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Shakespeare: 'Macbeth' (Judi Dench) - sleepwalking scene Judi Dench ... Lady Macbeth Denyse Alexander ... Gentlewoman John Woodnutt ... Doctor from the 1979 TV version of the Trevor Nunn production by the Royal Shakespeare Company from 'Shakespeare's Work' (1847) by Gulian Crommelin Verplanck: It was, I believe, Madame de Staël, who said, somewhat extravagantly, that the smell is the most poetical of the senses. It is true that the more agreeable associations of this sense are fertile in pleasing suggestions of placid, rural beauty, and gentle pleasures. Shakespeare, Spencer, Ariosto, and Tasso abound in such allusions. Milton, especially, who luxuriates in every variety of 'odorous sweets' and 'grateful smells', delighted sometimes to dwell on the 'sweets of groves and fields', the native perfumes of his own England--'The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, Or Dairy'-- and sometimes pleasing his imagination with the 'gentle gales' laden with 'balmy spoils' of the East; and breathing--'Sabean odours from the spicy shores of Araby the blest'. But the smell has never been successfully used as a means of impressing the imagination with terror, pity, or any of the deeper emotions, except in this dreadful sleep-walking scene of the gulty Queen, and in one parallel scene of the Greek drama, as wildly terrible as this. It is that passage of the 'Agamemnon' of Aeschylus, where the captive prophetess, Cassandra, wrapt in visionary inspiration, scents first the smell of blood, and then the vapours of the tomb breathing from the palace of Atrides, as ominous of his apporaching murder. go here to see that scene of Cassandra from 'Agamemnon' (the chorus speaks of her smelling): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPikNIfBGIo Source: youtube |
