Articulating the Olfactory (3)

A third post on the topic, after this one and this one. In the most recent one, I found Virginia Woolf saying that not even Shakespeare could describe smell. So I have quickly corralled some data on Shakespeare’s olfactory vocabulary. Specifically, I have word-searched all instances of the word ‘smell’ and its cognates (smelled, smelling etc.), and seen what qualitative, descriptive vocabulary he uses there. I think I’ll just leave it as a list, and not embellish it more than to offer a hasty conclusion, i.e. (i) Shakespeare does not have an unusually full vocabulary of smell, (ii) Plato was right that pleasantness / unpleasantness dominate the repertoire — see the quotation from Timaeus cited in the previous post, and ‘sweet’ in the lists below.

SMELL

‘all horse-piss’
‘bad’ (like a fox; metaphorically)
‘fish-like’
‘like a fish’
‘like in simple time’
‘most rank’
None (‘a man of middle earth’)
None (blood of an Englishman)
None (but aversive; ‘of hot meat’)
None (civet)
None (dead bodies)
None (Emilia in Othello; women have senses too)
None (scent of a hare)
None (Launce, of Crab – a distinctively bad smell)
None (‘the first time that we smell the air, / We wawl and cry’)
None (leek; makes Pistol ‘qualmish’)
None (‘let him smell / His way to Dover’)
None (re. blood; ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical, suspicion)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; means ‘judge’)
None (‘of sin’)
None (of a flower; ‘comparing it to Adonis’ breath’)
None (onions)
None (Othello can’t smell a plucked rose)
None (pork)
None (pun on ‘rank’)
None (pun, dunghill / unguem Latin)
None (re. a ‘foul deed’)
None (refers to perfume in abstract)
None (refers to perfume in general, of herbs)
None (refers to the sense)
None (sense in abstract)
None (sense in abstract)
None (‘the very smell’)
None (verb; blocked up nose)
None (verb; metaphorical for detect)
‘of sweat’ (no more specific)
‘rank’ (‘of weeds’; Sonnet 69)
‘rank’ / ‘villainous’ (re. Falstaff in the laundry, ‘rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins; that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villanous smell that ever offended nostril’
‘stinking’ (but somewhat metaphorical)
‘strong’ (metaphorical)
‘strongly’ (metaphorical)
‘sulphurous’ (Jupiter)
‘sweet’ (general savours)
‘sweet’ (‘of different flowers’, Sonnet 98)
‘sweet’ (person)
‘sweet’ (‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet’)
‘sweet’ (rose)
‘worse than weeds’ (verb; festering lilies smell)

SMELLS

‘April and May’
‘loathsome’
‘most sweetly’ (Thaisa’s coffin)
None (‘the violet smells to him as it doth to me’)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
‘of mortality’
‘rank’ (‘O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’)
‘sweet’ (‘the forward violet / my love’s breath’
‘well’ (‘the feast smells well’)
‘wooingly’ (‘This guest of summer, / The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, / By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath / Smells wooingly here’)

SMELT / SMELLED / SMELL’D

‘brown bread and garlic’
‘like a fool’
‘musty’ (‘You are the musty chaff, and you are smelt / Above the moon’)
None (‘lifted up their noses / As they smelt music’)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (refers to smelling things in general)
None (but suggests skull smells horrible, ‘And smelt so, pah!’)

SMELLING

None (love)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (‘odouriferous flowers of fancy’)
None (sense in abstract)
None (sense in abstract)
‘sweet’ (‘sweet issue of a sweet-smelling sire’)
‘sweetly… all musk’
‘tender’ (but probably adverbial, suggesting a delicate sense of smell, ‘most tender-smelling knight’)

A street in London famous for shops selling drugs and perfumes; ‘simple’ is a perfume.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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