Colleen E Kennedy
I no longer work in academia after several visiting assistant professor positions. I am currently the Publications Editor for the Baltimore Museum of Art, and an arts & culture writer for the greater D.C., Baltimore, and Northern Virginia region.
Supervisors: Richard Dutton, Hannibal Hamlin, and Christoper Highley
Supervisors: Richard Dutton, Hannibal Hamlin, and Christoper Highley
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Even earlier, Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Gardens” (pub. 1625), 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. 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.
Patricia 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 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). This essay, then stubbornly and poignantly focuses on one sense—smell— but in the multisensory vocabulary.
For Michel Serres, empiricism and phenomenology cannot be properly expressed through language. For early modern thinkers, however, language is often one of the additional senses. 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. Our richest vocabulary for odors is created through the comparative poetics of smell, outlining the ways that odors are signified through similes, metaphors, and analogies, especially the vernaculars of the other senses. This paper attempts to reconstruct such early modern multisensory 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) by turning to key moments in several of Shakespeare’s works: Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Venus and Adonis, The Sonnets, and King Lear.
Michel Serres, in "The Five Senses :A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies," disagrees: “The name of the rose has no fragrance” (190).
In this paper, I will consider Serres’ chapter “Tables,” on the senses of smell and taste as well as the inadequacies of language, read against or beside some early modern conceptions of how to give a language (a “first tongue”) to the sense of smell (a “second tongue”) (Serres 152-157). For early modern thinkers, language is often one of the additional senses; 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.
And in the instance of this short essay, the “name of the rose” and the “scent of the rose” are not as distanced when read analogously through the historical phenomenological lens. I briefly recover the early modern olfactive lexicon (i.e. “the idea of the scent of the concept of rose”) to assert that there is, or was, a poetics of smell that blurs the senses, but not just the expected mingled senses of taste and smell, but rather the intermingled senses of speech and smell.
Although the Thai government’s Ministry of Culture initially helped fund director Ing K’s adaptation of Macbeth, entitled Shakespeare Must Die (2012), the film failed to the meet the censorship board’s approval. In April 2012, the film was officially banned, and the director Ing K (Ing Kanjanavanit) and producer, Manit Sriwanichpoom, immediately filed an appeal. Over a year later, the saga continues, but they continue to fight for the release of their film.
While Ing K's accompanying documentary "Censor Must Die" has been exempt from the censorship board as a documentary film (but still not widely available in theatres afraid of repercussions for showing the film), "Shakespeare Must Die" remains banned in its homeland. Nevertheless, the film has started to garner international acclaim–winning two major awards at the Tripoli film festival. After two months of protests against current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the fear that her brother, the ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, may return from exile, the politics of “Shakespeare Must Die” are more topical and relevant than ever.
The film is a metatheatrical exercise in the powers of play, whether that is the performance of a dictator, the performance of a Shakespearean play, or a blurring the two. Like a good revenge tragedy, some of the most inherent critiques of the larger political system revolve around the play-within-a-play. In this case, a theatre troupe stages the tragedy of Shakespeare’s usurping tyrant in a nation (an unnamed country/fictionalized Thailand) ruled by such a despotic leader. The tyrant halts the production of the play. Ing argues that the film speaks on a global level concerning any of a number of recent dictators:
“I feel like we are heading to a very dark, dark place right now, a place full of fears and everyone has to be extra careful about what they say. …When Cambodians watch this they’ll think it’s Hun Sen. When Libyans watch it they would think it’s Gaddafi.”
Even earlier, Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Gardens” (pub. 1625), 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. 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.
Patricia 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 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). This essay, then stubbornly and poignantly focuses on one sense—smell— but in the multisensory vocabulary.
For Michel Serres, empiricism and phenomenology cannot be properly expressed through language. For early modern thinkers, however, language is often one of the additional senses. 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. Our richest vocabulary for odors is created through the comparative poetics of smell, outlining the ways that odors are signified through similes, metaphors, and analogies, especially the vernaculars of the other senses. This paper attempts to reconstruct such early modern multisensory 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) by turning to key moments in several of Shakespeare’s works: Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Venus and Adonis, The Sonnets, and King Lear.
Michel Serres, in "The Five Senses :A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies," disagrees: “The name of the rose has no fragrance” (190).
In this paper, I will consider Serres’ chapter “Tables,” on the senses of smell and taste as well as the inadequacies of language, read against or beside some early modern conceptions of how to give a language (a “first tongue”) to the sense of smell (a “second tongue”) (Serres 152-157). For early modern thinkers, language is often one of the additional senses; 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.
And in the instance of this short essay, the “name of the rose” and the “scent of the rose” are not as distanced when read analogously through the historical phenomenological lens. I briefly recover the early modern olfactive lexicon (i.e. “the idea of the scent of the concept of rose”) to assert that there is, or was, a poetics of smell that blurs the senses, but not just the expected mingled senses of taste and smell, but rather the intermingled senses of speech and smell.
Although the Thai government’s Ministry of Culture initially helped fund director Ing K’s adaptation of Macbeth, entitled Shakespeare Must Die (2012), the film failed to the meet the censorship board’s approval. In April 2012, the film was officially banned, and the director Ing K (Ing Kanjanavanit) and producer, Manit Sriwanichpoom, immediately filed an appeal. Over a year later, the saga continues, but they continue to fight for the release of their film.
While Ing K's accompanying documentary "Censor Must Die" has been exempt from the censorship board as a documentary film (but still not widely available in theatres afraid of repercussions for showing the film), "Shakespeare Must Die" remains banned in its homeland. Nevertheless, the film has started to garner international acclaim–winning two major awards at the Tripoli film festival. After two months of protests against current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the fear that her brother, the ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, may return from exile, the politics of “Shakespeare Must Die” are more topical and relevant than ever.
The film is a metatheatrical exercise in the powers of play, whether that is the performance of a dictator, the performance of a Shakespearean play, or a blurring the two. Like a good revenge tragedy, some of the most inherent critiques of the larger political system revolve around the play-within-a-play. In this case, a theatre troupe stages the tragedy of Shakespeare’s usurping tyrant in a nation (an unnamed country/fictionalized Thailand) ruled by such a despotic leader. The tyrant halts the production of the play. Ing argues that the film speaks on a global level concerning any of a number of recent dictators:
“I feel like we are heading to a very dark, dark place right now, a place full of fears and everyone has to be extra careful about what they say. …When Cambodians watch this they’ll think it’s Hun Sen. When Libyans watch it they would think it’s Gaddafi.”
Herrick’s odes to “balm, oil, spice, and ambergris” are complicated, however, by the wealth of meanings that sweet odors had in early modern English. Frustratingly divine and bestial, these particular smells, when part of the liturgical service, connected man to God, while these same odors, when metonymically linked to desirable women, likened man to beast. I argue that Herrick’s narrator, like the flitting putti, hovers somewhere in between.
The feminine aromas are further confused depending on genre and intended audience. In the Ovidian love poems, idealized nymphs drop ambrosial odors and the poet’s desire heightens their sweet scent until “love perfumes all parts.” 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.
Religion, Politics, Incense, and the Contemplative Life
The chapter I am currently working on is a study of the aromas of sanctity during the English Civil War and early Restoration. Beginning with William Lower’s The Phaenix in Her Flames (1639) with its elaborate use of incense to create a balsamic atmosphere, I am now incorporating the devotional poetry of Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
For a Catholic writer, such as Montaigne, in his essay “On Smells,” incense performed a very particular and important spiritual function: “The use of incense and perfumes in churches … was intended to cheer us, and to rouse and purify the senses, the better to fit us for contemplation.” Matthew Millner has recently undermined the belief that Protestants were austere and ascetic while Catholics were sensuous in The Senses and the English Reformation. Millner’s work ends at the later Elizabethan age, but I am especially interested in the later religious sensate controversies and especially, how they thought incense would affect the minds, hearts, and souls of parishioners.
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One of my major areas of interest is in the olfactory self- and other-identification, realizing what one’s own odor is and using that knowledge to differentiate from others’ odors. Beginning with the works of Mark Jenner and Alain Corbin, with their focus on deodorizing as civilizing process, I have built upon this in claiming that personal body odor has conflicting and layered accords. This extends to more general issues of masculinity, manhood, class status, and nationality. This chapter would focus on the plays of the Shakespeare's Second Henriad ("Richard II,""1 & 2 Henry IV," and "Henry V, "extended to include "Merry Wives of Windsor"). The men of the play are constantly commenting 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. Ultimately, what I argue is that the plays of the Second Henriad, usually considered Shakespeare's most nationalistic and English of all his works, create a teleological emphasis on smelling like an Englishman, an encompassing and characteristic British body odor embodied in the personal odor of Henry V.
I have co-organized this session with Christopher Madson to bring together other scholars working on Renaissance sensory studies. Sensate, somatic, and historical phenomenological approaches to Renaissance literature are growing as part of the affective turn. In October of 2011, the University of London held a symposium on Shakespeare and the Senses, part of a longer study of sensate Shakespeare studies. The so-called higher visual and auditory senses are usually studied, so this particular panel hopes to bring together those working especially on the lower senses.
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Your sources can include, first and foremost, the assigned readings and supplementary materials, as well as any other useful texts you come across. I encourage you to supplement CPB entries with extra-curricular material: quotations from readings for other classes, lyrics from songs, lines from movies, tweets with relevant hashtags, an occasional quotation from a classmate during discussion, etc. These extra-curricular commonplace passages, however, are in addition to and not in place of the required passages as described below.
Getting Started: http://postmodernodysseus.tumblr.com
The defunct literary humor blog had an ongoing series entitled “How to Tell if You’re in a Novel: Quick Strategies for figuring out what novel you’re trapped in.”
The Toast created clever satires of the literary and generic conventions of both particular authors—Hemingway, Austen, the Brontës—and specific genres—“signs you are about to be in a gay subplot in a period drama,” “how to tell if you are in a regency romance novel,” etc.—in short listicles.
The above list was created by students in a course focused on English Revenge Tragedies. Most students submitted 3-5 suggestions during the opening exercise, and I compiled the list to create a more narrative flow. I also shared their “How to Tell If You Are in a Renaissance Revenge Tragedy” answers in a series of tweets (available via Storify): https://storify.com/ReadColleenK/revenge-sp-2017)
We will consider some of the most important recurring literary techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry: caesura, kennings, alliteration (see terms list below and sample passages below in PART 2)
Finally, we will turn to some of the missing text of Beowulf, and you will have an opportunity to reimagine and compose the missing lines, considering our discussions about translation and the literary conventions of this epic poem (PART 3).
“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?”
I hope to challenge prevailing beliefs and misconceptions about early modern bathing practices and hygienic rituals. My intervention here is based on 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 bathing found in these primary sources. In this first post, I tackle the concept of “bath” in the Renaissance.
Last week I reviewed the RSC’s U.S. production of Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary African nation-state. This week, I turn to the (partial inspiration) for this particular adaptation: Robben Island Bible.
Anyang’ Nyong’o covers the complicated history of studying Shakespeare (and other canonical English literature) in Kenya. Kenya gained its independence from Great Britain in 1963, which made Shakespeare’s works a source of contention–the words of the former colonizing power.
Malthouse Theatre & Melbourne Festival will present The Shadow King, an Aboriginal take on King Lear from October 11-27 at the Merlyn Theatre. Set in modern northern Australia, this production depicts Lear’s royal family and Gloucester’s noble line as two Indigenous families. The play will be performed in English and Kriol languages.
In the small island of Carriacou, a Grenadan dependency in the Lesser Antilles, a very special Shakespeare tradition entitled Shakespeare Mas or Pierrot occurs on Fat Tuesday.