ADRIAN The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
SEBASTIAN As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
ANTONIO Or, as ’twere perfumed by a fen.
GONZALO Here is everything advantageous to life.
ANTONIO True, save means to live.
SEBASTIAN Of that there’s none, or little.
GONZALO How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
ANTONIO The ground indeed is tawny.
SEBASTIAN With an eye of green in’t.
ANTONIO He misses not much.
SEBASTIAN No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. (2.1.49-59)
On one level this is more of the same, as Adrian and Gonzalo join forces to praise the island, and Antonio and Sebastian continue with their snide, undercutting remarks. Adrian says that the air is sweet, not polluted; he’s using breathes quite poetically, as one might describe a gentle breeze. Sebastian personifies it, giving the island diseased lungs and bad breath; Antonio suggests that there’s a foul smell, as might be expected to come from a fen, bog, a swamp. Londoners were used to marshes and foul smells, and the environment in the Globe – and most likely in the Blackfriars – would have been none too fragrant; tanners worked in the area around the Globe, a notoriously stinking trade, and the smell of drains (or the lack of drains) and of rubbish heaps and waste of all kinds would have been very familiar, and largely inescapable. This matters because the idea that disease could be caused by foul air, miasma, was still very current – hence the use of sweet-smelling herbs in medicine (and to ward off illness) and the carrying of posies and pomanders. Then Gonzalo starts up again: everything you could possibly need to live on is here. (Nope, say Antonio and Sebastian.) Look at that lovely grass; how green it is! It’s brown, says Antonio. Greenish brown, says Sebastian. He’s not missing much, says Antonio. It’s just that none of it’s true, retorts Sebastian. And it’s this last part of the exchange that’s more interesting. If the question of what the island smells like has brought the air of London into the theatre, and perhaps even made the world outside the theatre momentarily present (is that a whiff of woodsmoke? Of gunpowder? The smell of brewing, of manure, of rot?) then Gonzalo could well be describing the actual stage. No grass, clearly – that’s how theatre works. There’s no lush grass here. But there could be rushes, strewn on the boards of the stage – green if freshly cut, getting a bit tawny, brown if not – and perhaps visible through them, the brown boards of the stage. All four of the characters involved in this exchange are doing what theatre does: making a place, a setting, an environment present through language. It’s just that here there are two competing versions, and the audience doesn’t know who to believe. The cynical, narky Antonio and Sebastian? Or the idealising, let’s make the best of things Gonzalo and Adrian? (This is a device common in classical poets like Ovid: two descriptions of the same thing or place, one positive – in bono – and one negative – in malo. Shakespeare does it in Titus Andronicus, for instance, where the scene of Tamora and Aaron’s illicit rendezvous and subsequently Lavinia’s rape and mutilation is described first as a place full of nice trees and birdsong, and then as being full of horrible snakes – both times by Tamora, in the space of a few lines, without leaving the stage. And in the theatre, on a more or less bare stage, at least bare of ‘set’, as it would now be understood – who is to be believed? The island can be anything they – and we – want or need it to be. Like the stage.)
