• 1 Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4, Winter 2007, p. (...)
• 2 Ibid., p. 485.
• 3 Randle Cotgrave, A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, London, Printed by Adam Islip, 16 (...)
• 4 “If what I offer bear an acceptable odour…”, Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. F. H. Mares, London, Me (...)

1The smell of a dramatic work is difficult to assess. A play is a text that may include olfactory metaphors, but being also a staged work, we may want to try and imagine what a play smelled like on stage. In an article on “The Smell of Macbeth”, Jonathan Gil Harris tried to imagine the smell (or the stench) of the Shakespearean stage.1 Evoking the “thunder and lightning” of the stage directions and the technical construction of such an indication in Macbeth (1606) he explored the embodied reaction to the play for early modern playgoers and what sort of “archive of smell” it would have elicited then. Plays, presumably, had different smells. For thunder, squibs were commonly used, Harris tells us, and that type of firework produced a “pungent stink”,2 an association that Cotgrave confirmed when he suggested “a little fart, or Squib”, to translate the French word Petereau.3 According to our cultural model, Macbeth would thus have smelt bad, being steeped in the “smoke of hell” (i.v.49) as well as the “smell of blood” (v.i.42). Other plays are associated with different kinds of smells. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), Vindice and Hippolito use perfume to trick the Duke into kissing the skull of Vindice’s dead lover Gloriana, while Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) immediately suggests the scatological with Subtle’s attack on Face at the beginning of the play, “Thy worst. I fart at thee” (i.i.2). The play’s coprophilous interest is corroborated by the later episode of the “privy” (iii.v.78) where Dapper is locked up until well into act V, when he admits to having been “overcome” by “the fume” (v.iv.5). The play is inundated by various smells, actual or metaphorical, so much so that Ben Jonson hoped that his dedicatee, Lady Mary Wroth, would find the odour of the play “acceptable” in his prefatory letter.4

• 5 Thomas Dekker, The guls horne-booke, London, 1609, p. 2 and 28. Accessed via EEBO.
• 6 Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Chicago and London, The University of Chi (...)

3It is difficult to separate a history of early modern English theatre (especially in London) from a history of early modern disease and the context of the various plague epidemics at the turn of the century, since major outbreaks of the plague always meant a closing of the theatres in order to try and protect Londoners from the pestilence. In his book on “gallants”, The guls horne-booke, it is interesting that Thomas Dekker, when describing the playhouses, should use such expressions as “a stinking breath of hisses” when he evoke s the “Comick Theater”, or “the Breath of the great Beast”5 vanishing into thin air in the theatres. London was affected by the plague several times between 1570 and 1670. Ernest B. Gilman indicates frightening figures for London and its environs during that period: 225,000 deaths. In 1593, he reports, “more than 15,000 people died — one out of every eight Londoners, given a total estimated population of 123,000”.6 Love’s Labour’s Lost was written and performed during that period. The plague, or pestilence, was thought to be caused by bad smells or “miasmas”. Contemporary plague writers, such as Thomas Dekker, made it clear. So did earlier narratives of the plague by Ovid or Boccaccio. Shakespeare himself uses references to pestilent air, such as when, in Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke asks of his son: “Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son? / ’Tis full three months since I did see him last. / If any plague hang over us, ’tis he” (v.iii.1-3). Bearing these contexts in mind, I would like to address the question of the smell of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and wonder in what way the olfactory system of the play could inform us about its aesthetics. More specifically, I would like to look at the possibilities of inversion offered by olfactory metaphors and how they give us a clue concerning the reversibility of language.

• 7 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant. Odour and the French Social Imagination, transl. Miriam Ko (...)

5Smells are social constructions. Good and bad smells vary and our perception of them depends on several factors. What we may perceive as a stench can be sensed in a different way for another culture or may have been sensed differently in another time period, as Alain Corbin showed in his history of smell in modern France, The Foul and the Fragrant7. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the sense of smell is part of a social and cultural construct according to which the upper and/or educated classes are supposed to give out sweet fragrances while the lower and/or uneducated social classes are associated with bad odours. Armado suggests that rhetoric can be obscured by “sweet smoke” (iii.i.52), a phrase that points both to the dangers of an intricate and complex use of language and to its admirable plasticity, hence its decidedly fragrant smell. Speaking can thus be equated to giving out a “sigh” (iii.i.56), an image which is commonly found in Petrarchan rhetoric, as Ferdinand points out, albeit with a negative connotation, when he accuses Longaville and Dumaine of having read out love poetry: “[I] / Saw sighs reek from you” (iv.iii.132).

• 8 Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: Or the Combat of the Tongue, and the Five Senses for Superiority, London, 16 (...)
• 9 Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume. Scent and Sense in Early Modern England, Baltimore, (...)

6For the pedants of the play, the smell of learning is fragrant and Holofernes associates Ovid’s Naso with the “flowers of fancy” found in Berowne’s letter: “Ovidio Naso was the man; and why indeed ‘Naso’, but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?” (iv.ii.110-111). Ovid is supposed to be the epitome of poetic invention, but Holofernes, using Ovid’s Latin name Naso, gives him a nasal appendix sensitive enough to sniff out the flowers of fancy, thus giving language, and especially rhetoric (where those flowers are to be found), a material dimension (that of the nose) as well as a metaphorical one (the flowers of fancy are smells, the most elusive of sensations). In Holofernes’ mind, olfactory sensations serve to oppose the stench of ignorance to the sweet smell of learning. In the early modern period, certain smells were thought to induce memory, such as incense. In Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua: or the Combat of the tongue and the five senses, Olfactus describes how, through the use of incense, he can “strengthen memory” in order to “make mans spirits more apt for things divine”.8 However, incense was no longer used in English churches at the end of the sixteenth century, being associated with Roman Catholicism. Apart from this specific fragrance, the perception of smell is, more generally, based on memory, as Holly Dugan has showed.9 It is thus not surprising that the metaphor should be used in a remark that refers to one of the most popular sources of early modern literature.

• 10 William C. Carroll, op. cit., p. 96.

7The smell of the play, though, is made up of several elements and goes through several phases, changing according to the characters present on stage. When Costard enters in act III, scene i, the implication that the “sweet smoke” of rhetoric previously evoked by Armado is now turning into a bad smell, is established by the clown’s various misunderstandings and his inability to perceive the subtleties of language. When Armado asks Moth to give him “l’envoy” (60), he gives rise to a network of scatological images, first because Costard mishears the word “enigma” and understands “egma” instead (60-61), which he seems to take for some sort of enema or clyster-pipe. As William Carroll explains it in his footnotes to the Cambridge edition, the word “l’envoy” had already been associated with the scatological by Thomas Nashe in Have With You in Saffron Walden (1596) when mocking Gabriel Harvey’s pedantic use of the same word, referring to Harvey’s “excrementall conceipts” and “a third Lenvoy, like a fart after a good Stoole”.10 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the poetic term turns into a laxative for Costard, who is freed (and cured of constipation) by Armado: “and now you will be my purgation and let me loose” (110-111). But “purgation” also has a figurative meaning, that of a purification from sins or any kind of defilement, a word that is thus appropriate for Costard’s situation, that of having been caught in an “obscene and most preposterous event” (i.i. 230). Patricia Parker has written extensively on the word “preposterous” and its structural implications in several of Shakespeare’s plays. She explains that:

• 12 Thomas Heywood, Gynaikeion: or, Nine bookes of various history. Concerning women inscribed by ye na (...)

In this case, a man following a woman. As Patricia Parker notes, the term can also imply sexual practices condemned as “unnatural”, or “preposterous venery”, a phrase used, among others, by Thomas Heywood in Gynaikeion (1624), in the part entitled “De Laenis, or of Bawdes”.12 The relation between the posterior and the scatological is further exploited in IV.ii. It is first suggested by Dull’s malapropism when he says that “the pollution holds in the exchange” (IV.ii.39), pollution having connotations of uncleanliness, dirt and impurity. Of course, the most potent example is Holofernes’ sarcastic remark:

• 13 Montaigne, “Of smels and odours”, Essays, transl. John Florio, 1613 edition, p. 171, accessed via E (...)

9Even if Costard and Dull are invariably (and sometimes unwittingly) drawn towards the lower parts of the body by the polysemic possibilities of language, the pedants of the play do not escape bad odours. Through a sense of inversion, the scatological further invades the play and its characters in its “posterior” part, in particular during the Pageant of the Nine Worthies that turns on itself to become an antimasque, thus inverting the intrinsic heroic meaning of the show. When Nathaniel plainly declares that he is “Alisander” (v.ii.554), he is betrayed by his body odour. Boyet thinks his nose “stands too right” (555) compared with the traditional descriptions of Alexander’s nasal appendix but, more to the point, Berowne clearly expresses the odoriferous impossibility of that statement through an antiphrasis: “Your nose smells ‘no’ in this, most tender-smelling knight” (556), since, according to Plutarch, Alexander’s sweat did not smell bad or, as Montaigne put it, “yeelded a sweet-smelling savour”.13 Berowne’s assertion is confirmed by Costard, when he definitely sends Nathaniel to the privy by reinterpreting Alexander’s coat of arms. Instead of a lion on a throne, he sees that “Your lion, that holds his pole-axe sitting on a close-stool, will be given to Ajax” (565-566), the “close-stool” being a seat in a privy, and Ajax a clear reference to an early modern toilet, that had just been invented by Sir John Harington when Shakespeare wrote the play, and described in his A new discourse of a stale subject, called the metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), with the now-famous pun on “Ajax / a jakes”.

• 14 Donald Watts, Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore, Oxford, Academic, 2007, p. 268.
• 15 See for instance Thomas Lupton who, in A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes Wherof some are (...)

A gilt nutmeg was a nutmeg glazed with egg yolk and was, according to Donald Watts, “a common Christmas gift, and, encased in silver, they were worn at night as an inducement to sleep”.14 As for the lemon stuck with cloves, it is a kind of pomander that was mainly used, at the time, to flavour and purify a kind of wine used against disease.15

• 16 See Holly Dugan, op. cit., p. 106.
• 17 Samuel Daniel, Delia and Rosamond Augmented. Cleopatra, London, 1594, sonnet 1.

14The rhetoric of Petrarchan poetry abounds in love sighs and sweet breaths. The sigh is one of the most frequent motifs of love poetry and one that is as evanescent as a smell. Breath and smell were related for early modern anatomists because it was only through breathing that invisible particles of odours could “touch” the brain.16 In the play, Cupid is, as Berowne calls him, “Th’anointed sovereign of sighs and groans” (iii.i.159) and makes him “sigh for her” (177). The sigh is an expression of love, tainted with melancholy. Hence Armado’s use of them, even if, at first, he “think[s] scorn to sigh” (i.ii.53), because he is not sure it is in keeping with his status as a great soldier, yet he does not hesitate to sigh at Moth when he is pleased with him: “By thy favour, sweet welkin, I must sigh in thy face” (iii.i.56). Sighs are also frequently used as a metaphor of language in love poetry: Samuel Daniel uses the image in the first sonnet to Delia, writing “Heere have I summ’d my sighes” in the first sonnet (l. 7-8),17 and Berowne draws on the same type of imagery when he says “I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, groan” (iii.i.181). In such type of rhetoric, language seems to lose its materiality: the written word of love poetry is first and foremost a spoken word, and even a sigh with no substance, which is in keeping with the sonneteers’ frequent assertion of speechlessness as they try to express their impossible love.

• 18 Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe Sonnettes, madrigals, elegies and odes, London, J. Wol (...)

15Sighs are usually a counterpoint to “sweet breath”, but breath can also be a part of the language of love, as spoken by the lover who is then “out of breath” if he loses his capacity for speech. In Parthenophil and Parthenophe, the speaker of Barnabe Barnes’s sonnets laments that he should “Wast breathlesse wordes, and breathfull sighes increase” (sonnet xviii)18. Longaville, in his sonnet of act IV, scene 3, uses the same image but adds the idea of an exchange of breaths when he says that “Vows are but breath, and breath a vapour is / Then thou, fair sun, which on my earth dost shine, / Exhal’st this vapour-vow, in thee it is” (60-63).

• 22 On this, see Nichole DeWall, “‘Sweet recreation barred’: The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time”, in (...)

20The double meaning of the word is thus fairly established: a token is a sign that is part of a semiotics of disease.22 Interestingly, in the dialogue between Rosaline and Berowne, the infection or visitation is caught not through the sense of smell (which was thought to be the most conducive of the disease) but through that of sight: “They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes” (v.ii.421). There is a form of correspondence between an early modern discourse on the plague, in which the disease was caught through the air and then became a visible sign on the skin, and the language of love, in which the “token” is an attempt at giving it substantiality and visibility. It points to the necessity to “see” love and give it visible signs, which is all the more necessary in the play as the only “banquet” the young men have access to (through their oath) is that of the mind and not of the body (i.i.24-25).

• 23 Philip Sidney uses this oxymoron in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, as in sonnet 60 about (...)

21The use of the sense of smell is not surprising in a play that is based on insubstantiality: that of the plot, which is thin as thin air, and that of love, which is lacking in clear definition. It is there, and not there, absent and present as sonneteers would say.23

• 24 Holly Dugan, op. cit., p. 4.
• 25 I would like to thank William C. Carroll and Henry Woodhuysen for drawing my attention to the relev (...)

22The sense of smell is based on that evanescence, and the idea of the ephemeral. It does not last but remains as an olfactory memory. It is difficult to word, and calls for metaphors, as Holly Dugan points out in her book The Ephemeral History of Perfume: “Metaphor is the apparatus through which invisible smells are ‘made to appear’”.24 Dogberry, in Much Ado About Nothing, unwittingly confirms this literary dimension of the smell with his malapropism: “Comparisons are odorous” (iii.v.16).25 Interestingly, in his essay on odours and smells, when Montaigne tries to define the ideal smell of a woman, he ends up defining it as an absence, while the presence of smell is suspicious—an idea that is frequent in the early modern period:

• 27 Ibid.

23Smells tend towards nothingness, and it is their very ephemeral quality that makes them popular in poetry to define what cannot be represented, what cannot be defined. Montaigne goes as far as saying that, as a young man, he kept on his moustache the olfactory memory of “The close-smacking, sweetnesse-moving, love-alluring, and greedismirking kisses of youth”.27 As an example of an olfactory metaphor that represents what cannot be represented, Shakespeare uses the image of the distillation of perfume in Sonnet 5 in order to define the beauty of the male addressee:

• 28 Michael Clody, “Shakespeare’s ‘alien pen’: Self-Substantial Poetics in the Young Man Sonnets”, Crit (...)
• 29 Samuel Daniel, op. cit., sonnet 19.
• 30 Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies, transl. Paul Eugene Memmo, Jr., Chapel Hill, The University of (...)

24To quote Michael Clody, the olfactory image constitutes a shift from the visual and helps define beauty as “unreachable”.28 However, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, olfactory references or images do not only serve to express the inexpressible, but are also used in an attempt to give substance, to give materiality to language. This is the case in Petrarchan poetry, in which images of the plague are meant to counterbalance the sweetness of the nosegay, as we may call it. Samuel Daniel evokes the perfume of Delia’s breath in sonnet xviii. Delia should give up all her attributes, among them her particular odour (“T’Arabian odors give thy breathing sweete”, 6), so that the speaker may lose his sickness, in the last line of the sonnet: “So shalt thou cease to plague, and I to paine” (14).29 So in this case, the poet equates the “breathing sweete” and the “plague”. This idea of a correspondence between good and bad odours could be read as a Neo-Platonic motif but it also offers aesthetic possibilities on the question of representation. Giordano Bruno, in his satirical “Argument” to the Heroic Frenzies, describes women’s beauty as a series of metonymies, one of which being “that stink”, and concludes that it “deceives us as a species of beauty”.30

• 31 See Paulette Choné, “Bellange ou le parfum de la maniera”, in Didier Souiller, ed., Maniérisme et l (...)
• 32 On the different smells attached to the public and the private theatres, see especially Andrew Gurr (...)

25Shakespeare is part of this aesthetic attempt at giving substance to the insubstantial and at exploring the ephemeral. The olfactory is the perfect image of that absent representation: it is very difficult to define. Hence its presence in early modern sonnets, in which language loses its substance to the point of silence. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the sweetness of the air breathed by the young men and women, combined with the stench of the plague and the scatological references, reflects the intermediary status of the sense of smell—between the “noble” senses of hearing and sight, and the basest ones of touch and taste31—and its dual literary status as a metaphor, both elusive and full of substance. Finally, the play stands in an intermediate state, between the bad odours of public theatres, and the more refined aromas (to early modern noses) of the private theatres or even court performances, attested by its stage history.32