ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a peculiar relationship between early modern ideas of smell and the dramatic rendition of urban space through its material constituents. In depicting the imagined urban buildings and bodies as undeniably solid, dramatic references to odors further emerged as important means for channeling concerns over the material health of London's massive organism at the turn of the seventeenth century. The dramatists appear to have been disturbed by the more restricted character of freshness and openness at the turn of the seventeenth century when the city perimeter became overcrowded with bodies and buildings. The Puritan chiefly imagines the enclosed spaces of London through the archicon of restriction, the prison. In this process, each work also suggests that it is possible to recover a peculiar olfactory topography in drama, one which interrogates the character and nature of the city's interiors. During the English Renaissance the notion of any olfactory'essence', though, was laden with controversies.