A little soft soaping
OUT, damned spot,’ cries Lady Macbeth in Act V, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. Perhaps if the Bard’s conniving villain hadn’t been sleepwalking and mimicking washing to rid her hands of the blood of Duncan, the playwright would have had her scrubbing her palms with a scented soap made from olive oil—the preserve of the wealthy in Jacobean England. By 1606, when this famous ‘washing’ scene was crafted, soap is likely to have been in use for in excess of 4,000 years, with the Babylonians reputed to have(soap in late Latin) made from tallow and ashes in his (77 AD ).
