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The city out of breath: Jacobean city comedy and the odors of restraint

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Abstract

By examining two popular Jacobean city comedies, The Puritan (1606–1607) and Westward Ho (1604–1605), this article proposes that the rich lexicon of smells, outlining or residing within interior built spaces in each play, becomes a precarious signifier of restrictive forces of material expansion that at once challenge and build upon the more intimate nature of Jacobean private theaters. In so doing, it further argues that in early Stuart performances, references to smells not only were meant to evoke the materiality of stage and the bodies of actors and spectators, but significantly expanded drama's means of incorporating and probing into the material foundations of city life. The two plays also suggest that while Jacobean satirical drama employed odors to communicate concerns about London's restrictive conditions of living, it also used select venues to target ‘odor-conscious’ spectators who were more likely to respond to such fears.

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Notes

  1. The academic comedy Lingua (1607), for example, describes smelling as a complex, uncertain activity: the character Olfactus (Smell) is told that ‘of all the senses, your objects have the worst luck; they are always jarring with their contraries; for 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’ (Tomkis, 1607, 4.3.12–14).

  2. Dugan (2011, 3–4) argues that the transient and problematic materiality of odors has relegated them to ‘the footnotes of scholarly work … [A]lthough there have been important scholarly studies of the history of hearing, touch, and taste (in several historical periods, including early modern England), very little scholarship has been done on premodern histories of olfaction.’

  3. For a more extended discussion of early modern London's experience with crowded spaces, see Munro (2005).

  4. Gibbons (1968, 11) sees the sub-genre as derived from the Morality tradition, Roman intrigue comedy, and the commedia dell’ arte. City comedies exclude romance, fairy tale, sentimental legend or patriotic motives, and focus satirically on city life, usually criticizing social types rather than individuals.

  5. James issued numerous proclamations that restricted the erection of new buildings as well as restrained the separation of already standing buildings into tenements; see Bly (2007, 62, 69 n3).

  6. Middleton ([1626] 1903) presents the capital as ‘the most pleasant garden of England, the noble city of London, [full of] flowers emanating the sweet odors of their virtue and goodness’. Others, such as Kellwaye (1593) in A Defensative against the Plague and Godskall (1604) in The King's Medicine for This Year were far more skeptical of this notion, particularly in time of epidemics.

  7. Zitner (2004, 12), the Revels Series editor of the play, has ascribed the initial performance not to the Children of Paul's but to the Children of the Queen's Revels, even though Beaumont and Fletcher's Woman-Hater, composed during the same year as The Knight, was performed at Paul's. Nell's remark about the sweet breath of a child actor, however, appears to be a generic appreciation of the olfactory neatness such young performers generally exhibited.

  8. The higher probability that better-bred playgoers would emanate more appealing smells also stems from the olfactory fashion of the times: a late Elizabethan fad for the perfuming of gloves, for instance, retained closer resemblance to the practices of ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians and Egyptians, who applied and associated fragrance with ‘a state of grace … evoking a sense of distilled youth and beauty’ (Classen et al, 1994, 14). Jacobean subjects were also fond of reinforcing fashionable aroma by wearing musk, civet and other prominent natural odors, as Lingua reminds us (Tomkis, 1607, 4.3.13).

  9. As Hamilton (2007, 509) explains, the title page of the first printed edition of The Puritan (1607) stated that the work had been written by ‘W.S.,’ so the play was included in the 1664 and 1685 Shakespeare folios. For more than a century, however, stylistic analyses have singled out Middleton as the most probable author.

  10. Hamilton (2007, 510) claims that by blending ‘traditional’ Puritan harping upon definitions and connotations with the pseudo-magical charades in the house of Widow Plus (a favorite way of depicting ‘Romishness’), Middleton ‘associate[s] puritan and papist [and] conflate[s] the two … literalizing the identification of one with the other.’

  11. After the Devil materializes in Newgate Prison amid colossal thunder and cracking, one of the constables exclaims: ‘Fough! What a steam of brimstone is here … the prisoner's dead, came in but now … the devil sure has a hand in this … this is strange! And favors of the devil, strongly! I’ ha’ the sulphur of Hell-coal in my nose … Fough … How rank it is’ (Jonson, 1616, 5.7.1–14)!

  12. Jonson's (1612) gross mock-epic, included in his Epigrams, follows the adventures of an inglorious duo upstream the Fleet Ditch (from Bridewell to Holborn) as they row and encounter the dirt, dung, and sickening waste of the city of London.

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Stanev, H. The city out of breath: Jacobean city comedy and the odors of restraint. Postmedieval 3, 423–435 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.36

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