'Beginning to Smell Gamey'

 “I have always found the atmosphere of Twelfth Night a bit whiffy.” 

That hasn’t been my experience. I think of Twelfth Night as second- or third-tier Shakespeare, enjoyable, often linguistically interesting, occasionally amusing but a universe away from Lear. The judgment above is Auden’s in “Music in Shakespeare” (The Dyer’s Hand, 1962). In his Lectures on Shakespeare (2000), Auden writes: “The society in Twelfth Night is beginning to smell gamey.”

 

Auden seems fixated on stink. The OED tells us whiffy means “having an unpleasant smell” and cites Auden’s usage, as well as Melville’s in Mardi: “A pithy, whiffy sentence or two.” Think of our synonyms for foul-smelling: stinky, mephitic, funky, malodorous, reeking, rank, smelly, fetid, frowsty. Odoriferous originally meant pleasant-smelling but has evolved to mean “strong-smelling; odorous.”

 

More than thirty years ago I wrote a newspaper feature story about jobs in which workers had to deal with foul odors, including garbage collectors. This was before emptying trash bins had been automated. I rode midsummer on the back of a truck with the crew and noticed that a steady stream of fluid leaked from under the compactor compartment at the rear onto the pavement. In my story I described it as “noisome brown juice,” and the copy editor loved that.

    

Joyce in Ulysses reminds us of the interrelatedness of taste and smell: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

 

Yiddish, predictably, has the most evocative adjective for a bad smell: farshtunken. And I see there's even a Farshtunken Sandwich: three kinds of herring and raw red onion on a buttered bagel.