Bartholomew Fair’s Olfactory Cross-Mappings

Abstract

This chapter explores the various olfactory cross-mappings at work in Ben Jonson’s city comedy Bartholomew Fair as a case study for understanding the material and perceptual interaction between space, performance, and audience in the early modern theatre. It uncovers how the audience was implicated in creating the olfactory environment of the theatre: the theatre’s smellscape was a result of their bodily presence and the olfactory affordances of the material environment as well as of the audiences’ perceptual experience of them and the associations and memories such smells evoked for them. The chapter argues that cross-mappings, supported by olfactory signatures of particular places, are a dramaturgic principle of Bartholomew Fair, which deftly employs the affordances of the theatre as an olfactory environment which is jointly created by actors, props, and audience, in a performance that infuses inanimate matter with the spirit of theatricality.