonic plague is also spread by breathing in Y. pestis suspended in respiratory droplets from a person (or animal) with pneumonic plague. Becoming infected in this way usually requires direct and close contact with the ill person or animal” (“Facts About Pneumonic Plague”). Margaret Healy claims that pneumonic plague, despite its extreme danger, only accounts for about 10 percent of all plague cases (Fictions 52). Leeds Baroll adds the symptoms of a bloated, reddened face and coughing up blood (80-81). 150 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immediate proximity to the afflicted as the disease was only a breath away.171 As the authors of Aroma: A Cultural History of Scent explain, “Put succinctly, putridity engendered putridity, with smell constituting the primary agent of contagion” (59).172 The plague is figuratively not just a disease of bad air or unhygienic habits, but it is also beyond the body—it is God’s punishment for the wicked. Rebecca Totaro explains,

“When plague visited England, from its first visitation until its last, people generally agreed that although God was its primary cause, the secondary source was most often the air” (Suffering 169). The plague-as-disease functions metonymically to represent the health and purity of the larger socio-political body, whether that of the monarch, the city, or the nation. The stenches of the plague are complicated by a bouquet of other often conflicting accords: the antiseptic aromas of pomanders and other protective perfumes; the odor of sanctity, arising from the saintly, martyred, and otherwise pure of soul; and the many literal and metaphoric uses of aromas, whether medicinally or religiously employed. While most of his contemporaries simply believe that good odors are salubrious and malodors are unwholesome, Thomas Dekker reveals a more complicated reading of bodily effluvia that confuses the usual and simplified binary.

Thomas Dekker was a well-known and prolific playwright, but with the great plague of 1603 and the subsequent closing of the theatres from March 1603-April 1604,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 171 It is important to note that there may be different types of pestilential air: “general air” (“whole open air of the region”) and “special air,” which include the odors of the house’s chambers, chosen perfumes, foodstuffs, and apparel (Bradwell 14-20). I return to “special air” later in the chapter. 172 By far, the most sustained and analyzed olfactocentric reading of pestilence is in Mary J. Dobson’s Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (1997). Her first chapter, “Landscapes of the Past” considers miasma theory by examining the environmental and historical-geographical causes of health and disease, even recreating an “olfactory map” of south-east England that allows us to view the topography of malaria, contagious disease, and wholesome vapors (14, fig. 1.2). 151 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! as well as Dekker’s constant threats of imprisonment for debts, he began his secondary and supplementary career track by publishing his first and greatest plague pamphlet The

Wonderfull Yeare in December 1603 or early the following year.173 Over the next twenty plus years, he continued to publish pamphlets regularly on a variety of urban issues, such as cony catching and foolish gallants and gulls, in addition to his plague pamphlets.174

Together, the pamphlets reveal Dekker’s intimate knowledge of London’s seedy underbelly, capturing the slang of criminals and prostitutes, uncovering aristocratic cowardice and cruel indifference toward the ill and poor, and creating an intricate sensory topography of early modern London. Newes from Graves-end: Sent to Nobody (1604),

The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, or the Walkes in Powles (1604), A Rod for Run- awayes: Gods Tokens… (1625), London Looke Backe (1630), and The Blacke Rod and the White Rod (Justice and Mercie) (1630) are Dekker’s plague pamphlets, yet none are as long or as developed as his initial response to the plague. The Wonderfull Yeare covers the events of 1603, Queen Elizabeth’s death, the accession of James I, and the death of approximately one-fifth of the population due to the plague (Gilman 35).175 As the plague outbreaks continue and he writes these pamphlets for over twenty-years, there is a weariness and repetition in his literary work.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 173 I am indebted to George R. Price’s concise yet thorough biography of Thomas Dekker (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1969), as well as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry, and F.P. Wilson’s introduction in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). 174 Price offers 18 prose pamphlets attributed to Dekker during these years (excluding works that are republished under new titles) (113-115). 175 Gilman (following the computations in Slack’s Impact of Plague table) states that London’s total population was estimated at 141,000 for 1603 and there were 25,045 burials recorded in the city and liberties. Does this overall population estimate include the liberties? By “1625, there were 26,350 plague burials out of a total urban population of 206,000” (Gilman 35). 152 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In his different plague writings, Dekker offers a fluid sense of “nasal ethics” that questions the foul (moral and physical illness) and fragrant (spiritual purity and health) dichotomy upheld by early modern physicians, ministers, and lawmakers. The social leveling of the plague forces Dekker, anticipating Merleau-Ponty, to renegotiate his understandings of bodily effluvia, ambient environments, and the relationship between the reader and his text.176 Many of these Renaissance writers were producing phenomenological texts: their writings were dependent on and inseparable from the ambient worlds that they were attempting to describe and control. Dekker’s “nasal ethics” includes a phenomenological consideration of the production and circulation of the material text, and an attention to the intimate space around readers’ bodies as they read.

While London remains the locus of infection—with all the medical and spatial implications intact—Dekker acts as genius loci, centered within the diseased city center, yet uninfected. In this imagined privileged position as a psychopomp, Dekker reconstructs and challenges the miasma-based social responses to the plague, alternately infecting and curing readers with his own plaguey texts. Whereas Dekker may dismiss the idea of miasma—the contagious pollution of the “general air,” the “whole open air of the region” in his plague pamphlet Newes from Graves-end—his decidedly claustrophobic and noxious settings engage with the concept of “special air,” the air kept closer to the person, including the aromas of the household, perfumes, pomanders, aromatic foodstuffs, and scented apparel (Bradwell 14-20). In fact, from his fears of the marketplace, the theatre, and rotting bodies within graves, to suspicions of perfumed clothing and a paranoia over the origins of paper, Dekker obsesses about the intimate

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 176 In my “Introduction,” I more fully cover Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, and especially, historical phenomenology as methodology. 153 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! smells between close bodies in confined spaces, yet also finds the cure to stem from a different type of intimacy—the community of the playhouse and the shared laughter arising from good company and comedies.

Defining Nasal Ethics

The term “nasal ethics” originates in Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s

Children, in which the protagonist Saleem Sinai is born with a huge nose and fosters an acute sense of “nasal ethics” (364). Each child born at the stroke of midnight the moment

India became independent of colonial rule was blessed with a supernatural gift. After nasal surgery to correct a disabling blockage, Saleem loses his congenital mind-reading abilities but develops another supernatural power: an extremely heightened sense of smell. Saleem trains his nose by riding through the streets of Karachi, Pakistan, creating olfactive taxonomies of synaesthetic categories: ordering smells by color, by weight, and by shape to cover the known smells of the physical world. Then, he cultivates the facility to sniff out “the perfumes of emotions, and all the thousand and one drives which make us human” (363):

Because soon I understood that my work must, if it was to have any value, acquire

a moral dimension; that the only important divisions were the infinitely subtle

gradations of good and evil smells. Having realized the crucial nature of morality,

having sniffed out that smells could be sacred or profane, I invented, in the

isolation of my scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics” (364).

He lists his sacred smells: “purdah veils, halal meat, muezzins’ towers, prayer-mats” and profane odors: “Western records, pig-meat, alcohol” (364), all unsurprisingly dichotomized by a young Muslim man. Saleem can finally discern “the glutinous reek of

154 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile [of] spinster Aunt Alia,” who still harbors envy that her beautiful sister married her unrequited love (350). For Saleem, the odors of the physical world—the “camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes” (362)—are all novel and appreciated, but he prefers to study, understand, and critique personal aromas, discrete bodily odors that indicate “sadness and joy” (354),

“intelligence and stupidity” (354), or the “heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate” (352). For Saleem, the olfactive and the affective become intertwined; smell not only alters emotions, but more importantly emotions and inner thoughts give off discernible odors. The figurative stenches of moral or religious corruption give off very literal stinks, if one is blessed with a nose as discerning as Saleem’s.

This self-proclaimed “nasal ethics,” a way of determining morality via bodily effluvia, is not unique to Rushdie’s contemporary magical realism. Nietzsche, in Ecce

Homo, declared that “my genius is in my nostrils” (132). As the “first decent human being,” he could discover falsehoods and lies: “I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood— that I to say, I smelt it as such” (132). “Gifted with a sense of cleanliness,” Nietzsche, like Saleem, finds that he “can ascertain physiologically—that is to say, smell—the proximity, nay, the inmost core, the ‘entrails’ of every human soul” (25). Even earlier than these writers, Thomas Dekker demonstrates his own adaptable nasal ethics, writing on the stenches of plague victims, overly perfumed courtiers, and syphilitic prostitutes, and redemptive, curing odors. When we examine the metaphors of plague through an

155 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! olfactive lens the medical and metaphysical overlap and can be seen as integrally connected in early modern beliefs.

While smells are often reductively dichotomized as foul or fragrant, these odors fluidly shift taxonomies in early modern beliefs, especially when they are also expressed through literary devices such as similes and metaphors. This is further complicated as odors are not only represented as metaphors but, as Susan Sontag argues, illness is also represented metaphorically to stigmatize and blame the victims. The stench of decay is already an ambivalent and loaded signifier, working on the concrete level to diagnose plague, but this same stench of decay also works allegorically or metonymically to indicate a series of associated concepts: sin, immorality, hell, or God’s displeasure with a variety of vices, such as generally wicked Londoners, tyrannical leaders, etc., etc. Sontag, for example, highlights how both the romantic metaphors of tuberculosis as a “disease of time” (“it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it” (14)) or as spiritual disease (an affliction of the soul (18)) disregard the “disgusting” reality of the disorder: “Surely everyone in the nineteenth century knew about, for example, the stench in the breath of the consumptive person” (30).177 Whether literal, figurative, or both, the historical plague

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 177 Sontag wishes to strip disease of meaning, insisting that illness is not a metaphor, but nothing more than bodily ailment (102, 2); Renè Girard in a reading that predates Sontag’s (writing just before the later twentieth century “plagues” of AIDS, Ebola, swine and bird flu, etc.) finds that nowadays plague only exists as metaphor. Girard argues that the plague (or the term “plague”) exists as a “transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence that spreads, literally, like the plague” (837). In Girard’s compelling but circular argument for the “mimetic nature of desire” of the plague and its effect, plague incites and/or is incited by the collapse of social order and individual differentiation (837). Ernest B. Gilman’s afterword “Plague and Metaphor” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (2011) offers a very brief but wonderful corrective to Sontag and Renè Girard’s readings of plague as metaphor. Gilman convincingly argues for an exploration of the “fragile boundary between the literal and metaphoric realms of epidemic disease” (220). 156 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is an olfactophobic epidemic, and plague writers, especially in the plague pamphlets of

Thomas Dekker, return to the metaphors and theories of good and evil smells to describe and understand the plague, creating a nuanced “nasal ethics.”

Encountering plague tracts with an enhanced scholarly “nasal ethics” allows us to read the recurring rhetoric linking malodors not only with physical disease but also metaphorically to spiritual filth and socio-political disorder in early modern plague pamphlets. Carla Mazzio has patiently outlined how the very invisibility of air in early modern thought led to a crisis of ontology. Citing many of the same medical plague works also utilized in this chapter, the affective and infective stenches of plague saturate

Mazzio’s section on bad air—“stinking fulsome smell,” “stynch and filthy savours,”

“thick, cloudy, moyst, and ill smelling vapours” (cited in Mazzio 175-176). She takes such stinks as “commonplaces,” but when applied to Hamlet, “the fumes and vapours of a decayed world align melancholy with both religious and climatological forms of corruption” (177). Yet, her work remains dogmatically ocularcentric (170-175).178 For example, she argues that air “during this time was made ‘visible’ through a range of medical treatises, natural histories, and cultural fictions” (171) and later asserts that the science of air could be dismissed as “a kind of fiction or product of unreliable sensory information” (172). Likewise, Margaret Healy, a noted scholar of medical humanities and

Renaissance literature, who began her pre-academic career in the medical field, often distances her readings of the plague from the grosser realities of stench. When writing on the spread of venereal disease and the plague in the early modern period Healy notes,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 178 Ellen MacKay links the anti-theatrical tracts and plague pamphlets which both hinge on shared iconophobic ideas of how frightening spectacles arouse fear, which poisons the body (89-94). 157 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“You could be ‘touched’ in this period without being touched—without the mediation of the senses” (“Anxious” 23). The myriad references to stench that permeate plague writings, however, reveal that malodors are perceptible indicators of disease that do not require visible evidence of contagion and must be fully explored on their own olfactive terms. Erin Sullivan, on the other hand suggests, “Early modern writers frequently invoke physical illness to illuminate the nature of sin—whether in poetry, sermons, or meditations on the London Bills of Mortality—necessarily reflected a more complex and richer relationship between the two” (88). She continues that the metaphors of spiritual, physical, or social illness function because they are first and foremost embodied metaphors (88-89). In other words, the ethics of the plague are most easily and emphatically conveyed through sensate language: the “nasal” and the “ethics” are indivisible in early modern plague writings.

When we turn to the varied odors of Renaissance plague writing—the pong of standing dunghills, the fetid breath of the dying, the sickly sweet ooze of the burst plague sore, and the sweet scents of rosemary, spiced pomanders, and the Biblical odors of myrrh and frankincense—these odors appear just as categorically separate as the “good and evil smells” or “sacred and profane” odors, to borrow the terms as described by

Rushdie’s protagonist. The nasal ethics of the Renaissance, however, is ultimately more complex as these dichotomies of foul and fragrant or sacred and profane breakdown, are challenged, or even replaced altogether by a new nasal ethics in Thomas Dekker’s The

Wonderfull Yeare (1604).

Dekker’s Anti-Miasma Theories

158 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dekker is decidedly more “nose-wise” than any of the other early modern plague writers composing on miasmatic theories.179 Paul Slack points out that most of the plague tracts “were not written by professional medical men in the modern sense. Their authors made their living in other ways. They were lawyers and civil servants, clergymen, or, by the end of the century, professional writers, most of whom would have regarded themselves as socially and intellectually superior to mechanic surgeons” (Slack,

“Mirrors” 253).180 Dekker was already a playwright (albeit one often in debt and feuds with fellow playwrights), and seems emphatically wary of portraying his narrator as one of the many plague-writing quacks. Dekker’s narrative voice is skeptical at different times of physicians of the soul and ministers of the body.

Dekker’s skepticism is important as he considers yet ultimately rejects the most common explanations for the plague. Margaret Healy convincingly outlines how

Protestant discourse becomes embedded in English medical writings in the mid-sixteenth centuries and how religious writings begin to employ the semantics of the medical

(Fictions 35). This is why the opening example of this chapter can have a title evocative of the material and spiritual cures: A Perfume against the noisome Pestilence (1603).

Healy offers another example as two 1562 works, the medical treatise Bulleins Bulwarke of Defense and the religious tract Thomas Becon’s The Pomander of Prayer, both

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 179 This term used by his contemporaries Thomas Nashe and John Taylor depicts one with a “keen sense of smell” as well as one who is “quick-witted” (“nose-wise,” OED). See the First Chapter for other similar early modern olfactory terms. 180 Elizabeth Lane Furdell explains: “Besides almanacs and primers of health recipes, translations of famous medical authors and plague books dominate any trendy book list of the Tudor and Stuart era” (Furdell 36). She continues that this resulted in “a huge range of medical books from elite to popular” and that “distinctions between lay and medical readerships blurred; amateurs and professionals both read woks which were likely intended for the other” (Furdell 38). 159 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! indicate that “sweet perfumes and foul air have spiritual and moral significances in addition to natural medical ones” (35). Leeds Barroll argues the “city fathers… turned their backs on the highly providential orientation to be found in preludes to most treatises on plague,” instead providing a theory of biological infection that could be controlled through a series of hygienic measures, quarantines, and punishments for those who did not conform to the stringent laws (95, 88-95). Paul Slack notes that it is often hard to differentiate between medical and devotional works, partly because many divines were also medical practitioners” (Impact 38). The two competing theories of the plague’s origin with distinctive causes and cures—biological infection cured by clean homes and containment of the ill, or divine infection cured by clean souls and communities of parishioners—are inextricably confused in medical and religious writings.

Turning now to Dekker’s second plague pamphlet Newes from Graves-ende

(1604), co-written with fellow playwright Thomas Middleton, the playwrights are distrustful of medical and miasmatic explanations for the plague.181 Over the years his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 181 While F.P. Wilson’s early collection of Dekker’s plague pamphlets state that The Meeting of Gallants (1604) might be the work of Middleton (the initials T.M. and the affinity to Middleton’s other 1604 pamphlets—Father Hubbards Tale and The Blacke Booke). In Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s hefty edition of Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works, the editors ascribe Newes from Gravesend and The Meeting of Gallants as collaborative efforts. Several scholars have written on their collaborations, including Lane Furdell (who reads these works in opposition with more of Dekker’s metaphysical darkness in News and more of Middleton’s city comedy in Gallants (“Life and Death in Middleton’s London” 61-67); Alison Chapman finds both works as part of the larger plague writing continuum, dating back to the Decameron (“Writing Outside of the Theatre” 243-249). There are several entries on Middleton’s collaborative works in Thomas Middleton in Context (ed. Suzanne Gossett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and the Oxford Middleton offers other collaborations between the two playwrights, such as the plays The Patient Man and the Honest Whore (1604), The Roaring Girl of Moll Cutpurse (1611), The Bloody Banquet (1639), and (with also John Ford and William Rowley) The Spanish Gypsy (1653); as well as The Whole Royal and Magnificent Entertainment for King James through the City of London, 15 march 1604, 160 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! response to the plague varies, but after the horrors of 1603 Dekker and Middleton’s poem first turns to religion for comfort. The authors do not have faith in miasma theory, noting that all of God’s creatures who breathe the same air would perish the same way (82.23-

83.32). In an extended explanation of the “cause of the plague,” they systematically list and then denounce the different aspects of miasma theory, subscribed to by many early modern physicians: “Nor drops this venome, from that faire/ And christall blosome of the

Aire” (82.24-25). This beginning disjunctive already dismantles the idea of malarial contagion, but rather than moving onto the alternative, they continue listing such airborne causes. The air is so vacuous and encompassing that “vaporous stench” is subsumed into the whole, dispersed, and diluted by the concentration of clean air (82.27). Listing the usual environmental stenches associated with miasmatic airs—“standing Pooles,”

“Muckhills, Graves, & Tombes,” “Moorish breaths, and nasty Denns,” etc. –it seems as though the authors are going to confer with the physicians (“yet we must grant that…”), but they dismiss this theory as an epistemological uncertainty (“Or,…”) by again moving onto the very next miasmic notion (83.5, 6,8, 1, 13).

Dekker and Middleton also reject the concept of an unbreathed–upon-breather (to paraphrase Aristotle’s concept of the unmoved mover) or what we now would term a patient zero:

Can we believe one man’s breath

Infected, and being blowne from him,

His poison should to others swim

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with the Arches of Triumph (with also Stephen Harrison and Ben Jonson). Ultimately, I am less concerned with identifying stylistic differences between the two authors, but am more concerned with identifying the continuations and disruptions of Dekker’s phenomenology and nasal ethics. 161 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For then who breath’d upon the first? (Newes 84.16-19)

The greatest fear of bodily stench was reserved for the breath of the dying in early modern medical treatises. Stephen Bradwell warns of stinking breath, “And the Pthisick or putrified Lungs do by their corrupt breath infect the lungs of others” (6) and of those who are infected, according to Nicholas Boward, doctor of divinity, “the breath stinketh more than it was wont by much” (Chap. 113, 34). Fear of the stinking breath of the plague victim has a valid epidemiological origin as it is the most obvious sign of the deadliest form pneumonic plague, which can lack the buboes, carbuncles, and “God’s tokens” of bubonic plague.182 Unlike the cryptic visual markers of the plague, however, the malodors of the plague, whether environmental, biological, supernatural, or purely metaphorical, are unambiguous.183 Smell, unlike vision or hearing, as Diane Ackerman

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 182 The most obvious visual symptom of bubonic plague is the swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck, armpits, or groin. These buboes could become very large; discolor to a bluish-black, and burst, leaving disfiguring scars. In addition to the blaynes, botches, and carbuncles as visual signifiers of the plague, there is another visible symptom, the initial site of infection where the infected flea bit the flesh. There were more objective terms for this type of signifier—plague sore, plague spot, abscess, etc.—but the pathology and the ontology are confused and conflated by the deific phrase “God’s tokens.” The plague’s visual markers are so pervasive and central to early modern beliefs that Foucault develops his initial theory of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish by turning to seventeenth century French measures to control “the plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing” (198). Older, clean, sober widows—the relative cleanliness of their own bodies and habits are likewise policed—were hired as “searchers” by parish councils; due to their relative invisibility as marginalized citizens, these women acted as the surveillance, making sure the ill did not leave their homes and identifying corpses as expiring of the plague instead of other illnesses (Munkhoff 1-3). 183God’s tokens are often illegible or misread. Margaret Healy notes that in “recognizably Protestant-authored regimes against the pestilence, the macrocosm is rendered as an ever- burgeoning storehouse of (sometimes very curious) signs which—like the microcosm— need to be interpreted and acted upon if God’s wrath is to be assuaged, and his scourges averted” (35). W. Kemp, in a 1665 plague treatise, complains of the diverse symptoms and laments that there “is no one perfect proper, infallible, and inseparable sign” to initially foretell the difference between another illness and a new wave of plague (29). 162 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! explains, is a continuous sense: “But we smell always and with every breath. Cover your eyes and you will stop seeing, cover your ears and you will stop hearing, but if you cover your nose and try to stop smelling, you will die” (6). In the Renaissance, however, breathing was more vexed: not breathing led to certain death by asphyxiation, yet breathing could lead to contracting the pestilence and dying several days later. The mephitic odors of graveyards and fens, the noisome sweats and stinking urine of the infected, and the rancid miasmas arising from decomposing corpses are crude but honest signs of disease. Again, the cause of plague can be reduced to either air or God, and

Dekker and Middleton methodically dismantle the arguments for the former.

Dekker and Middleton instead consider God as the true cause of the plague and the stinking signs of the plague as the symptoms of immorality:

For every man within him feedes

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! James Godskall, a self-proclaimed “young preacher,” highlights how inconsequential the tokens first appear in his The Arke of Noah for the Londoners that Remaine in the Cittie to Enter in (1603). Contrasting the grandeur and horror of Biblical plagues (“whole armies, devouring beasts, earthquakes, fire or brimstone,” etc.), Godskall notes the contemporary plague appears nugatory, deceptively so: “Ist not strange that a little botch or carbuncle hath such admirable force? Well may they be called Gods tokens, for thereby he sheweth his strength” (C1v). Thomas Hastler turns to the military metaphor, with Christ as “righteous Judge” and “mighty warrior,” and the angels draw their bows and “prepare their instruments of death”: “the Angell is a darting the right-ayming arrowes of the Lords wrath at euery mans doore: Gods deadly tokens, the onely markes of his displeasure” (41). Instead of the gashes and large penetrative wounds of war, however, there are only these insignificant signifiers of “displeasure.” In these medical and religious texts, the initial symptom and site/sight of infection—the discolored flea bite—is disregarded until the corpses start to pile up, then the diagnosis becomes clear: God is smiting Londoners and they are marked with His token of “displeasure.” Margaret Healy offers an astute Protestant reading of Dekker’s recurring battlefield metaphors as not only Death or Plague personified waging battle in London, but also as war of social class, in which the impoverished Londoners always lose to the wealthier landlords, government officials, etc.

163 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A worme which this contagion breedes;

Our heavenly parts are plaguey sick,

And there such leprous spots do stick. (85.26-30).

In this vivisection, they expose the internal and festering parts of the soul and the body, the diseases usually only known by God, uniting the material and immaterial, spiritual and physical corruption. While miasma theory was one of the frequently cited exopathic causes of the plague, the plague was also an endogenous disease discernible by touch, sight, and especially, smell within and around the body. Plague sores are automatically recognized by sight and touch, but they are also putrescent signifiers. While diagnosing the malodors of the ailing may seem particularly archaic in our modern clinic, even today some disorders present themselves with characteristic odors that doctors still sniff out

(Schiffman 1341). James Manning, “minister of the word,” offers a succession of stinking excremental fluids in his 1604 medical treatise Complexions Castle: “the breath stinketh more than it was wont by much… the digestion is thin, liquid, spumie [i.e. foamlike], stinking, and unctuous [oily or greasy]: some do vomit, some have the flux, the urine is stinking” (34). When buboes explode or are lanced, they release gangrenous pus and emit disgusting malodors. Simon Kellwaye describes repulsive secondary infestation and stinking buboes as “evil signs”: “If in the skine appeare greene or blacke spottes, the excrements of dyvuers colours with wormes in it, either dead of liuing, hauing a vile stincking sauour, and spitteth stinking and bloody matter, [this] betoken death” (Kellwaye 15).

In Dekker and Middleton’s worm-eaten portrayal, the cause of the disease originates in the sinful body and is expressed through a metaphoric malodor that offends

164 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God’s acute sense of smell. Miasma theory is rendered obsolete and replaced by a supernatural agency although the rhetoric of endogenous bodily stench remains. The authors catalogue a variety of the sins embodied in London’s various citizens:

The courtier’s pride, lust, and excess,

The churchman’s painted holiness,

The lawyer’s grinding of the poor,

The soldier’s starving at the door…

The scholar’s envy, farmer’s curse… (86.19-22, 25)184

These sins, “pride in diet, pride in clothing, /Pride in building, pure in nothing” are the political and urban causes of disease, not a general corruption of the air, the contagious breath of the dying, nor the stenches of graveyards and fens (87.7-8). Robert Maslan, in his introduction to this pamphlet, argues that the pamphlet “anatomizes the social diseases of seventeenth-century London as minutely as it scrutinizes the physical symptoms of pestilence” (128).185 The metaphorical stench of mortality is the unmistakable signifier of physical, spiritual, socio-economic, or political corruption, but even these metaphors begin with the perceptible stenches of the plaguey body that is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 184 “The courtier’s pride, lust, and excess” is covered in my previous chapter on the contested popularity of civet; I turn to “the churchman’s painted holiness” in the final chapter. I more thoroughly move through the olfactive implications of Shakespeare’s various classes in the first chapter, and later in this chapter I cover the comparative encounters with Dekker’s various citizens. As early as William Bullein’s 1564 Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, different classes of characters discuss their responses to the plague, and the character Citizen sends away his children, and eventually flees, but is too struck down (recounted in Slack’s Impact 41). 185 Much has been written about the political and urban metaphors of early modern plague (Healy 50-122; Gilman 129-162), but briefly the religious, medical, and official writings on the plague again conflate the stenches of sin and the noxious fumes of the air (Healy Fictions 58; Gilman ibid.). Ian Munro situates Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as two plague works that link agoraphobic fears of crowds with both the plague threats but also London’s population explosion. 165 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! anatomized, whether by physician or God.186 Even in the divine explanation that seems to focus on the “City-sin,” however, Dekker and Middleton litter this work with so many negating conjunctions—yet, not, or, the very same disjunctives which undermined their miasmic epidemiology—that they abandon this section on the “Cause of the Plague” to

(bravely, if incorrect about miasma) “take breath [with] our panting Muse” (87.1,

88.13).187 That is, while their section begins by denying miasma theory as a satisfactory explanation and the authors shift to divine origins of God’s wrath for London’s excessive sins, but they ultimately seem apprehensive about subscribing fully to this as well.

When first invoking Phisicke, their medical muse, Dekker and Middleton call for a toast “To Sicknes, and to Queazie Tymes, / We drinke a health in wholesome Rymes” already noting that the performative utterance of verse and rhymes have as much as a cheering and salubrious effect as drinking a healthy draught. There are hopes that the goddess Physick can teach the arts of aromatic cures (“the abstruse powers / Of Hearbs, of Roots, of Plants, of Flowers” (80. 16-17)) or to “Teache us how we may repaire /

These Ruines of the rotten Aire” (81.1-2). Again, this is part of the rhetoric of invoking and then undermining miasma theory, and as Physick becomes infected Dekker and

Middleton turn to the “Tragick Maid” instead, abandoning the miasmatic etiology and the pseudo-medical conceit. The pen is mightier than the scalpel in Newes from Graves-end.

With Melpomene’s gloomy inspiration and their specialized writing materials—a quill from a shrieking owl, the tears of widows, and a winding sheet for their pages—Dekker

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 186 Healy summarizes this internal/external binary as the pamphlets’ Protestant rhetoric of “somatic idioms to offer an alternative vision of the nation’s poor and unemployed” (121). 187 See Rebecca Totaro’s discussion of other “muses” in the conventions of plague epics (The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, 26-32). Maslan highlights the pun of city- sin/citizen (141). 166 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and Middleton imagine the emotional and physical affect of their verse as their readers suffer horripilation and weep (81-82).

They end the poem proper by giving this corrective:

Only this Antidote apply,

Cease vexing heaven and cease to die… (102.5-6).

Shortly after that moralistic remedy that smacks of the Book of Job, however, they offer another cure: the power of poetry (101.11-102.5).188 Dekker (and in this pamphlet,

Middleton) repeatedly asserts that his contribution, despite his own moralistic and pedantic agenda, is that of a poet-dramatist and neither physician nor minister. He continually implies, however, that it is neither pomanders nor prayers but rather his poetry and the purging effects of the theatre (in this instance, Tragedy) that can protect, infect, or heal his readers. This is one of his most prevalent tropes and intersects with miasma theory in remarkable ways, especially in his Wonderful Year.

Dekker’s London Smellscape

Dekker knew London and all its beauty, poverty, stenches, inequity, and grandeur, having been born, raised, educated, variously employed and imprisoned, and eventually dying in London (Price 17-20). Because of his familiarity with London’s “smellscape,” his plague pamphlets play with issues of space and olfaction in innovative ways.189 In two of his later plague pamphlets, both A Rod for Run-aways (1625) and London Look

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 188 Job’s wife tells her suffering, diseased husband to “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9). 189 J. Douglas Porteous, scholar of Geography, devised the term “smellscape” to move beyond the visual “landscape” (and “soundscape”) to open up the possibilities to describe the temporal, cultural, and personal affects of smell in a region. He explains that a smellscape is “non-continuous, fragmentary in space and episodic in time” (91), but he borrows and adapts from soundscape studies to create the olfacto-spatial lexicon (e.g. smell events, smellmarks, nosewitness, etc.) (92). 167 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Backe (1630), Dekker offers “perspective glasses” to his runaway readers so that they may telescopically observe the “miserable estate of London” (Rod 138).190 This relatively newfangled ocular prosthetic allows for observation from a safe distance.

While not as often studied as the early modern landscape and soundscape, the early modern smellscape is fragmented, subjectively imprecise, fleeting, and yet, due to the Renaissance beliefs about smell’s potency, potentially the most dangerous sense of

“scape.” Dekker may begin with his “perspective glasses” but as the spaces of the city, nation, and even the world become poetically more condensed, there is a shift in

Dekker’s sensorium to the infected “toposmia.”191 Scholars nonetheless characterize

Dekker’s descriptions of London through purely visual terms, undermining his detailed toposmic survey of London. John A. Twyning uses such ocularcentric language in his description of Dekker as “both a kind of painter of London’s colorful life and a powerful social critic” (“Literature,” 348). Lawrence Manley describes his “detached, pictorial manner,” and his role as “urban voyeur” (419). Yet, it is just as fair to describe him as an olfactive flanêur, or what Jim Drobnick terms a flaireur, an especially nose-wise observer

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 190 On “perspective glasses” in early modern England, see David H. Levy’s The Sky in Early Modern English Literature: A Study of Allusions to Celestial Events in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writing, 1572-1620 (London and New York: Springer, 2011) especially pages 62-70. 191 Approaching the concept of smellscapes from the perspective of contemporary art, museums, and olfactive performance pieces, Jim Drobnick invents the term “toposmia”: “What is required is a new field of inquiry, what I designate as toposmia (place+smell), which describes the spatial location of odours and their relation to particular notions of place” (Drobnick, “Toposmia” 33). Adam Zucker offers a brief but strong depiction of Dekker’s The Gulls Hornbook (1609) as a “mock courtesy pamphlet” with a traceable route from St. Paul’s to the theatres and around London’s neighborhoods as “possible motions through social space” (47). 168 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of urban life. 192 Dekker’s narrator joins a host of other such early modern London flaireurs: the two hapless gallants of Ben Jonson’s “On the Famous Voyage” who travel up the Fleet Ditch to a whorehouse and are covered in excrement for their pains; a blind gentleman who “sees” a brew house on Redcrosse Street with his nose; and the servant

Frisco leading astray rival foreign suitors and declaring that he can sniff his way around

London (once he sniffs out the centrally located “London-stone”) in the earliest city comedy Englishmen for My Money (1598).193

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 192 Jim Drobnick coins the term flaireur to describe one “for whom smell is a pre-eminent aspect of being in the world” (163). He notes the commonalities of the flaireur with his better known brethren, the 18th century Parisian flâneur: “both are conditioned by similar origins within the processes of modernity—urbanization, shifting class structures, and so on,” but he adds “the flaireur arises earlier” (163). The flaireur, I would add, is further contrasted by his embeddedness in the material culture of the city; Walter Benjamin’s flâneur as artist may rifle through the refuse to create his work, but the flaireur takes the city into his body with each breath. 193 On Jonson’s “poetic navigation” through the unmapped spaces of London, see Andrew McRae’s “‘On the Famous Voyage’: Ben Jonson and Civic Space” (in Early Modern Literary Studies, 3 (September, 1998): 8.1-31). The author of The Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (1648) is at first surprised when the blind gentleman uses the visual turn of phrase: ‘This is a Brew-house, I see it.’ To whom I: ‘It is will guessed, Are you sure you see it?’ ‘Aye,’ replied he, ‘That I do, I smell it.’ Two Gentlemen passing by smiled at the blind man’s expression. ‘Nay, I assure ye Gentlemen,’ said I, ‘He is in the right, for he does see it.’ (J.B. 68). The olfactive sense is represented as visual (see also the first chapter for more on synaesthetic terms to describe odors). In Englishshmen for my Money, Frisco states: “I haue the scent of London-ſtone as full in my nose, as Abchurch-lane of mother Walles Paſties: Sirrs feele about, I smell London-stone” (cited in “London Stone.” The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Web. 24 March 2015. ). Janelle Jenstad uses that passage again to offer a sensory reading of early modern London maps (Jenstad, Janelle. “Using Early Modern Maps in Literary Studies: Views and Caveats from London.” New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place. Ed. Sarah Luria and James Ketchum. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011: 112-120). 169 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beginning from the distanced privilege afforded by sight, Dekker moves down the sensorium, and by doing this, he collapses the safe spaces of the countryside, where the wealthy have fled to avoid the cramped proximity to potential plague carriers within the city, and the urban spaces, which are often compared to noxious burial sites.194 Dekker is not content to let his readers observe from afar, but he pulls his reader into the city’s complex smellscape forcing them to breathe in the city’s immoral and physical stenches, the pongs of disease, and the foreign threats of aromatic luxury goods. His works, too, in form as well as content play with these issues of overcrowding, escape, and containment.

That is, the rhetoric of miasma, breath, air, and smell that wafts through the pages

(metaphorically and literally) create a complex smellscape of the social responses to pestilence that is replicated in his literary form.

Ian Munro reads the plague as “As the quintessential urban malady, plague is a spatial disease; it refigures the lived and symbolic space of the city, altering and transforming the urban aspect. At the same time, its resonances are temporal, recalling and recycling a long historical and literary tradition of urban dissolution” (242).195 Smells

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 194 Chapters 6 “Metropolitan Crises” and Chapter 7 “Counting the Costs” of Paul Slack’s erudite Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England shows the devastation of the pestilence on the population of London (and other English cities) by utilizing parish records and bills of mortality, highlighting which districts (usually the poorer and cramped areas) were hit the hardest, and the lasting socioeconomic effects. 195 In 1990, Porteous was still able to claim: There appears to be no general history of environmental smells. Social historians of Britain give but passing mention to ambient odors. Yet it is clear that any future historian would have to include: the medieval ripeness of houses, persons, and foods; the characteristic smells of ‘occupational streets’ in pre-modern towns, from Bristol’s Milk Street to York’s Shambles, where one would have encountered the raw reek of butchery and blood… (98) Since then, the smellscape (or larger sensory landscape) of early modern England has attracted much scholarly attention. Emily Cockayne offers the foulest depictions of daily life and attempts to curtail filth in her Hubbub; Holly Dugan often turns to the reeking 170 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! operate both spatially and temporally in confounding ways. “Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles,” Helen Keller once wrote, “and all the years we have lived” (181). Dekker explicitly engages with the moralistic explanations for disease, but it is his ability to move through and across the topographies of London, into both the plague-free but frightened countryside and the shuttered homes of the ill, imagining new spaces within London, and entering into the graves that demonstrate Dekker’s literary and phenomenological innovations.

His ability to traverse England is not akin to just the perspective glass, but rather a plaguey breath that is able to infiltrate closed spaces and intimate settings or a gust of wind that moves across the whole of England quickly while remaining invisible. Dekker is indebted to earlier London pamphleteers Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, and Robert

Greene for the “seriocomic” tones, narrative innovations, novel personae, and combining elements of the chronicle, sermons, poems, petitions, fables, dramatic and Socratic dialogues, and other short written and verbal forms and genres (Manley 414-419). Those works, of course, revel in the authors’ intimate knowledge of the city’s nooks and crannies, sniffing out the scents of the marginalized bodies of foreigners and prostitutes, smelling out the hypocrisies of errant clergymen and corrupt politicians, and delighting in the aromatic luxuries of the court.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! locales of various early modern theatre sites (see, for example: “‘As Dirty as and Stinking Every Whit’: The Smell of the Hope Theatre” (in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, 2013), “Coriolanus and the ‘rank-scented meinie’: Smelling Rank in Early Modern London” (in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, 2010), and “Osmologies of Luxury and Labor: Entertaining Perfumers in Early English Drama” (in Working Subjects in Early Modern Drama, 2011); and most recently Hristomir A. Stanev has contributed to this discussion with Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603-1625). Dugan and Stanev both cover various aspects of miasma theory, the plague, and the stage, but as I will show I am more interested in the smaller and imagined spaces rather than the city or nation at large. 171 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To avoid the pestilent contagions in the general air there are only two courses of action: fleeing the noxious fumes or containing the stench of the diseased bodies. Those who could flee London for the supposedly clean (spiritually, morally, and disease-free) airs of the countryside did.196 Governmental measures focused on maintaining the purity of the general air of the city. This included shutting up of sick houses, employment of searchers to find potentially ill Londoners, and closing the theatres during plague outbreaks. The theory was that by regulating the bodies of the diseased, and locking them out of sight kept the uninfected safe. Touching diseased bodies or inhaling their sickly smells caused disease and the visual markers of red crosses painted on doors served as sign of what to avoid.197 Within the city, there were other toposmic ordinances. The 1665 pamphlet The Plagues Approved Physician recommends fleeing the crowded and contaminated city, but if that is impossible to worry about the special air in the immediate vicinity, by avoiding “all kind of stinke, filthinesse, or sluttishnesse,” keeping the home clean, burning fires to purify the air, especially with purging and sweetening incenses

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 196 Paul Slack covers the “social response” to the plague (i.e. the shutting up of homes and fleeing the city). Barroll covers the closing of the theatres for the 1603-1604 season in great detail (97-116) and offers a chart noting the closures for the years 1603-1613 (173). Totarro writes of the royal progresses (a highly organized and royally sanctioned form of fleeing) (Suffering 61-68). 197 In his first encounter with the plague on June 7, 1665, Pepys writes on the frightful miasmas: This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension. (Pepys 2151) Whether Pepys believes it is his sense of smell or his unique aroma that is “ill,” the cure for both is the same: smelling and ingesting sweetly scented tobacco. This aromatherapy also alleviates his generally unwell mindset, too; it takes “away the apprehension.” 172 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(A5v). Bonfires were lit and gunpowder fired off as the smoke perfumed and purified the city air.198

Dekker returns to the issues of special or interior air in several of his pamphlets, and the natural odors of the healthy human body and the lively smells of the active city are contrasted with the stenches of disease, the deception of perfumes, and the refigured smellscape of the dying metropolis. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), notes that the nose is an “organ of health” and that “by avoiding bad smells, as by choosing good, which do as much alter and affect the body many times as diet itself” (I.

158). Alain Corbin, in his seminal study of the post-Enlightenment conceptions of personal and public hygiene, claims that “for a long time the best protection against disease remained possession of a shield against smells, smelling strongly oneself, and also sniffing odors of one’s choosing” (64).

For Dekker, a London author in the city during the worst plague outbreaks, we would imagine that he might promote the use of the limited olfactive safeguards afforded to the poor, yet what we discover instead is a recurring phobia of such scented niceties. In his 1604 plague pamphlet, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, Dekker turns a satirical eye to the returning runaways. Signior Shuttlecocke commends his friend for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 198 On the issues of urban cleansing and public laws for street cleaning, waste removal, and the use of bonfires and gunpowder to clear the air, see (Totaro 69-86, especially where she reads More’s Utopia through his role as Commissioner of the Sewers; Dobson 29-37; Cockayne 181-205). Freshly washed linens and sweet perfumes maintained clean and protected skin and nostrils (see especially Kathleen M. Brown’s study Foul Bodies). Michael C. Schoenfeldt highlights how George Herbert adheres to the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” in his conduct manual The Country Parson. The rural clergyman must have clean clothing, without spots or smell, “because it advertises corporeally the spiritual purity of the subject… Cleanliness, moreover, is correlated with the attainment of spiritual and social status” (105-106). Richard Milton’s plague epic London’s Misery (1625) creates a verse calendar of the plague, and offers in rhyme the most common of the aromatic preventatives (Totarro and Gilman 564-580). 173 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! braving the “dangerous” featherbeds, blankets, and sheets of the Inn (113).199 They describe Saint Toole’s [i.e. St. Olave’s] Parish as “the most infected place in London,” and grieve more over their tattered clothes, than the many lives lost. But they are too afraid to buy new and possibly infected clothes (114).200 The gallants, infamous for their love of civeted-perfumes (the subject of the previous chapter), have not even bought new perfumes. Signior Ginglespur explains,

Well, I have almost mard their market, for Gentlemen especially, those that love

to smell sweete, for they are the worst Milliners in a Kingdome, and their sutes

beare the mustiest perfume of any thing breathing, unlesse it were an Usurers

Night-cappe again: And indeed that sents worse then the strong breath of Aiax,

where his sevenfold shield is turned to a Stoole with a hole in it. (115).

While perfume may prevent disease, it might also indicate spiritual or physical unsoundness. Sir John Harington concisely highlights the problem in one of his epigrams

“On Don Pedro His Sweet Breath”:

How is’t Don Pedro’s breath is still perfumed,

And that he never like himself doth smell,

I like it not for still it is presumed

Who smelleth ever well, smells never well. (Kilroy 126)

Whereas bad breath might be symptomatic and trigger of the plague, perfuming the breath is deceitful. Don Pedro loses his personal aroma and his use of sweet scents makes

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 199 To be fair, such shared fabrics would probably be flea-infested and therefore potentially plague-infected. 200 See Amanda Bailey’s “Livery and Its Discontents: ‘Braving It’ in the Taming of the Shrew” for a brief overview of gallant’s insatiable clothing purchases. Eleanor Lowe nicely covers the embedded personal aromas in shared fabrics in Jonson’s Epicene and The New Inn (332-334). 174 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the poet “presume” that he has worse stinks that he is attempting to obscure. Pierre Du

Moulin, a Huguenot French minister residing in England, even more explicitly connects the language of the physician and the Puritanical preacher in his derision against bodily perfumes: “But as for them that lap up their bodies in the pleasant mists of aromaticke perfumes, let them withall swallow this Pill: Within a sweet and civet lurking body, often is imprisoned a loathsome stinking soule” (Du Moulin 124). For Du Moulin, the perfume indicates spiritual corruption that may manifest itself in physical illness. His “pill” offers advice on avoiding deceptive and corruptible perfumes.

The nasal ethics of plague writings become decidedly more complex when sweet perfumes and pomanders fail to protect the sniffer, when metaphysical or spiritual perfumes replace fragrant medicines, and when otherwise foul odors can prevent the plague. The infamously antitheater Puritan Phillip Stubbes warns against the inhalation of perfumes as negatively affecting the “spirit and senses”:

So these (in a maner) palpable odors, fumes, vapours, smells of these

musks, cyvets, pomanders, perfumes balmes & suche like ascending to the braine,

do rather denigrate, darken and obscure ye spirit and senses, then either lighten

them, or comfort them any manner of way. (Stubbes 51)

Stubbes employs current medical thinking (the immediate effect on the brain) to denounce such medical advice (utilizing pleasant aromas to calm the spirits and mind).201

It is in this sententious (Stubbes, Du Moulin) and satirical (Harington) distrust of perfume as potential signifier and possibly carrier of disease that we must consider when

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 201 See the Introduction for a fuller discussion of early modern philosophies of smell, how odors affect the brain, and for Montaigne’s discussion of aromatics and spiritual contemplation. 175 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! analyzing the behavior of Dekker’s gallants. Ginglespurr no longer correlates perfumes and fine clothes with his wanton and frivolous lifestyle, but now associates the musky perfumes with milliners (themselves the subject of xenophobic scorn), the crowded marketplace and sins of conspicuous consumption, frivolous lawsuits, and the stench of an usurer’s nightcap (most likely, a reference to the foeter judaicus), and stink worse than the stench of a privy (or Ajax).202 That is, in this topsy-turvy post-plague London, the worst faults of London’s worst inhabitants smell like the sweetest perfumes. Due to his cowardice, Ginglespur has “mard the market” (i.e. spoiled the trade of the milliners).203

Repeatedly in Dekker’s urban pamphlets gallants serve only one purpose: to spend lavishly all throughout London buying the newest fashions and perfumes, attending the latest plays, and eating and drinking in the most popular establishments.204 These gallants, however, fail to spend, and the city suffers again.

Even the sweet perfumes of gallants, the tickle of fresh rosemary, and the fragrances of a thriving garden become the destabilizing smells of London’s deadly toposmia. In his 1625 pamphlet, A Rod for Runaways, Dekker again derides the commercial and immoral aspects of perfumes, observing that all shops are shut up and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 202 See the previous chapter for a discussion of the messenger in 1 Henry IV and his comparison to a milliner, and the first chapter covers the concept of the foeter judaicus and stinking caps of laborers. Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax is Harington’s scatological political satire, history of the Roman cloaca and sewers, and his own design for a flush toilet. Also see Holly Dugan’s “Osmologies of Luxury and Labor.” 203 “To mar another’s market” (II. (Trade, business, and other extended uses) 4.†c. Chiefly fig. to mar another's (also one's) market : to spoil another's or one's own trade. Cf. to queer the pitch.” (“market, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 April 2015.) 204 See, for example, Dekker’s later The Gulls Hornbook (1609) with chapter titles such as “How a young Gallant shall not only keep his clothes…,” “How a Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary,” and “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse.” I touch on the last point in my previous chapter. 176 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“none thrive but Apothecaries, Butchers, Cookes, and Coffin-makers” and (adding in the second edition) “Clerkes, Sextons, Grave-makers, Herb-women, Bearers, Searchers”

(139). John Taylor the Water-Poet will later dub these occupations “the grave trades,” but that the true trades “are dead or almost out of breath, / But such as live by sickness, or by death” (257-258).205 Dekker places apothecaries and herb-women, both providers of perfumes and the spices for pomanders, as benefitting from the plague, “for the price of flowers, hearbes and garlands, rose wonderfully, in so much that Rosemary which had been wont to be solde for 12 pence an armefull, went now for sixe shillings a handful”

(Wonderfull 34-35). The city is empty and the usually bustling commercial center

Cheapside “is a comfortable garden, where all Phisicke-Herbes grow” (139). In this new

London smellscape, the busy city reverts back to some pre-cultivated but post-lapsarian perversion of Eden where everything is commodified and potentially deadly.206

Dekker’s Collapse of Space and “Special Air”

In The Blacke and White Rod: Justice and Mercie Striking and Sparing London

(1630), Dekker condenses the “World” into smaller and smaller analogies, each one further compressing the spaces around physical and figurative bodies of all classes and types, from the Royal Exchange (199.1-200.11) to the Playhouse (200.12-202.11) and, finally, to the Grave (202.12-23). In doing so, he considers the “special air” within closed

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 205 Taylor, in The Fearful Summer (pub. 1636, but earlier versions from 1625) includes Mercers, Grocers, Silk-Men, Goldsmiths, Drapers, and Dyers (257-262) among the accepted trades and watermen-cum-quacks (mocking his own profession), apothecaries, sextons, gravemakers, coffin makers, searchers, bearers, dog-killers as “the grave trades” (263-282). 206 Beatrice Groves reads this garden metaphorically as a “garden of the mind, a recreational space in which stories and laughter imitated the medicinal effect of herbs” (243). While I am in agreement about her overall argument on the curative effects of mirth (and I end with a reading similar to hers), I believe that Dekker’s Cheapside garden is unnatural and represents disorder. 177 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! parameters, and the matryoshka-like layering of this mixed metaphor both replicates and challenges the efficacy of containment as a social response to the plague.

The Royal Exchange

His first line indicates “This World is a Royal Exchange, where all sorts of Men are Merchants…” (201). Implicit in these lines are the sensuous urban landscape with all of its familiar sights, sounds, and smells. Dekker is consciously nose-wise in his witty olfactive portraits of such mercantile and crafty Londoners in several of his other works.207 In his Owles Almanacke (1618), Dekker comically predicts the successes and failures of the different tradesmen of the Twelve Livery Companies of London. Bakers, grocers, vintners, and brewers are fortunate to be surrounded in a sweet smellscape of their fragrant shops and aromatic wares, while fish-mongers and the many occupations involving the handling and processing of animals (skinners, salters, leather-sellers, chandlers—who make candles from tallow, butchers, etc.) are associated with the stenches of their labors. Good housewives also smell of their labor, emitting the “smell of huswivery” (34). Young bachelors frequent the Barber-Surgeon for a “dash of the rosebud to smell odoriferous in his Mistress’ nostrels” (45-46).208 The Royal Exchange, already a major commercial site, was also located just east of both the foul Stokes Street

(“a market place both of fish and flesh standing in the midst of the cittie” according to

Stowe’s Survey) and the fragrant Bucklersbury Street, the site of many apothecaries and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 207 In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, there are several references to the smells of the trades. Eyre likes to keep a tidy shop and wakes up his workers and his maids to demand they “sweep me these kennels, that the noisome stench offend not the nose of my neighbors” (4.6-8). Eyre warns Rose not to marry a courtier, who looks sweet outside only, but to instead marry a “Gentleman Grocer” as it is a “sweet trade” (11.39-49). The 208 See chapter 1, page X for the “garlic-mouthed stinkards,” civet-perfumed gallants, and tobacco-smoking “satin-gulls” that Dekker complains ruin the theatre experience. 178 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! grocers’ shops, fragrant with perfumes, spices, herbs, and other aromatics (Chalfant 48-

50). The aromatic center of commerce and trade may be imbued with fears and threats of too much luxury goods, objects of vanity, and immoral excess, but it is at the same time the commercial heart of the city.209 Unlike the grotesque profiteering of the “grave trades” and the prodigality of the gallants, London’s lively and aromatic economics are lauded. These are the comforting odors of the thriving, bustling metropolis.

All the World’s A Stage

Yet, if this analogy weren’t compact enough and saturated with aromas by squashing the whole of the world into one very packed market of London, he reduces the world next to a stage: “This Earthly spacious Building, in which we Dwell, (as Tenants only for life) is likewise a glorious Theater” (200). From this point, Dekker waxes poetical on a variation of the “seven ages of man” that ends rather like Shakespeare’s final stage of the old man’s demise (200-202).210 Dekker’s collapse of boundaries in The

Blacke and White Rod between ill and healthy, and his increasingly stinking depictions of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 209 See also Munro: “But if the crowd is the symbol of the healthy city, the vibrant city, London as it should be, it is also the harbinger of the plague and thus of London’s destruction. The plague was closely linked to London’s overcrowding. Crowds in the streets and crowded living conditions were considered prime causes or exacerbations of the plague” (250). As much as I agree with most of Munro’s arguments about a general anxiety of overcrowding and disease, I think that Dekker may satirize those he finds abhorrent (criminals, gallants, gulls, the idle, etc.) but that he expresses a “Protestant work ethic” and sincere admiration for London’s trade workers. Simply put, those sounds, sights, an odors of the lively city are exactly that—full of life and vitality. 210 Kelly J. Stage reads Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore as a response to the plague with Milan a stand-in for London (especially as the last act shifts to Bedlam Hospital), the initial funeral of a woman (not unlike the death of Queen Elizabeth which preceded the plague), the solution of domestic quarantine, and the reformation of the whore Bellafront as symbolizing “hope for urban renewal and spiritual cleansing” (62). In Dekker’s collaboration with John Webster Westward Ho, Stage offers that this is another play that deals with some of the issues of plague response—policing bodies, surveillance, the fear of infection, and flight from the city (66-70). 179 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ever more claustrophobic spaces is a damnation of the ineffective practice of closing the theaters and the cruel custom of shutting up plague houses.

The theatres closed in 1603 (March 9, 1603) for the Lent season but with the death of Elizabeth remained closed after her funeral (April 28), and, if they resumed operation, were shut again with the onset of the plague (Munkhoff “Contagious” 98). In his works, Dekker repeatedly evokes the spaces of the theatre, a potentially threatening site of infection and an area that was shut up during epidemics. Richelle Munkhoff suggests that one of Dekker’s reasons for his recurring connections between the plague and the theatre is an attempt to “confine plague to the space and time of theatrical performance” (“Contagious” 99). I concur that Dekker’s confinement has a therapeutic effect, but he suggests confinement within the playhouse and not the pesthouse as cure.

His claustrophobic narrative form parodies the measures taken by the authorities during confinement, and Dekker spends over twenty years suggesting that the cure is in pleasant community, not isolation.

Dekker’s satire moves between different genres and narrative modes, but often has elements of the theatrical, as in the dialogue as in The Meeting of Gallants at an

Ordinarie (1604). Joad Raymond describes the dramatic aspects of Dekker’s plague pamphlets as “energetic performances, an opportunity not to preach but to turn the page into a stage (and the theatres were closed when pestilence raged), rich with eloquence and dramatic tension” (112). Dekker’s The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie (1604) begins with a dialogue between War, Famine, and Pestilence arguing about who kills the most people, and continues with dramatic dialogues in the ordinary, between the barkeeper and the visiting customers, the aforementioned Shuttlecock and Ginglespur. Dekker and

180 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Middleton call upon the “Tragick Maid” to inspire their pamphlet Newes from Graves- end, and later in this pamphlet, they compare the pest-house to a playhouse in which a tragedy is being performed (Maslen 131). In The Wonderfull Yeare, Dekker famously personifies the pestilence as “like a Spanish Leagar, or rather like stalking Tamberlaine,” who “hath pitcht his tents . . . in the sinfully- polluted Suburbes,” evoking one of

Marlowe’s most famous characters (31).211 The Wonderfull Yeare resounds with the language and imagery of the theatre. His anecdotes and stories “yeeld Comicall and ridiculous stuffe, others lamentable: a third kind upholding rather admiration, then laughter or pittie,” paralleling the comedies, tragedies, and chronicle history plays performed in the early modern playhouse (38).

He interweaves both analogies so that that the ill who die are likened to both the rich man of the Royal Exchange who defaults on debts and subsequently is thrown into prison as well as the actor who undresses after his role to put on his “poore winding-

Sheets” hastening to his home, “and (still) that’s the Grave” (202).212 The Grave is the tightest of spaces, packed with all the diverse bodies of London’s citizens: “The Grave then, is the Rendez-vouz where we all meet” (202). Dekker desires the “rendezvous” of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 211 See also Garrett Sullivan’s “Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine” (31). Much has been written on the economic and creative impact of the plague on the early modern theatre. See Leed Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre (1991); Wilson, F.P. Wilson’s The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); Ellen MacKay’s Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Ian Munro’s The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 212 Dekker returns to this conflation of the Theatre and Royal Exchange in The Gulls Hornbook in his chapter instructing young men how (not) to behave in the theatre: “The Theater is your Poets Royal-Exchange, vpon which, their Muses (ye are now turnd to Merchants) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware then words” (27). 181 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! people meeting, buying, and selling together in the Royal Exchange or laughing and weeping together in the public playhouse.

The Grave

In The Blacke and White Rod, as the Royal Exchange and the Stage transmogrify into the grave, the grave is not only a tiny plot heaped with corpses but expands back into the World, becoming and engulfing “the Market-place,” “the Towne-Hall,” and “the

Castle” (202), folding and expanding like a collapsible perspective glass. The world can be reduced into smaller spaces with ever more equality and yet the grave, the smallest vision of this world, inverts or perverts hierarchical norms, and the noxious malodors are no longer contained. This image of the egalitarian grave is also a nightmare vision, as described in Dekker and Middleton’s poem Newes from Graves-ende (1604):

That twentie shall but have one roome;

Their friend, and foe, and yonge and old,

The freezing coward, and the bold:

Servaunt, and maister: fowle and fair… (94.22-25)

The horrors of the plague do not end with an excruciating death, but begin with the nightmare of diverse bodies intermingled into “one room” together. “The distinctiveness of the plague,” Rene Girard once eloquently argued, “is that ultimately it destroys all forms of distinctiveness” (838). Dekker continues by singling out a “jealous man” who laments that his dead wife has not only played the “woman’s part” by lying with Death, but now that her corpse is tumbled into a mass grave, she is in an eternal embrace with the “poorest Groome” in “selfe-same bed, and self-same roome” (95.7, 12-13, 15-16).

182 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even more troubling are the shared fluids and stenches of these blended corpses in the plague pits. In the “Epistle Dedicatory” of Newes from Graves-ende written to “Sir

Nicholas Nemo” (aka “No-body”) by “Some-body,” Dekker describes the stinking horrors of this practice of mass burials: “in hot and drie Sommers (that are yet not dreamed on) those mustie bodies putrifying, the inavoidable stench of their strong breath be smelt out by the Sun, and then there’s new worke for Clarkes and Sextons” (72). This dread of the odors of putrefaction is a recurring olfactive image in Dekker’s works, and here he explicitly considers miasma theory or, at least, a farther reaching version of special air.213 Reflecting after the Great Plague of 1665, Thomas Doolittle asks, “How many open Graves have you seen, and those that have been nice and curious of their comely bodies, have been interred, and given to be meat for worms, and to be a prey to rottenness and putrefaction?” (85). Another pamphlet from 1652 cautions that the “great store of rotten and stinking bodies, both of men and beasts, lying upon the face of the earth unburied, as in the time of warres hath been seen, doth so corrupt the air” (5-6).

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the English king warns his French enemies that his

English soldiers will continue to defeat the French, even after death. Even though the sun

“draws their honors reeking up to heaven,” their rotting corpses remain buried in the plague-causing “dunghills”: “Leaving their earthly parts to choke the clime, / The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France” (4.3.99-104). As Henry repeatedly asserts in his rhetoric of brotherhood amongst his soldiers, the Englishmen, regardless of rank rot and stink together against the French foe; it is one last combined effort of all Englishmen to destroy the enemy. This is also resignation that all must die and rot, irrespective of one’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 213 Wilson points out in a footnote how frequently Dekker returns to this lack of individual burial places in London (234, note page 72). 183 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! status in life, or as Hamlet asks of the skull he holds and sniffs at: “Dost thou think

Alexander [the Great] looked o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth?/... And smelt so? Pah!”

(5.1.181-182, 185).

Dekker’s lengthiest, most exhaustive depiction of the tomb occurs in his first and greatest plague pamphlet, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603). In brief, the first section—in blank verse, prose, and epigrams—details Elizabeth’s death and lying in state, England’s mourning of their queen, then the celebration for the accession of King James. In this unguarded moment of celebration, however, the plague strikes. Dekker reveals his distinct understanding of olfactory tropes to protect and infect specific readers who lack his nasal ethics in his opening description of the plague. First, Dekker eases into his initial depictions of the plague by slowing down his prose, bulking up the details, and letting his reader slowly discover the horrors of the plague through the reader’s own bodily experience and phenomenological understanding by using a familiar extended metaphor: London as tomb, London as hell.214 Dekker depicts London first as a Tomb, that is, silent, cold, dark, and relatively devoid of sensation, then as a somatic Inferno where the different sensory organs are attacked:

What an vnmatchable torment were it for a man to be bard vp euery night in a

vast silent Charnell-house? hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly &

slowly burning, in hollow and glimmering corners: where all the pauement should

in stead of green rushes, be strewed with blasted Rosemary, withered Hyacinthes,

fatall Cipresse and Ewe, thickly mingled with heapes of dead mens bones: the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 214 Ernest B. Gilman offers a very strong reading of the prevailing tomb imagery in plague pamphlets as a sort of trauma writing that both buries the trauma and yet encrypts and memorializes it (54-63). Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 184 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

bare ribbes of a father that begat him, lying there: here the Chaples hollow scull of

a mother that bore him: round about him a thousand Coarses, some standing bolt

vpright in their knotted winding sheetes: others halfe mouldred in rotten Coffins,

that should suddenly yawne wide open, filling his nosthrils with noisome stench,

and his eyes with the sight of nothing but crawling wormes. And to keepe such a

poor wretch waking, he should hear no noise but of Toads croaking, Screech-

Owles howling, Mandrakes shriking: were not this an infernall prison? Would not

the strongest-harted man (beset with such a ghastly horror) looke wilde? And

runne madde? And die? And euen such a formidable shape did the diseased Citie

appeare in… (27.3-23, emphases added)

Neither of these depictions are novel, and anyone familiar with Dante is used to this contrapasso sensate punishment, but what is striking about Dekker’s depiction is that he has his reader move into the tomb and as his senses acclimate, the horrors of death become manifestly and somatically obvious. Merleau-Ponty, for example, writes of the mind as embodied, but the body is always in and cognizant of a world that preexists that body.

In other words, Dekker effectively describes such a Tomb as a space that cannot contain mind nor body; it is Tomb and it is Womb as he creates a pre-cognitive, pre- perceptive, senseless space. Simon Kellwaye claims that one of the “evill signes” that a victim cannot be saved from the plague is if the victim has disordered sensations: “When the partie being very sicke, yet saith he feeleth well” or when he suffers from cacosmia, phantom fetid maladors, “when he seems all thinges doth stincke” (16). Abraham

Holland’s A Description of the Great, Fearful, and Prodigous Plague (1626) explains

185 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that the plague’s fever causes temporary madness, visual and auditory hallucinations, depression, anxiety, and distracts and confuses the senses (‘knoweth no difference between soft and hard” (534) (505-543). In this confused state of mind, the sufferer is

“bereave[d] …of the means of Penitence” (506).

Dekker asks his readers to imagine “What an unmatchable torment were it for a man to be hard up every night in a vast silent Charnell-house?” In this “vast silent charnel house … hung with lamps dimly and slowly burning,” Dekker is acutely aware of how one’s senses function when entering a dimly lit and relatively silent unfamiliar setting, the eyes slowly adjusting to the light and making out the shapes of rotting family members’ bones and the ears hearing that the tomb is not silent but full of nocturnal noises. The tomb of sensory deprivation is replaced by a hell of overwhelming sensations, as Dekker’s catalogue demonstrates: the eyes are filled “with the sight of nothing but crawling worms,” the ears “hear no noise but of toads croaking, screech owls howling, mandrakes shrieking,” and the “nostrils [are filled] with noisome stench.” But before the “higher” senses of hearing and sight have adjusted, the nose has already compensated and is aware of “blasted Rosemary, withered Hyacinths, fatall Cipresse and

Ewe, thickly mingled with heapes of dead men’s bones.”

The scents of these aromatics used in funerary wreaths are the first sensed signifier that Dekker’s character is realizing the gravity of his environment. Once the stench of mortality enters the nose and the metonymic connections between these flowers and death are realized, then the eyes and ears, now aware that they are in a tomb may adjust and begin to see and hear the horrors of this hell. We may think of Merleau-

Ponty’s insistence that an a priori mode can only be retroactively and nostalgically

186 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! realized. The smells of these particular flowers hold no meaning until they have become a part of the cultural and sensory fabric of London’s funerals, but for Dekkers’ readers, the combination of Rosemary, Hyancinth, cypress and Ewe can only mean death.215 Dekker frames and then reframes an ambient world, a world that exists only on the page, but is completely accessible to readers as a familiar world of how the sensory organs compensate, or compete to overcompensate, when entering a dark and silent room.

Dekker acts as a Christian Virgil who can bring his readers into London’s underworld. Dekker even complains that his arms are tired from rowing in London’s stygian waters; that is, he figures himself as Charon, the ferryman of the dead. As psychopomp, he is able to move freely through a London and the English countryside that is becoming more difficult and dangerous to navigate, but is disease free. As a

Dantean narrator/character within this hell, however, Dekker is able to use his writing to damn or save the other characters in his text. What Dekker does effectively in this description of the charnel house is phenomenological; he creates the sense of presence and makes his reader experience through bodily perception the sensate horrors of the plague. Once he recreates the horrors of the Tomb/Hell for the reader, then Dekker pulls the reader back out into a version of the “real world.” This is not a “vast Charnell-house” but rather a microcosmic depiction of London (27.21-22).216 This London, however, is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 215 On the rosemary’s sociocultural olfactive significance, Dugan reasons that the “smell of rosemary was a complicated signifier of disease and death. Commonly associated with rituals of memory, its scent symbolized betrothals, marriages, and funerals. Yet the scale with which it was used as a plague preventative during the outbreaks of 1603, 1609, and 1625 suffused it with new kinds of signification… the scent of rosemary thus became a harbinger both of erotic, affective promise and diseased peril” (99). Dugan uses several examples from Romeo and Juliet in her depiction of the erotic aspects of rosemary. 216 “And even such a formidable shape did the diseased Citie appeare in” (27.21-22). 187 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not the thriving, vibrant London of the Royal Exchange or the neighborhoods of

London’s playhouses, but a hellish phantasmagoric London (27-28).

This begs the question: Why would Dekker move his reader into this grave space of London as tomb/London as hell? Dekker’s intended reader is not the person inflicted with the plague nor the widow, orphaned child, or other victim of plague-related death.

Dekker is writing for the survivors and for Dekker that often means those runaways who have left London for the countryside. Therefore, Dekker frames this sensate tomb for those who are not there to experience it, and he allows his work to affect their senses and infect their minds and souls, if not also their bodies.

Runaways, Perfumes, and the Fresh Air of the Countryside

Dekker not only captures the suffocating atmospheres of the grave and pesthouse, but he can also penetrate into the uninfected airs of rural England. The title of one of his 1625 plague pamphlets—A Rod for Runaways—fantasizes the punishment for the cowardly and the rich who flee to the countryside. Dekker compares the runaway wealthy

Londoners to invading Saxons conquering the country folk or native Brittaines (153). The fashionable fleeing Londoners are conspicuous in their sumptuous dress—wearing black satins and velvets, and treble ruffs around their necks—which the farmers fear as though they were ghosts in a graveyard (154). Londoners are unwelcome in the sanctuary of the countryside as the rural inhabitants believe that “no Plagues, no Botches, Blaynes, nor

Carbuncles can sticke vpon any of their innocent bodies, vnlesse a Londoner (be he neuer so fine, neuer so perfumed, neuer so sound) brings it to them” (154). Holly Dugan contends that “the presence of sweet-scented airs could signify both the presence of the plague and its cure” (Ephemeral 104).

188 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Broker in Houndsditch, Dekker recounts, tries to gain access to his brother, a rural tanner (one of the most notoriously stinking occupations) in plague-free Hampshire.

In a scene with Biblical parallels to the many fratricidal rivalries of the Old Testament or

Peter’s denial of Christ, the country brother renounces his own urban sibling, “he knew not his face, his favour, his voice” and was furthermore convinced that “his Clothes smelt of infection” (155). There may even be an olfactive pun hinging on the homographs

“favour”/”savour” (with a long “s”).217 Even after attempts to bribe his way in, the broker returned dejected yet “a little wiser then hee went” (155).218 He concludes by telling these urban refugees that their perfumes do not signify wealth and luxury to their rural brethren but rather olfactively code them as diseased foreign threats: “The smelling to your Iuory

Boxes does not so much comfort your Nosthrils, as the Sent of your perfumed brauery, stinkes in the Noses (now) of Countrey-people” (157).

Dekker’s narrative, generic, and modal shifts in the Wonderfulle Yeare are complex, but in one especially nightmarish passage, he focuses on a wealthy landlord with a country estate to which he may escape (29.18-31.13). This passage differentiates itself as the narration slides into an extended second person address.219 In the extended

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 217 “Savour” “I. Smell, aroma, and related figurative and extended uses. 1.a. A quality or characteristic likened to a smell or aroma, esp. in extended metaphors, 2. a. lit. A smell, an aroma.” Etc.” (“savour | savor, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 April 2015). 218 The frontispiece of A Dialogue betwixt a Citizen and a poor Countreyman and his Wife (1636) depicts a fashionable Londoner in his black clothes and rose-covered shoes, being denied entry by the rural folk. The wife closes the gate and waves the man away with one hand, while her husband covers his nose with his hand. 219 Dekker often uses the second person at other points in his essay, especially when he acts as a psychopomp through the London underworld of the plague, such as in the following example: “I could in this place make your cheeks look pale, and your hearts shake, with telling how some had 18 sores at one time running upon them…” (37.22-24), but these are usually brief moments, little asides to the general reader, almost used as an 189 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! passage on the wealthy landlord, however, Dekker’s direct address is quite different. The landlord begins very simply and impersonally as “a worldly miser” (29.7) or “such a coward” (29.9), but with the introduction of his rich attire and luxurious goods Dekker attributes enough description that the readers can begin to imagine his wanton locks and goodly eyes or smell his perfumed flesh. In Classical philosophy, the philosopher John D.

Caputo claims, bodies that “smell” in the intransitive sense are no longer viewed as cognitive and perceptive subjects, but reduced to mere objects.220 For Caputo, this landlord/reader would be the ideal body of Philosophy: “Philosophy’s body—from Plato and Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty—is an active, athletic, healthy, erect, white male body, sexually able and unambiguously gendered, well-born, well-bred, and well-buried, a corpus sanum cut to fit a mens sana in the felicity in the being-in-the-world and mundane intentional life.”221 It is in Dekker’s concrete sensory imagery that this man becomes more realistic and not just a Spenserian allegorical miser. This landlord is not just a coward, a miser, or Philosophy embodied, but a young, healthy, wealthy Renaissance man, a man who has never had to worry about his livelihood, his life, his death, or other

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! apostrophe. He specifically compares himself to Charon, the ferryman of the dead, and he moves the readers briskly through different areas of the city, through the suburbs, and into the countryside. He is Anchises, or Virgil, or, looking ahead to Dickens, the Ghost of Plague Present. In the above quotation, his direct address only points out his omniscient knowledge on the subject and allows his general readers the intimate viewings of the plague’s victims. 220 Indebted to Derridean concepts of the gift, Caputo defines “obligation” as the demand of the other or a type of disaster, something often abhorrent or unfulfilling (29). Drawing upon Western philosophy, especially Heidegger and Hegel; phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty; and Abrahamic law, Caputo opines that bodies that are diseased, marginalized, or “smelly” are bodies that resist Western hegemony and become part of what he terms an “anti-phenomenological reduction” (203-206). 221 On the other hand, “flesh” is the classical body “stripped of sense and being”: “Flesh is highly polyvalent, the site of uncontrollable disseminations, suggesting simultaneously carnivals and sacrificial offerings, sensuality and obligation” (196). 190 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! existential issues until this moment of the plague. Smelling death, hearing the death bells ringing, fearing for his health and life, and the life of his child, he must now make a choice: stay in London or flee.

It is immediately after this man becomes fleshed out through sensory imagery that

Dekker commences to address the man directly, making the man not just real for the reader, but making this man the reader: “But (wretched man!) when thou shalt see, and be assured (by tokens sent thee from heaven) that tomorrow thou must be tumbled into a

Muck-pit…” (29.18-20, italics added). From this moment on, the rest of the passage is directly addressed to the wealthy landlord in a second person address; in other words,

Dekker conflates his character of the runaway wealthy landlord and the reader of his pamphlet. Dekker makes every reader imagine himself in this situation to create this heightened ethical Everyman dilemma: to stay or to go?

Yet, for Dekker, while his “pampered” (29.10) man “so perfumed and bathed in odoriferous waters” (29.11) may have the advantage of manipulating his olfactive environment with pomanders and other aromatic prophylactics, these cannot save him from the leveling effects of death, and the universal stench of mortality, as he “must one day be thrown (like stinking carrion) into a rank & rotten grave” (29.12-13). For the time being, however, this reader is safe, “But thou art gotten safe (out of the civil city

Calamity) to thy Parks and Palaces in the Country” (29.29-30.1) with his sole heir. After the reader’s son dies from the plague, the reader attempts to hire his servants to bury the boy, but to no avail. This acts not only as a fantasy of social leveling and an earlier “rod for runaways,” (the title of and recurring theme in Dekker’s other plague pamphlets) but also as a moment that validates and complicates Caputo’s major claim that ethical

191 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! obligation is not a true philosophical concern as the ethical dilemma is not about logos but purely pathos. Dekker’s passage is constructed with an excess of pathos, as we feel for this absentee lord—meant to be villain—who is only protecting his own, but it is also a passage of pathology, a discourse of emotions and dis-ease, the landlord’s obvious loss of contentment with himself and his life.222

For Dekker, the “perfumed” reader, that is the man who would have “smelled” in the transitive sense as an evaluating subject has now been reduced to smelly object, diseased flesh, or source of miasmic contagion, as his indigent, smelly, sweaty laborers are now aware of a perceptive shift in their bodily effluvia. Because the reader has been exposed to the stench of plague and because his own immediate concerns have superseded his ethical obligations, his servant “that weather-beaten sun-burnt drudge, that not a month since fawned upon thy worship like a Spaniel, and like a bond-slave, would have stooped lower than thy feet, does now stop his nose at thy presence, and is ready to set his Mastiff as high as thy throat, to drive thee from his door” (30.19-23). Whether or not the reader is physical diseased does not matter; what does matter is that he is perceived as diseased and reeking, and that he is at dis-ease. He now smells in the intransitive sense as object and the drudge has become the subject who smells, perceives, and makes these moral or medical olfactive judgments on others. Dekker subverts social and olfactive hierarchies, and furthermore, denotes his reader as anoetic—all emotion

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 222 Pathology could mean a study of the emotions rather than study of diseases or mental illness in early modern England. “pathology, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 3 June 2015. For two-hundred years before it acquired our modern usage of illness or physical malady (c. 16th century), “disease” meant (and continued to mean): (1.a.) “absence of ease; uneasiness, discomfort; inconvenience, annoyance; disquiet, disturbance; trouble.” “disease, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 8 June 2015. 192 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and sensation, but lacking cognition. Dekker’s passage on this reader doesn’t end with the reader’s death (the reader is, after all, reading the pamphlet), but worse. Dekker abandons this reader with his son’s body still in his arms, still considering his (un)ethical choices, and Dekker transforms into Charon to row out of this “Stygian Ferry” (31.14), and moves onto the bulk of his text, reports and anecdotes “some of them yielding comical and ridiculous stuff, others lamentable: a third kind upholding rather admiration, than laughter or pity” (38.17-19).

Confinement and fleeing are the opposing reactions to avoid plague infection and miasma, but when we read News from Graves-end (confinement) and A Rod for

Runaways (fleeing) together, however, what happens is that the distance from countryside to city, from playhouse to real world, from life to death are liminal, transitional, fleeting. When read within the context of how Dekker recreates smellscapes, ellipses time, and disorders the senses, Dekker’s innovative narrative forms functions as synecdoche for the social realities and responses to the plague. Dekker distils these moments, creating an ephemeral safe space within his text. Dekker’s fantasies of collapsed spaces, shuttered urban smellscapes, and the leveling effects of the grave are at once highly egalitarian yet the narrator still remains within London/Hell/the grave and yet somehow safe and separate from these horrors.

This Booke is … yet somewhat infected

Finally, after we have snuffed the diverse represented smells of early modern plague literature, it is time to return for a fuller analysis of Dekker’s first, longest, and most detailed plague pamphlet, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603). His multi-generic pamphlet records and expresses different responses to the plague, covering Elizabeth’s death,

193 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

James’ accession, the horrors of the plague, and his work concludes with an accumulated series of reports and anecdotes. The stories are imbalanced, at times expressing gallows humor, sometimes bitingly cruel, and other times depicting a lucky character who escapes from death. This also seems to be a part of Dekker’s nasal ethics; ultimately, it is impossible to stop breathing all air in order to avoid noisome fumes, and the power of his prose pamphlet may metaphorically (or literally) offer as good of a cure as anything else.

His work then, is both metaphorically and materially infected, and Dekker offers a type of curative correction through his poetry as both cathartic tragedy and maker of mirth, and via the metaphoric olfactive cures contained within his text.

In his dedication to Master Cuthbert Thuresby, London’s water-bailiff, he admits that The Wonderfull Yeare is a plaguey text: “This book is, (though not sorely) yet somewhat infected” but promises that Thuresby’s strong constitution and Dekker’s humorous tales (“if you read, you may happily laugh, tis my desire you should because mirth is both Physicall and wholesome against the Plague”) will work together to protect

Thuresby from contagion (3).

Many scholars have written on the implications of this dedicatory phrase, and I summarize their arguments while interweaving my own readings of Dekker’s larger phenomenological innovations. Rick Bowers offers one of the earlier analyses of how

Dekker’s content and context worked together: “Dekker’s jocular storytelling works within the pamphlet to contain and metaphorically spread the plague. He thus uses the plague rhetorically, with all its multiple and savage ironies, to induce laughter as topical

194 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! antidote, and paradoxically, to inoculate against the plague” (229).223 The proliferation of stories, Bowers argues, is a type of contagion within itself, but the laughter acts as medicine for the civil society. Ernest B. Gilman finds anxiety within the etymological connection of “plague with the Logos, the Word itself,” that the spiritual rhetoric of the plague is in itself pestilential, so that while in Dekker’s dedication he may offer the reading of his book “as a form of prophylaxis,” the metaphors of breath, word, air, miasma “slide into identity, suggesting that contaminated speech itself could not only provoke but disseminate the disease” (Gilman 97, 99, 100). Leah Knight and Sharon

Achinstein both move from the metaphorical to the material in their captivating examinations of the physical artifact of the plague pamphlet. While Achinstein writes on the plague pamphlet as infected object of censure, Knight offers a redemptive reading of the metaphors of sweet airs, with “airs” as both the pleasant odors and as lyrical poetry composed to be sung aloud. My own intervention is to reclaim an olfactive reading that considers the generic and narrative traditions and innovations (historical formalist), and the physical text (material studies, book history), within the historicized context of miasma theory.

For Dekker, fate is as capricious as whatever direction the wind may blow and his narrative and generic modes shift and waver with the current tenor of his story. The pamphlet begins as an almanac, and at the beginning of the year, the spring sky is clear, sunny and noted for its perfumed and “excellent aires” (9).224 Vertumnus, the god of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 223 Bowers is well aware that inoculation is an anachronistic concept (229), but he does not realize that the plague was a disease that one could horrifically suffer from more than once. Unlike smallpox, the body never creates an antibody after initial infection. 224 The calendar year in the Renaissance could begin on March 25 (Annunciation Day) or January 1, but as Dekker’s pamphlet begins with the god Janus and then the arrival of 195 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! seasons, garden, and changes, ushers in the new year, 1603 with his fragrant court of spring deities, “perfuming all the ways that he went, with the sweet Odors that breath’d from flowers, herbs, and trees” (9).225 Then tempests and storms emerge from the west, this personified Element gives birth to Sickness (raised by death), and the young Sickness in disguise as a courtier calls the Queen to Heaven’s star chamber. The storm clouds (and possible foreign threats) remain until James appears like a “comfortable Sun out of the

North, whose glorious beames (like a fan) dispersed all thick and contagious clouds”

(20). When the plague strikes, Dekker calls upon a “lustier winde” to change course with his narrative (31). The rhetoric of miasma and special air fills up and blows through the pages of his pamphlet.226

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! spring, it appears that his New Year begins on January 1st in this pamphlet. Other evidence to support a New Year’s date of 1603 include Elizabeth’s death on March 24, 1603 (or before the start of the March new year) and plague outbreaks usually commenced or worsened in warmer weather, as indicated in the pamphlet. 225 Rebecca Totaro contends that plague epics composed in heroic measures, and dealing with the destruction (and rebuilding) of plague-time London, offer a therapeutic marriage between Protestant beliefs and Classical poetic conventions (Totaro, Plague Epic 7-10). Dekker’s pamphlet is mostly in prose, excepting the heroic couplets when he imagines a staged prologue to London’s tragedy (14-17). 226 Dekker summarizes the political upheaval as “As first, to begin with the Queenes death, then the Kingdomes falling into an Ague vpon that. Next, followes the curing of that feauer by the wholesome receipt of a proclaimed King” (20). Dekker employs the language of the physician in this brief synopsis, but his work is neither so contained nor so neatly concluded. 1603 is the “year when plague and politics most clearly aligned: the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the coronation of King James VI of Scotland becoming King James I of England precede and follow this plague visitation. One might say that the plague itself took the throne in the interim” (Totaro Representing 14). Elizabeth’s death calls for a brief tragic prologue in heroic couplets followed by several epigrams on her funeral. James’ accession calls for a short laudatory poem, and then Dekker moves back into prose to describe the merriments of Londoners: “…they saw mirth in every mans face, the streets were plum’d with gallants, Tobacconists fild vp whole Tavernes…” (24). The pamphlet plays with all of the innovative formal and narrative techniques that Dekker writes in olfactive and phenomenological terms that has been covered above. Gilman nicely covers Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare as it is “plotted in detail as a tragedy” (132). 196 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The physical artifact of the plague pamphlet also exhibits Dekker’s involved sense of nasal ethics. In his invocation, he shuns Apollo and the Muses, but beseeches

Sorrow and Truth as his muses. Dekker’s ghastly writing supplies metonymically reconstruct the materiality of suffering as he uses the tears of the deceased for his ink.

Dekker asks these souls to act as his Muse:

Join all your hands together, and with your bodies cast a ring about me. Let me

behold your ghastly visages, that my paper may receive their true pictures. Echo

forth your groans through the hollow trunk of my pen, and rain down your

gummy tears into mine Ink, that even marble bosoms may be shaken with terror,

and hearts of Adamant melt into compassion. (Wonderfull 26-27)

If his ink is composed of the tears of the dead and his pages are the burial linens, containing the fluids and materials of disease, he has composed an infected work.

Bower claims that Dekker’s work inoculates against the plague by offering a diluted and non-contagious variant of the disease; however, I would contend that for those readers who have fled London and are reading his pamphlet he is not inoculating but rather infecting them. He calls both upon the power of poetry and the material object to achieve his noxious contamination. In the letter “To the Reader,” following the dedication to Thuresby, Dekker dismisses the idea of addressing his reader as “gentle,

“courteous,” or “learned,” because as we have seen, many of his readers lack a sense of nasal ethics. Dekker punishes his runaway readers by forcing them to enact their lack of feeling for others by suffering sensory deprivation or sensate hell, as in the previously analyzed passages on the “vast Charnell house” or “pampered and perfumed” runaway.

197 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dekker combines Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy with Galenic conceptions of the humors to infect his wayward readers. Dekker, as writer, suffers perturbations even thinking about the plague: “A stiffe and freezing horror sucks up the rivers of my bloud: my hair stands on an end with the panting of my brains: mine eyeballs are ready to start out, being beaten with the billowes of my teares...” (25). In his later News from Graves- end, as we have analyzed earlier, he again invokes the Tragick Maid as his muse, also utilizing morbid writing instruments (82), and he imagines how reading about the plague would incite his readers’ passions, the way composing the plague similarly affected his own: horripilation, eyes bulging, frozen with fear, and then moved to pity (82).

In Bruce Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare, he states that the surrounding reading environment affects the reading of an early modern text as much as the physical text.

Dekker does precisely this; his reader is forced to consider his reading experience as phenomenological and spatial activity, he must think about where he is reading this pamphlet and his proximity or distance to the plague-infested city. Even if in a supposedly safe area, such as the “perfumed and pampered …wretched man”/reader on his country estate, reading about the plague may cause symptoms that mimic those of the plague victim. In both The Wonderfull Yeare and News from Graves-end, Dekker imagines readers feeling the physical affects of fear and/or the plague—hair standing on end, large saucer eyes, and coldness in the extremities—neither by experiencing the plague firsthand nor even witnessing the horrors within London, but by merely reading the plague.

Dekker’s reader must grapple with his mortality as he reads this pamphlet.

Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, explains in his section on “Terror and Affrights” that

198 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“lamentable effects are caused by such terrible objects, heard, read, or seen” (I.337). In

Galenic terms, this excess of fear is the result of too much black bile, which leads to melancholia, illness, and therefore, a greater susceptibility to the pestilence. It may also, as Dekker hopes, lead one to pity (82). Dekker calls for nothing less than Aristotelian catharsis, the purgation or purification of the emotions (Aristotle 10). Aristotle states:

Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from

the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior

poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye,

he who hears the tale will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place.

(24-25)

Dekker’s work is “somewhat infected” on a figurative level even if that may bleed into manifested symptoms for his readers. But his work may be “somewhat infected” as several scholars have recently pointed out, on a literal level, too. Josh Calhoun argues that there is a “poetics of paper,” a way to consider the multiple materialities and temporalities of the text to better comprehend the rhetoric of the value of the book.227 In

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 227 By studying the production of flax and the recycling of linen rags to create cheap Bible paper, Calhoun reads Henry Vaughan’s poem “The Book” (1655), which ponders the material genealogy of the Bible, as a poem in which “the subject of the poem is corruptibility, not death, and its object is a printed Bible made of culturally processed natural resources, a Bible that is a palimpest of plants and animals, social circulation, religious tradition, and textual production”(341). The “corruptibility” appears in Vaughan’s ruminations of the book’s past as linen clothing, considering the bodies that wore the clothing, and the virtues and sins of those bodies, a type of spiritual effluvia that clings to the linen, even after it is processed into paper. The former wearers (and their lives, words, and deeds) are separated like the wheat and chaff as either “good corn” or “fruitless weeds.” Thou [God] knew’st this paper when it was Mere seed, and after that but grass; Before ’twas dressed or spun, and when 199 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his reading, Calhoun considers the lifecycle of linen, from flax to clothing to recycled rags turned into printing press paper. Sharon Achinstein writes that forbidden books were not only considered morally corruptible, but the “very physical object itself was a potential carrier of disease, since the rags from which paper were made were thought to be able to carry plague” (34).

Indeed, Dekker returns to images of foul and diseased linens repeatedly in his pamphlets, blurring the lines between the metaphors of contagion, medical theories of septicity, and the material conditions of book publishing. In A Rod for Runaways, Dekker complains that the English wool drapers are suffering from a competition with the linen drapers, because there is a greater market for the dead’s winding sheets than for the clothes of the living: “Few woollen Drapers sel any Cloth, but euery Church-yard is euery day full of linnen Drapers: and the Earth is the great Warehouse, which is piled vp with winding-sheetes (139). In Dekker’s first piece of prison literature, Jests to make you merie with the coniuring vp of Cock VVatt, (the walking spirit of Newgate) to tell tales

(1607), he imagines writing invectives and rhymes made with the ink of the poisoned gall of toads and composed on “paper made of the filthy linen rags that had beene wrapt about the infected and vlcerous bodyes of beggers, that had dyed in a ditch of the pestilence”

(30). As covered in greater detail in the first chapter, the printing house was a malodorous working environment, and paper was impregnated with the olfactory memories of its processes, and imbued with the (im)moral and physical memories of its previous life as worn clothing. Dekker focuses on funereal linen in several key passages of The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Made linen, who did wear it then: What were their lives, their thoughts, and deeds, Whether good corn or fruitless weeds. (cited in Calhoun 342) Dekker seems to be pulling at both ways at the same time—infecting and curing. 200 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wonderfull Yeare, most notably, when he writes that the conflated “wretched man”/reader will bury his own beloved son: “for thou must be inforced with thine own hands, to winde vp (that blasted flower of youth) in the last linen, that ever he shall weare” (31.3-6).

If the linen paper of Dekker’s text is “somewhat infected,” the ink made of the tears of widows, and the affect of reading striking horror into the hearts of his readers, he also offers some cures as well. First, Colin Bloy notes that “throughout the centuries, printing ink has in some way or other entered into the pharmacopeia of folk medicine” as a panacea for cuts, bruises, burns, hemorrhoids, ulcers, wounds, and tumors (Bloy 8).

Therfore, the same text that may be infected could also potentially act as a cure.

Several of Dekker’s other cures concern the affective powers of reading, perfumes, and mirth. While fear may lead to illness and death, it may also lead to pity, as

Aristotle asserts. Dekker explicitly hopes that his tragic pamphlet will positively affect the passions of his readers, so that their “marble bosoms may be shaken with terror, and hearts of Adamant melt into compassion” (26-27). To feel for those who are afflicted and suffering, rather than fleeing from them is the type of therapy that Dekker promotes.

Thomas Dekker’s dedication to M. Cuthbert Thuresby hints at another therapeutic virtue of his Wonderfull Yeare. “If you read, you may happilie laugh; tis my desire you should,” Dekker tells Thuresby, “because mirth is both Phisicall and wholesome against the Plague” (27).228 Totaro notes how precarious it was to “practice mirth or even seek

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 228 Achinstein also contrasts this with Dekker’s infected pages: “The reader was not to worry, though; the reader’s resistance to the plague would improve with his pamphlet, since mirth itself would be a corrective. Dekker here applied the Galenic model of disease, where disease was cured by righting an imbalance in the humors” (Achinstein 35). 201 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! consolation in plague-time, because … even letters from loved ones might drive one to fear, making one more susceptible” (53). Letters might comfort by noting that family members were still alive, or, conversely, cause fear in their infected pages. Beatrice

Groves reclaims the humorous story as its own type of prescribed medicine:

In the early modern period good spirits and laughter were held to be beneficial in

warding off this disease, and incongruity was an important aspect of the

contemporary theory of humor. This belief generated a distinct genre that

influenced Nashe: the plague pamphlet that combined strict warnings with

therapeutic pleasantry. (239)229

William Vaughan, in Approved Directions for Health (1612) argues that “mirth,” the happy yet contemplative state of mind, prevents disease, circulates blood, brings a twinkle to the eye, and prolongs life (141). Dekker’s works are often mirthful. The title page for The Owl’s Almanack (1618) is “calculated for the Meridian mirth of London.”

The Epilogue for his comedy, If it be not good, the Diuel Is In It (1612) ends by noting that the three staged hours were full of mirth.230 Dekker’s celebratory city comedy The

Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) begins with an epistle to all good fellow craftsmen,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 229 Groves continues: “Dekker's Wonderful Year (1603) is perhaps the apogee of the humorous plague pamphlet. Written during an epidemic that claimed almost a quarter of London's population, it interweaves merriment and disease until sickness creates matter for laughter and jests are infected with plaguey possibilities” (247).

230 “IF't be not good, the Diuell is in’t, (they say,) The Diuell was in’t, this then is no good play By that conclusion, but hereby is meant, If for so many nones, and midnights spent To reape three howres of mirth, our haruest-seede Lyes still and rot….”

202 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! apologizing if any offense is taken, “for nothing is purposed but mirth. Mirth lengthenth long life, which with all other blessings I heartily wish you” (“Epistle” 19-20). These other works are all focused on unequivocally happier times and settings, but there is a common thread that Dekker would rather write to please and delight his readers/audience than to teach or censure. Mirth, the antidote to and antithesis of melancholy, is a positive psychosomatic state caused by “merry company” and “music” (Burton 2.119). To counteract the melancholic’s susceptibility to the plague, Stephen Bradwell suggests mirthful enjoyments, “Wee that are Phisitians to the Body, are but Chirurgians to the

Soule: wee can but talke of Topicall remedies, as to apply Mirth, Musicke, good

Company, and lawfull Recreations; such as may take away all time and occasions for carefull thoughts and passionate affections…” (42). Mirth is also, as Dekker, knows well, the sensuous enjoyment of life, related to “pleasant discourse, jests, conceits, merry tales”

(Burton 2.119). Mirth physically manifests in symptoms contrasting those of Dekker’s frightened readers: laughing, healthiness, ruddy coloring, warm sensations throughout the body, a purging of the blood, and longevity of life. Mirth depends on good company, the kind found on the lively streets of London’s markets, or in a tavern with friends, or at the playhouse enjoying “Comicall and ridiculous stuffe” (Wonderfulle Yeare 38). This is all denied by the closure of the theatres, the shutting up of plague houses, and other ordinances that limited movement around the city and congregations from meeting.

Burton lists several of the ancients who promote mirthfulness through the different senses: “By all means,” saith Mesue, “procure mirth to these men in such things as are heard, seen, tasted, or smelled, or anyway perceived” and Epicurus who suggests that “sweet smells, good diet, touch, taste, embracing, singing, dancing, …” will “expel

203 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! grief and procure pleasance” (Burton 2.120). Vaughan differentiates between two types of mirth, the common man’s mirth—enjoyment of the sensual pleasures, such as looking at beautiful women and gardens—and the wise man’s mirth—contemplation, especially spiritual meditation. Whether the mirth is engaged with spiritual or corporeal pleasures, he offers the same recipe to “make the heart merry”: “You must vse to carrie about you a sweet Pomander, and to haue alwayes in your Chamber some good perfumes; Or you may wash your face and hands with sweet waters: for nothing in the world can so exhilarate and purifie the spirits, as good odours” (141-142). Pomanders and perfumes are two of the most frequently recommended plague preventatives or cures in early modern medical writings. The sweetly scented and highly spiced pomander ball can be easily around the neck or waist by a small chain or ribbon, carried in a pocket or pouch, and utilized in congested or malodorous areas to scent the air passing through the nose.

The scents of the pomander are aromatic, clean, refreshing, and calming.

These aromatics are also heuristically employed to represent the sweet scents of heaven and redemption. Metaphysical perfumes are a common trope in religious plague pamphlets uniting the supernatural causes and cures of the plague—originating from God and terminating in death, redemption, and/or repentance—with the natural causes and cures—stench and sweet perfumes. Mathew Mead in Solomon's prescription for the removal of the pestilence, or, The discovery of the plague of our hearts (1665) claims that

“It is the incense and perfume of your prayers, that through Christ, must appease an angrie God, and clear an infected Air” (84). Richard Kingston’s Pillulae pestilentiales, or, A spiritual receipt for cure of the plague delivered in a sermon preach'd in St. Paul's

Church London (1665) has a Latin title “a pill for the plague” that would work just as

204 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fittingly for a publication by the Royal College of Physicians or Worshipful Society of

Apothecaries, while the subtitle “a spiritual receipt” elevates the home remedy to holy redemption. Sampson Price warns “Neuer goe abroad, but with the Pomander of faith, full of the sweet spices of good works” (39). Roger Fenton’s A Perfume Against the

Noysome Pestilence (1603), the introductory passage of this chapter, is yet another example of this type of spiritual and olfactive mirth as preventative against the plague.

Leah Knight relates the similar material forms of both the good book and the aromatic pomander:

More than one book portrayed itself, in its titular rhetoric, as a pomander of this

kind, an identification that might have been partially inspired by the hinged and

clasped containers that often housed such items. Such a metaphorical

identification of book and pomander might encourage the former to be carried

about, as was the latter, on the person, as well as raised toward the face (as one

does when reading) in order to be inhaled in the same way as were the

pomander’s healthful vapours when such defenses were required. (46)

Ladies carried small devotional books on their persons, and often hanging from a chain at the waist, the way many pomanders were at easy reach. When the spirits were agitated, the lady could pull up a good verse or a sweet smell to alleviate her mental discomforts and to provoke mirthful meditations.231 Knight offers another material point of comparison, “Even books that did not operate metaphorically as pomanders might have done so more literally, since one of the readiest ways to preserve the sprigs of herbs which could combat diseased air was to press them tightly between the pages of a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 231 A beautiful 17th c. pomander at the Wellcome library is shaped like a book. 205 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! book…” (46). Dekker’s jests then could operate to drive away apprehension and fear in the reader, and between the pages one could slip a sprig of rosemary.

In this sense, Dekker’s The Wondefull Yeare is yet another one of these olfactive cures. Dekker’s dedication then as both “somewhat infected work” yet also “wholesome against the plague” is engaged in the concept of special air, the idea that the odorous objects near the body could corrupt or cure the reader. Dekker’s prose can infect runaway readers; it can purge the pestilence through tragic catharsis; the winding sheets-cum- pamphlet pages harbor the stenches of disease; yet the mirthful laughs of company and aromatic possibilities may prevent contracting the disease.

Rebecca Totaro contrasts the “hopeful,” “certain and positive” tone of William

Bullein’s A Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence with the uncertainty of Dekker’s The

Wonderful Yeare, despite the very similar humorous interludes and biting satire in both

(Plague Epic 4). In contrast to Bullein’s 1563 plague pamphlet,

Dekker closes anti-climatically (if he can be said to close at all), offering only a

string of absurd, grotesque stories uttered in exasperation. By its end, Dekker’s

entertainment contains enough bile to diminish even his early promise to help the

reader secure mirthful distraction from plague-time sorrow and fear. (Totaro,

Plague Epic 4-5).

In one of Dekker’s saddest stories in The Wonderfull Yeare (and paralleling Romeo and

Juliet), a beautiful bride succumbs to the plague on the day she was to be married, and the church’s ceremonial decorations—her gown, the music, and even the “rosemary that was washt in sweete water to set out the Bridall, is now wet in teares to furnish her burial” (46)—are recycled for her funeral. Such smells could be foul or fragrant,

206 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! indicative of life and mirth or death and decay. The olfactive memories embedded in the material texts make Dekker’s pamphlets infectious, but his nasal ethics—poetry, the catharsis of tragedy, and the powers of communal mirth—cure his readers, too.

207 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 4: The Olfactory Erotics of Robert Herrick’s Poetry

Ann Coiro writes that Herrick is the “poet of anxiety” par excellence:

Herrick is at once the most classical of English Renaissance poets, speaking of

ancient themes of love and death with a perfect native voice, and the most eerily

modern, caught in the tensions of his nuclear family and turned inward to a

private domestic space where he finds safety in contemplating his own oblivion.

It may be argued that Herrick is the poet of anxiety… (Coiro, “Edge” I, emphases

added)

Coiro suggests that Herrick is a poet of the domestic sphere, and yet, most of the major recent scholarship on Herrick has been in the New Historicist vein of politicizing his verse.232 This has been the prevailing tendency of Herrick studies since the 1980s—to either bifurcate his poems and his intentions into either a politicized reading of later

Caroline and Civil War era religio-political tensions, the decidedly more popular inclination, or to dismiss his verses as lovely but irrelevant erotic trifles. It is true that in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 232 Achsah Guibbory reads Hesperides and Noble Numbers, as Herrick’s attempt to reconcile “liturgy” (pagan, Roman-Catholic rites) and “temple” (early Christian, Judaic) into his own idealized version of the Church (Ceremony 89). Andrew J. Power suggests that the two collections may refer to Herrick’s opening focus on “hell” (Hesperides) and “heaven” (Noble Numbers), comparing the work to Dante’s Divine Comedy (173). I am not so convinced of Power’s reading: “Hesperides is a realm (or heathen temple perhaps) full of sins of the flesh, the beautiful and ugly of natural mortal life. It is certainly celebrated, but it is also regularly reviled”(173). Of course, I am wary of binaries and dichotomies throughout this dissertation, and even just a consideration of Herrick’s odes to sack undermines such a reading; Herrick enjoys life in its complexity and exquisite beauty, but does not find anything hellish in even his most grotesque caricatures. I am more convinced of his general attention to the body, especially the grotesque body, in Hesperides. 208 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his over 1,402 poems there are lyrics celebrating King Charles, songs reveling in Laudian church rituals, and many political anxieties over the war-torn England, but there are also hundreds of poems on daffodils, or Julia, or Queen Mab.233 Therefore, this chapter is not concerned explicitly with those politico-religious anxieties, but returns to the textual and literary anxieties by attending to the formal tendencies and the content of several of his erotic poems, domestic encomia, and his framework poems.234

Following Ann Coiro’s proposition that Herrick is “the poet of anxiety” (Coiro,

“Edge” 1), this chapter focuses on the aromatics of the feminine and the “private domestic space” to investigate Hesperides. Expanding on the feminist cultural materialism of such scholars as Wendy Wall, Michelle Dowd, and Natasha Korda, as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 233 Following other scholars, while I refer to Hesperides (1,402 poems), I only write on the secular poems (1,130 poems of the Hesperides and exclude the religious poems of The Noble Numbers). As Hesperides was entered into the stationer’s register in 1640, but not published until eight years later, with a separate page for his collected religious poems The Noble Numbers, and especially as the religious poems are not the erotic lyrics I am focusing on, I have mostly excluded them from this chapter. I realize that there are deficiencies to this approach. For example, Herrick’s own title page lists his works as “both humane and divine.” There are numerous religious poems amongst his humane works in Hesperides, and his Noble Numbers retain his sensuous focus on the small (im)materialities of his secular poems: sweet aromas, blazons of bodies (Christ, Mary), and items of divinity. 234 Much has been written on Herrick’s Royalist sympathies, and anti-Puritanical or pro- Laudian tendencies, but listed here are the definitive works: Leah S. Marcus’ The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of the Old Pastimes (1986) and “Herrick’s Hesperides and the ‘Proclamation made for May’” (1979); Peter Stallybrass’ “’Wee Feaste in Our Defense’: Patrician Carnival in Early Modern England and Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1986), and Achsah Guibbory’s Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (1998). John Creaser, using the datable surviving manuscript copies of Herrick’s poetry, smartly questions the religio-political readings that place most of Herrick’s poetry as composed after his movement to Devonshire, and written in the 1630’s and 1640’s. He warns the historicists to not place “context before text”(178). By reading Herrick through an olfactive lens, as smells are both highly historical and occasional, yet also so hedonistically idiosyncratic and (a/trans)historical, the issue of dates is of less concern for this study. 209 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! well as queer theories of perfume, I reclaim those erotic trifles and reinsert them into our larger readings of Herrick’s work.235 By returning to some of the lighter fare in a reading that re-genders and queers Hesperides, we can focus on Herrick’s personal fears and formal fixations: concerns over gendered labor and poetic output, apprehensions concerning the reception of his poems, and fears of growing old and dying, and how all of these uncertainties are connected to feminine olfactory pleasures.236

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 235 These three scholars bring together feminist critiques, new historicist scholarship, material culture, and new formalism in a seamless way that I hope to replicate in this chapter. Specifically, Wendy Wall argues that domesticity is represented as uncanny, both as a “reassuringly ‘common’ sphere in which people immersed themselves in familiar rhythms, and as a profoundly alienating site that could never be fully inhabited or comprehended. In its first incarnation, the household harbored supposedly indigenous rituals, languages, and practices that bound the natio. In its second form, it was associated with femininity, lower-class servitude, vulgar lore, or a degraded oral culture, and, as such it constituted a site of shame particularly for elite men. The drama of the period fuses the two…” (5-6). In my readings of Herrick’s poetry, I argue that perfumes occupy a liminal space between the Classical or divine worlds and the domestic household. Furthermore, Herrick distances himself from the unseemly production and labor in the household in his poems celebrating domestic work. Michelle Dowd reads early modern women writers, some published and some in manuscripts, alongside dramatic representations of working women to find the patterns between these works. I am not, unfortunately, considering women writers—excepting an opening bit on Isabella Whitney, but I am reading some early modern gardening manuals, conduct books, and recipe collections all written and published explicitly for female readers alongside Herrick’s poems. Natasha Korda’s work on “stuff,” the material goods that defined the early modern household is also essential for my reading of Herrick’s “trifles,” “dainties,” “décor,”—all terms used disparagingly by scholars for his diminutive poems and topics. 236 On the queerness of perfume, Stephen Guy-Bray, recently argued that Holly Dugan’s Ephemeral History of Perfume may be queerer than Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (2011) or Will Stockton’s Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy (2011). He concisely states: Scents, whether pleasurable or otherwise, by their nature leave no trace, and there is a sense in which writing a history of something that did not lead to anything is an excellent metaphor for doing the history of homosexuality. (524) Later in this chapter, I discuss the olfactory erotics of Herrick’s verse, queering the distinctions between the binaries of male/female and subject/object. David Landrum 210 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Herrick may be the “poet of anxiety,” but he is also the poet laureate of smell.

Most literary scholars, however, have overlooked Herrick’s penchant for sweet aromas.237 From the title Hesperides (which both depicts the famous mythological garden sacred to Juno and the divine nymphs who tend the garden) to the fraught frontispiece which depicts a large-nosed bust of Herrick crowned with roses in this mythical garden, and from the anthologized contents of his work—that is gathered and arranged like the flowers in a bouquet—to the lines of his opening “Argument to His Book” in which

Herrick claims he will “sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece / Of balm, of oil, of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! complicates Herrick’s sexuality by reading his ironic and distanced purely poetic mistresses alongside the many real women for whom he writes verses, subverting both Petrarchan desires and preconceived gender roles. 237 On the other hand, social scientists love citing Herrick. Constance Classen (cultural historian), David Howes (anthropology), and Anthony Synott (sociology), the co-authors of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994) devote a short section of the chapter “Following the Scent: From the Middle Ages to Modernity” to “Odes of Odour,” citing several of the canonical authors—Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Spenser, and Swift—and quoting two poems by Herrick: “Upon Julia’s Sweat,” and “Upon a Free Maid, with a Foule Breath.” They claim that Herrick’s poetry “particularly abounds with imagery of this sort” (75). Havelock Ellis, the influential psychologist, notes in his seminal work Sexual Selection in Man (1905) that along there a “few exceptional, but still quite healthy people, [for whom] smell would appear to possess an emotional predominance which it cannot be said to possess in the average person” (72). For Ellis, many of these “few exceptional people” are canonical authors--Baudelaire, Zola, Huysman—and several of whom are early modern English writers—Milton, Shakespeare, and Herrick. Ellis argues, “It may indeed be said that most poets ... devote a special attention to odors, and since it has been possible to describe smell as the sense of imagination, this need not surprise us” (74), but even among those devotees and poets of aromatics, Herrick is an exceptionally exceptional nose: “Among our older English poets, Herrick displays a special interest in odors with a definite realization of their sexual attractiveness” (74). The zoologist D. Michael Stoddart, in The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour (1990), allocates one section to the importance of scents in philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and folklore, and immediately following his overview of Ellis’ theories on the olfactory imagination, Stoddart claims that “among the poets, more of whom dwell on scent than do novelists, pride of place must go to the Englishman Robert Herrick, who writes about the fragrances of his various lovers with a power and exquisite intensity which is truly striking” (129). 211 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! spice and ambergris” which all work together to create a collection of poems in which gardens, households, bodies, desires, death, and poetry are fluidly connected through pleasurable fragrances.

I begin with Herrick’s anxieties concerning the olfactive afterlife of his texts, the larger issues of the work as a whole by offering readings of the title Hesperides as framing device, the opening “The Argument of His Book,” and by extension, the eight opening and seven closing framework poems. From there, I work through several of his olfactory erotic lyrics and satirical epigrams, but give the most attention to the seldom anthologized and complexly allusive “To the most fair and lovely Mistris, Anne Soame, now Lady Abdie” (H-375). I end with an analysis of his (quite literally) central poem,

“The Apparition of His Mistresse calling him to Elizium” (H-575).

Wrapping Spices

In a comical anxiety over the reception of his Hesperides (pub. 1648), Robert

Herrick fears that his book will be recycled and reused, and his sweet garden of verse subjected to stench. He addresses several of his epigrams “To His Booke”; he blesses his book and tells it not to fear “spice, or fish, or fire, or close-stools” (“To his Booke” (H-

405)).238 In these uneasy poems, Herrick worries that his leaves will become toilet paper, used as kindling for house fires, or wrapped around fishy foodstuffs, all malodorous and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 238 All citations of Herrick’s poetry are from The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (ed. J. Max Patrick, 1968) unless noted otherwise. In “Another [to his book]” (H-5), Herrick curses those who would use his book as toilet paper: Who with thy leaves shall wipe (at need) The place, where swelling Piles do breed: May every Ill, that bites, or smarts, Perplexe him in his hinder-parts 212 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! humiliating ends for his sweet lyrical poems.239 Randall Ingram links together the material production of Herrick’s book and some of his lesser-known poems (such as the brief epigram “Ambition”) to argue that “Hesperides is especially frank about its recycling of both cultural and physical materials” (110). Indeed, Herrick’s Hesperides is a garden of verses, motifs, tropes, and genres, planted from the seeds of previous writers:

Martial, Anacreon, Ovid, Horace, Catallus, and his English predecessor, Ben Jonson.240

The material text as potentially malodorous waste paper undermines the aspirations of the poetic project as a permanent and idyllic garden of lyrical and olfactory delights, complete with fellow poets, fragrant flowers, and perfumed nymphs (“The Apparition of

His Mistresse calling him to Elizium” (H-575)).241

Herrick fixates on his book ripped apart, the pages reused and recycled, and the immortality of verse subjected to the tyranny of nothing more than household economics.

In another “To his Booke,” Herrick suggests his collection of verse find a “friendly patron” lest “the Grocers in a trice, / Make hoods of thee to serve out spice” (H-844.2, 6-

7), and in “To His Booke,” he promises to recover any shredded leaves of his book and put them to rest in a “chest/ With spice” (H-960.5-6). The fragrant and imported luxury of spice serves as a potential gravesite or unsavory end for his book, when a grocer anatomizes the pages to sell his wares to a housewife. When Herrick vows to collect the dismembered leaves of his poem, he imbues his pages with life, embalms them with the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 239 As described in the earlier chapters of this dissertation, the materials of the book move through different physical states and processes, each imbued with its own distinctive odors. 240 I conclude the chapter by giving more attention to these Classical sources, and the critical history of Herrick as Classical writer, in my reading of “The Apparition of His Mistresse calling him to Elizium” (H-575). 241 See, also Stephen B. Dobranski’s argument that “Herrick conceives his Hesperides first and foremost as something physical” (168). 213 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! very same spices for which the pages were originally shorn, and provides a perfumed burial. “Spice,” in the early modern imagination, comes from places such as Arabia (the

“Land of the Spices”) the geographic Eden, home to Biblical exiles, and the luxurious

Queen of Sheba, linking together the aromas of geographical and erotic paradise. Yet,

Arabia is also a place of racial, religious, and cultural others.242 Spice is foreign, piquant, luxurious, and dangerous.

But “spice” as Herrick asserts is also a domestic good—sold at the Grocers, bought by housewives, and used in everyday recipes. “Spice” is several times mentioned in poems concerning weddings and “bridal-cakes”—“To the Maides to walke abroad”

(H-616) and in “The Bride-Cake” (H-805)—the focus of the fourth line of his opening poem, “The Argument of His Argument”: “[I sing] Of Bridegrooms, Brides, and of their

Bridall-Cakes” (H-1.4).243 In one of his later poems, Herrick also laments the death of a beautiful virgin, who will not have spiced bridal-cakes, but rather, like the destroyed copy of Hesperides, will be buried in “Bed of Spice” (“Upon a Maide” (H-838.1)).

Equally, he imagines his own death and burial in many poems, often calling upon his sweet mistresses to embalm his body, such as Anthea to lie beside him to or be buried together with him as a preservative “spice”: “From my embalming (Sweetest) there will be/ No Spices wanting, when I’m laid by thee” (“To Anthea” (H-55.9-10). He asks his

Julia to kiss him and infuse his corpse with her breath scented like nard, balm, and myrhh

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 242 In the early modern and periods of colonial expansion, “the rhetoric of spice played between topography and tropology, between the uneasy instability of scent, desire, flavor and drug an the fixed location of righteous consumption, love and medicine, and between the boundaries of national place and the locus of a meal, and the unstable fluctuations of commerce” (Morton 74). 243 In his opening poem of the Hesperides, Herrick states that he will sing of sweet aromas: “I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece/ Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-Greece” (H-1.7-8). I give more attention to those lines later in this chapter. 214 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(H-327).244 There is a wonderful circularity of literary and domestic economics in

Herrick’s anxious “spice” poems: Herrick writes poems about bridal-cakes and spices and publishes his Hesperides; those pages are then used to carry spices home from the market; those same spices are used in the baking of bridal-cakes; Herrick consumes and composes about spiced bridal-cakes; Herrick dies and is embalmed with spices, buried like his own sweet book or a young virgin.

This cyclical nature of these “spice” poems underscores the larger circuitousness of his collection, concerned with the ephemeral moment or sensation that is captured in the immortality of the lyric, and always within the particular moment that looks simultaneously to the distant (pagan or early Judeo-Christian) past and the far future (the heavenly afterlife or some version of the Blessed Isles). The (im)materials of Herrick’s poetry, too, shape this repetition of indirection. On the one hand, like the printed text,

Herrick thinks in terms of enduring materials—monuments, gravestones, and even jewelry—yet on the other, he is just as invested in the immaterial and ephemeral— perfumes, flowers, a cup of sack.245 Books, bodies, anxiety over literary or actual deaths,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 244 “Spice” often emanates from the body of Herrick’s favorite mistress, Julia. In “On Julia’s Breath” that the sweetness of her breath causes the poet to claim that foreign spices do not come from the East, but her parted lips (H-179). When Julia unlaces her gowns, all the sweetest scents of earth and heaven are released (“Upon Julia’s Unlacing her self,” (H-414). Even her shadow is fragrant and irresistible, smelling of “milder Pomander” (“Another of Her,” H-485). And in the poem, “The Bride-Cake,” Herrick instructs Julia to make a bridal cake with savors of her own flesh (“paste of Almonds”) and her sweet breath (“spice”) (H-805.4, 6). 245 His very first poem, preceding his famous “The Argument of His Book” (discussed in detail later in this chapter) is a prefatory poem “To the Most Illustrious and Most Hopeful, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales” [i.e. later Charles II] seems to have been intended as a special gift for the prince in 1640 upon his tenth birthday and his initiation into the Order of the Garter, thwarted by the English Civil War. The Prince is represented in light imagery—light, Sun/son, evening stars (the Hesperides), and the omen of the Hesperus star seen at midday at the Prince’s birth (Patrick 9). His poems “my Book” (1), 215 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immortality through verse, the recycling of poetry (whether the Romans or Jonson), and the reutilizing of the material text—all are infused with the sweet scents of spice and the domestic odors of the kitchen, but also a nervous sweat.

Hesperides: the plotting of a garden

T.S. Eliot, in his “What is Minor Poetry?” (1944) famously contrasts George

Herbert’s The Temple (1633), “a book constructed according to a plan… a continued religious meditation with an intellectual framework” (42) to Herrick’s Hesperides, in which “there is no such continuous conscious purpose about Herrick’s poems” (44). The former, he argues, has a blueprint as the title implies and “we are rewarded for the trouble of reading” Herbert in his entirety; therefore, he is not a minor poet. Herrick, on the other hand, is a minor poet: the whole of his poetry is not greater than the sum of its parts (43-

44).246 Herrick’s most astute—if not most forgiving critic—Gordon Braden states that

“the poems, read as a whole, support the sense of a man with nothing really new to say or find out or in general to get at, but with a keen disposition, quickly expended and quickly renewed, to write in a certain way” (160). Herrick’s marginalized place in literary history,

Ann Coiro insists, is because there are “too many poems, too little ambiguity, too much in the shadow of his aggressively laureate father Ben, too Royalist to be politically correct, too pretty for our muscular postmodern taste, not man enough, not feminist enough” (iii).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “my Book of Glories” (9) (that is, commendatory verses) become “Immortall Substances,” eternal verses that live in the person of the King, yet also pointless and unreadable in the bright light of the Prince. It is this very collapse of the (im)mortal and (im)material that is so dependent on close readings of Herrick’s “airs,” “dews,” and “perfumes” and other ephemeral substances. 246 Leah Marcus, having Eliot in mind, charges that “read as a whole, Hesperides is broader and stronger than the sum of its parts, but also more bewildering” (173). 216 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are major differences between the two collections that Eliot does not feel the need to cover. Herbert only wrote about 170 poems for The Temple; Herrick, by contrast, has eight times that number. The title The Temple connotes stone, permanence, patriarchy, religion, the senses of touch and sight; Hesperides signifies gardens, ephemerality, femininity, secular pleasures, the senses of taste and smell. Recent scholarship has returned to the issue of Herrick’s collected poems, especially the issues of

Herrick’s organization, (dis)continuities between poems, and whether or not the work is even meant to be read in toto.247 I do not disagree with the argument that Herrick is a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 247 For example, Coiro is very clear on her opinion, and counters Eliot’s arguments: “I propose that Hesperides should be read in its entirety” (Epigram 3). She offers Eliot’s missing “continuous conscience purpose” by reading the work in the tradition of the epigram book tradition. She finds that there is a complex organizational structure, in which lyrics and epigrams “stand side by side in complicating proximity and that was open in the Renaissance to an astonishing variety of intentions an interpretations” (4). Stephen Dobranski, on the other hand, makes a strong and pragmatic case against Coiro’s claims of Herrick’s meticulous control over the order of the poems: In practical terms, that any seventh-century poet would have been able to insist on a precise organization for printing over 1,000 separate poems seems unlikely…” (154). He finds the framework opening and concluding poems—discussed later in this chapter as specifically ordered, but that most of the rest, Herrick would not have complete control over. For my own part, I would split down the middle. Herrick does not easily divide his work even into secular and sacred (there are many religious poems within Hesperides), let alone into something divided purely by genre (there are more lyrics earlier and a flurry of epigrams at the end, but there are no neat divisions), as a seasonal calendar (the opening of the “Argument” suggests this as one possible teleology), or some other obvious organizing principle. There are moments when a series of epigrams are grouped together, but it is never all the epigrams in one place. There are groupings of poems that work together for obvious reasons, and were probably intended in that order according to Herrick, and retained by the printers due to their obviousness—for example, his two elegies for his brother (H-185, H-186); poems dedicated to the King and Queen (H-264 and H-265, both highlighted by their change the capital headings, but these poems are not early dedicatory verse, alongside the prefatory poem to Prince Charles); a small nosegay of floral-themed poems: cherry-blossoms (H-189), lilies (H-190), pansies (H-191), gillyflowers (H-192), and “The Lilly in a Christal” (H-193))—but such groupings are relatively uncommon. A reader is more likely to find poems grouped together that may have no inherent connection: a lengthy “Panagerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton” (H-377), for example, follows two other poems of praise (H-375, discussed 217 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! minor poet writing many dainty poems most often on tiny moments, movements, and objects, but I do find that there is a type of atypical and osmological pattern in Herrick’s verse.

The significance of the title should demonstrate that Herrick’s plan, as noted above, is following the plot of a garden—whether mythical or physical—rather than the architecture of Hebert’s collection. As such, it is more fluid, susceptible to decay and mutability, and meant for a pleasurable stroll, or lingering in one place for a while, before moving onto another enjoyment. It is not linear and teleological, but cyclical and boundless. Ann Coiro, writing on the “curious, beautiful, and allusive” title of the collection, Hesperides, considers the different references—not only the garden sacred to

Juno and invaded by Heracles, but also the maiden sisters who live there and later

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! later in this chapter, and H-376) seemingly creating a pattern, but H-377 is followed by several foul epigrams (on a prostitute, a hobo, and a lute player with bad breath (H-378, H-379, H-380, H-381) and then back to poems of praise for Herrick’s poetic father, Ben Jonson (H-382 and H-383). Dividing the poems into “centuries” Coiro finds a sort of teleology—Herrick’s march towards death (211). Leah Marcus finds his organizing principle is Robert Herrick, himself: “The most obvious unifying feature of the collection is that on early every page we are made emphatically aware that it belongs to Herrick, the poet, its author” (“Herrick” 173). Katherine Maus finds in his disordered poems “a principle of iteration” (33); repetitions of themes, rhymes, phrases, etc. demonstrate Herrick’s own lack of overall career trajectory (34-36). John L. Kimmey, by noting the triplicate persona of Herrick—1. “ a poet fusing classical and Christian motifs to write poetry that will make him eternally famous,” 2. “an aging lover searching for rejuvenation through the company of young mistresses and through participating in bucolic life and all its delighst” and 3. “a ‘free-born’ Londoner banished to western England during a period of social and political upheaval”—creates the definitive overview of Herrick that allows for these more subtle but interrelated claims from Maus, Marcus, and Coiro (221-222). As I am in agreement with all of these readings and think they speak more fully in conversation with one another—Kimmey, Maus, Marcus, and Coiro all argue that Herrick (as anxious poet) fears death and seeks immortality, an obvious point on my own thesis—but I am recuperating some of the lesser analyzed feminine poems for this argument. 218 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! become stars, a pagan Eden, and another Elysium.248 Coiro notes that this garden is one of “sensual pleasure, especially those of rich odors, and beautiful sights,” (“Name” 314) and that there are “hundreds of floral poems” in Hesperides (317), but she quickly moves away from the sensual and floral aspects of the collection to focus on the politico- religious implications of the garden as metaphor.249 While I agree with Coiro’s assertion that The Hesperides is a highly occasional allegorical garden resonating with political upheaval and Herrick’s own professional and personal disappointments as a secluded country vicar, I would prefer to align Herrick’s poetry and his titular garden with both the common trope of poetry and miscellany collections as gardens. As Herrick creates separate odes for laurels, daffodils, cherry-blossoms, pansies, violets, carnations, eglantine, roses, primroses, willow trees, meadows, yew and cypress, sycamores, daisies, marigolds, tulips, and others, there is no reason not to spend more time reading Herrick’s garden as a site of “sensual pleasure, especially those of rich odors, and beautiful sights.”250

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 248 Richard Braithwait, in Essaies vpon the fiue senses with a pithie one vpon detraction. Continued vvith sundry Christian resolues, full of passion and deuotion, purposely composed for the zealously-disposed (1620), contrasts the mythological pleasure gardens with those of the Judeo-Christian tradition: “The Gardens of the Hesperides warded and guarded by those three daughters of Atlas, were pleasant; the Gardens of Lucullus fragrant; the Groue of Ida eminent; yet not comparable to those exquisite pleasures, which the diuine pastures comprehend; there is that hedged Garden, that sealed Well, that Bethesda, that Eden, that Syloe; here may the delight of euery Sence be renewed…” (60). Herrick’s work is more comfortable with the instability of boundaries and taxonomies, so his Hesperides can be Eden and Elysium at the same time, enjoyable in their same sweet fragrances. 249 The garden is often a symbol of England, as in John of Gaunt’s and the Gardiner’s speeches in Richard II. I touch briefly on this topos at the very end of the first chapter. Also, see Amy Tigner’s study on the Renaissance garden as political topoi: Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II. 250 In addition to those floral odes, Herrick provides many other floral Ovidian-style etiological poems—usually formulaically entitled “How X-flower became Y- 219 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Herrick’s title jocundly refers to tasks as difficult as Hercules’ eleventh labor of stealing the garden’s famous golden apples. On the one hand, Herrick’s loyal readers show their own endurance if they complete the Herculean task of reading 1,400 poems.

On the other hand, it is not Hercules who completes this heroic task at all, but rather a duped Atlas, although Hercules receives all the glory for his carpe florem, or in this case, carpe malum (seize the apple!). Herrick, derided by many modern critics for his pilfering of the many Classical authors, congratulates himself as the sole author, a truly Herculean victory. For those who label Herrick as a lesser son of Ben, it is as though he let the previous poet do the Atlantean heavy lifting for awhile as he plucked from the sacred

Classical garden of others’ verses.251

Hesperides, therefore, belongs alongside any of the earlier poetry collections whose titles play with a floral pun on “posies” (as both flower and poem)—such as

George Gascoigne’s Hundredth Sundry Flowers/The Posies of George Gascoigne and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! distinguishing characteristic”—as maidens become flowers or impart an aspect of their physical or moral virtues to a flower (H-36, H-37, H-167, H-190, H-192, H-258 H-260, H-391, H-503, H-706). “How Violets came blew” is both a prime example of the genre and is an especially fragrant little posy: Love on a day (wise Poets tell) Some time in wrangling spent, Whether the Violets sho’d excel, Or she, in sweetest scent. But Venus having lost the day, Poore Girles, she fell on you; And beat ye so, (as some dare say) Her blowes did make ye blew. (H-260) 251 Coiro reads the garden, as expressed above, as a politicized depiction of a lost but idealized England, and reads Herrick as Hercules as more heroic than what I would suggest: “The final element of the Hesperides myth is, of course, Hercules himself, the male principle violating the feminine garden. Herrick occasionally puns with his own name and plays with the idea of himself as Hercules among his nymphs, but, as Gordon Braden has pointed out, in spite of all the nymphs that the poet inveigles, there is not a single consummation in Hesperides” (“Name” 326). 220 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posy—to stress that the olfactive and floral tropes of Herrick’s work are important as formal properties.252 The author of an anthology of translated works liberally plucks from the gardens of verse planted by others. Gascoigne, on his title page admits his obligation to earlier authors: “A Hundreth

Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie. Gathered partely (by translation) in the fine outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, …”253 It is not only Herrick who discerns which poets to translate, adopt, and adapt for his own bouquet of verse, but his readers, editors, and critics also engage in “carpe florem,” choosing which poems to read or dispose. Gascoigne, as an example of the osmological design of such anthologies, tells the readers that some of his poesies “may perchance smell unpleasantly to some noses,” but the reader may choose which poesies to smell at/read:

… You shall be constrained to smell of the floures therein conteined all at once,

neither yet to take them up in such order as they are sorted: But you may take any

one flower by itself, and if that smell not so pleasantly as you wold wish I doubt

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 252 In the first chapter, I wrote on the floral and olfactive terms of “anthologies” composed of fragrant “posies.” Herrick’s hundreds of posies on floral subjects becomes a tautological daisy-chain. Cora Fox has nicely covered how Whitney uses the olfactive and classical traditions of the anthology to legitimize her status as woman author, and that she then destabilizes this by referring to the commercial and urban and her own moralistic aromas (via Plat’s didactic garden and her plague-warding nosegay). Rebecca Laroche reads Whitney’s references to her nosegay as a plague preventative in conversation with early modern herbals, and the female authors and readers of these medical texts (137-166). Michelle Dowd, in her first chapter in Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, creates a really nice reading on Whitney’s Nosegay, the duties of a maidservant, and her literary aspirations. 253 Whitney, too, cites many famous Classical authors—Antipater, Demades, Diogenes, Darius, Virgil, Ovid, Mantuan—in her opening dedication to George Mainwaring, Esq. and her opening poem “The Auctor to the Reader,” but she finds her true inspiration in Sir High Plat’s Floures of Philosophie (1572), a miscellany of moralistic poems. She insists on her “labor” and role as “author” in writing her own responses to Plat, in ways that Gascoigne as gentleman author does not need to account for. 221 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not yet but you may find some other which may supplie the defects thereof

(Gascoigne 4.6-11)

Later, Gascoigne divides his verses into three olfactive floral categories for the readers to

“smell unto these Poesies”: “Floures to comfort, Herbes to cure, and Weedes to be avoided” (371). His “Flowers” are light inventions “being more pleasant than profitable”

(367); we may compare those with Herrick’s lighter fare, the erotic verses, flower poems, georgics, etc. His “Herbs” are “morall discourses,” “more profitable than pleasant” and less poetically inventive; we might compare these to Herrick’s own religious or political verses. Finally, Gascoigne offers “Weeds,” “neither pleasant nor yet profitable” but as weeds, even those “vile or stinking” may have medicinal properties when properly employed, he offers these scurrilous poems as negative examples of what one should avoid (367-368); these sound not unlike Herrick’s foul epigrams.254

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 254 In the first edition, there is no division, but we see that the later taxonomy employed by Gascoigne is still misleading. Gascoigne, who categorizes his collection into this neat herbal taxonomy does not actually categorize his poems into distinct sections based on these headings. While he uses these headings, the That is, we may find erotic verse in his herbs or moralistic works amongt his weeds. Whitney, too, suggests that readers’ different humoral complexions and personal tastes may make her nosegay more pleasant to some readers than others (“Auctor” 47-70), but readers should sample her poems, share with others, and then try Plat’s poems for more. Scholars interested in the Renaissance body, especially the depictions of lower class and laboring bodies, do discuss Herrick’s epigrams of disgust. John L. Kimmey finds that the epigrams are didactic, teaching better manners; Robert W. Halli analyzes the humor of the epigrams as maintaining a hierarchy in which those who ape the fashions of the upper classes are mercilessly mocked; Michael Schoenfeldt reads the epigrams as a sort of grotesque conduct book, that separate the comical bumpkins from the idealized nymphs to maintain class distinctions; Ann Coiro argues that the epigrams are purposefully organized alongside the lyrical poems to create poetic juxtaposition (and to mock the lower classes); David Ainsworth finds a religious message, in which even the foulest sinners may find redemption; and, in a forthcoming essay, Natalie Eschenbaum recuperates the desirability and allure of the disgusting. One of the older analyses of these epigrams by Paul Nixon finds their basis in Martial’s scurrilous epigrams. 222 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Herrick, who does not even offer this sort of olfacto-floral taxonomy, of course does not follow this plan as his lyrics, epigrams, panegyrics, and other poems seem to intermingle haphazardly. It is Herrick’s readers who try to create a meaningful narrative from his collection, pruning, plucking, harvesting, and disposing as needed. Sarah Gilead convincingly argues that Hesperides is a figurative garden of verse:

The reader enters the garden and strolls (browses) through it. The garden’s

flowers are the poems themselves. ‘Gather ye rosebuds’ becomes then, a

metaphor for the act of reading and interpreting. In this sense, the persuasion to

pleasure of Herrick’s carpe diem may be read as persuasion to seek signification:

textuality replaces sexuality. (135).

His own scattered leaves were first circulated as manuscript poems and recorded in the commonplace books of readers (Cain and Connolly, “Introduction” 10-12).255 Herrick’s sweet lyrics and epigrams are such flowers waiting to be plucked by his readers, and jotted down in commonplace books and other florilegia (Swann 152-153). In this circumstance, Herrick’s coterie of readers give continued life to his ephemeral verse by gathering, recirculating, and reinscribing his poems, and he has some control when he chooses which of his verses he will circulate.256

In the re-evaluation of Hesperides in the nineteenth century, Herrick’s problematically disgusting poems are ignored, and according to the Victorian taste for sweet poems, “It was almost exclusively the flower poems and erotic poems that were

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 255 Many of these poems are dated twenty years or more before their publication in 1648. Herrick registered his poems in the Stationers Register in 1640, but did not publish for eight more years. 256 See, also Gilead’s inspired argument that this “closed economic system” of readers and texts “defeats time itself” (140). 223 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! anthologized” (Fowler 112). Indeed, most scholars and critics of Herrick cherry-pick poems—“Corinna’s Going a Maying” (H-178), “The Hock-Cart” (H-250), “To the

Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (H-208), and for those focusing on his religio-political writings, any of the panegyrics to King Charles as well as The Noble Numbers. That is, readers, editors, and critics choose the posies to gather together (“anthologize”).

Previously, his “flowers” received the most attention; more recently, scholars have turned to his “herbs”; his “weeds” still remain the avoided verses.257 The lack of overt organization into a cultivated garden that separates figurative weeds and flowers may preserve the material—if not the thematic—unity of Herrick’s work. For example, weeding out a page of foul epigrams to wrap fish would also destroy the first verse of his lauded posy, “To live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses” (H-201).258

Herrick’s imagined garden may also be likened to the historical early modern pleasure garden, a purposefully lush, aromatic, and dizzying space. Christine Coch points out that “pleasure gardening and poesy were developing in tandem during the sixteenth century… Because both arts privileged pleasure alongside utility, writers were challenged to justify them in moral terms” (100). Coch’s essay is very convincing, excepting that it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 257 Leah Marcus explains readers’ “bewilderment” on reading the poems in similarly floral terms: “Where earlier readers and editors would have culled out the flowers from Herrick’s garden and left the rest, ignoring the politically topical poems and relegating the poems of physical disgust to appendices where they could fester unnoticed, more recent readers have become interested in searching out patterns of order within the collection’s wild abundance” (173). 258 The two epigrams immediately preceding “Trust to Good Verses” are especially vile. “Upon Luggs” (H-199) tells of a lecher whipped for soliciting a wench, and “Upon Gubbs” (H-200) creates an infanticidal joke of a man who would love to drown his children like kittens. Printed on page 88 with the first verse of the oft anthologized poem: Now is the time for mirth Nor cheek, or tongue be dumbe: For with the flowrie earth, The golden pomp is come (H-201.1-4). 224 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is a relatively anaesthetic depiction of the sensuous details of the pleasures and threats of the garden. The sense of smell already accomplishes that reconciliation between pleasure and virtue; metaphors and terms linking sweet aromas, flowers, books, and intellectual pursuits were frequently troped. In Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Gardens,” the garden is

“the purest of human pleasures” and the “greatest refreshment to the spirits of man”

(197), and to truly enjoy this pure and refreshing garden, he advises the gardener to learn

“what be the flowers and plants that best perfume the air” (198). In this sense, Herrick is engaging with the florilegium tradition—both the tradition of commonplacing moral and religious passages, but also the illustrated and descriptive floral treatise.

Literary gardens are filled with fragrant posies to cause such contemplation. The reader is meant to wander, pause, and move freely through these texts.259 Whitney admits that for all her admiration for Plat’s Floures of Philosophie, that readers need be warned:

“One word, and then adieu to thee, yf thou to Plat his Plot/ Repayre: take heede it is a

Maze to warne thee I forgot” (“Auctor” 89-90). In his own such florilegium, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers (1629) John

Parkinson, royal botanist to Charles I, composes only a few potential designs for enterprising gardeners who wish to develop their gardens.260 Otherwise, he realizes that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 259 Sir William Alexander, in Anacrisis (c. 1635) for example, compares a poem to a garden, and the ordering of the parts to the different fragrant walkways (298-299). 260 The 1629 edition has the chapter on “ordering a pleasure garden,” but the illustrated garden designs are only in the 1656 edition, according to EEBO findings. John Parkinson dedicates Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers (1629) to Queen Henrietta Maria, a noted gardener in her own right. Parkinson explicitly genders the pleasure garden and his book a “feminine of flowers,” just as he will dedicate his later work Theatrum botanicum: The theater of plants (1640) to King Charles, and declare it a “Manlike Worke of Herbes and Plants” (“Dedication to the King”). Amy Tigner creates a really nice reading of Parkinson’s Paradisi, as appealing to a readership of aristocratic ladies, especially the Queen, who garden for pleasure and not 225 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his work “would be almost endlesse, to expresse so many as might bee conceiued and set downe, for that euery man may inuent others farre differing from these…” He suggests then,

Let euery man therefore, if hee like of these, take what may please his mind, or

out of these or his own conceit, frame any other to his fancy, or cause others to be

done as he liketh best, obseruing this decorum, that according to his ground he do

cast out his knots, with conuenient roome for allies and walkes… (5)

While Parkinson suggests temperance, order, and restraint, Herrick’s designs for his garden are infinite, and the prospective pathways are interminable. “Even in their most organized layout—the labyrinth,” “Holly Dugan asserts, “pleasure gardens were designed to overwhelm inhabitants with sensory input” (Ephemeral 161). In the examples she gives, from the labyrinthine walkways to the inclusion of imported exotic flora (in her chapter, especially jasmine as recent glamorous commodity), and the unexpected grotesque features of the gardens, there are still hints of the flower, herb, and weed categories as mentioned by Gascoigne. Herrick’s epigrams of disgust—focused on the grotesque, dripping, oozing bodies of rural folk—almost seem to have their statuary counterparts in the “carnivalesque pleasures” of “sculptures that could urinate, spit, or lactate” onto surprised garden strollers (Dugan 163).

Herrick’s poems, too, may be read in the printed order and Herrick bids an opening and closing framework for his poems, suggesting a coherent plot. The first eight poems suggest a sense of order—“The Argument of His Book” works as a table of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! for practical purposes (profit, food or medicine supply, etc.). This work, she finds, as politically optimistic unlike his later Theatrum, which becomes more somber, pragmatic, and masculine with the King’s declining fortune (186-194).

226 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! contents (H-1); “To His Muse” is a standard invocation to a Pastoral/Buccolic Muse (H-

2); followed by three poems addressed to his book (H-3, H-4, H-5); one “To the Soure

Reader” (H-6); another “To His Book” (H-7) and “When He Would Have His Verses

Read” (H-8). From the third poem to his book, he already fears the reutilization as toilet paper (H-3); he hopes his poems will titillate virgin readers (H-4); he tells sour readers to keep sampling and sampling his verse; and most importantly, he wishes his poems to be read (or sung) in the evenings, after dinner and drinks, during happy times, and near a warming fire (H-8). The eight concluding poems also indicate a framework and mirror the opening poems: a farewell to his Muses (H-1123, “The mount of the Muses); a poem lamenting the sort of erotic verse that might make a maid blush (H-1124, “On Himself”); three poems on his book (H-1125, “To his Booke”; H-1226, “The end of his worke”; and

H-1127, “To Crowne it”); “On Himselfe” (H-1128) returns to the pastoral modes of his first two poems, but is now turned to eulogy, and his last two poems: “The pillar of

Fame” (H-1129) and his book’s epigraph (H-1130) look forward to the “Heaven” of his

“Argument.” This all seems to indicate an orderly progression, but he reiterates all of this over and over again: he addresses his Muse again (H-84);261 there are more poems for

“soure readers,” both his “detractors”(H-173, H-174) “an ill Reader” (H-344);262 and there are many more poems addressed “To his Book” (H-194, H-240, H-405, H-603, H-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 261 There are several other poems to or about his Muse(s): H-224, H-611, H-657, and H- 778. 262 Herrick, thanks “the generous reader” (H-95) who “winks at small faults” (95.3) in this long work. In advice “To His Booke” (H-868), Herrick thinks back to those initial “soure readers”: Take mine advice, and go not neere/ Those faces (sower as Vineger)” (1- 2). Herrick, the great Anacreontic lover of wine and sack, points out in a different poem that “Vineger is no other I define,/ Then the dead Corps, or carkase of the Wine” (H-964. 1-2). 227 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

844, H-868, H-899, H-960, H-1125).263

Hesperides is both teleological, leading toward death and immortality, and circular, focusing on the minutiae of the immediate present or small object to suspend the movement of time. The order of his collection then is all about getting lost in the garden’s maze, knowing that there may be an endpoint and there will be therapeutic herbs, gross weeds, grotesque statues, refreshing fountains, and many fragrant posies, but there will be missteps, retracing of one’s steps, pauses, breaks, and lingering enjoyments.264

Hesperides as eternal garden is the final destination, but it is the journey—consisting of all the minutiae of life, little joys and great losses—that matters to Herrick. Herrick’s

“The Argument of His Book” offers another organizing principle for his work, and as I will argue in the next section, it, too, depends upon a feminine and domestic olfactory poetics that attempts to organize, contain, and taxonomize his collection of poetry.

The Aromas and the Argument of His Book

His first poem of the collection, the “Argument of His Book,” as Ann Coiro notes is a “succinct statement of intent” and he “frames the volume with eight introductory and concluding poems throughout, speculating on its fate in the world” (312). Marjorie

Swann compares Herrick’s collected works to a “ cabinet,” the early modern cupboard holding collections of various items associated with scholarly curiosity, exploration,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 263 There are many more examples of this sort of purposeful confusion: “The Welcome to Sack” (H-197) comes hilariously only 70 poems after “His Farewell to Sack” (H-128), but that is life. One drinks too much, swears off the drink the next morning, and tries for moderation rather than abstinence the next time. 264 Marcus succinctly and beautifully elucidates a type of progression in the works: “Hesperides considered as a whole is bounded by a fanfare of royal allegiance at its beginning and a retreat to communal Anglican piety at its end, but in between it offers a seductively sweet, strangely tumultuous exploration of love, war, friendship, festivity, and loss” (“Herrick” 180).

228 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! empirical science, and other masculine intellectual pursuits. She astutely argues that

“Herrick conceives of the self as an assemblage of discrete objects, and he constructs

Hesperides as a catalogue of his life’s experiences” (150).

The “Argument” is an exercise in “cleanly wantonness,” a lyrical table of contents:

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

I write of youth, of love, and have access

By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece

Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.

I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write

How roses first came red, and lilies white.

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

The poem is tidily constructed with everything in its right place. Every two lines contain a full set of interrelated objects placed neatly upon the shelf. There is occasional enjambment, but only within the rhyming couplet, not spilling over onto the next unit.

The poem builds from the natural world (1-2) to man’s celebration and taming of

229 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! nature—seasonal festivities, marriage rituals, and the development of oils and perfumes

(3-8). There is a shift then to the supernatural—“Time’s trans-shifting,” Ovidian etiology

(“and I write / How roses first came red, and lilies white” (9-10), English folklore in the next two lines, and ending with the divine—Heaven and Hell.

The form of the “Argument” looks neat, contained, and small, yet is a recipe of different poetic modes and genres, but again, there is an osmological design. The opening

“I sing of…” sounds like the epic poet’s invocation, and the poem is written in heroic couplets, the vehicle of epics, but he continues “… brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers” eliding into a bucolic lyric or pastoral mode (H-1.1-2).265 His “Argument” is constructed “piece by piece” and he refers not only to the content of his other poems, but to other poetic forms and literary topoi as well:266 “Of April, May, of June, and July flowers” (the eclogue or calendar); “I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes”

(bucolic, rural ballads); “Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes” (epithalamia);

“I write of youth, of love, and have access/ By these to sing of cleanly wantonness”

(seduction poems, lyrics, erotic verse, sonnets, carpe diem, carpe florem); “I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece/ Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris” (multigeneric); “I sing of Time's trans-shifting” (elegies, tempus fugit); “…and I write/ How

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 265 The diphthongs of “bowers” and “flowers” may (depending on the reader) may be monosyllabic, fitting neatly into the meter, or the first two lines either end in feminine rhyme if read as polysyllabic, or for those who wish to retain meter but read these as disyllabic, the vowels of “bowers” and “flowers” must elide to work. Whether there is an excess of the feminine that cannot be contained, or something is deleted or packed in to fit the space, either way, this is a slightly messy start for the this otherwise neat taxonomy of poems. The diphthong of “oil” in line 8 can also scan as disyllabic. 266 This list is by no means inclusive, but is a starting point to see how the “Argument” both contains and leaks out his verse. The editor Edward Everett Hale Jr. offers a nice endnote of that lists “how many of the poems of the Hesperides are here referred to either directly or by implication” (159). He skips over the olfactive lines 7-8. 230 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! roses first came red, and lilies white” (carpe florem, Ovidian etiologies); “I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing / The court of Mab, and of the fairy king” (British folklore/folksongs); “I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all” (religious poetry, devotional verse, the whole of Noble Numbers).

Furthermore, this poem itself is a hybrid. As previously noted, it first echoes an epic, but it may also be classified as: an epigram, short and witty; a lyric, meant to be sung; and a sonnet, as there are fourteen lines, and the conclusion acts as the volta as the tenor switches from rural and lusty pastimes to religious meditations: “I write of Hell; I sing

(and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all” (H-1.13-14).267

“I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece,” Herrick claims, “Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris” (H-1.7-8). At the very center of Herrick’s argument is his unifying thesis: the liquids of nature (dews, rains) and the odorants discovered, cultivated, and used by men and women (balm, oil, spice, ambergris) are the very stuff of life, pleasure, and even, religious meditation.268 He revels in sweet smells and olfactive imagery more than any other early modern poet, and he sings of these sweet smells “piece by piece” as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 267 Swann also notes the “tension between epic expansiveness and epigrammatic particularity” (187). 268 While Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s introduction to Herrick’s poetry (1900) both demonstrates the bizarrely lovely Edwardian scholarship that jars against our modern academic prose and more importantly shows that earlier scholars were more willing to acknowledge Herrick’s interest in rural odors: Never was there so pretty a table of contents! When you open his book the breath of the English rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense of hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattice half hidden with honeysuckle; and distant voices of the hay- makers, returning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one’s ear, as sounds should fall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly English as Herrick. (xiv) 231 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! they so thoroughly infuse all his poems.269 These aromatics and unguents appear in different poems in many different functions, often reiterating the very foci of the rest of the “Argument.”

Unlike Swann’s depiction of the masculine cabinet of curiosities, this is a ladies’ cabinet, instead.270 Herrick is uninterested in astronomy, the Americas, medicine or any of the items often found in such cabinets; he is, however, invested in good wine, a fine dinner, delicate lace, and sweet perfumes, the items that appear in the domestic cabinet.

The argument, especially in these aromatic lines, is like the household commodities that flavor foods, heal the infirm, and perfume the body and household.271 In Herrick’s poetry, like a well-ordered garden, or a nicely chosen bouquet, or even a cleanly domestic space, everything comes together “piece by piece” to create an aromatic and effortlessly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 269 Hale’s comment that “though many other poets have enjoyed such things as please the eye and the ear, and even the touch, Herrick stands almost alone among the poets in his leaning to the delights of perfume” (xxxiii) is typical amongst scholars of Herrick. Hale, unlike most critics, however, offers three pages of examples—garden scents; the perfumes of Julia, even noting some of his personal preferences; the aromas of “ancient days”; and the general odors of the countryside (xxxiii-xxxv). 270 Among the items often found in such collections, Swann notes: “antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, medals, rare or unusual zoological specimens, plants, natural and manmade objects from Asia and the Americas, intricate carvings, portraits of important historical figures” (2). The cabinet, too, could refer to the actual cupboard with its set of shelves and drawers that held the collection, as well as an architectural space (“a closet joining a bedroom, a summerhouse”) that held such cabinets, or the collection itself (2). None of these are objects on which Herrick composes his poems. On the other hand, Laura Lunger Knoppers describes the objects of the aristocratic ladies cabinet: “Found within a withdrawing room, bedroom, or closet, cabinets were both ornate objects in themselves and the repository of writing, jewels, miniatures, money, rare spices, and other household and personal valuables” (468). These objects are much closer to those found in Herrick’s argument and scattered throughout his poetry 271 Knoppers notes that many similar titles of “secret recipe” books in the early modern period—The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie K t. Opened (1669), The Ladies Cabinet Enlarged and Opened: Containing many Rare Secrets, and Rich Ornaments of several kindes, and different uses (1654), and Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts (1670) (467). 232 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! constructed whole.272 Yet, even in a hortus conclusus, some things cannot be controlled: odors permeate, leak, and extend beyond; time flies, loved ones die, and Herrick often expresses disquiet over the reception of his expansive work.

“One of the inherent paradoxes of Hesperides, Michael C. Schoenfeldt notes,“is that a poet so fascinated by neatness and smallness would produce such a messy and sprawling book” (130). Randall Ingram asserts that “Hesperides seems to be a transitional book, a book in which an author alternately asserts his control over his perfected text and then, because he knows that even a perfected book will not necessarily live, relinquishes control to readers who are encouraged to help make the book”

(“Making” 134). Even Schoenfeldt and Ingram’s readings of the Hesperides as messy and (un)controlled can be compared to Herrick’s own erotic and olfactive aesthetics; there is “delight in disorder” (H-83), a return to the artfully naturalistic in several of his erotic lyrics.273 We can turn to even one of these odorants and see how every single line, theme, or genre mentioned in “The Argument” can be inspired by and filtered through any of these aromas.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 272 Walter Charleton, a mid-seventeenth century atomist, writes on the release of odorous particles and the attempts to preserve perfumes: No Academick can be so obstinate, as not to acknowledge, that there is a certain Effluvium, or Corporeal Exhalation from all odorous bodies, diffused and transmitted through the aer;… or decay of Quantity; which makes our Druggists and Apothecaries conserve their parcels of Ambre Grise, Musk, Civit, and other rich Perfumes, in bladders, and those immured in Glasses, to praevent the exhaustion of them by spontaneous emanation (28). Natural decay of odorous substances into smaller and smaller scattered particles causes the perfume to lose its scent. 273 Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder” is indebted to Jonson’s “Still to be neat, still to be drest”; both poems celebrate a balance between natural beauty and artful arrangements, or even the artful artlessness of looking untidy. For Herrick, however, this moves beyond an emulation of Jonson as it so thoroughly represents a mantra of his work and his representations of desirable women with their untied shoelaces and tripping petticoats. 233 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The aromatic lines 7-8, part of his overall collective thesis, are glossed over in most anthologies and while many scholars note his attention to the aromatic, there is often no further discussion. Yet, Herrick uses the terms “balm,” “oil,” “spice,” and

“ambergris” in fifty-seven different poems, sometimes even using two or more of the terms in the same poem. It is worth looking closer at how Herrick uses these terms, and in what sort of poetic context. Herrick’s odes to “balm, oil, spice, and ambergris” are complicated, however, by the wealth of meanings that such sweet odors had in early modern philosophies of smell and cultural attitudes to perfume.

For example, Herrick’s “balm” is healing agent, soothing unguent, funerary aid, and erotic essence. Herrick refers to “balm” most often as either the unguent to heal and calm a wound (whether a physical hurt or emotional scar), such as in the elegy “Comfort to a Lady upon the Death of her Husband” (H-259), or as integral part of the funerary rites, and especially in poems, where he imagines his own death and burial. In “His age, dedicated to his peculiar friend, Master John Wickes, under the name of Posthumus,”

Herrick laments his old age, finds comfort in friendship, and suggests to his companion:

Crown we our Heads with Roses then,

And ‘noint with Tirian Balme; for when

We two are dead

The world with us is buried. (H-336, 5.33-36).

“Balm” is also significant in the religious poems on His Noble Numbers, especially as it connects Christ’s nativity and, in his poetry, the circumcision, with Christ’s death, and subsequent resurrection. In “His Embalming to Julia” (H-327), his mistress acts as coroner, priestess, and deity. Through her kiss and the sweetness of her breath “trans-

234 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fuse[d]” into the poet’s chest, Julia’s breath, which is “Balm, the myrrh, the Nard” makes his body incorruptible (H-327.3,5). Herrick’s “balms, oils, spices, ambergris” are like so many labeled perfume bottles sitting in a lady’s cabinet, containing a world of significance within each waft. The odorants become the organizing principle, linking the secular and sacred, the beautiful and grotesque, epigrams and lyrics, elegies and epithalamia. Perfumes, too, are always expansive and therefore subversive. The perfumes may contain the whole of Hesperides, but Hesperides cannot contain the emanations and affects of the aromatic.

When Herrick sings of his central thesis—“of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris”—he most often fetishizes female bodily odors.274 We can see that despite their use in repeated ritualistic and religious functions, and as rural products and harvested goods, balm, oil, spice, and ambergris seem to begin and end with the effluvia of his mistresses.275

Perfuming and Composing Julia, Piece by Piece

Despite his sundry odes to his “many fresh and fragrant mistresses” (H-612.2) scholars often focus on the scopophilia of Herrick’s verse. Leah Marcus points out that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 274 In addition to those perfumes, there are numerous references to floral smells—roses, violets, and lilies topping the list—and many other perfume ingredients sprinkled throughout at least 140 other poems—storax, myrrh, laudanum (H-485); camphor, spikenard, galbanum (H-414); frankincense (in both Hesperides and Noble Numbers); and in an especially aromatic religious dirge, “The Widows’ Tears” (NN-123): saffron, calamus, spice, spikenard, storax, and cinnamon. 275 Herrick has fourteen classically named mistresses, seven of whom are named at once in “Upon the Loss of His Mistresses” (H-39). Alistair Fowler convincingly argues that we should not attempt to find historical and biographical “Julia” or “Anthea,” but realize that these are Herrick’s muses, the personifications of different poetic genres (Literary Names 45-51). John T. Shawcross stresses that the names function onomastically, so that Anthea, whose name means “flowering” often appears in poems on that topic, or Julia, with her name etymologically linked to Jove’s functions in a role of redemption (96-99). 235 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“some readers have found Herrick’s sexuality curiously, even disturbingly, infantile”

(178), but “however we interpret the sexuality of these poems of ‘wilde civility,’ they create a playful and highly personalized eroticism that surges unchecked through the garden of Hesperides, although it wanes somewhat in the volume’s second half”

(“Herrick” 178).276 When we turn to his erotic verse, Herrick is more greatly moved by his nose than his eyes.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 276 Achsah Guibbory calls the poet a “voyeur… an observer rather than an active participant” (“No lust” 79). Herrick is derided as “the Peeping tom of English poetry” (cited in Woodward 270). Gordon Braden, undeniably the best reader of Herrick’s poetry and the Classical tradition with which it engages, finds the flirty, non-orgasmic erotics of Hesperides the fantasies of “either a wide-eyed ten-year-old boy or of a dirty old man”: The emphasis on foreplay and nongential, especially oral gratifications, the fixation on affects (smells, textures) and details (Julia’s leg), and the general voyeuristic preference of perception to action are all intelligible as a wide diffusion of erotic energy denied specifically orgiastic focus and release. What is missing in the Hesperides is aggressive, genital, in other words, “adult” sexuality” (Classics 223). Heather Dubrow disagrees with Braden’s argument for Herrick’s infantilized sexuality, finding instead that there is a “gendered dichotomy, an identification with the reluctant maiden on the one hand and a celebration of masculine aggression that extends to the point of violence on the other” (244). She finds an anxiety in Herrick’s epithalamia and frequent drowning imagery related to sexual pleasures. Coiro reads a BDSM bent to Herrick’s contained pleasures, with all those twisting and invading vines, for example: “The final containment is the most intensely erotic, the orgasmic pleasure of death literalized in Herrick’s erotic fantasies of burial, wrapped in his mistresses’ bed sheets and girdles and moistened with their tears and oils” (“Edge” vi). David Landrum reads the mistresses as parodic fictions, both subjugated to the male gaze as desirable objects, but also given their own desires, including their frequent dismissals of the poet’s advances. Beyond immature, nongential desires, and voyeurism, many read the clothes and jewelry, rather than the mistresses themselves as the actual object of desire (Traub 146). Queer readings of Herrick’s poetry complicate the historicity of early modern sexual practices. Will Fisher writes on non-penetrative fricative thigh sex, beginning his essay with Herrick’s description to challenge the concept of “Herrick’s penchant for the ‘perverse’ or ‘fetishistic’” (1). William Kerrigan finds in Herrick’s poems, with their focus on kissing over consummation, not an immature sexuality, but rather a poet who knows how to create the “innocence of sexual fantasy” (160). “Kissing,” according to Kerrigan, “differs from orgasm in its capacity for limitless increase” (160). Kissing creates reciprocity and denies gender distinction: “As is not the case with intercourse, the 236 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In his short riddling sonnet “Of Love: A Sonet” (H-73), he wonders, “How Love came in, I do not know, / Whether by the’ye, or ear, or no:” (1-2). For Herrick, the answer is neither: love enters through the nose. He is a “renifleur,” a person (usually a man) “given to recurrent sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behavior involving smells” (Colman 649), or in Renaissance parlance, a “smell-smock.”277 In this poem, he continues:

Or whether with the soule it came

(At first) infused with the same:

Whether in part ‘tis here or there,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! orifices joined in kissing have no gender differences. Both have lips, and both have tongues, and both are, if you will, both” (Kerrigan 163). Valerie Traub turns to Herrick’s many breast poems to understand his “poetics of polymorphous perversion: it dallies and defers, playing out its fantasies across the surface of the female body without feeling the need to come to a point” (143). Traub turns to Herrick’s multisensate desires—“orality, tactility, scopophilia”—but his perfumes remain bottled in these readings. Moira Baker asserts, in her extended close reading of “Delight in Disorder,” that the “real subject of the poem is not the woman’s clothing at all, nor the body beneath it, but the poet’s power to shape language into an erotic experience” (19). Beyond (and related to his olfactory erotics), I would point out Herrick’s foot fetishism: he kisses Anthea’s instep while tying her shoe (H-33); both the king and queen tread upon and release the odors of amber (H-79); in both the published and differing manuscript versions of “An Epithalamie to Sir Thomas Southwell and his Ladie” (H- 149A, H-149B), the brides feet walking through the meadows perfumes the ground with each step; another bride approaches her groom with “auspicious feet” (H-618); there are 619 “silvry feet” in several poems (H-619); a good husband creates fresh and useful compost by just walking across his pasture (H-771); many of the mocking epigrams focus on the stinking feet, ripped stockings, corns and toenails of peasants; and he dedicates one especially pretty little scopophilic poem to feet: Her pretty feet, / Like snails did creep/ A little out, and then,/ As if they started at Bo-peep,/ Did soon draw in agen” (H- 524). Freud connected the “coprophilic pleasure in smelling” and the hair or foot as fetishized object (cited in Feigel 425). 277 The psychological term is osphresiolagnia. Havelock Ellis writes extensively on this topic in his Sexual Selection in Man. “Renifleur” is French for a “sniffer.” “Smell- Smock.” OED. This term, used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Middleton and Heywood, denies the supremacy of sight in determining a sexual mate. Also, see “Do You Smell a Fault?”: Detecting and Deodorizing King Lear’s Distinctly Feminine Odor” for my analysis of Gloucester and Lear as “smell-smocks.” 237 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or, like the soule, whole everywhere: (3-6).

The language of “infusion” is figuratively “imparted by divine influence,” but there is the language of fluids and sublimation as to infuse is literally to pour upon, to steep in a liquid, to melt or dissolve.278 The early modern physiological understanding of the soul’s

(im)materiality within the body, its representation as an airy substance, and its connection to the breath as life force, all links the soul to odor in the early modern imagination.279

The inability to trace the source of how love slipped in is not unlike the confusion when determining the source of an odor. The soul and the scent are both all-encompassing, invisible, omnipresent, and this causes some anxiety:

This troubles me: but I as well

As any other, this can tell;

That when from hence she does depart,

That out-let then is from the heart. (7-10).

Herrick never discovers the source of his own penetrability (though I’d wager the nostrils) but he does find the mistress emits “from the heart” through her “out-let” that penetrating Love.

If this connection of love and perfume is not evident enough in this poem, Herrick returns to these conceits of the importance of the sense of smell, the fluid state of desire,

Love-as-perfume, and the anxiety of his own extinguishment in a later sonnet (H-883): In this poem, “Love in a showre of Blossoms came / Down, and halfe drown’d me with the same” (H-883. 1-2). As he enjoys the white and red blossoms, he also inhales their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 278 "infused, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. 15 May 2015. 279 This is an abbreviated version of the slipperiness of these interrelated terms discussed more fully in the dissertation’s “Introduction.” 238 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“sweet scents commingled” (4), “As whether (this) I cannot tell / My sight was pleas’d more, or my smell…” (H-883.5-6). In a poem to his mistress Biancha, he admits that he would not fear going blind, as he would follow his mistress’ aromas to find his way through the world (H-98). The “out-let” of his “Love” sonnet is the sweet scents emitted and flowing from his mistresses’ bodies. Sartre states:

When we smell another’s body, it is that body itself that we are breathing in

through our mouth and nose, that we possess instantly, as it were in its most secret

substance, its very nature. Once inhaled, the smell is the fusion of the other’s body and my own. But it is a disincarnate body, a vaporised body that remains whole

and entire of itself while at the same time becoming a volatile spirit. (qtd. in Le

Guerer 24)

This is the infinite erotics of Herrick’s olfactory verse. Instead of the loss of spirit during climax, he can breathe in and absorb his mistresses’ aromas. He ingests and incorporates their most airy spirits; he can be “inspired” to compose poems on their divine sweetness, and the mistresses go through a metamorphosis, transmogrified into the divine and captured in immortal poetry.

The “carpe florem” tradition is in seemingly direct contrast to the way Herrick describes his mistresses in his erotic poems through elaborate blazons. The former is about choosing pieces and working them together to make a whole; the latter, as Nancy

Vickers has argued, rewrites the female body as dismembered, scattered, fragmented, and abstracted.280 Moira P. Baker studies Herrick’s male gaze as he writes his many blazons,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 280 Vickers writes of this poetic violence against the female in “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme” focusing on the inherent violence of the desiring male gaze: “Seeing and bodily disintegration, then, are related poles in the Ovidian 239 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in which the poet “empties the woman’s body of its corporeality” (17).281 Herrick does subject his mistresses to the this form of fragmentation when he composes visual or gustatory blazons, but in the olfactive blazon there is no real body to begin with, just perfumes and their affects. Herrick would agree with Margaret Cavendish that

“Imagination” correlates to the “Sense of Smelling” (198), but he would have all the five inner wits—imagination, knowledge, understanding, memory, and reason—borne from this sense as well.282

“Stately Julia, prime of all” Herrick’s mistresses (H-39.3) breezes through seventy-seven of his poems.283 “Julia” is introduced early in Hesperides; the very first poem after the initial framework poems is a celebration that Julia has recovered from an illness (H-9, “Upon Julia’s Recovery”). In this first instance, Julia is already defined by her relationship to nature, and especially flowers.284 As in his central thesis, those lines

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! context that Petrarch brings to his text; they also are poles Ovid conjoins elsewhere” (269). 281 The scopophilia of Herrick’s verse is dependent on a handful of the most often anthologized poems—Julia’s legs peeping from her skirts after a tumble, (H-227), “see[ing] a wild civility” in his mistress’ “erring lace” or “careless shoestring” (H-83, “Delight in disorder”), “Julia’s petticoat, waving, pressing, billowing in the wind (“That leading cloud I follow'd still, / Hoping t' have seen of it my fill” (H-175), or his voyeuristic imperatives to Dianeme: “Shew me thy feet; shew me thy legs, thy thighs… (H-403). 282 Cavendish follows the common paradigm if correlating between the five (“inward”) wits and the five senses, or outer wits: touch=knowledge, taste=understanding, smell=imagination, hearing=reason, and sight=memory. In the introduction, I more fully cover the usual enumeration and hierarchy of the senses. 283 Over the course of the poems, she is at times a pastoral goddess or muse (H-9, H-11); a priestess (H-539, the “Queen Priest, Flaminica Dialis”); a woman who has just given birth (H-898), and a beautiful but clumsy country girl (H-27). Julia’s various roles reflect the genres, modes, and conceits of Herrick’s “Argument.” 284 During her illness, flowers wilted in sympathy, but re-bloom upon her revival. Shortly, thereafter, Herrick dreams that the Parliament of Roses convened for a gathering in Julia’s bosom; the Rose is voted “Queen of flowers,” but she must submit as “maide of Honour” onto Julia (H-11, “The Parliament of Roses to Julia”). One of Julia’s defining 240 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! are composed of dews and perfumes, and Julia, for all her jewels, hair, silks, and lawns is just pure, disembodied essence.285 “How rich and pleasing thou my Julia art/ In each thy dainty and peculiar part!” Herrick sings in one of his blazons to Julia (H-88).286

Over the course of his poems, he constructs his Julia “piece by piece,” and like the “Argument” her body is composed of perfumes, spices, balms, oils, and dews.287 The male gaze would divide and separate, the male sniff, instead brings together as though composing a recipe. Her lips, such “fresh, fragrant, luscious flowers” confuse a “little filcher” bee, who drinks the honey of her mouth (H-182.16) When she exhales, “all the

Spices of the East/ Are circumfused there” (H-179. 3-4). Her breath acts as the perfume for the sacrificial altar (H-251) and the spices for a bridal-cake (H-805). Her sweet kiss, imbued with “the Balm, the myrrh, the Nard” can embalm the corpse of Herrick “to give incorruption unto me” (H-327. 5-6). Her breast is an altar that smells “like Frankincense”

(H-417). Her wrists perfume the pomander bracelet she gifts him (H-32). Her sweat excretes the aromas of lilies and spikenard (H-719). Even her shadow smells like “mild

Pomander” of “Storax, Spiknard, Myrrhe, and Ladanum” (H-485.2-4).

“Upon Julia’s Unlacing her self” (H-414), taking off those clothes—all

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! characteristics is her ever present nosegay of roses tucked into her bosom (H-78, H-734, H-1070 285 Her last appearance (and she is the mistress who appears last) is in H-1095, in which Herrick imagines his death, and asks Julia to take care of his burial and his book. 286 In this particular blazon, Herrick describes the various items of jewelry she wears with only the faintest description of her body beneath (H-88). This is the dismemberment and abstraction that occurs in the typical ocular blazon. If Julia is all scent, already difficult to verbalize and represent, the sense of imagination, memory, and sublimation, the blazon cannot take away, but only add to or intermingle the aspects. 287 There are several poems dedicated to Julia’s hair, but H-484 is specifically on the dewdrops glittering and spangling in the light. She is not only composed of lawns, silks, laces, and her overpowering perfumes. She also has a beguiling and heavenlyvoice (H- 67, H-68, H-252). 241 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“liquefaction” and “brave vibration” (H-779)—she transcends the worldly and becomes divine. The small space created within her loosened stays releases the odors of

“Camphire, Storax, Spikenard, Galbanum, Musks, and Ambers,” perfumes biblical, classical, and domestically available. She smells like the goddess Juno when she unites with Jove in the rites of the hieros gamos. Her odors, then, are not a substitute for sexual union, but represent the divinity and spiritual aspects of such an ecstasy: “Whose pure-

Immortall body doth transmit / A scent, that fills both Heaven and Earth with it” (H-414.

9-10). Identities collapse and comingle. Is the “her” Juno, whom Herrick was discussing in the previous lines? Is Julia the antecedent as the previous section ended? Is her both the goddess and the mistress in one? Her body becomes “immortal” and “pure,” the perfumes purify and create the transcendent experience. This hyphenated term “pure-

Immortal” demonstrates the sublimation occurring; there is not a particular term that can capture this essence, so Herrick invents a term, just as he also coins the neologism

“circummortal purity” to describe Julia’s breasts in another poem as a purity that is beyond the mortal world and the language of man (H-230).

In “To His Mistresses,” Herrick imagines his coterie as dressing and perfuming their clothing with their natural aromas: “Put on your silks; and piece by piece / Give them the scent of Amber-Greece” (H-54.1-2). In these opening lines, he recalls specific phrases from “His Argument” as he recalls one of his favorite perfume ingredients: ambergris, the highly valuable, odoriferous, digestive excreta of the sperm whale.288

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 288 “Unique, illusive of precise description,” Dr. Robert Clarke, the world’s leading expert on ambergris, offers his own complexly layered portrayal of this odorant: “The odor of ambergris has been said to suggest fine tobacco, the wood in old churches, sandalwood, the smell of the tide, fresh earth, and fresh seaweed in the sun. I myself am reminded of Brazil nuts” (Kemp 28). 242 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

According to perfumer Paul Jellineck, “the exceedingly delicate, warm, soft, perhaps somewhat balsamic scent of ambergris is reminiscent of the odor of the scalp and may also be considered a component of the odor of the pubic region” (70). If we agree with

Jellineck’s description of the scent of ambergris, it is already the scent of the beloved’s erotic zones and so Herrick’s dressing nymphs only transfer their own erogenous odors, likened to this “delicate, warm, soft” perfuming, to the very silk underclothes touching the hidden, yet fragrant parts of their bodies.289 The clothing fixation in so many of

Herrick’s poems may also be a perfuming fixation as the natural odors of his mistresses permeate the fabrics they wear.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Christopher Kemp’s Floating Gold: A Natural (& Unnatural) History of Ambergris provides the occasional early modern history of ambergris (32-46), especially in his final chapter, when he attempts to make and consume early ambergris recipes (190- 200). Most of his fascinating history, however, concerns accidental discoveries of the highly valuable “floating gold,” and the seedy underworld of ambergris collectors and buyers. 289 Holly Dugan devotes one chapter of her monograph to this particular perfume, and argues that ambergris “transformed Spanish perfumes, especially those made in the south” and because of the scented gloves preferred by the fashionable queens Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici, the use of ambergris also “transformed the leather industry [of England and Continental Europe],” making the perfumed glove the fetishized object par excellence of Renaissance England (Dugan 131). Sophie Read has also written a history of the scientific understandings of early modern ambergris, and the inability to explain the mysterious source or describe the desirable odor of this odorant. She concludes her essay with a really brief, but wonderful reading of Herrick’s depictions of ambergris, with all of its ambivalent and conflicting resonances to argue that Herrick is always evoking “distance and loss” by evoking ambergris: Perhaps this is what scent always does in erotic poetry. Far from offering us a privileged access to emotions and memories not our own, the trope simply measures the written word’s failure of intimacy, and calibrates the distances between lover, beloved and reader. You are not here, and the unimaginable quality of scent, its resistance to verbal expression, demonstrates that beyond question. (232) I think she captures how Herrick blurs the erotic and the divine, and granted that her discussion is only a few pages, she cannot write enough about Herrick’s poetic constructs or his blurring of eros and thanatos.

243 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In both “To His Mistresses” and “His Argument,” Herrick even repeats the phrase

“piece by piece.” Richard J. Ross considers the voyeuristic poem “Upon Julia’s Clothes”

(H-779) and finds this short poem highlights one of Herrick’s “recurrent theme[s]: the paradoxical yet proper interplay in human affairs of Art and Nature” (172). Ross concludes,

In ‘Julia’s Clothes,’ the point is that the drapery is beautiful, but especially

because of the evident flesh beneath. The silks flow smoothly and glitteringly

because of the splendid movements of the woman. The first stanza describes what

the silks do for Julia and the second what Julia does for silks. (180)

Whether it is women dressing in gowns or Herrick’s writing of poems, these are all imagined as acts of pulling together “piece by piece” until there is a unified and aesthetic whole. The mistresses are fictions, scented imaginings, so Herrick constantly alerts the reader to his absent object, the immateriality of the perfume, and the circummortal immortal-purity of his verse. Art and nature work together to create the desirable woman, the lyric poem, and the garden of verse.

Herrick’s nymphs and mistresses, especially his Julia, do not just use perfumes; they are perfumes. It is only the upstart peasants who fail in their ability to use art to obscure their natural stinks. Every time Herrick creates such an idealized vision of his mistresses or such a small, neat, aromatic poem, he offers at a later point a conflicting epigram. Although Anthea’s lips smell like the “most sincere / Altar of Incense” (H-

155.3-4) and his mistresses’ breaths smell “ambrosia-like or nectarell” (H-54.3-4),

Herrick writes several epigrams on otherwise desirable and kiss-worthy young women with foul breath (H-588, H-598, H-738, H-878). For all the fragrant mistresses smelling

244 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! like the Phoenix’ nest, Juno in her marriage bed, or like the incense of a sacrificial altar, in Herrick’s fantasy, these are always naturally occurring aromas or so subtly applied that they blur the boundary between the perfume and perfumed. The stinking peasants suffer from hygienic neglect, and those who wear flagrant perfumes try too hard:

You say y’are sweet; how should we know

Whether that you be sweet or no?

From Powders and Perfumes keep free;

Then we shall smell how sweet you be.” (H-282, “On a perfum’d Lady”)

Herrick’s ideal mistress, he informs us in “What kind of Mistresse he would have” (H-

665) must master the art of looking and smelling natural, “like a civill Wilderness.” There must be “order in a sweet neglect” (H-665. 8).

Michael C. Schoenfeldt, one of several scholars who works on the often excised scurrilous epigrams, reads closely the poem “Upon Some Women” (H-198) as a

“purposefully negative blazon” and states that “this poem offers a clear statement of the piecemeal misogyny that often infiltrates Herrick’s attitude to the female body” (143).

This cruel blazon which describes “Woman” as a piece of “garbage” disguised in gowns and silks ends with the lines: “False in head, and false enough;/ Only true in shreds and stuff.” This poem with its negative “shreds and stuff” both inverts the erotic vision and seductive scents of the aforementioned “To His Mistresses” with the aromatic dressing’s

“piece by piece” but also more problematically subverts Herrick’s own works, as he also composes “piece by piece.” Valerie Traub claims that Herrick’s microphilia, that is his eroticization of “neatness and smallness” (a term she borrows from Alistair Fowler) demonstrates, a “desire for control” (146). Similarly, Herrick’s own poiesis, like his

245 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mistresses’ domestic efforts or their dressing is mysteriously without toil, without labor, a relinquishing of control, as in “Delight in Disorder” (H-83), in which the poet enjoys the

“wild civility” of sweet imperfections more than in an “Art … too precise in every part.”

The feminine aromas wafting through the Hesperides are further confused depending on genre and intended audience. In the Ovidian-inspired love poems, idealized nymphs drop ambrosial odors and the poet’s desire heightens their sweet scent until “love perfumes all parts” (H-155). In striking contrast, Herrick’s epigrams reveal abhorrence for artificial perfumes. His epithalamion for “Mistress Anne Soame” depicts the bride as domestic producer of aromatics and sweet balms (H-196). Even in his erotic verses, there is often an anxious fixation—which wafts through his other poems—concerning the poet’s mortality, labor, production, and the reception of his collection. This “desire for control” over bodies and odors, labor and pleasure, is illustrated in his rural celebration poems, such as “The Hock-Cart” (H-250). In that poem, Herrick, a self proclaimed “Lord of Wine and Oil” imagines this “oil” as originating from the toil of happy, singing rural folk but for the most aromatic of oils, he suggests extracting their sweet essences from his mistress’s sudor in “Upon Julia’s Sweat.”290

WO’d ye oyle of Blossomes get?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 290 “Oil” is often cited alongside “balm” as a funerary preparation or as a healing agent, but Herrick also often places “oil” with “wine” as in his poem “On Himself,” in which the poet becomes a Bacchanalian celebrant crowned with flowers and who “love[s] to have my Beard/ With Wine and Oile besmeared” (H-170.3-4) and most famously in “The Hock-Cart”: “We are the Lords of Wine and Oil” (H-250.2). That is, both balm and oil fulfill ritualistic and religious rites in Herrick’s poetry, but while the former is usually associated with death or healing, the latter is associated with revelry, feasting, harvesting, the joys of rural life, and poetic inspiration (via his Anacreontic odes and his poetic father, Ben Jonson). In “Pray and Prosper,” Herrick instructs the proper bucolic rituals (which unsurprisingly begins with the burning of incense) to ensure that “Amber, Cream, and Wine, and Oile/ Shall run, as rivers, throughout thy soil” (H-370. 4-5) and in “The Spell” oil is used as part of an apotropaic charm to ward off evil spirits (H-769). 246 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Take it from my Julia’s swaet:

Oyl of Lillies, and of Spike,

From her moisture take the like:

Let her breathe, or let her blow,

All rich spices thence will flow. (H-719)

Herrick, in this poem, as in “The Hock-Cart,” is not one who toils, labors, and sweats.

Rather, he instructs (when he toils at all), preaches, composes, or he simply enjoys the fruits of others’ labor. We are not informed of the source of Julia’s sweat—whether it is due to her labors in the field, in the temple, or in bed—but we know that her effluvia is highly aromatic, and Herrick’s olfactive poem obliquely teaches a third-party how to become a perfumer, extracting and distilling Julia’s sweetness, so Herrick may enjoy the captured scent. Julia reproduces the very diverse odorants that most other women must either buy or domestically produce and then apply. Herrick’s fetishizing of the female body and her effluvia displaces the origins of sweat and labor, shifting the focus both onto and away from Julia’s sweating body, his own labors in writing, and the work of the addressed perfumer.

In “The Bride-Cake” (H-805), Herrick instructs Julia to make a bridal cake for

“Mistress Bride.” While he does not actually dispense any practical cooking advice, the poet notes that the flavor of Julia’s hands as she kneads the dough will impart the savor of “paste of Almonds” and by kissing the dough, her sweet breath will give it the needed

“spice” (H-805.4, 6). Therefore, while Julia must indulge in some domestic labor,

Herrick displaces much of the drudgery onto Julia’s sweet essence. A contemporary almond paste recipe in The French Perfumer (1646) demonstrates that this is a multistep

247 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! process including scalding the almonds, peeling, air-drying, beating, running through a sieve, layering with flowers, mixing frequently, and pressing for the oil. This last step alone is time consuming: “Observe that in the Composition of Essences … the… Paste must be in the Press three hours at least to draw the Oyl” (47-48).

Yet, Herrick’s Julia does not need to toil or press or scald because her skin exudes essence of almond as she prepares the bridal-cakes. In his epigram “Upon Sibilla” (H-

561), he conflates overtones of the olfactory erotics of personal aromas, domestic labor, the beautiful and fertile housewife, and the recipes that blur lines between edible and topical concoctions. This results in a poem that hyperbolically celebrates Sibilla’s desirability and her homely, domestic attributes:

With paste of almonds, Syb her hands doth scour;

Then gives it to the children to devour.

In cream she bathes her thighs, more soft than silk;

Then to the poor she freely gives the milk.291

Syb “scours” her hands with almond paste and bathes in sweet cream, giving the remnants of the paste and the milk to children and the poor, respectively. Almond, due to the moisturizing qualities of its natural fats and oils, and also the exfoliating properties of its shell, is a common recipe in soaps, so Herrick shows his domestic thrift and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 291 Halli finds this the “nastiest beauty process” and contrasts this poem with the immediately following epigram of praise: “Upon his kinswoman Mistresse Bridget Herrick” in which the lady's beauty is praised and her scent equated to “Blossomes of the Almond Tree.” We see the dichotomy between a correct relationship of almonds to beauty, and the disgusting travesty of charity utilizing the almond in “Upon Sibilla” (Halli 40).

248 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! knowledge again.292 Sib’s body exudes sweet savors which flavors her edible cosmetics, subverting not only the positive depiction of his niece, who also smells like “Blossomes of the Almond Tree” in the next poem (H-562), but also comically undermines his depictions of naturally aromatic mistresses.

Herrick’s Olfactive “Epigram of Praise”

Ann Coiro states that critics need to attend to Herrick’s “epigrams of praise”: “It is particularly important to include Herrick's epigrams of praise in any holistic reading because they are as concerned as much with his ‘Book’ and his art as they are with the people he praises” (135). Dedicated to his married niece, “To the most fair and lovely

Mistris, Anne Soame, now Lady Abdie” (H-375) with all of its fragrant niceties is a celebration of the well-ordered household, and it refers back to the inventory of Herrick’s

“Argument” and the olfactory erotics of his seduction lyrics. But even here, in this familiar and comfortable domestic sphere, Herrick expresses a slight anxiety over domestic production and consumption, and there is still disorder despite its initial neatness.

Almost all lines end with a neat, clean end stop, replicating the same sort of neatness and containment we find in the poem. Every line is folded and packed neatly, like scented linens in drawers. The good housewife has every item in its proper place, but

Herrick, too, becomes fastidious housewife by ordering the order in this ordered poem.

The only lack of containment within the poem occurs in the sweet odors that permeate

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 292 The Queens closet opened (1659) offers a delectable and highly fragrant soap recipe (“To make an Ipswich Water”) with white Castile (vegetable fats) Soap, rose-water, marjoram, savory, oil of cloves and spike (nard), musk and ambergreece, “work all these together in a fair Mortar, with the powder of an Almond Cake dried, and beaten as small as fine Flower, so roll it round in your hands in rosewater.” 249 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the air throughout the household; otherwise, all the spices, cosmetics, fruits, and savory dishes are neatly placed in cupboards and pantries:

SO smell those odours that do rise

from out the wealthy spiceries:

So smels the flower of blooming Clove;

Or Roses smother’d in the stove:

So smells the Aire of spiced wine;

Or Essences of Jessimine:

(H-375. 1-6)

Herrick utilizes sweet odors as his defining conceit for the poem so that he may praise Lady Abdy’s skill as housewife, but also maintain a safe distance away from this gynocentric and productive domestic space. The source of the sweet spices is ambiguously displaced or unsourced in these opening lines; “wealthy spiceries” may be the apothecary’s or grocer’s shop, the storage room of the royal palace, or most simply and domestically, the dry cupboard to store spices.293 Reading this poem after all of

Herrick’s fears of his poems becoming the wrapping paper for spices complicates the practical economics lauded in this poem. Everything then has its proper place and only the alluring aromas and this sweet commendatory verse are allowed to escape the confines of the well-ordered cupboard.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 293 The “wealthy spiceries” of the second line could be any of the following, according to the OED, “A spice-shop or spice-store, or a set of these; a source or supply of spices,” ‘the department of the royal household connected with the keeping of spices,” or “a room or part of a house set apart for the keeping of spices” (“Spicery,”OED 1a., 1b., and 1c.). The “stove,” likewise is another sort of heated dry cupboard for the storage of spices, dried fruits, and other persevered goods, and not to be confused with our modern baking oven. 250 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This tidy household is also likened to a productive and busy beehive:

So smells the Breath about the hives,

When well the work of hony thrives;

And all the busie Factours come

Laden with wax and hony home: (7-10) 294

Yet, when it comes to either the enjoyment of the bee’s honey or Lady Abdy’s “roasted pears,” the poet is not one of the “busie Factours” (that is, the worker bees), but rather he is the imagined houseguest who can sit back and enjoy the work of others, whether busy bees or busy housemaids. Here, Herrick is fully Son of Ben, enjoying the hospitality of others, dining well, and writing about it. Yet, the poet, too, is the busy bee, who pulls from the many sources to make his fragrant little poem.295

Many of the lines of the poem begin with the anaphora “So smells” X (1), and then “So smells” Y (2), but the payoff of the simile is delayed until the last few lines. The poem alludes to the erotic, highly aromatic, and marital poem, the Biblical Song of Songs and the opening lines of Herrick’s poem hint toward the exotic flavors of that poem. The luxury foreign goods (clove) and the domestic (roses) are equally as aromatic, and the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 294 Although covering the popularity of the Georgic depiction of the busy bee after Herrick, in eighteenth-century British poetry, James W. Johnson’s offers a nice overview of the Greco-Roman literary representation of apiaries. Johnson notes that there was a “ravenous interest” in the bee’s behavior in Renaissance empirical observation, leading to the discovery that the monarch was a female in Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchy (1609) (263-264). 295 See Mary Carruthers for a brief overview of the Classical through Neo-Classical metaphors of both the orator, who chooses from the best flowers of rhetoric to make his honeyed words, and the honeycomb or beehive as “books, book-collecting, memory, and scholarship” (44-45).

251 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! contrast between the wealthy spiceries and domestic stove blend like the notes of a perfume:

So smell those neat and woven Bowers,

All over-archt with Orange flowers,

And Almond blossoms, that do mix

To make rich these Aromatickes:

So smell those bracelets, and those bands

Of Amber chaf’t between the hands,

When thus enkindled they transpire

A noble perfume from the fire.

The wine of cherries, and to these,

The cooling breath of Respasses;

The smell of mornings milk, and cream;

Butter of Cowslips mixt with them;

Of roasted warden, or bak’d peare,

These are not to be reckon’d here;

In the above lines, there is a bustle of movement in three interrelated domestic or feminine spheres: first, the fragrant bowers of the pleasure garden, then, a perfumed amber bracelet and the burning of aromatics to perfume the home, and finally, into the sweet smells of the kitchen with delectable recipes. Each of these spaces is further segmented by the discrete and fragranced objects contained within—the bower has sweet blossoms of oranges and almonds; the home and the lady’s body are conflated, and defined by potpourri and jewelry; and the kitchen has pears, milk, rabbit, all simmering

252 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on the stove.296

Like the multivalent associations of balm, oil, and ambergris, the odors in this poem create a perfume that mingles the domestic, exotic, mundane, and divine. Regional flowers, foods, and herbs of England would include the “roses smother’d in the stove,” cherry wines, morning’s milk, sweet cream, cowslips, rabbit, baked pears, and raspberries, all items readily available in the well-ordered kitchen garden. Almonds, oranges, cloves, and jasmine are imported goods and exotic non-native plants and fruits.

The rural commodities of roasted rabbit stuffed with pears contrasts with the luxury of the scented ambergris bracelet. In this way, Lady Abdy is connected to any of Herrick’s imagined fragrant mistresses with his fantastic depictions of perfume’s affects.

Yet, the epigram’s volta undermines the previous lines of the poem: “these

[fragrant items] are not to be reckoned here.” This is not an inventory of her kitchen and larders, but an inventory of Lady Abdy’s own aromas. The discovery that all the spiced goods of the household are also Lady Abdy’s personal aromas alter the genre from a country house poem to an olfactive blazon. As Nancy Vickers eloquently describes a blazon is an “inventory of fragmented and reified parts,” and here Herrick, the husband

Thomas Abdy, and the readers of the poem are all in control of Lady Abdy’s body and goods (“Blazon” 96). In a version of Song of Songs that lacks the overly erotic element, the sweet smells and tastes are of Lady Abdy’s body: “thus sweet she smells” (27). Just as is the case with Julia’s “almond scented hands” or her fragrant sweat, Lady Abdy is not a good housewife because she works hard to fill her cupboards with her domestic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 296 Knoppers contrasts the “exotic ingredients”— such as ambergris, musk, saffron, gum dragon, and gum Arabic,” notably all ingredients to which Herrick returns again and again, with the much more ubiquitous ingredients consisting “ordinary foodstuffs, herbs, or spice”(475). 253 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! labor and cooked goods, but because she can disrupt or obscure the source of production and labor. The art is in the obscuring of the labor and effort, and Herrick creates this panegyric that praises his niece, but also his own ability to create such self-contained yet highly allusive verse. The poem ends by explicitly finding the source of all the sweet aromas:

When as the meanest part of her,

Smells like the maiden-Pomander.

Thus sweet she smells, or what can be

More lik’d by her, or lov’d by me.

While the rest of the blazon did not compartmentalize different parts of Anne’s body as smelling of different flowers or foods, with only brief mentions of hands, breath, and wrists (where the bracelet would reside), Herrick now describes the “meanest part of her,” most likely her feet.297 He compares that lowly body part to a “maiden-Pomander.”

The pomander, as discussed in the previous chapter on the odors of the plague, is a scented ball carried on the body, which can be brought to the nose to smell at to filter out miasmic and noxious fumes, to perfume the air, revive the spirits, or clear the mind. The adjectival “Maiden” may state that she smells like the type of pomander carried by younger women, often descending from a chain around the waist. In such a case, the

“meanest part” also hints at her genitals. Maiden” may also describe Lady Abdy’s married chastity, or as the poem was written before her marriage, at her then-virginal status. Like the poetic construct of the liminal mistresses Julia or Anthea, Anne Soame is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 297 For example of this usage, in the pedantic series of letters from an inquiring Christian on the fall of Babylon, E. Avery explains that the “feet and legs are the meanest part of the body” (3). 254 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! virgin, bride, and industrious housewife in the same poem. Her body becomes multiple aromatic and pleasurable sites: the well-ordered, productive household, an imagined bower of bliss, the pleasure garden, and the hortus conclusus.

The form of this particular poem, as described, is like a lady’s cabinet, but the body and the poem are also contained in this image of the “Maiden-pomander.” There were two basic types of pomanders: the simple pomander—made of a piece of fruit, such as an apple or orange, stuck with cloves and rolled in spices, and this poem lists the ingredients of such a pomander—and the jewelry pomander—the small silver ball would open to contain different spices and gums, but was often segmented like an orange with each drawer holding different aromatics, and the poem creates such neat divisions with different odorants arranged nicely.

The poem, however, is as always too overfilled to be neatly contained. The poem, like the lady’s cabinet of Herrick’s “Argument” or his literary and pleasure gardens of

Hesperides is multigeneric: it is an olfactory or domestic blazon; the poem complements several of Herrick’s epithalamiums for noble marriages; it is akin to his encomiums of praise for other family members, such as his beloved sister; it resembles a country house poem with its abundance and hospitality; it even inverts his sometimes satirical epigrams to his own messy housemaid, Prew.298 That is, while the poem praising Lady Abdy seems

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 298 Ann Coiro explains why we must attend to these personal epigrams: Curiously, one of Herrick's most beautiful and moving poems, the epigram to his father's memory, has rarely been addressed by his critics. it is one of a group of poem, the epigrams of praise, that have been almost completely neglected since Hesperides was published. The neglect of the epigrams of praise, poems that were important to Herrick personally and are essential to the structure and import of Hesperides, may perhaps be attributed to the critical myth of Herrick as craftsman of pure art and fantasy. The reality of flesh-and-blood people in Hesperides, however, must alter our perception of the whole volume. (133). 255 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! neat and small, another microphilic ode, this poem does not fit nicely into a little cupboard of well-ordered genres, but rather like a scent seeps through and out of its own enclosure.

The men of Lady Abdy’s life further complicate the domestic and feminine spaces of the poem, and redefine her body and household in relation to her father, husband, and uncle-poet. Anne Soame’s father Thomas “was a prominent member of the Grocer’s

Company” (Patrick 236); therefore, the commendation may be less about his niece’s housekeeping skills and even more about her paternal lineage and her father’s successful trade in exotic spices. Furthermore, this epigram of praise almost reads like an epithalamion or country house poem, but John Creaser dates this poem to the 1620s, when Anne was still a little girl rather than composed for her marriage (191). Anne married her husband Sir Thomas Abdy in 1647; he was made baronet upon his father’s death in 1641. Herrick updated the title of this poem to “now Lady Abdie” after her marriage and before publication; in general, however, according to Cain and Connolly, he did not often update names and titles. The other exception is Elizabeth Lee (H-618); his sister retains her maiden name in his poetry, despite almost 40 years of marriage (Cain and Connolly 508). The Abdys had ten children, but their first son was not born until

1655 (Lundy). While Herrick updates her aristocratic title and the title of his poem, within the body of the poem she remains a contained, enclosed “maiden-Pomander.”

Finally, the poem ends with the poet’s own inclusion into this feminine space:

Thus sweet she smells, or what can be

More lik’d by her, or lov’d by me.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

256 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This deferral of source and displacement of labor demonstrate Traub’s “desire for control” over not only bodies and modes of production, but also a real anxiety concerning the reception of his work, or to repeat Randall Ingram’s quote, a “relinquish[ing] of control to readers who are encouraged to help make the book” (134).

Coincidentally, the poem itself is not contained tidily within the parameters of the pages of the 1648 Hesperides. Instead of this sweetly ordered (yet too long to be contained on one quarto page) poem beginning on the recto (page 162) and continuing onto the next verso (page 163), the poem instead begins on the verso (page 163) and continues onto the next recto (page 168). While the poems run without error (that is, the poem picks up properly on the next corresponding recto or verso page), there is a continuity error of the page numbers in this section of the 1648 edition (the book is well- ordered until pages 160-161, and pagination errors are not resolved again until pages 176-

177).299 While printers’ errors are another form of “relinquishing control” (and one

Herrick may not have even considered), the fact that this ode to a well-run household is misprinted both underscores Lady Abdy’s productive hive and efficient bower while undermining Herrick’s own anthology as a well-tended garden, but rather depicts his garden with too many incompetent gardeners or as a site that needs pruning and weeding to restore back to “wild civility.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 299 I consulted the three texts available on EEBO to see the placement of the “Lady Abdy” poem, which is consistently located on pages 163 and 168. The text was only printed in 1648 and the page numbers were not corrected (from the available sample). There was only one edition with two variant title pages (different “to be sold by” locations given), so the different markets indicate different issues. The pagination problem seems to stem from the compositor properly numbering the outer form of the M sheet, but making mistakes on the inner form. I thank Jonathan Holmes for suggesting that I look at the layout of this poem, and I am especially grateful to Aaron Pratt who explained the pagination error to me. 257 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of (Im)materiality and (Im)mortality

In the terms that modern critics use for Herrick’s verse, there remains the language of the domestic, too. Critics, focusing on what Alistair Fowler terms Herrick’s

“microphilia” (cited in Traub 144), term his works as nothing more than “light elegant trifles on dress and jewels” (Hibbard 168) or Gordon Braden’s “décor” (160).300 Critics enjoy labeling Herrick’s work as feminine baubles, glittering and of little value, or the arrangement of such knick-knacks. William Michael Rossetti states that “many of his compositions are, in the fullest sense of the term, trifles; others are at least exquisite trifles; some are not trifles, and are exquisite” (cited in Bloom 383).301 Herrick’s posies and trifles etymologically complicate such dismissive attitudes. A trifle is “a literary work, piece of music, etc., light or trivial in style,” but it is also a sweet dessert composed of light confectionary and cream, not unlike the raspberries, wine, and cream that Herrick associates with Lady Abdy.302 In the “sweet” (gustatory or olfactory) sense, the trifle is like a “posy” I have used throughout to describe his poetry and the small fragrant bundle of flowers, but a posy, George Puttenham, reminds us is a short epigram “sent usually for

New Year’s gifts, or to be printed or put upon their banqueting dishes of sugar-plate or of marchpanes and such other dainty meats…” (102). Herrick’s two-lined sweet epigrams can literally be sniffed and ingested if given as a New Year’s dessert.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 300 See also, Paul Nixon’s description: “Herrick’s verses… to his fair, imaginative mistresses will probably never lose their place among the most captivating and delightful trifles in the language. Through them we become acquainted with the poet; to them we most frequently return…” (Nixon 202) 301 Rossetti composed this note to Humorous Poems in 1872. 302 “trifle” (6 a) “A light confection of sponge-cake or the like, esp. flavoured with wine or spirit, and served with custard and whipped cream” ("trifle, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 8 May 2015.) 258 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A trifle is also a small piece of jewelry or décor, making Hibbard’s criticism redundant.303 As a piece of jewelry, the trifle is intricately linked to the posy, “used as devices in rings, and arms, and bout such courtly pursuits” (Puttenham 102). So many of

Herrick’s short epigrams would fit nicely on a ring as an engraved motto. Herrick was apprenticed as a goldsmith, like his posthumous father, and many of his poems are about jewelry.304 The delicacy and sensual aspects have always been a part of Herrick’s design.305 Katherine Maus elegantly argues that minor poems do not mean trifling, decorous, or dainty concerns: “So, for instance, it is undeniable that Herrick is deeply concerned with diminutive things. It is another thing to assume that Herrick’s concern with tiny objects and brief poetic forms just goes to show that he is silly” (28).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 303 “trifle” (3) A small article of little intrinsic value; a toy, trinket, bauble, knick-knack. 304 Some recent criticism has turned to Herrick’s early training as a goldsmith for a fuller material understanding of his jewelry poems. Pamela Hammon finds an anxiety in Herrick’s verse on giving jewelry as gifts and the poet “trans-shifting” from subject to (material) object. Tatjana Schaefer, too, reads his jewelry blazons as “trans-shifting” from coldness and hardness to the animated and lively bodies. Mary Thomas Crane combines the archaic Tillyardian hierarchy with the New Historicist and Marxist readings of Herrick’s work to consider the (im)material states of liquids and metals in establishing a type of social hierarchy within the epigrams of disgust. 305 Alistair Fowler complains that the fastidious Victorians could only enjoy Herrick’s sweet (mel) epigrams, those little flower or love poems that Puttenham describes above: “When it was rediscovered, in the nineteenth century, several of the subgenres it [Hesperides] employed (especially those once characterized as foetidus and fel) were so obsolete as to be unintelligible. Victorian readers consequently missed much of the complex variety and balance whereby its five epigram types offset and answer one another. Their overwhelming preference for mel, or sweet epigrams, led them to concentrate on one element in Herrick's work…. Flower poems and erotic poems” (112). Rosalie Colie writes of Scaliger’s Poetices (1561) and his classification of epigrammatic types into “metaphorical larder-terms”: “Epigrams, he said, could be stinking and foul, but this type was beneath the notice of serious poets or critics. The important categories for epigram were fel (gall), acetum (vinegar), sal (salt), and mel (honey)” (68). We have this very language throughout Herrick’s epigrams, as when he complains of sour or vinegar readers (H-6,H-868, H-964), or his warning epigram not to eat too much honey (H-909). 259 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Interestingly, as Coiro reads Herrick as an epigramist, she can find pattern and purpose in his collection, but Braden who reads Herrick as a lyricist cannot find anything more than “a group of poems that collectively realize and make intelligible the nature and implications of their common stylistic habits” (161). Jacob Blevins also claims that it is easy to overlook Herrick, despite the amount and beauty of his work, due to his preference for lyric: “Lyric poetry is all too often viewed as a limited genre, one in which an author expresses feelings and emotions in a one-dimensional way; no genre conflates more the author and speaker than lyric” (130). The two genres, epigram, that which was originally carved into stone (tactility), and lyric, that which was sung to a lyre and dissolved into air (aural/oral), also seem to bifurcate the eternal and ephemeral. From his beginnings as an apprentice of manipulating metals to his later poetic abilities to create entire gardens of verse and imagined perfumed mistresses out of words, Herrick sublimates matter into the immaterial and bypasses the decay and rot of mortality.

Herrick’s verse is a graveyard of mortality, scattered throughout with epitaphs and elegies for dead maidens, children, his brother, Ben Jonson, and most often, his own poetry or his own body. On the one hand, Herrick both invites death as the entry to

Heaven, and yet staves decay off by imagining (im)material items engraved with his verses, such as in “His Poetrie his Pillar (H-211). In this poem, the poet opens with the patently untrue lines “Onely a little more / I have to write…,” but continues composing and writing another 1,200 poems. He creates his own epitaph, “his living stone” to preserve his immortality (H-211). In “To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses” (H-

201), Herrick, enwreathed in roses and with perfumes in his hair, drinks to all the deceased classical poets who live in their words:

260 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Trust to good Verses then;

They only will aspire,

When Pyramids, as men,

Are lost, i’th’funerall fire. (H-201. 49-52)

His “last request” to Julia is asking his favorite mistress to choose his “Buriall roome” and to take care of his book (H-1095). His closing eight poems are a series of brief farewells, to his muses, to his book, to himself (H-1123-H-1130). His penultimate poem

“The pillar of fame” (H-1129) declares that his poetry can outlast “marble brasse, or jet” tombstones (H-129.2), and his final and only unnamed poem acts as his epitaph (H-

1130):

To his Book’s end this last line he’d have plac’t

Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast306.

Herrick, seemingly not trusting to good verses, composes an earlier epigram asking his tomb-maker to materially construct the above gravestone, despite Herrick’s concluding proclamations that words are longer-lived than stone (H-546):

GO I must; when I am gone,

Write but this upon my Stone;

Chaste I liv’d, without a wife,

That’s the story of my life.

Strewing need none, every flower

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 306 This ending is complicated by The Noble Numbers immediately following. Those poems begin with a sort of erasure of all of his Hesperides (N-1, N-2), but as the religious verse were initially published separately in 1647 and Herrick repeats, contradicts, conflates, and otherwise artfully disorders his poetry throughout, there is some closure as the last poems of the Noble Numbers also end with monuments and immortality as Herrick approaches Christ’s sepulcher in the final three poems. 261 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is in this word, Batchelour.

On the other hand, Herrick fears death and has recurring septophobic fantasies: he imagines his own and other bodies rotting without the preservative balms and spices.

Herrick is more concerned with asking his mistresses to embalm him than to go to bed with him. Most of his carpe diem and carpe florem poems end on a menacing note, with virgins becoming spinsters, flowers dying, or the sun setting (H-208 “To the Virgins, to

Make Much of Time”). Herrick offers a dirge for the Rose, who dies with a smile on her flowery face (H-686). Herrick’s epigram for the rosemary branch celebrates the liminal duality of the plant: “be’t for my Bridall, or my Buriall” (H-667.2). On a maid, who dies on her wedding day, poetry transforms content and meaning, so “this Epitaph, which here you see, / Supplies the Epithalamie (H-271. 7-8). As in the opening lines of his

“Argument,” with its focus on “times-transhifting,” Herrick composes on natural life cycles—birth-youth-marriage-parenthood-old age-death, the seasons, the day, etc.—and the teleological—the body rotting is his “Hell,” and his “Heaven” may be the Anglican or pagan conception of the blessed afterlife, depending on the poem’s occasion and genre.

He concedes why he composes so many of his posies on posies, so that the flowers will

“hounours to my Herese” (H-343.2). Herrick laments that “Putrefecation is the end / Of all that Nature doth entend” (H-432).

In this last section, I turn to one of Herrick’s greatest poems on poetic immortality, “The Apparition of His Mistresse calling him to Elizium” (H-575) to read the immaterial and the material, the epigram and the lyric, the immortal and the mortal as

Herrick’s centralizing theme. “The Apparition of His Mistresse calling him to Elizium” is literally central to his collection as a garden of verse and figuratively describing a

262 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mythical garden of verse, yet this central poem is doubly nullified: first, the poem is unfinished (Desunt nonulla) and secondly, it is revealed to be a dream, from which

Herrick grudgingly awakes. The poem in its anxieties over the poet’s death and poetic immortality makes it not unlike the “spice” poems that opened this chapter, whether poems fearing the destruction and degradation of his text or those imagining his sweet mistresses embalming his body with aromatics.

In “The Apparition of His Mistresse calling him to Elizium,” Herrick joins all the great deceased poets: Musaeus, Homer, Linus, Pindar, Anacreon, Virgil, Ovid, Catullus,

Martial, Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, Beaumont and Fletcher, and “Father Johnson.”307

Syrithe Pugh offers a really nice reading of this poem in light of Herrick's nostalgia for a royalist community, as the sons of Ben, can reconvene now only in the afterlife: “this conceit, at the exact centre of Herrick's poem, follows from the idea of poetry as a space transcending death in which poets may commune with predecessors: in such a space all poets become contemporaries and intertextual relations thus work both ways” (80).

Stephen Dobranski points out that Anacreon has memorized and recited Herrick’s own verses back to him: “…with this one scene, he combines his debt to ancient writers and his desire to find admiring readers” (171). The Herrick Ann Baynes Coiro once called

“the poet of anxiety” never seems anxious about his borrowing from the ancients (“Edge” i). However, the framework of the poem—the invocation to and the flight from

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 307 Gordon Braden’s The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry remains the best reading of Herrick’s classical allusions and uses of these previous poets. Earlier criticism of Herrick jostled to claim that Herrick’s greatest antecedent was this or that poetic father-figure. For example, Herrick is the “most eminent of the ‘Sons of Ben’” (Rollin 41), but “less learned [in the Classical tradition] than Ben Jonson” (Deming 330).Ruth Connolly grandly states that the 1,402 poems are “a homage to Ben Jonson’s folio wrought in octavo” (69).

263 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elysium—may even more importantly evoke Herrick’s concerns with olfactory erotics, death, immortality, and his own poetry.

His anxiety is always atemporal; he feels at home in the Classical world and the

Christian afterlife, it is the immediate past, the present, and near futures that Herrick fears. Furthermore, his anxiety if outopical: as Herrick makes clear, he is a poet in exile.308 Herrick’s Hesperides becomes both his hortus conclusus and locus amoenus. It is in this liminal atemporal space that connects so closely to early modern and contemporary theories of odors—as eliciting deep-seated memories, as defying decay and transcending into immortality, as essential for religious and seasonal rites, as both domesticated and exotic, as the sense of imagination, and as sublimating into poetry— that Herrick constructs and places his trust to good verses.

The poem begins with his mistress calling him to Elysium, which like his

Hesperides, is an island far in the west, and associated with the dead and heroic. The mistress seduces Herrick as the siren does: she sings his own song to him. As he begins his “Argument” with “I sing of..” in the epic mode before moving onto the pastoral, she begins with the invitational call, as from the greatest seduction poem/pastoral The Song of

Songs, “Come…” before fluidly moving into a pastoral seduction:

COME then, and like two doves with silv’ry wings,

Let our souls fly to th’ shades where ever springs

Sit smiling in the meads; where balm and oil,

Roses and cassia crown the untill’d soil.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 308 For example, see the following poems “Discontents in Devon” (H-51), “To his Paternall Countrey” (H-52), “Upon himself” (H-456), “His Content in the Country” (H- 552), “His Return to London” (H-713), and “His Tears to Thamasis” (H-1028). 264 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where no disease reigns, or infection comes

To blast the air, but Amber-greece and gums.

This, that, and ev’ry thicket doth transpire

More sweet than storax from the hallowed fire,

Where ev’ry tree a wealthy issue bears

Of fragrant apples, blushing plums, or pears

And all the shrubs, with sparkling spangles, shew

Like morning sunshine tinselling the dew. (H-575. 1-12, emphases added)

The first three stanzas are sensuous and aromatic pleasures, usually depicted as ephemeral and transitory. In Herrick’s poem, however, the brief and fragrant moment is eternalized, and this is the pleasure. She recalls all the dews and perfumes so central to his poetic “Argument.” In the next stanza, his mistress informs him that this is not a carpe florem/diem poem: it is eternally May and the sun never sets (H-575.13-16). She does not seduce him with the promise of joining the greatest poets, but with a version of his own poetic garden, Hesperides. Herrick sublimates the unpleasantness of death as his fragrant mistress leads him still living directly to Elysium, a place smelling of balm, oil, rose, and cassia, where Herrick can consort forever with the greatest poets.309

Ann Coiro, writing on the titular garden of the collection, argues that “whereas the image of a garden of eternal spring is at first glance a vehicle for praise, it becomes ultimately laden with regret—regret not only for a lost ideal, but, more importantly, for the poet’s loss of power” (14). Herrick, then, dreams of the frontispiece of his

Hesperides, a fragrant and immortal garden of verse, but also a site of olfactive,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 309 Hale notes that “it is characteristic that Herrick thinks first of the delightful fragrance of Elysium” (169). 265 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! receptive, and poetic uncertainty. His frontispiece illustration, a bust of Herrick on a pedestal as immortal poet, plays with the conventions of long-lasting stone monuments but eternal verses.310 The imagery is a reiteration of Herrick as poet, inspired by the

Muses, moved out of his own time into the eternal world of verse, and allowed into the sacred spaces reserved for gods and heroes.

The incongruous details of Herrick as both statuesque poet and as fleshy living man point toward his fears of mortality and his aspirations of poetic immortality. Herrick is depicted with both Cavalier curls and facial hair—the only features of the frontispiece which hint toward contemporary trends—and an Ovidian nose can exist within conflicting and overlapping polytemporal planes at the same time: current Civil War

England, ancient Greece and Rome, and the eternity of the Judeo-Christian garden of

Eden and afterlife. Herrick’s nose is so prominently his defining feature that the flying putti appear as though they are placing floral wreaths upon it.

But Hesperides, as the title indicates, conflates garden, female body, and poetry, and for Herrick all of this is sweetly scented and alluring, yet also dangerous. The garden is named after the presiding inhabitants, the immortal daughters of Atlas, who are liminal goddesses: they are virgins, but they are associated with both marriage (Eros) and death

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 310 To his right Pegasus—symbol of poetic inspiration—is about to fly from the Hill of Parnassus—home of the Muses, a place of poetry, music, and learning—from which the Spring of Helicon—the divine spring of the Muses—flows. To his left is a tree, maybe the sacred tree of the titular Hesperides—the tree of golden apples, sacred to Juno— around which five putti dance in a ring. Two more putti holding laurel or olive leaves point toward the large Latin-inscribed base of the bust. Two last putti—making the number nine, the number of the Muses—fly overhead with rose-wreaths. Jay Gertzman provides a thorough history of the reception, reprinting, omission, and analysis of Herrick’s frontispiece in Fantasy, Fashion and Affection : Editions of Robert Herrick's Poetry for the Common Reader, 1810-1968.

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(Thanatos). The Hesperides are goddesses of the sunset and their sacred abode is at the western reaches of the world, separate from but not unlike Elysium, the Classical afterlife for heroes. The garden was the wedding gift for Hera, the goddess of marriage, and as her loyal nymphs they are also matrimonial goddesses. It is one of the golden apples of

Hesperides thrown into the wedding of Peleus and Thetis by the goddess Eris that was the catalyst of the Trojan War. Coch’s historicized reading of the book-as-garden metaphor emphasizes the importance of the beautiful, but potentially threatening female figure in many depictions. The secular and the sacred are conflated, and the sensuous pleasures threaten the meditative possibilities, embodied in the desirable (yet less reasonable) female figure, who sometimes also transcends the physical, as in the case of the Virgin

Mary or the Muses.

In Herrick’s frontispiece, his domestic panegyric to his niece, his fragrant lyrics on his mistresses’ bodies, and his “Apparition,” Herrick idealizes the female body as perfumed hortus conclusus—a fragrant, aromatic bower of bliss—and the related locus amoenus—the pleasant place. For Herrick, the fetishized aromas of the female body are closely related to the stench of mortality, and the confusion between his poetic reputation, his mortal body, and immortal soul are all related to this blurring of the aromas of Eros and Thanatos. Just as the mistress is about to take Herrick to that “capacious roome” where Jonson is, the cock crows, the light of dawn frightens his mistress and she trips away, almost mid-thought (“I vanish: more had I to say…” (H.575.65)) and on limping feet.311 Herrick delays the inevitable, his own death and decay, and the disintegration of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 311 While the poem is written in rhyming iambic pentameter throughout, the final couplet is reduced to iambic tetrameter. 267 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his poems, by denying the teleological movement toward death, the afterlife, and joining his place alongside his poetic fathers.

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Chapter 5: Smelling Sanctity in the Later Renaissance:

The Aromas of Gods and Kings

Introduction: William Lower’s political incense

In the previous chapter, I analyzed the olfactory erotics of Robert Herrick’s poetry as engaging with his personal and professional anxieties concerning his own mortality and the afterlives of his collection of verse. Robert Herrick, as many critics argue, wrote as a supporter of the High Church and King Charles during the Civil War.312 His collection was published in 1648, as the Civil War was about to end with the capture and subsequent trial and execution of Charles. This last chapter is set in this tumultuous period—the later Renaissance, including the reign of Charles I and the Civil War, the

Commonwealth/Interregnum, and into the early years of the Restoration—and chapter concerns the depiction of holy scents: liturgical incense, the odor of sanctity associated with saints and martyrs, and the stenches of sin, corruption, and hell.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 312 A quick note on terminology: there are different ways of addressing the two major factions of the Civil War, and while I most often use Royalists and Parliamentarians as I am writing mostly on their represented leaders, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, I occasionally use other terms such as Cavaliers or Ceremonialists (when switching to a more religious register for his followers), and Roundheads, Puritans, or Calvinists when discussing different aspects of Cromwell’s followers. Likewise, for Charles’ form of church practice, I use the terms High Church, Ceremonialist, and Laudian to describe different aspects of liturgical and theological changes. These terms are not completely fungible and there would be Calvinists who supported the king, etc. but to try to cover some of the nuances of switching allegiances and identities, I have purposely decided to employ these terms for different occasions. 269 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the final act of William Lower’s play The Phoenix in Her Flames (pub. 1639), the Arabian princess Phaenicia commits suicide, after the murder of her lover,

Amandus.313 Using her namesake bird as her deathly inspiration, she creates a bed of perfumes and suffocates herself.314 The aromas created by the use of material perfumes and fragrant smokes to depict this death scene would create a wealth of olfactory significance, but especially a conflation between Biblical and ancient ideas of smoky sacrifices, and contemporary olfactory changes occurring within the Anglican Church.

While the play, at first, appears nothing more than another Orientalist tragedy, it resonates with olfactive cues throughout and occasional references to current political and religious controversies veiled in a cloud of perfume.315 In Phoenix, the religious use of incense demonstrates Lower’s own political and religious leanings, demonstrating

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 313 Perseus, Prince of Persia, goes on a Tamburlaine-esque rampage across Arabia when he believes that his betrothed, Lucinda, the Princess of Egypt is kidnapped by the Arabian royal court. She was kidnapped, but by a group of desert thieves and saved by the exiled Prince of Damascus, Amandus. Lucinda falls in love with Amandus who defeats Perseus and brings him as a prisoner of war to the King of Arabia. Amandus is delighted to be united with his love-object, and Perseus deserts Lucinda in favor of the same Princess of Arabia, Phaenicia. When Amandus and Perseus kill each other for her love, Phaenicia, who was in love with Amandus, commits suicide like her namesake the Phoenix, through an ostentatious and aromatic self-immolation. 314 According to mythology, only one Phoenix existed at a time and it would live five- hundred or one thousand years (depending on the source). As the beautiful flame-colored bird’s life drew to a close it would fly to a hot, arid region—Egypt, Arabia, or Heliopolis (depending on the source)—to create an aromatic eyrie of myrrh, frankincense, and other spices, where it would burst into flame. From the avian ashes of the unique bird’s death, a new Phoenix would emerge and the cycle would continue. The Phoenix was a symbol coopted by several English monarchs—by Elizabeth to demonstrate her singularity and uniqueness as the Virgin Queen, for example—and in 1649, after the execution of King Charles, Royalists commissioned a medallion with Charles I on the obverse and a Phoenix on the reverse to point toward the restoration of his son, Charles II (Kantorowicz 413). 315 Felix E. Schelling groups Lower’s play with other “decadent romances” of the period, notably the works of Lodowick Carlell and Thomas Killigrew (352-361). 270 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lower’s military knowledge while also at the disunity of Ireland, Scotland, and England in the antebellum unrest before the Civil War.316

Within the play, Arabia is divided into three disparate parts: Arabia Felix (“Happy

Arabia,” the site of the royal palace), Arabia Deserta (the relatively uninhabited wilderness that serves as home for a band of thieves), and Arabia Petra (“Rocky Arabia”; the ancient city Petra is located in this region noted for its rock-cut architecture within the mountainside). Arabia’s division into three distinct locales and the inherent issues of uniting those areas seem to correspond with the tensions of England, Ireland, and

Scotland in the 1630s and the ongoing unification controversy. Navigating Arabia depends on an understanding of the tripartite division of the land and the specific senses connected to each region: Petra is a haptic site, rocky and mountainous; Felix is an olfactory paradise; and Deserta is devoid of sensations. Most of the play occurs in the fragrant Felix Arabia, and incense is burnt onstage in several scenes, including

Phaenicia’s aromatic suicide.

During the reign of Charles I, there was a decided faction within the Anglican

Church concerning the reincorporation of highly sensuous rituals, such as the use of liturgical incense. Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, supported the “beauty of holiness” project while ascetic Puritans found some of these ceremonies and niceties to be too idolatrous.317 Part of the Ceremonialists’ re-beautification of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 316 While his earliest military records and exploits are missing, Lower was a lieutenant for the army of the Earl of Northumberland in the year following the publication of Phoenix; shortly after he becomes a captain, and in 1644, he was serving as “lieutenant- colonel in the king's army and lieutenant-governor of Wallingford” and was knighted by the king for kidnapping and ransoming the Mayor of Reading (Katham). 317 The term “beauty of holiness” derives from Psalm 96:9, but was adopted by Bishope Andrews, and later Laud and his followers to describe church renovations and 271 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! church involved the reintroduction of “smells and bells,” sensual rituals that were previously deemed as pagan-cum-Catholic theatrics. As Lower was a loyal Royalist, several of his works, including Phoenix, demonstrate an affinity toward the sensuous rituals associated with High Anglican church practices (Ward 290). Several years after the publication of Phoenix, he was captured by Parliament forces while fighting on the

King’s side, and while living in exile in Holland during the Interregnum he published favorable works about the exiled royal family (Stephens and Lee 206). Lower’s Royalist stance and his familial connections in Holland suggest that he would appreciate the beautification of the church and its restoration of certain rituals, such as the use of incense. His translations of several French works on religious martyrs—The Innocent

Lady (1654), The Innocent Lord, and The Triumphant Lady (1656)–also demonstrate

Catholic receptiveness, or after the beheading of Charles I, a strong empathy with

Anglican martyrdom.

The Phoenix performs Phaenicia’s scented suicide as just such a religious martyrdom, and the language she uses is purely liturgical. She changes her physician’s title from “Doctor” to “Sacred Priest” because he is “to sacrifice me to Amandus’ shrine /

A spotless Virgin” (4.1.M2v.24-5). The secular becomes sacred, and the importance of religious ritual is stressed. The Doctor/Sacred Priest suffocates Phaenicia to death on her bed in a fume of incense. Creating sensory reactions, exciting audiences or parishioners, and creating an otherworldly atmosphere are goals for both playwrights and parsons.

Both transcendental experiences are not only negotiated through spectacle and sound, as many critics have noted, but also through scent.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! decorations (Parry 18). See especially Parry’s third chapter on “Laud and the Renovation of the Cathedrals.” 272 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In Phaenicia’s final words as she dies beneath a cloud of perfume, the incense mingles with her own odor of sanctity:

I smell a heavenly vapor

Assaulting my weak breath, now Prince I come,

Beloved Prince thy dear Phaenicia comes,

Be ready to receive her, for her spirit

Ascends up in this smoky sacrifice. (4.1.M2v.31-M2r.4)

In her aromatic death, Phaenicia emanates the aroma of sanctity, the sweet scent associated with saints and martyrs, and her fragrance replicates that of her fallen lover, who also emitted such sweetness upon his death.318 Although the play is set in Arabia, the aroma of sanctity has a long tradition in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, and Near/Middle

Eastern cultures as an olfactory form of communication between the mortal and divine realms.319 Although in the Anglican Church the aroma of sanctity was more likely dismissed as a Popish superstition, Lower still utilizes this familiar olfactory trope to celebrate the virtues and purity of the two doomed lovers. As Phaenicia says her final words, the smell of the incense lit a few lines earlier by the Doctor/Sacred Priest would be now entering the audience members’ nostrils.320 They would recall the incense lit at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 318 The Colonel, part of Amandus’ loyal entourage, comments on Amandus’ fragrance: “Come now your shoulders honor with his Corpse / Sweeter than all the perfumes of the Realm” (4.1.L4v.28-9). 319 See Suzanne Evans “The Scent of a Martyr” and Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination for discussions early and medieval Christian depictions of the aroma of sanctity. 320 There have been several studies of the use of incense and scented special effects on the early modern stage, especially Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Holly Dugan nicely covers the gendered implications of perfumed performances in “Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England” and religious suggestions of staged incense in several later medieval and early Reformation 273 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the beginning of the play to create and define aromatic Arabia Felix. Contemporary church practices, ancient mythological beliefs, and early church rituals blend together in one whiff of frankincense.321

Studying works such as William Lower’s The Phoenix in her Flames and its innovative use of incense and perfumes as represented and performed on the stage calls for a further consideration of scented allusions, church rituals, and the early modern olfactory imagination during the English Civil War.322 This final chapter turns to literary, religious, and political writings of the later Caroline and Civil War period that explicitly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! plays (The Wakefield Offering of the Magi and the Digby Mary Magdalene) in the first chapter of The Ephemeral History of Perfume. Holly Crawford Pickett, in “Incense on the Early Modern Stage,” makes a strong case for the religious implications of incense in Jonson’s Sejanus and Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Crawford Pickett’s essay also details her onstage incense-burning experiment at the American Shakespeare Center’s Fifth Blackfriars Conference. Jonathan Gil Harris offers an occasional reading of the sulfurous stage squibs, concocted of explosives and dung, used for the staged storm scenes in Macbeth, which are conflated with the audiences’ recent memories of the Gunpowder Plot and King James’ nimble nose which allegedly smelt out the plot (in the article “The Smell of Macbeth,” and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare). At the same time, the squib’s sulfurous smell reenacts a nostalgia for Catholic “Harrowing of Hell” style plays and the lack of “smells and bells” in the Anglican church. Harris claims that Shakespeare’s staged scents subvert the inodorous Anglican Church by recreating the scents associated with Catholicism and rebellion. All three articles explore the religious resonance of staging scents in the Reformation, and all offer succinct overviews of the controversies of incense in the early modern church. My chapter extends and complements their arguments by turning to the Caroline period and the more controversial depictions of liturgical incense. 321 See my article on this play, “Performing and Perfuming on the Early Modern Stage: A Study of William Lower’s The Phoenix in Her Flames” in Early English Studies, for an extended reading of the various scenes using incense in this play. This play was never performed, but the prologue and epilogue imagine a performance rather a closet reading. 322 Jonathan Gil Harris in his erudite but preliminary essay on Macbeth and the significance of religious odorants, argues, “With the removal of incense from the churches, English men and women came to inhabit a new olfactory universe in which sweet smells no longer suggested the presence of the divine. Of course, all representations of God—visual as well as olfactory—had been expunged… This transformation has been thoroughly studied with respect to the visual and verbal conventions of the early modern theatre. But its impact needs to be understood also in relation to rituals of smell” (135). 274 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! refer to the use of incense or the odor of sanctity. By following a particular olfactive trope closely across various genres—religious sermons, polemical writings, cheap broadsides, poetry, and drama—I argue that the English Civil War could be read as a war of perfumes. If we were to assume an osmology for the Royalists and Parliamentarians, we could expect an osomology maintained by both sides that create the two poles of the binary as Parliamentarians as inodorous and Royalists as Perfumed.

We might imagine Cavaliers with their fashionable falling ruffs, feathered hats, hair ribbons and love-locks, and their liberal use of French-inspired (after the influence of the Queen Henrietta Maria) perfumes, considering themselves as sophisticated, romantic, wealthy, and gallant.The opposition would complain that those same perfumes stunk of idleness, sexual disease, and sins (see Chapter 2, 3, and 4). Therefore, in both their literature (Herrick’s verse) and in the Roundheads’ complaints, they would be represented as perfumed, but with different olfactive connotations. Contrariwise, the

Puritans, with their plainer dress, unadorned churches, and simpler pleasures would represent themselves as clean and pure, but otherwise inodorous. (See Kathleen M.

Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America for her study of early Puritanical hygienic beliefs and practices, and Chapters 1-2 for a discussion of the state of inodorousness.) This lack of perfumes, however, would make this group’s uncovered natural body odors stink to the perfumed Cavaliers.

This chapter extends and responds to two wonderfully eclectic yet highly impressive essays that follow a particular embodied strand—the rump and the nose— through later Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration literature and art: Laura Lunger

Knoppers’ “Noll’s Nose or Body Politics in Cromwellian England” (2000) and Mark S.R.

275 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenner’s “The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration

England” (2002). Both essays elucidate the need to “examine the language of politics” by attending to the understudied, but frequently represented body parts. In Jenner’s case, he turns to Royalist literature (c. 1659-1662) that exemplifies the “Rump” Parliament as the monstrous body politic—scatological, feminized, cannibalized, diabolical, and as

“stump, a bleeding residuum” (Jenner 88, 99). Such scatological doggerel with its rejection of the “godly reformation” (96), destabilized the depictions of the democratized

Commonwealth, asserting instead “Royalists were constructing an image of the Royalists as popular, and the popular as Royalist” (109).323

Laura Lunger Knoppers also writes on Royalist satire during the Cromwellian

Commonwealth, underscoring how politicized depictions of “Cromwell’s grotesque body,” especially his “ruby and oversized nose” were created to contrast with the idealized, Christ-like body of the martyred Charles I (23). She focuses on how the represented gross materiality of Cromwell’s body and the actual materiality of the proliferation of coins, medals, portraits and other images of the Lord Protector’s portrait, helped to restore the image of the sacral king when Charles II came to power (26, 40).

Both essays also work extensively with Bakhtin’s concept of the “grotesque body” as outlined in Rabelais and His World (1968) and the theory of the king’s two bodies—the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 323 Knoppers is a professor of English and Jenner is a professor of social and cultural history, yet they read many of the same types of texts. Nigel Smith has convincingly argued for a new type of popular and polemical author that emerges during the Civil War, and reads broadsides, satires, political pamphlets and other cheap print alongside political philosophies, such as Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathon and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Angela McShane responds to Jenner’s article by suggesting a closer considertation of paper and typography (indicating that these are cheap prints) and the variances of genre and message.

276 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! body politic and body natural—as analyzed in Ernst Hartwig Kantorowic’s seminal study

The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957).

But what if the represented body or matter is immaterial? Ascending incense, tobacco smoke, a fart, luxury perfumes, or the aroma of sanctity? Smells are more ephemeral, subjective, and full of competing significance than a defecating rump or a pimpled nose. I argue that both the Royalists and Parliamentarians adopt a shared lexicon that extols the politics of perfume during this unstable period in history. Incense and the odor of sanctity both resonate with occasional religio-political allusions, demonstrating continuities and change on issues such as divine rule, the theory of the king’s two bodies, and moral virtues of the leader. The saintly aroma of sanctity does not create the expected divisions between Parliamentarians (inodorous) and Royalists (perfumed); rather, the communal rhetoric and the destabilizing affects of incense disallow such distinctions.

This chapter moves through political theories of the king’s exalted senses and the king’s represented aromas to historicize Charles I’s connections to previous monarchical osmologies, including those of the pre-Reformed church. Charles’ personal aromas, his anointing chrism and use of liturgical incense, are both innovative and yet connect him through smell to earlier practices while scenting ahead toward a sweet heavenly afterlife.

After his execution, Royalists and the preachers of the High Church recall their king with a symbolic aroma of sanctity, reserved for (Catholic) saints and martyrs, and Cromwell acquires both figurative and literal stenches. This is all quite in line with Knoppers’ and

Jenner’s works on Royalist satires and the unruly body of Parliament; then, we turn away from Royalist commemoratory and satirical writings to those of Cromwell’s supporters in which the Lord Protector is not only cleanly inodorous, but also exudes sweet smells. By

277 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! using the same rhetoric, the Parliamentarians elevate Cromwell and desacralize the aromas of Charles’ martyrdom. This chapter ends by turning to John Milton’s Paradise

Lost, which more cautiously demonstrates the affective powers of the sense of smell and recuperates the sanctity of holy scents.

The King’s Nose: To Smell Well

The language of smells is consistent with the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, with depictions of the king as God’s chosen ruler, and with his infallibility as divine ruler. In such political depictions, the slippage of the transitive and intransitive verb “smell” meant both that the king smelled well and the king smelled good. First, the monarch’s senses and perceptions are considered more judicious and perfect than his subjects, and secondly, while the king’s body natural may be infirm, have biological urges and base needs, and may even emit bodily stenches, his body politic, “invisible and immortal” would smell divinely of ambrosia, ambergris, and other costly Biblical and godly aromas (Kantorowicz 15).324

Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax offers a helpful parable of a Hermit guided by an Angel in a crowded city, which uncovers the importance of both smelling well and smelling good. When they pass a

“gongfarmer,” a dung carter, the Hermit and the other townspeople cover their noses, but the Angel takes no notice. When they pass a beautiful woman, finely dressed and sweetly perfumed, the Hermit finds himself “revived with the faire sight, and sweet savour,” but now the Angel gags stating that the courtesan “was a more stincking savour afore God and his holy Angels, then the beastly cart, laden with excrements” (85). The two-fold

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 324 I use and refer throughout to Ernst Hartwig Kantorowic’s seminal study The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957). 278 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! allegory is clear: internalized moral worth is manifested externally by one’s odor, and the divine have more perfect sensory perception than man.

A king should have better sense (in all meanings) than the Hermit, approaching the divine perception of the Angel, and have more perfect senses than his subjects. This extends beyond the higher faculties of vision and hearing; the king’s sensible powers encompass an acute awareness of the lower sensorium, too.325 John Williams, preaching upon the death of James I, “Great Britain’s Salomon,” links the kings’ two bodies in an allegory of the senses:

For as in the naturall; so in the ciuill Body, the spie and discouerie of all

the members is plac't aloft in the watch-tower of the Head. Here are the Eyes, that

see for all. Here are the Eares, that listen for all. Here are the Nostrils, that smell

out for all. Here are the Braines, that sweat for all. And here is the Wisedome, that

prouides for all. (15)

The king’s body is the castle of reason by which the whole nation is protected. The description of the body “natural” as a guarded castle can be found in works such as

Thomas Elyot’s The Castle of Health (first published 1534 and reprinted continuously throughout the early modern period) or Edmund Spenser’s “House of Temperance”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 325 Ben Jonson's “The King’s Entertainment: A Panegyre" describes James’ penetrating vision: These his searching beams are cast to pry Into those dark and deep-concealèd vaults Where men commit black incest with their faults… (2.676.8-10). Erasmus, in his Adagia 102.1.2.2, writes on the depiction of the king as panoptic and all- hearing: “multae regum aures atque oculi … kings have many ears and many eyes … they have ears that listen a hundred miles from them; they have eyes that espy out more things than men would think. Wherefore, it is wisdom for subjects not only to keep their princes’ laws and ordinances in the face of the world but also privily … conscience sake.” I thank Ben Miele for his recommendations on sources pertaining to the king and surveillance. 279 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! episode (II.ix).326 In William’s sermon, the “civil Body” of the king is also the same guarded castle, but his sensory strengths defend his whole nation. His nostrils “smell out for all.”

The Spanish writer Juan de Santa María’s Christian Policie: or The Christian

Common-wealth was translated into English and published early in Charles’ reign

(1632).327 In this philosophy of government, de Santa María composes a chapter “Of the sense of smelling: that is, of the prudence of Kings.” Beginning with the lines from the

Song of Solomon 7:4 (coincidentally but notably, a cognomen for James I), “thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus,” de Santa María finds the nose a sentinel to sniff out enemies (233), and, symbolically, in its straightness and whiteness, a signifier of “discretion and prudence, which exalts it selfe aboue all other the workes of

Vertue, and doth grace and beautifie them all” (233).328 The prudent king becomes, in de

Santa María’s assessment, like the English bloodhound, “by this quicknesse of sent, they vnderstand that nimblenesse of apprehension, sharpenesse of vnderstanding, and sagacitie, which a King ought to haue” (261). He switches metaphors to a surgeon searching into the depths of a wound using his trained nose as his guide, “There is no

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 326 For earlier, pre-Reformation examples, see Milner (54-56) and the continued Henrician tradition of this trope (Milner 180-182). 327 de Santa María notes that some read this prudent nose as the Pope, but he believes that this is an allegory of the king (237). Other sensate chapters include: “Of the sense of Hearing, and the Audiences which Kings ought to give,” “Of the sense of Tasting, and of the vertue of Temperance,” “Of the sense of Touching,” and “Of sagacitie, sharpnesse of wit, and quicknesse of apprehension, which Kings ought to have.” 328 Interestingly, de Santa María’s nasal tower becomes a synaesthetic place to survey all around, offering a panoptic view of not only the spatial (the kingdom) but also the temporal (looking toward the future) (234-236). He finds the ability to survey danger not as useful as being able to sniff it out: “So that hee shall nose out any thing whatsoeuer, though neuer so farre off, and without seeing, or hearing them, be they neuer so secret and hid, shall make a right and true iudgement of things” (261). 280 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mysterie so secret, which hee must not pry, and diue into, he must nose from a farre the impstoures, artifices, fraudulent dealings, and cunning disguises of those that go about to deceiue him” (261). de Santa María’s advice is not unlike that offered by John Donne in his first sermon to King Charles to keep his senses pure and unadulterated: “And then, if the Magistrate stop his Eares with Wooll, (with staple bribes, profitable bribes) and with Cyuet in his wooll, (perfumes of pleasure and preferment in his bribes) hee falsifies Gods Word…” (11).329 The good king is truly sensible. Jonathan Gil Harris has proven that after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot (1605), James I was celebrated as an

“excellent smeller” who “literally smelled out the plot” (129): “The King’s nose is valorized as the organ uniquely able to tell the difference between fair and foul morality”

(129-130).330

Yet, many satirical poems undermine this divine sense belonging to the king.

“The Parliament Fart,” based on Henry Ludlow’s flatulent response to Sir John Croke’s message during a 1607 debate was a popular, adaptable poem that incorporated real topics from Parliament in a witty “extended fart joke” that continued to be tailored and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 329 This verse and Donne’s other treatments of religious perfume are explored more fully in Chapter 2 of the dissertation. In the book of Isaiah, the prophet predicts a King or Messiah who has “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD; 3 And shall make him quick of understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: 4 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor… ” (11:2-4, emphasis added). Some religious commentary and sermons suggest that there is an olfactive element as though it should read along the lines of “And his smelling is of fear of the Lord.” Jeremiah Unterman highlights different translations of the problematic Hebraic term, identifies the term contextually and concludes his translatation as “ and YHWH shall instruct him [the King] in the fear of YHWH” (22). 330 Christopher Hibbert provides an anecdote of Queen Elizabeth’s sensitive nose, recalling the stenches of former leper houses near St. James Palace, and her loathing of lavender oil treated book bindings (133-135).

281 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! circulated for almost twenty years (Bellany and McRae). “The Blessings of the King’s

Senses” is a grotesque manuscript poem based on additions to Ben Jonson’s masque, The

Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) (Knowles161), in which the king’s senses are enumerated and protected from offensive materials. In the verse on smelling, James is protected from the malodors of stinking feet, bad breath, messy college students, fishmongers, and James’ hated tobacco (cited in Knowles 3.1264-1274). James, known for his fastidious sense of smell, is mockingly reintroduced to flagrant stinks over and over in these verses, even in those intending to “bless my sovereign and his smelling.”

William Drummond’s satirical poem “The Five Senses” (c. 1623), based on “The

Blessings,” conventionally mocks King James’ bad counselors, corrupting courtiers, and

Catholicism. The fifth stanza is dedicated to smell, and begins by declaring incense as too

Catholic, “damn’d perfumes … fitt for hell” (5.54) and deriding the “whoreish breath” of

Ganymede (5.59), an obvious allusion to the King’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham.331

The final stanza asserts that the king may use his “royal nose” (5.74) to “quickly smell those rascals forth / whose black deeds have eclipsed his worth” (5.75-76). While the previous poems poke lighthearted fun at the sagacity of the king and the political symbolism of astute olfaction, “The Five Senses,” as Andrew McRae argues, fully undermines the concept of the king’s two bodies, if “the sins committed by the body natural may endanger at once his own soul and the health of the body politic” (McRae

81). Besides the crown, Charles become heir to his father’s theory of the divine right of kings, his annoyance with relying on Parliament, and his father’s delicate sense of smell, especially the shared abhorrence of tobacco smoke (Sanderson 1132). He also received

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 331 McRae and Knowles both thoroughly cover the libels against Buckingham. 282 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his father’s favorite, Buckingham, and with that relationship, he also inherited a revival of “The Five Senses” in 1628 (Cressy 309).

The King’s Perfume: To Smell Good

In addition to this higher sensate faculty, the English king’s body is, symbolically, if not literally, odoriferous. A 1524 silver medal at the British Museum is a perfect example of this symbolic scent of the monarch. The medal depicts a bust of Henry VIII on its obverse, “left hat with drapery looped under the brim, hair somewhat long for the period, cloak, riband round his neck for a medal; undergarment puckered with bands across the body” (Hawkins et al 31). On the reverse is a Tudor Rose, the symbol of

Henry’s familial dynasty, commemorating the end of the War of the Roses and the unification of the rival families (York/white rose and Lancaster/red rose). Above the rose is the inscription: “ODOR EIVS VT LIBANI,” or “His smell [shall be] as Lebanon.” As

Henry was created “Defender of the Faith” only three years previous, the aromatic reference has several politico-religious and metonymic meanings. Referring to both the prophetic passage in Hosea that Israel must repent and return to her Lord, and the eroticized depiction of the love between God and the Church as depicted in Song of

Solomon, reference to the “smell of Lebanon” becomes an olfactive reminder of Henry’s role as “husband” and the Church as beloved bride, while recalling his recent defense of the sacrament of marriage (Scarisbrick110-113).332 The Tudor rose and Biblical passages

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 332 Hosea 14:06-07: “His [God’s] branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon. They [the Israelites] that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall flourish as the corn and grow as the vine; the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon.” Song of Songs 4:11: “Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue: and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.” All Biblical quotations are from Oxford World’s Classics The Bible, Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha unless otherwise noted. 283 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! are linked through their sweet scent which both emanate from the body of the king, explicitly denoting the body natural and the body politic as aromatic and therapeutic paradise. The English king’s body is, symbolically, if not literally, odoriferous. Yet, often it is not until the king’s status is in flux that the odor becomes prominent. In the example of this particular medal, Henry had recently been rewarded with the honorific “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope for his loyalty to the Catholic faith (Scarisbrick 115-117).

Charles I’s aromatic body is represented—by friends and foes—in several key moments of his life and death: as divine king anointed with sacramental chrism; as a

Ceremonialist, who enjoys the sensuous rituals of the liturgy; and as a religious martyr, emiting the aroma of sanctity. All of these aromas, too, reiterate the theory of the king’s two bodies. Furthermore, his retinue is associated with a variety of sweet aromas, expanding the King’s fragranced spatiality. Charles I and his followers claim that the martyr-king smells of the odor of sanctity; his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, helped to rebeautify the church, bringing back liturgical incense; and his wife, Henrietta

Maria, a lover of perfumes brought over her personal perfumer from France.333 On the other hand, the usurping regicide—according to Charles’ loyal followers—Oliver

Cromwell, stinks of political corruption.

The Chrism of Charles I

The coronation process was a hallowed affair, and a transformative aromatic event. The most sacred gesture was the anointing of the monarch.334 Although Wesley

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 333 See Dugan’s article “Osmologies of Luxury and Labor: entertaining perfumers in early English drama” on early perfumers, including Henrietta Maria’s French perfumer Jean-Baptiste Ferreine. 334 I am very grateful to Renee Bricker for kindly sharing part of her Master’s Thesis “Queen Elizabeth I and Religious Rituals as Political Strategies.” She has guided me to 284 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Carr admits that each coronation is altered, adapted, and modified (using Queen Elizabeth

II’s coronation as his point of study), “the basic structure of all subsequent coronations can be seen in the original rite,” which dates back to the crowning of the English king

Edgar in 973, but also had earlier Christian European antecedents (13). After swearing fealty to God and country, Charles I would have changed into a simple white garment

(representing purity, innocence, and humility), but following his father, he did not don an overlaid red cloth (symbolic of the Holy Spirit) (Headlam 4).335 The Archbishop cleansed his hands, then prayed; then anointed (in order) the king’s breast, between the shoulders, both shoulders, the upper arms, and the crown of the head (Bricker 74).336 The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the major sources concerning Elizabeth’s coronation and anointment rituals. Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation process was a complicated and highly symbolic affair with many tracts written about her royal progress and the religio-political imagery in public spaces, but when it came to the anointing, there is less written. According to legend, Elizabeth I’s chrism was the last of the ‘miraculous chrism,’ given to St. Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary in a golden eagle-shaped ampulla, lost for several centuries, and then rediscovered before Henry IV’s coronation (Woolley 73). In this sense, then, there is a beautiful symmetry between the divine Virgin who gave the oil and the Virgin Queen, who uses the last of the oil, and in the controversy of church (Becket) versus state (Henry II), which was superseded by Elizabeth I as both head of England and the Anglican Church. Despite the solemnity and gravity of the anointing ceremony, Elizabeth complained that chrism was “grease and smelled ill” (Williamson 131). Even for the current monarch Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation “the anointing has the deepest significance during the ceremony,” the very “heart of the ceremony,” so much so that the anointing was not photographed nor televised (unlike the rest of the ceremony): But after the Creed come the anointing, the ‘intimate ritual,’ itself. Seated in the Coronation Chair, the monarch is anointed with oil ‘as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet.’ The anointing is in the form of a cross on the palms of the hands, the breast and the head. A canopy is held over the monarch to shield her from view. For this (and not the crowning, as is often supposed) is the most sacred part of the service. (Carr 20-21, emphasis added) 335 Headlam notes that the lack of purple-red garments was considered in auspicious by some, and recalled at his execution when he again stripped to a white shirt (Kishlansky 160). 336 The anointing process etymologically linked the monarch to Jesus Christ (Christ, as “the Messiah or ‘Lord's Anointed’…” ((“Christ,” n.1. OED)). 285 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Archbishop retold the history of Christ’s anointment as he poured the chrism from a small ampulla and spoon onto Charles, linking his body to Christ’s, and his temporal kingdom to Christ’s eternal kingdom:337

God, the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, which was anointed by his Father

with the Oyl of gladness above his fellows, he by his holy anointing, pour down

upon thy head the blessing of the Holy Ghost, and make it enter into the inward

part of thy heart, so that thou maiest receive invisible grace, and having just

governed thy temporal Kingdom, thou maiest reign with him eternally, who only

being without sin, doth live in glory with God, and the Father and the Holy Ghost.

(Qtd. in Bricker 74, The Forms of Prayers and Services used in Westminster, 9).

If based on the Biblical recipe—prescribed from God to Moses to anoint Aaron and his sons as consecrated priests, and then later used by Samuel to anoint the first Hebraic kings, Samuel and his successor, David—the chrism contained “the finest spices”— myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, cassia, and olive oil.338 All of the ingredients of this balm are nonnative to England, indicating the aromatic polytemporal and multi-spatial properties of the oil, connecting ancient and early modern, Biblical and monarchical, and Arabic and European through the repeated recipe of foreign, luxury, Oriental spices. Charles maintained much of the ancient ceremony, but he was innovative in his olfactory performance, altering the recipe for his coronation. The chrism contained orange flowers,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 337 The oldest piece of the coronation regalia is the 12th century gold Anointing Spoon.The golden ampulla, adorned with an eagle, holds the sacred chrism, and was commissioned by Charles II upon his Restoration, as the older ampulla may have been sold off during the Interregnum and the 1649 Inventory (“The Crown Jewels”). 338 The Biblical balm was highly sacred, with the proscription that the anointing oil created (with exact measurements of the ingredients (Exodus 30:22-25)) can only be used to anoint the tabernacle, the altar, and its goods, and anoint the sacred priests (30:26-31). Those who copy the recipe or wear the chrism will “cut off from his people” (30:33). 286 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! roses, cinnamon, jasmine, benzoin, sesame oil, musk, civet, and ambergris (Rich 168).339

A variation of this recipe is still used to this day (Aftel 187).340

Charles’ chosen ingredients are olfactive reminders of his kinghood, nationality, empire, and divinity, and the new formulation looked ahead to a new king and England’s future as much as it looked behind to the previous monarchs. The animalic base notes of musk, civet, and ambergris asserted his masculinity, virility, and in that transcendence of civet, royalty, and divinity.341 The perfume writer Chandler Burr states that musk is

“animalic in its most elevated form” and “one of the most astounding smells you will ever experience” (249). “Unique, illusive of precise description,” Dr. Robert Clarke, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 339 The luxury perfumer Roja Dove produced a very small batch—only 60 bottles! available exclusively at his unique counter Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie at Harrods—of Britannia for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. The highly stylized bottle depicted the crown, the Red and White roses of Lancaster and York, the Fleur de Lys, the Daffodil (an occasional symbol of Wales), and a cross. The scent itself is based on the anointing chrism: rose, jasmine, orange, cinnamon, benzoin, ambergris, musk, and civet (Townes). 340 There were occasional interruptions in reusing the oil. Mary I, as the Catholic successor of her Anglican half-brother Edward VI, refused to use the Protestant chrism and procured oil from the Catholic Bishop of Arras. After Elizabeth I’s long reign, the balm was either exhausted or compromised by time, and James I needed a new batch. The oil intended to anoint Edward VIII (who abdicated) and instead anointed George VI was not used for Elizabeth II, as its container was destroyed during the bombing of London, but Charles I’s recipe was restored and reused for her coronation, nonetheless (Rich 168). We can imagine that when the current Prince of Wales (the future Charles III) succeeds to King, a new batch of anointing balm will be created using the recipe of Charles I, that the anointment will still remain a guarded and sacred affair, and that no bloggers or twitter accounts will capture this aromatic and ritualistic moment. 341 Chapter 2 discusses the different conflicting reactions to civet, the secretion of the civet cat used to mark territory and attract mates. The popularity of musk in the Renaissance is covered briefly in Aroma: The Cultural History of Scent (70-77). Musk is rutting odor produced by the Himalayan musk deer buck. Burr continues: “It is, to put it most precisely, the rich, thick scent of the anus of a clean man combined with the smells of his warm skin, his armpits sometimes around midday” (249). Burr concludes his detailed queer conceit with “there’s simply no other way to describe it” (249). The zoologist D. Michael Stoddart more simply states that musk has a “warm, comforting smell” but also an urinous undertone that even tricks professional perfumers at times (64- 65). 287 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! world’s leading expert on ambergris, offers his own complexly layered portrayal of this odorant. The oceanic thrust of ambergris would smell of the British navy and seaside exploration.342 The second chapter of this dissertation discusses the different conflicting reactions to civet, the secretion of the civet cat used to mark territory and attract mates; the scent is described affectively as ambiguous, mystical, divine, royal, animalic, dirty, and highly aphrodisiacal.

The heart-note of cinnamon and the fixatives of benzoin and sesame are all

Oriental and Biblical spices. Jack Turner notes that medieval theologians, such as the

Venerable Bede, used cinnamon as a metaphor of “inner worth over outer display, of substance over style,” contrasting the desiccated brown bark to its warming, sweet, floral scent that dries to a powdery finish (252). Cinnamon is one of the ingredients of the original oil used to anoint Aaron the Priest (Exodus 30:23), and the female personification of Wisdom in the apocryphal Ecclesiastus asserts her sweet odors: “I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon” (24: 15).343 Benzoin, the resin of the Styrax or Benjamin tree, has a “soft, sweet, warm body note that evolves into a balsamic powdery finish”

(Aftel 90). The incense recipe God asks Moses to create to be burnt at his altar includes the indefinable “onycha,” which is often read as Benjamin (Exodus 30:34).344

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 342 Holly Dugan and Sophie Read both provide historical contexts for the popularity of and confusions about the source of ambergris, the excreted undigested remains of cuttlefish discharged by sperm whales. See the previous chapter for more on ambergris, and Robert Herrick’s olfactory erotics. 343 Her other aromas include aspalathus (a sweet-tea producing legume bush), “the best myrrh,” galbanum (an aromatic gum resin from a yellow-flowering brush), onyx, storax, “and as the fume of frankincense in the tabernacle” (24:15). 344 Stoddart provides a brief history of the use of incense, and a detailed chemical analysis of the different ingredients of Moses’ incense and anointing oil (168-206). 288 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The top notes recreate the English garden, and also represent England’s global trade routes and imperial prerogative. Rosewater linked Charles to his Tudor roots, with the dynastic olfactory and visual symbol of the damask rose.345 Jasmine, as Holly Dugan notes, was a popular seventeenth century imported flower introduced to the English pleasure garden from the East and West Indies (Ephemeral 156-157). Its name comes from the Persian yāsmīn, “gift from god,” and could refer to hundreds of interrelated odoriferous species (156, 167). “The mobility of such a term,” Dugan asserts, “linked natural, divine pleasures previously found in gardens to those cultivated, marketed, and consumed in private, indoor spaces… a floral syndechoce for places of provenance”

(157). Jasmine is the “most important perfume material” according to perfumer Mandy

Aftel, and it exudes a singular scent, “rich and warm, heavy and fruity, intensely floral, it is nearly narcotic in its ability to seize the senses and the imagination” (110-111).

Oranges were imported from Spain and Portugal and smaller orange trees could be grown indoors in England (Albala 212), taming the fruits of Spanish Catholic soils. The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper states that the Hesperides’ golden apples were “mala aurea

Hesperidum” or oranges (Culpeper 271).

Mathew Milner claims that “chrism, more than any other sacramental, made the connections between spirit-based sensory physiology and the affective sacramentality of late medieval religion apparent” (110-111). I contend that the balm’s ritualistic importance is both ephemeral—Charles’ skin absorbs the balm, the scent is temporary—

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 345 Holly Dugan covers Henry VIII’s religio-political appropriation of rose perfumes in Ephemeral History of Perfume; Constance Classen creates an overview of the myriad olfactive associations of rose over time and across cultures in Worlds of Senses; Alain Corbin suggests the shift away from animalic perfumes toward lighter rose waters in the eighteenth-century (71-77); and I briefly discuss the combination of civet and rose in Chapter 2, and the smell of roses, more generally in the Introduction and Chapter 1. 289 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and eternal—he has been transfigured into monarch by the process and the scent becomes memory. To become king, Charles engaged in an aromatic apotheosis, as the king’s two bodies merged through an olfactive and tactile act.346 As Shakespeare’s deposed king

Richard II claimed, “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / can wash the balm from an anointed king” (3.2.50-51).347

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 346 On the tactility of the coronation process and how it provided the king with the ability to heal by laying on hands, see Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France. 347 For Richard, the earthly (i.e. British) and heavenly kingdoms are so intertwined and dependent on scent, that when he thinks of the sanctity of kingship, he recalls the anointing aspect of the coronation ceremony. In the deposition scene, it is important that Richard does not call upon the royal balm as he strips off the royal jewels. Instead, Richard relies upon the sacral nature of the coronation process that is symbolically inversed as Bolingbroke usurps the crown, leaving Richard with an interiority and new status as martyr: I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown (3.3.146-148). Removing his sumptuous vestments and kingly goods—jewels, palace, apparel, goblets, scepter, subjects, and kingdom—in an extended anaphora, Richard’s language reverses the coronation ceremony, and he exchanges his luxuries for the simpler vestments of the clergy. Although his kingship was godly, he denounces it as too worldly. Finally, in a version of the marriage contract, he tells Bolingbroke, “Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all” (3.3.195). This symbolic exchange is not enough for Bolingbroke, and several scenes later, Richard is called back again to publically abdicate. Richard publically removes his crown and scepter (returned to him for the occasion) and hands them over to Bolingbroke: With mine own tears I wash away the balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (4.1.197-200) The anaphora again replicates the repetition of a liturgical event. While the catalogue of kingly items are not exact from the previous scene to this one, the exchange in the previous scene from kingly to godly items, now allows Richard to act as the religious officiate (such as the Archbishop of Canterbury who presides over the coronation) who can invest Bolingbroke as king in this ironic coronation/abdication/forced deposition. One of the differences here is that now Richard washes away the coronation balm, which he did not do previously. Unlike some of the other kingly attributes, the coronation balms cannot be re-performed and transferred. He cannot physically remove the balm that so 290 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Charles I and the Use of Liturgical Incense

While the chrismation may have been an ephemeral and guarded event, so private that only Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury could smell the orange and civet in the oil, there is another and much more public contentious aroma associated with Charles

I: liturgical incense. For a Catholic writer, such as Montaigne, in his essay “On Smells,” incense performed a very particular and important spiritual function: “That it was aimed at making us rejoice, exciting us, and purifying us so as to render us more capable of contemplation” (354). For Protestants, Catholicism was problematically “a richly textured religion of the senses, as against the austerity of Protestantism’s word based piety” (Ryrie 183). Catholicism stresses the importance of the sacramental, in which

“God is present in the visible, the tangible, the finite, and the historical” (McBrien 10).

Sacramentality, according to Susan K. Wood, is phenomenological: “The principle of sacramentality respects the way of being human in the world. We receive all our knowledge through our senses, including the most spiritual” (340).

The multiple Reformations and Counterreformations of the Tudor and Stuart eras alternated between an exploration and celebration of the sensuous aspects of the divine and a denial of the sensual enjoyments of the church. From the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church to 1660, when Charles II was restored to the English throne, the monarchs might oscillate in policies ordering the movement of the altar, the destruction of statuary, the whitewashing of walls, the removal of stained glass windows, or the return of religious imagery and the purchasing of sumptuous fabrics. Mathew

Milner, who writes on the late medieval Catholic English church and the Reformed

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! long ago penetrated his skin, unlike the “hollow crown” and “unwieldy scepter” which he can physically remove from his person and transfer to Bolingbroke. 291 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anglican Church through Elizabeth’s reign, claims that we need to avoid the “clichéd stereotypes of reform and sensation,” another simplistic teleology that moves from the

“sensual backwardness of Roman Catholicism” toward the “asensual and intellectualized reformed Christianity” (163). Over time, however, the shifting sensorium favored aural devotion, but he maintains that the church always retained both a favorable and affective belief in properly used senses and a fear of misuse:

Empirical reassessment of religious practices and battles over whose wits were

best did not resolve what religious sensing was supposed to do. The Reformation

did not get rid of affective religion. Rather it was shaped and driven by its basic

premise that sensible impieties were best undone by sensible pieties. (221)

By the time of Charles I’s ascension to the throne in 1625, the Anglican Church was not as uniformly plain and austere as previously assumed, as the degrees of decoration and the lavishness of certain ceremonies varied greatly from parish to parish.348 Under Charles I, there were a series of church beautifications and a “renewed ceremonial emphasis, which critics perceived as innovation, or even reversal of the

Reformation,” but “enthusiasts for this decorative frenzy claimed that God expected no less in his house” (Cressy 224-225). This “re-decking” project was not uniformly accepted but polarized different congregations and preachers, especially those with strong

Calvinist inclinations, decried these pre-Reformation niceties (Cressy 225-236). Part of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 348 On the austerity of the reformed church, see Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-c.1580 (1995), which posits a very balanced understanding of the later medieval English church as both more viable and less debauched than previously depicted, and offers in his final section, a description of the changes in church practices of lay parishioners. Mathew Milner covers the different austerity measures of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke explore the placement of the altar and its significance in Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (2007). 292 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the Ceremonialists’ re-beautification of the church involved the official reintroduction of

“smells and bells” that were previously deemed as Popish theatrics. Holly Crawford

Pickett notes, “The fierce Caroline debates about such ‘liturgical richness,’ including incense use, notoriously helped fuel the fires of the English Civil War” (5).

Jacob M. Baum, writing on the later medieval and early Lutheran German church, refers to the “reformation of olfaction” in the writings of Martin Luther that slowly replaced incense with prayer, causing a “desecralization of the sense of smell” (336). In the various factions of the Anglican Church, however, I would argue that there were

“reformations and counterreformations of incense.”349 For Charles, Laud, and other High

Church adherents, the use of incense in church services would conjure up the rituals of the early church, clear the parishioners’ minds, teach through the senses, and beautify the church for God’s pleasure.

William Prynne, in his trial against Laud, accuses the Archbishop of Canterbury of decorating and celebrating as in the “Popish Masse and Churches,” offering the example of the use of a censor to burn incense after the reading of the first Lesson, a concept Prynne hopes is so foreign to his followers that he defines the term: “A little

Boate out of which the Frankincense is powred, &c. (which Doctor Cosens had made use

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 349 The Ecclesiological Society offers a catalogue of early modern church records, listing the purchase and use of incense, flowers, thuribles, and censors, such as the 1581 obtaining of “item for perfume, when Mrs. Jerningham was beryed, 2d.” for St. Margaret’s in Norwich (Staley 174) or the acquisition of “frankesenc and Rosen (and other things) xxjd” in 1629 at St. Peter’s Mancroft, Norwich (176). There are accusations in 1641 that the crucifix is carried and censed with burning perfumes, as in the manner of Andrewes and Canterbury, but the editors note that “these and kindred Puritan complaints are untrustworthy” (Staley 180). 293 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of in Peter house, where he burned incense” (Canterbury’s Doom 123).350 But, such vehement dismissals of incense, David Robertson has argued, are relatively uncommon

(397). Rather, he notes the commonplace use of incense ingredients in everyday use, such as medicines and perfumes, and finds that most references to incense are “fairly neutral” and “non-political” (397, 398).351 The highly prolific Prynne ruminates on the spiritual and sensual joys of the garden, and dedicates a verse to the garden’s fragrant joys.

Although Christ’s metaphorical perfumes far excel actual perfumes, Prynne does employ this rhetoric of positive religious fragrances in his aptly titled poem, “A Christian

Paradise, or A Divine Posie, Composed of sundry Flowers of Meditation, gathered from the sweet and Heavenly Contemplation of the Nature, Fruites, and Qualities of Gardens”

(Mount-Orgueil 122-123).352 He turns specifically to a metaphor of “incense,” in which the “incense of a heart contrite” “flyes / Throughout the Earth” and upward to “Perfumes the Heavens, and is God’s delight” (164). Incense is not desacralized as much as it is reified: the material perfume is sublimated into the immaterial prayer.

It is ingenuous for modern scholars to project our own conceptions of the use of incense onto early modern beliefs to create a metanarrative that associates the inodorous and austere church with strict Calvinists and the burning of costly resins in a silver thurible with the Ceremonialists and Catholics. Metaphysical poet and Anglican priest,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 350 David Robertson nicely outlines the history of Prynne’s various incensed attacks on John Cosin, Bishop of Durham (c. 1628), William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (c. 1646), and as Laud’s predecessor, the earlier Ceremonialist, the late Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely and later Bishop of Winchester (d. 1626) (393-394). 351 In my third chapter on the plague, I turn to several of these ingredients as potential plague remedies and preventatives, as well as the proliferation of aromatically titled religious works. 352 Compare his title to the similarly named poetry collections discussed in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. 294 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

George Herbert, uses the metaphors of incense and sweet smells but in practice his own church and home was literally fragrant. In his guidebook and personal mediations, A

Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life

(1632), Herbert could advise fellow country parsons to keep their church well maintained and clean—dusted, swept free of cobwebs, with clean linen cloths and well-bound books

(221), and the parson’s own vestry must equally be “plain, but reverend, and clean, without spots, or dust, or smell” (204).353 Herbert’s own simple sanitation extends to painting edifying Scriptures on the wall, but only in “grave and reverend” colors and fonts, nothing in “light colors or foolish antics” (221). Yet, he also desired “fine linen” for the Communion cloth, and carpets of a “good or costly stuff,” moving along the continuum from austere purity to sumptuous ceremonial goods (221). The Anglican priest, Herbert directs, must find the Aristotelian mean between “superstition and slovenliness” decorating neither from “necessity or as putting holiness in the things”

(222).

Even in this unpretentious church, however, sweet smells were lauded, and

Herbert suggests that “at great festivals,” the church could be strewn with fragrant rushes, covered with aromatic boughs, and “perfumed with incense” (221).354 Herbert’s own desire for sweet simples, both fragrant healing herbs and the purity of a spotless life, is recounted in his guidance for the country parson’s home and also in his metaphysical poems, such as “The Odour. 2 Corinthians 2” and “The Banquet.”355 In both poems,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 353 Ephesians 5:26-27. 354 Mathew Milner recreates the different sensuous aspects of the pre-Reformed church, including the aromas of strewn rushes, floral bouquets, wreaths, and other seasonal plants (Chapter 3, especially pages 108-110). 355 Herbert describes the parson’s home and garden in Chapter 10. 295 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! pomanders and wines may be metaphors for God’s love, but Herbert breathes in the sweet aromas, perfumes his mind, finds spiritual sweetness, and inspiration to write verse, all effects of sensing real church incense; this is the other side of Prynne’s coin, the abstract and poetic perfumes allow for the continuation or reincorporation of scented rituals. The metaphors of these poems work because they are embodied in experience, church ritual, and finding the “holiness in the things.”

This rhetoric of liturgical incense is employed in Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, or the

Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitude and Death (published immediately after his death in 1649).356 In this series of personal meditations, Charles laments that he is denied the comfort of his clergy, friends, and loved ones. This is at the “pleasure” of God, so that he can reflect and prepare for his death, and he is as a solitary “Coal scattered from all those pious glowings and devout reflections which might best kindle, preserve and encrease the holy fire of thy Graces on the Altar of my Heart, whence the sacrifice of

Prayers and incense of Praises might be duly offered up to Thee” (215-216). Unable to pray in his own chapel with material incense, Charles offers up his own perfumed prayers.357

The Perfumed Martyrdom of Charles

The last and greatest perfumed performance for Charles was his calculated

Christic depiction. William Marshall’s frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, The Pourtrature of

His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings depicts Charles as Christ in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 356 The authorship is not Charles, but was presented and responded to as such. It was most likely composed by a little known clergyman, John Gauden (Kenyon 178). 357 On perfumed prayers, see the dissertation’s chapter on plague pamphlets, and David Robertson discusses different aromatic titles of religious sermons and polemics (399- 401). 296 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Garden of Gesthamane, kneeling in prayer at decorated altar, holding a crown of thorns but looking upward to a heavenly crown. Laura Lunger Knoppers states, “But it could be argued that Charles I became most fully an icon—an object of reverence, devotion, and adoration—only after the regicide. Charles I was more powerful in death than in life”

(24). With the popularity of such polemical iconography, and the ocularcentric title of his memoirs—in addition to the importance of Caroline masques and Van Dyke’s portraits of the king on horseback—it is not surprising to see scholars focusing on the carefully cultivated visual rhetoric of Charles kinghood and martyrdom. In this section, however, I argue that the “cult of Charles” employed not only visual imagery, but also a wealth of olfactive signification as well.358 Like Christ, the full transformation could only happen after death.359 Within hours of his execution on 30 January 1649, instead of Christ’s three days, the king reemerges and begins preaching via the dissemination of Eikon Basilike.

Charles and Tobacco

Several nights before his crucifixion, Christ was mocked and abused by the

Roman soldiers guarding him. They dressed him with a crown of thorns and wrapped his naked frame in a purpled mantle.360 In the martyr literature that deifies Charles I, we repeatedly find a similar episode that replicates the humiliation of Christ. Charles’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 358 See Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler for a discussion of how the different editions and frontispieces made for an interactive, malleable Protestant martyrology, and “from the start the image was democratized” (123). John Peacock, in the same collection of essays, covers Charles’ depiction on other frontispieces, coins, medals, and the printed Van Dyck reproductions (“The Visual Image of Charles I”). I borrow the term “cult of Charles” from Andrew Lacey’s study of Cavalier followers during the Commonwealth period. 359 Steven N. Zwicker analyzes the “proposed analogies and metaphors” used to “resurrect the body of the king as an everlasting monument in the hearts of true believers,” from secular myths to Old Testament heroes—Job, Samson, Jonah, and Josiah, and especially in comparisons to Christ’s passion (40). 360 The humiliation of Christ is recounted in all four Gospels: Matthew 27:27-31; Mark 14-15, especially 14:46-48, 14:62-65, 15:16-23; Luke 22:63-71, John 19:1-4. 297 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! captors spat in his face. They taunted him. They beat his supporters who attempted to bow before the king. Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649, the same day that the

Book of Common Prayer was dedicated to this very Biblical episode in The Gospel of

Matthew 27 (McKnight 138).361

But the soldiers also abused Charles through olfactive means, creating an

Englished and contemporary restaging of the passion of Christ. They puffed their

“stinking Mundungoes” and blew “stinking” tobacco smoke directly into his face, casting their “nasty” used pipes at his feet (Charles I, A True Copy 41; Charles I, Basiliká 55).

Charles acted regally and stoically, silently wiping spittle from his brow with a handkerchief, or silently enduring the smoke, “though he gave them to understand he was sensible of it, by his often putting away the offensive smoak with his Hand” (Charles I, A

True Copy 41). King Charles, we learn from various sources, abhorred the scent of tobacco smoke, “no smell to him more offensive” (Sanderson 1132). Loathing tobacco smoke links Charles back to his father, King James, and it also restores his sense of smell and prudence as the perfected perceptions of the king. The lowly tobacco smoke is a gross parody of Charles’ use of ascending liturgical incense during worship. The English soldiers are not only crude or cruel but also unable to smell out their own villainy. Their attempts to degrade the body natural fail:

When they had brought Him to His Chamber, even there they suffered Him not to

rest, but thrusting in and smoaking their filthy Tobacco, they permitted Him no

Privacy to Prayer and Meditation. Thus through variety of Tortures did the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 361 Zwicker points out that thirty years before James had dedicated his Meditations of St. Matthew to Prince Charles, focusing a particular passage on the guards mocking Christ (40-41). 298 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

King pass this Day, and by His Patience wearied His Tormentors: nothing

unworthy His former greatness of Fortune and Mind by all these Affronts was

extorted from Him, though Indignities and Injuries are unusual to Princes, and

these were such as might have forced Passion from the best-tempered meekness,

had it not been strengthned with assistance from Heaven. (Basiliká 55)

What happens instead is that the natural body, through olfactory mortification and humiliation, transcends into divinity. Despite their constant surveillance and their refusal of privacy, in these works, Charles still finds the time to pray, to write his memoirs, to find peace, and to prepare not only for his death but the aromatic apotheosis begun with his anointing as king and continued with his preference for incensed worship.362 In this way, Charles is like King David and his own Eikon Basilike is like the Biblical king’s book of lamenting and comforting Psalms.

Charles as Perfumed Martyr

In writings immediately after Charles death, and especially revived with the

Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Charles’ body becomes a perfumed memory, like the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 362 John Milton wrote his own response, Eikonoklastes (Oct. 1649). This famous counterargument argues methodically and rationally that Charles was a tyrant, that much of Eikon Basilike was scooped from previous (and non-Biblical) literary sources. McKnight succinctly states that Eikon Basilike (“the image of the king”) was all pathos and myth-making, and in contrast, Milton’s aptly named work (“the image breaker”) is a different rhetorical strategy, relying on logos and myth-breaking: “His attacks all come from the more literal end of the regicide rhetorical spectrum: he appeals to the facts of the late king’s behavior; he disputes the king’s sacred status; and he equates Charles I not only with biblical tyrants, but with tyrants from England’s own history, or from the pagan or classical past” (150). As such, the work is inodorous, excepting when he calls Charles a hypocrite for forgiving and praising the army that defeated him, claiming, “But praises in an enemy are superfluous, or smell of craft; and the Army shall not need his praises; nor the Parliament fare worse for his accusing prayers that follow….” (198). 299 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! depictions of Christ as fragrant martyr.363 As Suzanne Evans argues in her study of premodern Christian theology and the aroma of sanctity, while the scent was “originally associated with saints at the time of death, it grew to surround their life as well” (197), creating a larger “olfactory theology” (197). Charles’ preferred perfumes and disliked odorants become part of his own myth-making as his biographers and preachers develop an olfactory theology that redeems the king as scented saint.

The preacher Nathaniel Hardy, on the anniversary of the King’s death in 1661, can use the Proustian mnemonic aid to recall the King:

The remembrance of Charles the First, is like the Composition of the perfume that

is made by the Art of the Apothecary, it is sweet as honey in all mouths, and as

musick to a banquet of wine; yet with all the remembrance of his death, by which

we were bereaved of so excellent a Prince, cannot but be bitter as gall and

wormwood, and would be accompanied with sighs and groans. (35)

The remembrance of Charles becomes synaesthetic, both bitter like gall and sweet as honey, but invoked initially through the poetics of perfume. Memories are artfully crafted like the apothecaries’ art, denoting alchemical changes of substances from gross to fine materials, highlighting the importance of the sense of smell in memory, and offering a transcendence from mortal death to immortal fame. When Charles II ordered revisions and expansions to the Book of Common Prayer for 1662, he included an annual state service with “A Form of Common Prayer to be used yearly upon the 30 day of January

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 363 In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, he states: “For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Cor. 2:15-16). He uses the language of Christ as incense again in his Letter to the Ephesians 5:2. 300 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! being the day of the Martyrdom of K. Charles the First.” The evening prayers contrast

“the sacred person of thine Anointed” with the “foul act” of regicide, with the implied olfactory divisions (Cummings 661).

Robert Brown in The Subjects Sorrow (1649) compares the King’s “personal virtues” to a “a fragrant tract, having the sweet smell of A field which the Lord hath blessed,” recalling not only Genesis 27:27-29, in which Jacob receives his father’s blessing to become the great leader of a fruitful land, but also the English pleasure garden, a site for spiritual contemplation and sensual enjoyment.364 The pleasure garden is meant to be a place for meandering and reposing, but the urgency of his lamentation forces Brown to forego “the perusal of every pleasant walk of grace, and the delightful

Ambits of his vertues,” but to instead move from the intimacy of smell to the distancing privilege of sight: “let us as Moses from Mount Nebo take a general and distant survey of this blessed circuit flowing with milk and honey, King Charles his Celestial gifts and graces” (149). The anxiety of proximity and pleasure leads to a more distanced overview of his piety, zeal, devotion, and other attributes. As time goes on and there is a temporal, rather than the above spatial, movement distancing from the death, preachers become more willing to focus on the olfactory aspects.

Charles and Lamentations 4:20

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 364 Jacob, the younger of twins, deceived his father into giving him the blessing through a subterfuge concocted by his mother Rebekah who loved the younger, although the father preferred the elder (Gen. 25:28). The clever Jacob had already traded Essau’s birthright for a bowl of soup (Gen. 25:29-34), and Rebekah guaranteed Isaac’s blessing by covering Jacob in goatskins to replicate his brother’s hairiness when he brought a meal to his father (Gen. 27:1-41). Isaac’s poor sight, sense of touch, and sense of smell were deceived, “And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the lord blessed” (Genesis 27:27). Jacob is later blessed by God, renamed Israel, and becomes the great Old Testament patriarch (Gen. 35:10-12). 301 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Several preachers adopt the olfactory language of Lamentations 4:20—“The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, was taken in their pits, of whom we said,

Under his shadow we shall live among the heathen”—to meditate on Charles’ execution and to create another Biblical parallel, between the English King and Josiah, an early

Jewish king who attempted to restore the polluted temples to their previous state by instituting Mosaic laws.365 The Subjects Sorrow (1649) may be the earliest of extant homiletic work on Lamentations and Charles’ death. It was published in several editions and attributions in 1649, including one edition with a frontispiece depicting the dead

Charles in repose with the hill of Calvary in the background and two cherubs approaching with a heavenly crown (Juxon).366 Thomas Warmstry, in A hand-kirchife for loyall mourners or A cordiall for drooping spirits, groaning for the bloody murther, and heavy losse of our gracious King martyred by his owne trayterous and rebellious subjects, for the truth of Christ, and the liberties of his people (1649), quotes the passage on his title page. William Gouge cites this passage in his exegesis on “Gods anointing of his Sonne” in his larger analysis of the Hebraic Epistles.367

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 365 Lamentations is a Biblical poem lamenting the death of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem. This particular passage with its focus on God’s anointed being captured, the people succumbing to a warrior-king, and lamenting the lost king creates obvious parallels to Charles’ capture and trial, the rule of Cromwell, and the Royalists’ defeat. Josiah is a commonly used Biblical figure in Caroline commemoratory writings (2 Kings 22-24). Josiah, a king of Judah became king at age eight and ruled for 31 years. He repaired the Temple of Solomon, found the Hebraic book of law, and reformed the church, including ridding the temple of idols. Josiah, unlike Charles, was an iconoclast, but he irks God and is killed, despite being singular in his faith (2 Kings 23:25). 366 William Juxon, Bishop of London, stayed and prayed with Charles in the days leading up to his execution (Kishlansky 159-160). 367 Gouge considers the metaphorical versus literal mentions of anointing in the Bible: GOD who was in speciall the God of his Sonne, is here said to have annointed him. This is metaphorically spoken in reference to an ancient, continued inaugurating and setling of Kings in their Kingdom, which was by annointing 302 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

During the Interregnum, the verse is not cited as frequently, but upon the

Restoration of Charles II in 1660 the passage reemerges. In the 1660 quarto, God save the

King, Robert Lawrie re-members the body politic, relating the major parts of the body to specific Biblical passages.368 Citing Lamentations 4:20, Lawrie speaks on the vitality of kingship:

The breath of our Nostrils: which speaketh no less than this, that it is as possible

for a man to live without breath, as for a people to subsist without Magistracy.

The breath of a Peoples Nostrils is stopped, and what then followes but death to

the whole body? (17-18).369

Lamentations 4:20 then becomes standard in the many welcoming addresses and sermons to Charles II in 1660—Mirabilia dei, or, Britannia gaudio exultans Opened in a congratulatory sermon for the safe return of our Gracious Soveraign; A Thanksgiving

Sermon: For the blessed restauration of his sacred Majesty Charles the II; God save the

King, or A sermon of thanksgiving, for His Majesties happy return to his throne; etc.—all

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! them, or powring oyl upon their heads… Annointing being performed by Gods appointment, implied two things, 1. A deputation to the Kingdom, 2. An ability to execute the Royall Function. [Saul and Solomon] were annointed with external material oyl, but to shew that annointing had a mysticall signification, they who had not such oyl poured on them are called the Lords Annointed, Psa. 105. 15. (82) 368 For example, “The Hebrew word MELECH, cometh from a root that signifyeth, counsel: and the Scripture calleth him the Head of the Common|wealth, as for Supremacy, so for Counsels, 1 Sam. 15.17.” (16). In his prose pamphlet, he restores the king’s head, feet, eye, nostril, and breath. 369 John Davis, a preacher in Dover, in Seismos megas: Or Heaven & earth shaken (1655) counters the divine theory of kings through an exegesis of Biblical passages to prove that while God an Christ might bless or blast kings, kings are not God’s representatives on earth. In an especially callous passage on conquering other nations by overthrowing their kings, he uses the rhetoric of Lamentations: “people breathe much in their Kings; stop his breath, and you stop theirs” (Davis 80-81).

303 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! works that describe the essential nature of breath and the essential nature of kingship.

Later still, the verse becomes a common fixture for sermons commemorating Charles I’s death, as in England's breath stopp'd being the counter-part of Jvdah's miseries lamented publickly in the New-Church at Westminster on January 30 being the anniversary of the martydom of King Charles the First of blessed memory by Robert Twisse (1655), or John

King’s 1661 sermon, which cites Brown’s earlier “His personall Vertues, a fragrant tract, having the sweet smell of A field which the Lord hath blessed” (49).

Eikon Basilike and the Aroma of Sanctity

In several works, Charles emits a metaphorical odor of sanctity. In Eikon Basilike,

Charles reflects on the “scandals raised against the king” and worries that his name will be sullied:

And indeed, the worst effects of open Hostility come short of these Designes: For,

I can more willingly loose My Crownes, than My Credit; nor are My Kingdomes

so deare to Me, as My Reputation and Honour. Those must have a period with My

life; but these may survive to a glorious kind of Immortality, when I am dead &

gone: A good name being the embalming of Princes, and a sweet consecrating of

them to an Eternity of love and gratitude among Posterity. (122)

The body natural’s decay may be slowed by embalming with its spices and perfumes, but he achieves a “sweet” immortality through his pure reputation. The King reworks the theme of several key Biblical passages: Ecclesiastes 7:1—“A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth”—and the Song of

304 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Solomon 1:3—“Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.”370

Restoration-era sermons and remembrances of Charles I openly cite from Charles’ passage, developing the perfumed conceit. Samuel Rolle, a nonconforming clergyman and hospitaller, but a “moderate and loyal protestant” published Loyalty and Peace in

1678, reflecting on the anniversary of the king’s death (O’Neill). He contemplates

Charles’ proverbial coupling of a good name and good odor to argue that making one lose his good name is “worse than to behead him” (98). Killing Charles is likened to extinguishing a candle, “extinguish[ing] his Life and Light,” but sullying his repute was worse as it put the monarch in ill odor: “but [they] endeavoured to make him go out in a snuff, and leave a loathsome stench behind” (98). Despite the efforts of the “Traitors,” the stench was by “God converted into a sweet odor; and now he who had no Funeral

Sermon on the day he was Buried, hath hundreds, that may be so called, preached anniversally on the day of his Death, viz. each 30 day of January, and his name imbalmed a-fresh on every such day, and like to be so to all posterity” (98).

The 1684 miscellany, Delights for the ingenious, in above fifty select and choice emblems, divine and moral, ancient and modern curiously ingraven upon copper plates, reprints a version of Marshall’s frontispiece for the section on the “Majesty in Misery” and reprints various elegies and panegyrics for the king. In the fiftieth emblem that depicts several crowns and scepters ablaze and the motto “Even as the smoke doth pass away / So shall all the worldly pomp decay” (199), the concluding poem is on the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 370 Proverbs 22:1 offers a similar trope: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.” 305 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! insubstantiality of the “glories of birth and state” (204 “Conclusions” 1.1-2).371 The poem may generically assert that all die and only our good name matters, but there seems to be possible oblique references to both Charles, as King—

Death lays his Icy hands on Kings.

Scepter and Crown

Must tumble down (1.4-6) and also Cromwell, as martial leader

Some men with swords may reap the field,

And plant fresh Laurels where they kill.

But their strong Nerves at length must yield. (2.1-3)

Death is the great leveler, but the language of the sweet immortality of reputation, especially in a miscellany that includes the famous image of Charles, seems to refer back to the monarch:

All heads must come,

To the cold Tomb.

Only the Actions of the Just,

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust. (3.5-8).

Referring metaphorically to the sweetness or foulness of one’s immortal name may be subjectively decided, but is a noncontroversial trope. Unlike the issue of incense, which could be coded polemically as too Ceremonialist but other times accepted as part of purification of the church, but always acknowledged positively when represented metaphorically as prayers, the actual odor of sanctity remained a decidedly Catholic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 371 “Even as the smoke doth pass away” recalls Psalm 37: 20 and Psalm 68:2. “So shall all the worldly pomp decay” refers to 1 John 2:17. 306 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! phenomena (Dugan 24-27). For Charles to remain an Anglican martyr without acquiring explicitly popish attributes, it was essential that these martyrologies focus on his memory or name as scented rather than his kingly body. In “A Deepe Groane” by Henry King, a pro-Charles as Anglican martyr polemical tract, the “murthered” king emits an aroma of sanctity that nourishes the senses. In contrast, the traitors who executed the king are struck with stinking ulcers. This blurs the line on the metaphorical perfume of the good name and the aroma of sanctity, which could be perceived by others through the sense of smell:

Thy Aromatick Name shall feast our sense,

‘Bove balme Spiknard’s fragrant Redolence,

Whilst on thy loathsome Murderers shall dwell

A plague-sore, blayne, and rotten ulcers smell. (4)

As Suzanne Evans claims, “the scent of a martyr is not the scent of death, but the sweet smell of life” (208). The sweet name and sweet perfumes of Charles become intimately concomitant in these sermons and religio-political biographies connecting the martyred king to Christ and Biblical figures but also keeping him alive in a sense until the return of the monarch in the form of his son.

The Stench of Cromwell

“The abject body and the beatified body are both boundless; the only difference between them is that one smells of spice, the other of dirt” (Morton 140). For the

Royalists, Charles’ body natural did not decay upon his death, but was sublimated and ascended into an immaterial body, all memory, incense, and perfumes with the promise of the return of the re-membered and perfected body politic in his son Charles II. This

307 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! division of the King’s two bodies also recalls Bahktin’s discussion of the grotesque body—“unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits” (26)—in contrast to the idealized surface of the body—“closed, smooth, and impenetrable” (317). The grotesque body is a contradictory body: both the open orifices (mouth, anus, genitals) and the churning, secretive internal organs; the functions of birth and death; and an elemental body that contains the cosmic, but is always expanding. This grotesque body is a body that discharges fluids and odors—sweat, urine, feces, blood, etc.

Cromwell’s body is represented in satirical works by the Royalists as a noxious, stinking, grotesque body in contrast to Charles’ sweet odors and perfect wholeness.

While this argument is highly dependent on the earlier somatic work of Jenner (the scatological “Rump” Parliament) and Knoppers (“Noll’s nose”), I maintain that the language of smells is more unstable, esoteric, and abstract. The nose and the rump are almost always of the “lower bodily stratum” (Bakhtin 315-318), but smells can be foul or fragrant, bestial or divine, deadly or restorative, medical or sensual, or of course, any or all of those at the same time.372 Cromwell’s own faction will rewrite Charles’ perfumes as luxurious, but offer their Lord Protector as being in good odor.

Metaphorically, Cromwell stinks to Charles’ followers. He is a regicide, a mock king, usurper, and he stinks of villainy, hypocrisy, and the stench of his unforgivable sin of killing the king.373 Stinking condemnations of the Lord Protector can be found in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 372 Bakhtin reads the nose more along the lines of the phallus-substitute or anus, concerned with the gross matter of what comes out of the nose, rather than with the mouth (which is also grotesque), and its consuming abilities. The nose—when large and ugly, like depictions of Cromwell’s—may indeed be grotesque, but it could also be deadly (as I argue throughout this dissertation) to breathe in. 373 Even in a positive portrayal of Cromwell as a friendly chap, he is a smoker, contrasting him with the royals’ abhorrence of tobacco: ““But Cromwell, at the height of 308 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immediate aftermath of Charles’ death (1649-1653), when the language is more about smelling out the plots against the king or the rhetoric of therapeutic nosegays and aromas that might heal the nation.374 In the poem “Cromwell’s Recall” (30 July 1649),

Cromwell’s mouth breeds maggots (Britannophilus 5.13-14); he is the “Epitomy of Hell”

(4.8); his hands are stained with royal blood (6.1-2); and he is so disgusting that the pseudonymous poet, “a lover of Britain,” finds that words fail: “I know not what to compare / his other parts” (6.3-4). With his oaths and the stench of his hell-mouth, his exhalations

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! his fortune, was very diverting and familiar in conversation, when among his friends; tho’ in publick, for decorum’s sake, he was more reserved. On these occasions he commonly called for tobacco, pipes, and a candle, and would now and then take a pipe himself” (Bancks 218). 374 J. M., a Royalist, who states that he has suffered during the Wars, gives one of many of the conventional examples of smelling out Cromwell’s villainy: “Now, because the evill smell of theyr detestable projects is come abroad into a great part of the world, which in the short or long will make Crumwell, and his Helpers, for to spuw vp or leave the pray againe, by them vnjustly taken from theyr betters, both of our owne, and other Nations” (49). The 1648 pamphlet A Nose-gay for the House of Commons: Made up of the Stincking Flowers of their Seven Yeares Labours, Gathered out of the Garden of their New Reformation by the pseudonymous Mercurius Melancholicus uses this extended conceit of the ill smells of Parliament throughout, contrasting that with Charles (rose) and Queen Henrietta Maria (lily, fleur de lys). Only eight pages long, there is nonetheless, a lot of smelling out of bad plots. The Nosegay ends with an aromatic rebellion against Parliament: Yet this your comfort is the more you strive To Ruine us, the better do we thrive, Like Hearbes, the more you bruise us, wee the better sent, Plaine truth can nere be stain'd, but may be shent. (8) Nathaniel Joceline’s Parliament physick for a sin-sick nation. Or, An ordinance of Parliament explained, and applyed to these diseased times (1644) suggests the metaphor that the church’s preachers must act like apothecaries to help heal the soul of the nation during wartime. The anonymous ballad An excellent receipt to make a compleat Parliament or (if you please) a new senate fitted to the English-man's palate (1659) plays with this convention to mock the members of Parliament and to make some xenophobic jokes on empire-building and vote-buying.

309 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

…send forth a breath

Of many Royallists to their death:

And such sulphurous scents you’d swear

Etna and Hell but vapours were

With Blasphemeies” (5.15-19).

“Again, the language becomes more and more hyperbolic,” according to Knoppers,

“Cromwell’s breath is deadly, embodying the stench of the lower parts not only of the body but of the world” (30). Cromwell is envisioned as nothing less than Satan himself, complete with devouring and sulfurous hell-mouth, stinking of all the corruptions of the usurping regicide.

It is more difficult to find the negative olfactory rhetoric of Royalist writing during the tense years of the Protectorate (1653-1658).375 The most putrescent prose appears in the years 1658-1661; after his death in 1658, quickly followed by the resignation of his son in 1659, the restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the disinterment of his remains in 1661. In Cromwell’s Bloody Slaughterhouse (1660), John Gauden can rhetorically ask of Cromwell’s rule: “Have you not already made the Name of these

Protestant and Reformed Churchs to stinck among all Nations both Christian and

Heathen, through the dead flies, and rottenness of your principles and manners?”

(Gauden 76).

Robert Twisse, one of the aforementioned clergymen, who preaches on

Lamentation 4:20 on the anniversary of Charles death (1665), creates an analogy in which kings are to their government as the breath God pours into Adam to animate him

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 375 This is excepting, of course, the limitless scatological puns of the Rump Parliament. See Jenner for more. 310 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and give him a soul, and by killing the king, Cromwell stopped the breath of the nation, suffocating it, leaving behind so many carcasses (21). He then wishes: “Well may then their Memory stink and rot amongst us, that made Three famous Kingdoms become so many stinking Carcases: They must needs be so when their breath was stopt. And how just is God in taking away their breath, that robbed Three Nations of their breath at once?” (21-22). Twisse anticipates Frankenstein’s monster in his description of Cromwell as “more Artificial than Natural,” a head grafted unto a dead body that “could not animate the Body long” (22). The breath is restored upon Charles II’s return, and like

Lazarus, who is rotting but revived or the aromatic Phoenix, there is a spectacular resurrection: “… so that within a few years the Three Nations lay a gasping and panting for breath, and were in a manner giving up the Ghost, when God in rich Mercy was pleased to inspire a new Life into us, in raising up our present Sovereign to be unto us as

Life from the Dead” (23).

Cromwell died in 1658, possibly from a malarial fever or septicemia from a kidney infection at the age of 58 (McMains 85-99).376 Unlike Charles’ perfumed martyrdom, in Royalist literature, Cromwell’s body becomes even more grotesque and unruly after his death.377 In these depictions, Cromwell’s death and burial becomes a perverted parody of Charles’ own. The imagines stenches of his unruly reign as Lord

Protector are reimagined as literal rottenness.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 376 McMains suggests it was actually poisoning, by a Royalist, but before he reaches that conclusion he offers a nice overview of the arguments others have made for ague or gout and kidney issues. 377 He was struck with an illness while at Hampton court, and moved to Whitehall after a week of no improved symptoms, where he could be with his physicians, councilors, family, and clergy, but he succumbed to his illness in the afternoon of September 3, 1658. He was buried with his daughter Elizabeth, who died shortly before him. 311 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

During the embalming process, his corpse stunk so greatly that “they were fain to bury him privately” (May 147). A more revolting version states:

His body being Opened and Embalmed his Milt [spleen] was found full of

corruption and filth, which was so strong and stinking, that after the Corps were

Embalmed and filled with Aromatick odours, and wrapt in Cere-cloath, six

double, in an inner sheet of Lead, and a strong Wooden-coffin, yet the filth broke

through them all, and raised such a noisome stink, that they were forced to bury

him out of hand (Heath 206-207).

Cromwell’s moral corruption, previously only metaphorically smelled out by the

Cavaliers, is represented as a literal manifestation of the smell of mortality. Neither perfumes nor the winding sheet—waxed to capture odors and fluid leaks—suffice to contain his noxious fumes. The scene becomes grotesquely comical as multiple winding sheets are wrapped around his body, then layers of lead and wood, but “the filth broke through them all” (207).

Although buried quickly, Cromwell’s supporters create a large and spectacular funeral. Effigies of the Lord Protector lay in state for weeks, dressed in sumptuous fabrics, with black velvet hangings in multiple rooms, a funeral procession of international ambassadors, and in his stead, there is an idol, a “Waxen Picture of the

Protector (with a Crown on his Head, a Sword by his Side, a Globe and Scepter in his hands)” (Heath 208-209). In death, Cromwell, the staunch Calivinist, becomes an idolatrous Catholic, and worse yet, he becomes the fabricated idol of false worship. In this respect, the disinterment of Cromwell and several others on 30 January 1660, the anniversary of Charles’ execution, is not only the avengement of his father’s death or

312 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Charles II’s revenge for his exile, but is also a moment of iconoclasm as the triumphant

Royal acts as fierce Protestant destroying and desecrating false idols.

Destabilizing Odours

Whereas the Royalists employ the rhetoric of reeking sins and the stench of mortality to represent Cromwell as usurping regicide, how might the Parliamentarians and Puritans represent the odor of the Lord Protector? In previous chapters, I have demonstrated how Puritan writers represented imported perfumes in the royal court as effeminate, prideful, deceitful, and covering the stenches of immorality and venereal disease.

This is the language of A Deep Sigh breathed through the Lodgings at Whitehall

(1642), a nostalgic pamphlet of the author musing as he walks through the empty halls imaging past luxuries. Yet, the fetishized luxuries of the court slide into lighter mockeries of class, gender, and the sins of the court: “At the lodgings of the several lords and gentlemen, where the smell and odor of the perfumes and tinctures of morning’s curling and dressing, made for attendance not to seem tedious [now replaced by] raw scent of moist walls” (A3). The broadside “Alas pore Parliament, how are thou betrai'd?” (1644), the apostrophe to the honest, but exploited Parliament, concludes with “Doe yee thinke

Greatnesse without Goodnesse can ever thrive in excellent actions? no, Honour without honesty stinkes: away with't: no more Lords and yee love me, they smell o'the Court.”378

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 378 The historical Cromwell, rather than the stinking monster of Royalist satire or the inodorous Puritan, had quite the collection of perfumes. Mrs. Prescott, Oxford Square, (née Cromwell Russell) a “lineal descendent of Oliver Cromwell” who shared “some interesting letters and papers” and “personal relics of the great man” (97): After I had looked over the MSS, Mrs. Prescott was good enough to show me two swords formerly belonging to the Protector, and the very large hat worn by him when he dissolved the Long Parliament and several other personal relics. One 313 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Therefore, it may seem as though iconoclastic Calvinists would represent

Cromwell as inodorous to avoid olfactive comparisons to the decadence of the royal court or the idolatry of the High Church and Catholicism. This, however, is not quite true.

While Cromwell is often inodorous, he also smells sweetly, too. As a military leader,

Cromwell (and Fairfax), are likened to Esau and Nimrod, as they “smell strongly of the field, and savor rank of the blood we command them to spill in hunting” (A Fraction

9).379 The rhetoric may be fragrant, but it remains masculine and martial, and Biblically grounded. The Biblical analogues, even though they are meant to be positive comparisons, are oddly allusive: Esau is the disgruntled disinherited brother of the beloved Jacob, and Nimrod is the hubristic king who begins building the Tower of Babel.

Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, following the model of his friend Abraham

Cowley, published his Pindaric Ode lauding the late Lord Protector in a panegyric volume (1659).380 In “To the happy Memory of the late Protector Oliver Cromwell,”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! great thing of beauty is a small cabinet presented to him by the Grand Duke of Tuscany; it is of fine Florentino mosaic, enriched with fruit and flowers in pietra dura; its three drawers contain numerous vas of opal-coloured Venetian glass, filled with soaps, powders, and oils, the perfumes of which are still fragrant. (Alfred J. Horwood 98, cited in Eyre and Spottiswoode) 379 Esau, as mentioned previously, was the elder brother of Jacob and the intended heir of Isaac. Jacob, quiet and preferring tents, was a shepherd (an heir of Abel and antecedent of Christ), but the hirsute and hircine Esau “was a cunning hunter, a man of the field” (25:27). Due to his warrior-hunter nature, his father associates the smell of the field with his favorite son, and when he accidentally blesses Jacob, the deceitful son wears his brother’s odorous clothes (Genesis 27:27). Noah’s ancestor, the grandson of Ham, Nimrod, the mighty hunter, became a shorthand term for a mighty hunter, and he later built the Tower of Babel (Gen. 10:9). General Fairfax was immortalized in several works by Andrew Marvell, including the great countryhouse poem, “Upon Appleton House.” 380 Abraham Cowley was a master of the Pindaric ode and a loyal Royalist. Sprat’s poem later became a bit of an embarrassment for Sprat, and his biographer Morgan states that it may have been written more in an effort to curry favor under the current leaders than expressing his own beliefs, especially when read alongside the allegorical Plague of Athens, which covered the English Revolution (Morgan). 314 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sprat begins common elegiac themes: the immortality of the deceased in verse and deeds, the difficulty of capturing the greatness of the deceased in the verse, etc.381 The poem, in sixteen stanzas, lauds Cromwell as a martial and religious hero, a selfless leader who acted as God’s hand in destroying the troublesome lion. The ode becomes an “Epitaph” to keep Cromwell “Alive in Inscription,” and Sprat decorates this poetic monument with metaphoric sweetness:

Alive in an inscription,

Remembred only on the Brass, or Marble-stone.

‘Tis all in vain what we can do:

All our Roses and Perfumes,

Will but officious Folly shew,

And pious Nothings to such mighty Tombs.

All our Incense, Gums, and Balm,

Are but unnecessary Duties here:

The Poets may their Spices spare,

Their costly Numbers, and their tuneful Feet:

That need not be imbalm’d, which of it self is sweet. ( Buckingham I. 13-23)

The poem moves back and forth between actual perfumes and funereal flowers and poetic aromas. The inclusion of burning incense, even only figurative incense, is more

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The miscellany Poems on the Affairs of State, first published in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution revives earlier poems, and in several of these poems, Cromwell is restored to glory. There are obvious parallels to be made between the weak, unpopular and Catholic James II and his grandfather the quasi-Catholic (according to his opponents) Charles I; Cromwell, then, like William and Mary, is the true defender of the Reformed Church in England. 381 Morgan notes that the title was changed to “usurper” in later editions, even though the verse was unchanged and remained highly commendatory. 315 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! problematic, connecting Cromwell’s funerary rites to either pagan sacrifices or

Catholic/High Church rituals. Sprat must erase the materiality of the perfumes by denouncing them through a series of oxymora: “officious Folly,” “pious Nothings,” and

“unnecessary Duties.” The first stanza ends by rewriting the horrors of Cromwell’s failed and noxious embalmment, as now he does not need sweet aromatics, or the embalming process at all as he emits a metaphorical aroma of sanctity.

H. Dawbeny, in Historie & policie re-viewed, in the heroick transactions of His

Most Serene Highnesse, Oliver, late Lord Protector… as they are drawn in lively parallels to the ascents of the great patriarch Moses (1659), styles Cromwell as a second

Moses finding thirty-points of parallel life events or personal attributes, such as

“extraordinary clemency, and sweet temper of their government,” “remarkable Beauty of body,” “great skill in military conduct,” and so on. In the dedication to Cromwell’s son and successor, Richard, a “second Joshua,” the author apologizes for his unadorned and rushed volume, without the “due dresse and ornament of Language,” but the late

Cromwell enjoyed plainness in speech, and knew “how to make a value of a pure

Oriental Pearle, though covered with a course shell, and how to accept of a precious sweet Perfume, though shut up within an abject Box” (5-6). He justifies his parallel lives, not in the tradition of Plutarch, but in more recent parallels: John Calvin and Elisha, or

Queen Elizabeth and Deborah (10-11).

In his last parallel between Moses and Cromwell, after death, “Moses built himself a Monument in the hearts of all his people” (295). He asserts that “The whole great Oliver cannot be contained, within so scanty an enclosure, as is the vault that holds his body,” claiming that his fame is too great and his reputation too large to consider the

316 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! actual small dimensions of his tomb. There is, however, the distinct aftertaste of

Cromwell’s grotesque body in Royalist satire that literally could not be contained in a lead vault but still burst out stinking fumes. Therefore, Dawbeny must create an immaterial monument of fame as depicted through the poetics of perfume:

Thus the Lord is pleased to make the memory of his Saints precious (in the

language of the Spirit) as sweet ointment poured forth; for we see here, how he

will make his dead servant Moses to ascend still in this World, by the fragrancy of

his memory: and indeed it is the last Ascent, that humane perfection is capable of;

to mount up, after a blessed death, to a happy and honourable remembrance

amongst men; a most particular grace and prerogative, which the Divine

goodnesse indulgeth to none, but to his most dear servants. (296)

Moses’ memory is described in terms of the aroma of sanctity, smelling like a precious ointment, ascending upward, enjoyed and remembered by others. It is when Dawbeny applies the same rhetoric to the Lord Protector rather than the great Hebraic lawgiver, with whom God used to visit, that the imagery veers into a comparison that should be uncomfortably Catholic for good Puritans:

Has not our most Serene second Moses, received this precious Transcendental

favour likewise, from the hands of his gracious God? has he not so filled the

mindes and mouthes of all the good people, of the Nation? that they have nothing

almost left to think, and speak on, but the memory of their late great Protector?

Insomuch, that we can compare this glorious Ascent, of his Highnesse his happy

death, to nothing so properly, as to the expiration of the Phenix, upon the

Mountain of the Sun, in the sweet odours of his heroick vertues. (296)

317 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are traces of idolatry again as Cromwell’s followers can speak of nothing else, and

Cromwell assumes an aroma of sanctity. “This precious Trascendental favour,” “which the Divine goodnesse indulgeth to none, but to his most dear servants” savors of a sensible sweet smell rather than a metaphorical odor. He concludes by comparing

Cromwell’s sweet odours not to any of the noted Biblical odors but to the Phoenix, a mythical bird, whose symbol was coopted by the British monarchy over and over.

Dawbeny’s rhetoric elevates Cromwell—note all the language of ascendancy—not to the status of prince, but to mythic demigod or saint.

The language and attitudes toward smells is not easy to separate based on political or religious delineations, even during the English Civil War. The supporters of Charles and Cromwell both utilized a complex osmology from early Judaic laws, Catholic rituals, and ever shifting liturgical practices, alongside ancient theories on the stenches of hell and morality in contrast to the inspiring aspects of incense or the sweet aroma of sanctity.

Figuratively, the Royalists presented Charles as Messianic martyr smelling sweetly with

God’s grace, and his usurper as a flagrant hell-mouth, whose stench could not be contained. Likewise, the Parliamentarians used the sweet scents of perfumes to represent the luxuries and idleness of the monarch’s court, sweet odors that only artificially covered his stench of political corruption, and they extoled their own leader as aromatic as the Phoenix. In practice, while their use of incense at church practices may have varied, they both ascribed to a piety of olfaction through their metaphoric burning of incense in front of their own fallen leaders. With this intoxicating fragrance of shared aromatic lexicons, if not beliefs, in mind, I want to now end with a brief discussion of

Milton’s political and religious depictions of perfumes.

318 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Milton’s Holy Scents

David Robertson notes that Milton cites “incense” seven times in Paradise Lost

(1674), and admits that while “we know virtually nothing about Milton’s mode of worship in the second half of his life,” Milton would be well aware of the Caroline

“smells & bells” controversy of the re-beautification of the church (407). Robertson makes the convincing argument that while we may want to pigeonhole Milton as an ascetic Puritan, when it comes to the references to incense in Paradise Lost, Milton may be revising some of his earlier beliefs:

One of the things Milton seems to have learned is that human beings need

ceremonies. Perhaps they need to remember that these are only outward shows,

but outward shows can be signs of inward belief and worship. (409)

Robertson’s historicizing of the controversy over incense is informative; his reading of

Milton’s representations of incense is underdeveloped. It is important to determine what incense does by considering the larger olfactory context of the epic. Milton insists that incense can be properly used, if and only if, the parishioner has embodied his prayers and has learned how to negotiate sensual pleasure, affective perspective, and divine worship.

For the most part, Milton’s references to odors in his Restoration-era epic are highly conventional.382 Hell stinks, but Heaven is fragrant (II.399-403).383 Eden is highly aromatic and the angels produce ambrosial odors by the flapping of their wings.384 All of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 382 Holly Dugan has a nice overview of the odors, especially of the Garden, in her The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2011): 172-175. 383 David R. Clark, for example, does a nice reading of Satan’s comparison to the Biblical demon Asmodeus (Book of Tobit) and his stinking fishy fume as representing his spiritual corruption and impurity. 384 David Reid questions whether the angels actually produce the fragrance in some sort 319 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is conventional—good smells indicate moral goodness and salience and ill odors indicate evil and death. After the fall, Death detects the original stench of mortality

(X.265-270).

Yet there are moments where Milton utilizes innovative olfactive imagery. Milton is a keen observer of the affective powers of sweet aromas and he recuperates the most contentious of early modern holy scents—incense and the odor of sanctity. When Satan discovers Eve “veiled in a cloud of fragrance,” her body and her natural odors and beauty are conflated with the floral charms of Eden (IX.425).385 The beautiful woman emitting sweet perfumes is conventional from Petrarchan love poetry and has the Biblical precedent in the Song of Songs—the sacred and profane conflated. Her body is equated with the garden and all of its beauty, fragrances, and potential fecundity. Eve’s body is

Edenic, made more so by Milton’s contrast between Eve’s lovely and pleasantly scented body with contemporary, crowded, reeking, stewing London, moving from the beginning of time in ancient Eden to seventeenth-century London, collapsing all of time and space:

As one who long in populous city pent,

Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,

Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe

Among the pleasant vilages and farms

Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of biological metabolic process or if they wear perfumes, and Edward Le Comte responds by asking why Reid didn’t consult the Bible? He suggests the olfactory odes in the Song of Songs and an anecdote of George Herbert’s older brother, the “vainglorious, swashbuckling” Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who bragged of his own unbelievably sweet personal odors (18) 385 All Milton citations are from the second edition Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge. Elledge, Scott, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. 320 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,

Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sounds. (IX 445-451, emphasis added)

Furthermore, Eve’s beauty and graceful movements are like her aroma—material and immaterial at once:

That space the Evil one abstracted stood

From his own evil, and for the time remaind

Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm'd,

Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge… (IX 463-466)

Eve’s natural perfumes and beauty transfix Satan to one spot. In this portrayal of Eve’s fragrance, Satan momentarily forgets his evil purpose “and for the time remained /

Stupidly good.” Dugan states, “even in Paradise—when yoked with innocence and bliss—scents have a rapacious power to inspire overwhelming appetites. They disorient him, rendering him temporarily and spatially transfixed” (174).

This moment parodies the transcendental affects of incense that Francis Bacon describes in pagan and earlier devotional practices: “Incense and nidorous smells, such as were of sacrifices, were thought to intoxicate the brain, and to dispose men to devotions; which they may do by a kind of sadness, and contristation of the spirits; and partly also by heating and exalting them” (501).386 While Eve’s fragrance has a momentary positive effect on Satan, it soon wears off, not unlike the odor saturation that occurs when exposed to a scent for long enough that it loses its potency. Furthermore,

Satan is not moved to goodness, that is, he has not been inspired to do something good

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 386 When Satan first leaves the stenches of Hell, the “pure now purer air” “inspires/ Vernal delight and joy, able to drive/ All sadness but despair” (IV. 152-155). He can feel some joy through the redemptive airs of Eden, but even this aromatherapy cannot alleviate his despair (“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell” (IV.75)) 321 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! for Eve (such as abandon his project and return to Hell), but rather, he is “good” because he cannot move, he cannot act, and he is “stupid.” Satan’s voyeuristic and olfactive pleasures are inversely idolatrous; the male gaze and the male nose note the object, yet he is the one frozen like an idol. Satan is not contemplatively sad, only “stupidly good.”

Satan embodies the anti-incense arguments, the fear that it might excite the senses but without any higher moral or contemplative end.

The caveat, of course, is that this is Satan’s imperfect or corrupted sensory perception and that the prelapsarian Adam and Eve, as well as the heavenly angels, would have pure, non-disabled proper sensate faculties. We learn from Adam’s conversations with Raphael, however, that this is not true. Raphael teaches Adam the differences between the angels’ immaterial bodies and his own corporeal form, but they both share the same sense faculties (V 404-439). Adam is already erring in his sense of touch and

Raphael must reprimand him and remind him that sex is not all the pleasure in the world.387 The senses may be used properly to worship God, but it is easy to fall to ignorant sensuality—whether its Satan’s stupid goodness or Adam’s bestial sense of touch. This is not demeaning or diminishing the importance of the lower faculties in the role of religious worship, but rather complicating Milton’s depiction of the sensate component of worship and contemplation.

There is a beautiful cyclic sense of breathing, smell, and the purity of incense in

Paradise Lost. “This aroma of [of sanctity] is bestowed by God and returns to him as the martyrs are sacrificed for the love of God,” Suzanne Evans explains, “In this way God

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 387 Adam, when recounting making love to Eve, lists touch as his dominant sense (VIII.521-535), and Raphael chides him: “But if the sense of touch whereby mankind / Is propagated seem such dear delight / Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed / To cattle and each beast” (VIII.579-581). 322 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and those who sacrificed themselves for him are known to each through a direct form of communication unmediated by words” (Evans 201). This eternal breath is true of all sweet odors in Eden and Heaven—he makes all the fragrances and he enjoys their sweetness. He bestows sweet aromas on others—Eve “veiled in a cloud of fragrance,” or the ambrosial odors which shake from the angels’ wings—to show his love for his creations, and he enjoys their sweetness. Thus, this is every morning in Eden before

“man’s first disobedience”:

Now whenas sacred light began to dawn

In Eden on the humid Flowers, that breathed

Their morning incense, when all things that breathe,

From th' earth’s great altar send up silent praise

To the Creator, and his Nostrils fill

With grateful smell, forth came the human pair

And joined their vocal worship to the choir

Of creatures wanting voice, that done, partake

The season, prime for sweetest scents and airs (IX.192-200)

Flowers and “all things that can breathe” exhale, offering off their sweet scents as

“morning incense” to thank their Maker, aromas that originate with God. All of Earth is the altar and all living matter prays to God and their aromas as well as their “vocal worship” (and their “silent praise”) all ascend upwards to God. This scene, however, is the last, a movement from the eternal and cyclical to the linear and teleological; it is already wistfully nostalgic as this particular morning is the one that Satan convinces Eve

323 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to eat from the forbidden fruit, and Milton writes by looking back at the last pure morning.388

To ignore such perfumed beauty and ceremony is damnable. In Book VII,

Raphael recounts to Adam the creation of the world and the celebration on the hallowed seventh day of rest:

As resting on that day from all his work,

But not in silence holy kept; the harp

Had work and rested not, the solemn pipe,

[dulcimer, organ, wind instruments]

…intermixed with voice

Choral or unison; of incense clouds

fuming from golden censers hid the mount. (VII.593-600)

In heaven, the celebration is quite literally full of smells and bells. The instruments and golden censers anachronistically appear more like the instruments of contemporary High Church practice, rather than the instructions given to Moses or

Solomon’s great Temple. The ceremonies of worship can be celebrated if the participants are true and pure believers. Yet, in the Satanic Parliament, Belial complains about such angelic servitude and celebration:

To his Godhead sing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 388 In this scene, Satan is already on Earth, planning his destruction of mankind and inhabiting the body of the sleeping snake (IX.181-191). Eve recounts how she loses track of time while conversing with Adam, and the eternal seasonal nature of Eden: I forget all time, All seasons and their change, all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds…” (IV. 639-641). 324 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Forced hallelujahs; while he lordly sits

Our envied Sovran, and his altar breathes

Ambrosial odors and ambrosial flowers,

Our servile offerings. (II. 242-245)

His complaint sounds almost like a Parliamentarian complaining of the idleness and luxury of the monarch or the Puritan charge against liturgical incense.

It is within this complex of olfactory confusion and conflation that we must approach Milton’s two references to liturgical incense within Paradise Lost. Those two moments—Adam & Eve’s postlapsarian prayers mingled with Christ’s incense appease

God, and Abel’s incense-strewn primeval sacrifice—participate not only in the polemical discussions concerning incense, but also collapse time and space, and create a typology in which Old Testament uses of incense are replaced and displaced by the Son’s aroma of sanctity.

Before their expulsion from Eden, the angel Michael shows Adam the entire

Biblical history. One of Adam’s initial scenes is Abel’s incensed sacrifice to God

(XI.429-448). Robertson reads this scene as specifically pro-liturgical incense: “Milton seems here to be going out of his way to suggest that a certain level of ritual in worship is natural and acceptable, as there is no mention of incense in the Genesis account of the sacrifice” (406). This seems more closely in line with the polychronic and distemporal effect that Eve creates. Adam sees his two sons and their major life events—Abel’s sacrifice to God, Cain murdering of Abel, and Cain’s banishment—all in quick succession. Time is compressed and these events play out quickly, not unlike a theatrical procession in a masque. Furthermore, whether or not Milton added the detail of incense,

325 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this type of sacrifice may be in Adam’s future, but liturgical incense is still a complicated issue in Milton’s present.

In the second scene where incense is performed, the fallen Adam and Eve pray, weep, and ask God’s forgiveness for their crime (XI.1-44). The Son acts as priest, blending their tears and sighs, offering this as incense to placate the angry God.389

Francelia Butler makes a convincing argument that Milton, building upon Jacob Böhme’s olfactive religious writings, uses incense and sweet fragrances throughout the epic to represent various manifestations of divine grace, which resides in all things, as anointed

Christ (65-70). Prayers are not just likened to incense through similes or metaphors, but rather prayers become incense—the immaterial and emotional becomes the material.390

Through immanence, which like distillation is a process of concentration and descending downward, “prevenient grace descending” upon Adam and Eve, altering their bodies

(XI.3); the sinners’ hard hearts are replaced with fleshly hearts, and their sighs,

“dimensionless” breath becomes something physical that can be “clad by incense (XI.17-

18).”

At the same time, this is an event of transcendence: they are “inspired” (breathed into by God) in order to create the prayers that ascend to heaven. The Son collects their incense-clad prayers and acts the role of the first priest to burn incense to God, Aaron, presenting the gift to God in a “golden censer” on a “golden altar” (XI.18, 24). Although

Milton does not use the term “Christ” or the given name “Jesus,” the Son may predate his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 389 Revelations 8:3-4, Pslams 141:2, Ezekial 10:2. 390 Robertson notes that incense, even from Old Testament writings, was a metaphor for prayer—“pleasing” and “ascend[ing] toward heaven” and that incense is not polemical when used in “ the same metaphorical use of incense as the more moderate Protestant writers” (390, 404). 326 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! human form and appelations, but he is already associated with the sweet scents of chrism and sacrificial incense. God is appeased by the incense and by His Son’s supplications, and again readers experience a polytemporal collapse in time, as this Son who acts as

“priest” who presents the incense will later become Jesus Christ, the perfumed sacrifice, the incense which reaches God’s nose through his act as martyr and his aroma of sanctity

(XI.25). The Son in his earlier role teaches God how to smell properly, how to “receive /

The smell of peace toward mankind” (XI.37-38).391

To conclude, the representations of holy scents are especially fraught with religio- political significance during the later Renaissance, and Milton subtly portrays the sense of smell as an integral component of worship. Yet, he also demonstrates that the senses must be properly trained in order to best perceive and worship. As one early biographer astutely stated, “His whole career exhaled the very odor of sanctity” (Martin 296). In both

Milton and Lower’s works, despite their different religious and political inclinations, incense is a divine essence that can mediate the immaterial and material, the sacred and the profane, the godly and the earthly, and the aroma of sanctity is a sign of godliness that transcends death.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 391 2 Corinthians 14-15: “Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place. For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish”; Ephesians 5:2: “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a swee tsmelling savour”; Philippians 4:18: “But I have all, and abound: I am full, having received of Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you, an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well pleasing to God.” 327 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Conclusion

This dissertation distills the early modern olfactory and literary imagination, analyzing how the smells of the body and the book were perceived and represented in a variety of genres by several of the most canonical Renaissance writers. In doing so, it emphasizes the importance of hunting through these familiar texts for unfamiliar descriptions of aromas (or other cultural or historical points taken for granted), meticulously working through metaphors and similes to understand how the ineffable was described through comparisons and conceits, and following etymologies to their sensate roots. The rewards of such an approach is in the creation of an “olfactive turn,” an inclusive methodology that embraces previous literary theories and tactics from cultural histories and anthropologies to create an all-encompassing theory of early modern literature and culture. The poetics of smell dismantles preconceived metanarratives of simplistic binaries by embracing the paradoxical. Hamlet states that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.244-245), and this dissertation repeatedly asserts a similar argument: There is nothing either fragrant or foul but thinking makes it so.

The immateriality of perceived odors does not curb the importance of scented bodies and books, but rather imbues them with a sort of indefinable power. The language of odors may be elusive and imprecise, but it allows for a world of cultural significance and literary innovation. The immaterial sublimates into pure poetic constructions as these authors describe these invisible aromas, offering beautifully complex and varied ways to 328 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! portray the ineffable through similes, metaphors, and elaborate conceits. Baroque comparisons are symptomatic of the paradox of perfume as the immaterial and unknown source of a scent is compared to other bodies, flowers, or material substances through the immateriality of language.

The poetics of smell is compounded by the malodorous materiality of the text.

The discrepancy between the ripe physical labor and the stenches of the printing house, especially the fears of infected linen papers, saturate writings even as delightfully aromatic as Herrick’s many fragrant lyrics, in which the poet likens the writing and reading processes to such aromatic labors as cooking, distilling perfumes, and walking through a pleasure garden. There is a recurrent theme in all of these works that reconciles the material and earthly basis of perfume ingredients and bodily aromas with the immaterial through a transcendental movement upward. Whether the immortality of verse is contrasted to the physical text; the ascendancy of perfumed prayers, sacrificial incense, and the aroma of sanctity is compared to the weight of sin and the decay of flesh; or the airiness of an idealized beloved is opposed with the stench of an undesirable erotic object, these comparisons create idealized and evanescent aromas with all of their positive affective qualities.

The poetics of smell also considers how and why early modern writers used their olfactory vocabularies to create characters, challenge religious dogma and outdated medical beliefs, construct literary gardens of pleasure, and critique regime change. The smells of the early modern body are especially fraught with meaning in this literature.

The circumscribing smells of the ethnic, religious, racial, or socioeconomic Other discussed in the first chapter, the comically ostentatious perfumes of upstart courtiers

329 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! analyzed in the second chapter, the contagious malodors of the plague-stricken in the third chapter, and the stenches of political corruption clinging to Cromwell and Charles I in the final chapter all demonstrate how the sniffing subject uses tropes of various malodors to define problematic bodies and characters as dirty, diseased, deadly, and immoral. The erotic perfumes of the beloved, the comforting domestic aromas of the idealized housewife, and the redemptive odors of sanctity delineate these bodies as pure, desirable, perfected, and virtuous. These paradox of perfume, however, is that it is only a difference in circumstance or who is sniffing, evaluating, and writing that makes perfumes such as civet, ambergris, and rose smell so fragrantly or flagrantly. That is why, to quote Juliet, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but a perfume consisting of roses and civet may be alluring or revolting, depending on who is wearing the perfume and who is smelling it.

I wish to end the dissertation by turning to two contemporary examples that exhibit how early modern aromas—preserved only in the literature, “as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them” (Milton Areopagitica

720)— may be historical and ephemeral in an archeological sense, but yet also transhistorical and immortal in the olfactory and literary imagination. In these two examples, a recently launched perfume collection and an award-winning novel of historical fiction, Renaissance literature informs the contemporary researcher, and the olfactive significance of scented bodies and perfumes is translated across oceans of time.

At the time I was finishing this dissertation, in March 2015, the London-based perfume company Jo Malone—famous for its single or double-note scents designed to be worn alone or layered together—released its limited edition fragrance quintet: Rock the

330 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ages. Five different colognes represent different eras of scented British history designated on the bottle by a specific set of dates: Tudor Rose & Amber (1485-1603), Lily of the Valley and Ivy (1714-1830), Pomegranate Noir (1837-1901), Geranium and

Verbena (1901-1919), and Birch and Black Pepper (2015). Covering historical periods noted for their fashions, literature, and the arts, such as the Georgian, Victorian, and

Edwardian periods, the contemporary scent of Birch and Black Pepper is especially difficult to find in stock online or in stores, but only the earliest scent explicitly qualifies its epoch on its label Tudor Rose & Amber. Each bottle of the collection is color-coded and wrapped in a fabric suitable for the time period it represents—sage green lace for the

Georgian era or black leather for postmodern punk rock—and the Tudor Rose & Amber cologne is encased in a crimson velvet, evoking the sumptuous fabrics worn by Henry

VIII and Elizabeth I in their portraits by Holbein and Hilliard.

Tudor Rose & Amber consists of rose absolute, clove, ginger, and amber accords.

I find that the top notes of ginger and clove are warm, heavy, and evoke Christmas. I am also reminded of the magnificence of the Christmastide festivities seen in almost each season in the television serial The Tudors: feasting, dancing, tables laden with fruits and meats in elaborate arrangements, boughs of firs decorating Henry’s great hall, candles burning brightly, and the regina du jour wearing a crimson dress and a chaplet of holly berries. Then the rose—a deep red, big-blossomed rose—unfurls and takes over. The company’s website reminds us of that the fragrance’s rose note derives from the “the heraldic Tudor rose,” “still used today as a royal symbol of England” (“Tudor Rose”).

This description collapses time and space, but importantly retains the distancing fantasy of royalty. Moving away from the gourmand of the fading ginger and cloves into the

331 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mysterious, soporific, embrace of amber, the scent becomes heavy and warm, now smelling as velvet feels.392 There is also a cool “metallic base note” that emerges (The

Sunday Girl) that counters the warmth of amber, which master perfumer Christine Nagel added to “evoke the Tudor sword…a bloody Tudor sword” (Nagel). Reviews of the perfume repeatedly note the same affects of wearing this perfume: the aroma is “rich, sumptuous” (“Tudor Rose”), “extravagant and carnal” (Hughes), and smelling of

“opulence” (Emma).

Several of the notes or “ingredient voice” correspond to early modern perfume ingredients—rose, amber (as a substitute for ambergris), clove, and ginger—but the metallic base savors of the “imagery voice,” the mood or allusiveness of a particular scent. The rose, too, despite being one of the most popular perfume ingredients and beloved early modern smells also has too much importance in the Renaissance olfactory and literary imagination to be just another common ingredient. It is the smell of

Shakespeare’s Fair Youth of The Sonnets, the comparison to Romeo’s accursed familial name, the flower of the Tudor dynasty, and so the smell of the rose must always be redolent of something, someone, or someplace else.

Diane Ackerman, in her Natural History of the Senses, writes on the connection between memory and the sense of smell: “Nothing is more memorable than a smell. …

Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth” (5). The release of this perfume

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 392 Amber, a combination of Oriental resins—labdanum, benzoin, and styrax, often with vanilla—is not to be confused with the early modern ambergris, but like that ingredient, it is noted for its depth and warmth (Vosnaki, “Amber”). 332 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! collection attempts to do just that, to transport the wearer through an olfactive time machine, and the tripwire moves the wearer far into the past. The notes may blur together one’s own associations and emotions concerning particular notes, but more importantly the Jo Malone colognes try to recreate a whole epoch of British history, distilled to its most enduring and distinctive fragrances.

How does one create a perfume that can claim to smell of “Tudor” rose and ambergris? Christine Nagel chose the perfume’s ingredients based on historical, cinematic, and literary research:

The creative studio sent me books and films as well as a presentation on each era.

Everything from Christopher Marlowe’s writing to Downton Abbey. They were

also particularly interested in quirky anecdotes from each age. For instance in

Tudor times they used pomanders with cloves to cover the stench of the street.

Cloves became an ingredient we definitely wanted to incorporate in Tudor Rose &

Amber. (Nagel)

Besides the reference to Marlowe, Nagel has not divulged her early modern reading list, but the personal aromas and perfumes covered in this dissertation from Shakespeare’s drama and sonnets, Donne’s elegies and sermons, Dekker’s prose pamphlets, Herrick’s epigrams and lyrical poems, and Milton’s epic poetry retain their cultural sillage, influencing perfumers, such as Nagel, and contemporary novelists, such as Hillary

Mantel. In fact, several perfume blogs reviewing Jo Malone’s Tudor Rose & Amber suggest the connection between the olfactory and literary imaginations by offering related book recommendations. Nagel’s aromatic lesson in seduction and history is compared to contemporary novels set in Tudor England, such as Philippa Gregory’s bodice ripper The

333 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Other Boleyn Girl (2001), focusing on Mary, Henry’s first mistress of the Boleyn family, and CJ Sansom’s Dissolution (2003), a Cromwellian mystery novel concerned with the dissolution of the monasteries (Crilly).

My second example of the transhistorical affect and influence of early modern literary odors comes from Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009). Winner of the Man Booker

Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, the lauded novel was followed by a sequel

Bring Up the Bodies (2012), a Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, and a BBC miniseries, focusing on the rise, career, and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Nathalie Atkinson, in an article “This spring, you too can smell like a Tudor” suggests the olfactive connections between Mantel’s novel and Malone’s cologne, concisely and effectively arguing that “the costume-drama craze has made retro trappings the marketing tools of an unlikely category: scent.”

In Wolf Hall, Mantel vividly describes Henry’s confrontation with his alienated wife. It is June 1527, when Henry VIII approaches Katherine of Aragon’s chambers to convince her that he must remarry to lawfully conceive his desired son and heir. He prepares by freshening his appearance—“well barbered and curled, tall and still trim” and altering his speech—“his voice is low, gentle, persuasive” (Mantel 81-82). In contrast to his demure rhetoric and his attempt to resume his princely comportment, his perfume is defiant and brash: “He moves in a perfumed cloud made of the essences of roses; as if he owns all the roses, owns all the summer nights” (81). This is Henry as deus ex machina, a perfumed deity descending from the heavens in a cloud, owning and desiring all that is beautiful, fresh, and vibrant. His new mistress Anne Boleyn’s skin is described as “faintly perfumed: amber, rose” (273) and when she stretches her arms “she smells of green

334 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! leaves and lavender” (293); her aromas already complement Henry’s own rose perfumes, and she is as fresh as all the summer nights. Mantel’s novels were painstakingly researched over many years, and she deftly employs little whiffs of the past to create the sumptuous court of the Tudors, and here the personal aromas of the king and his consort allude to about their desires and internal characteristics.

The authors and genres covered in this dissertation include some of the most commonly anthologized, taught, and researched literature of the early modern period.

These works also demonstrate how the represented smells of early modernity seep into all genres of Renaissance English literature. The scented lexicon used to describe the

(im)materiality of smells, the materiality of the text, the physicality of the body, and the desirability, abjectness, virtues and vices of the scented subject all demonstrate how boundaries between object and subject, metaphor and literal meaning, and foul or fragrant are all unstable and fluid in early modern beliefs, yet hold relevance to us today.

335 ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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