Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays

162 Pages·2010·0.75 MB·English

Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays
ii Food in Shakespeare

This book is dedicated to my sister, Elizabeth Mason, for her hospitality.
Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays

Joan Fitzpatrick, University of Northampton
iv Food in Shakespeare
Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Familiar Extremes: The Case of Sir John Oldcastle 11
What Eating Too Much Meant to the Elizabethans 12
Shakespeare’s Belly God: 1 Henry 4 18
Foils to Sir John: 2 Henry 4 23
The Gaping Grave: 2 Henry 4, Henry V, and Merry Wives 29

2 Celtic Acquaintance and Alterity 37
Henry 5: Figs and Leeks 37
Macbeth and Poisoned Nutrients 44

3 Strange Diets: Vegetarianism and the Melancholic 57
As You Like It 57
The Vegetarian Option 58
Melancholy and Diet 61
A Christian Golden World 63
The Winter’s Tale 67
Leontes’s Condition 68
“Exit, pursued by a bear” 72
Vegetarian Feasts 76

4 Famine and Abstinence, Class War, and Foreign Foodstuff 81
Sir Thomas More 83
Close to Home: Dirt, Cannibalism, and the Stereotypes of Ireland 89
Coriolanus 93
Pericles 99

5 Beyond the Pale: Profane Consumption 105
Hamlet 105
Timon of Athens 113
Titus Andronicus 119
vi Food in Shakespeare
Conclusion 127

Notes 131
Works Cited 139
Index 155
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the University of Northampton for awarding me the study
leave which facilitated the writing of this book and for providing the funds which
enabled me to deliver a paper at the conference ‘Shakespeare and Philosophy in a
Multicultural World’ in Budapest in March 2004. I would also like to thank the
British Academy for the Overseas Conference Grant which enabled me to deliver a
paper at the annual meeting of the South Central Renaissance Association in
Malibu in March 2005. The latter enabled me also to consult the Huntington
Library. These trips directly enhanced chapters of this book. At these and other
conferences, conversations with Alan Sinfield, Patricia Parker, Jane Kingsley–
Smith, Claire Jowitt, Ceri Sullivan, and Robin Headlam Wells helped me form and
revise the ideas I present here.
Sections of chapters 4 and 5 appeared in the journals Early Theatre and
Connotations and I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint the
material here; what I say here about Munday (et al.) Sir Thomas More and
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus benefited from insightful feedback from their
anonymous readers. The anonymous reader from Ashgate made useful suggestions
regarding the book’s argument and improvements to the sample chapter; I thank
Erika Gaffney at Ashgate for her faith in the project from that early stage to
completion. I am very grateful indeed to Shawn Martin at the Text Creation
Partnership (TCP) project at the University of Michigan for providing searchable
electronic texts of books that are difficult to read (and impossible to search) in
printed form.
James Shaw and Kate Welch at the Shakespeare Institute Library provide a
world–class resource for early–modern scholars and most of this book was written
there. I am thankful that the Royal Shakespeare Company had the courage and
good taste to stage an outstanding production of Sir Thomas More in 2005, and for
recent productions of the plays considered in this book. I would also like to thank
Willy Maley and Lisa Hopkins for their general support over the years. Last, but
not least, I’d like to thank Gabriel Egan who encouraged some of my better ideas
and saved me from myself on some of the madder ones.

Introduction

This book is the first detailed study of food and feeding in Shakespeare’s plays. Its
purpose is to provide modern readers and audiences of Shakespeare with an
historically accurate account of the range of, and conflicts between, contemporary
views that informed the representations of food and feeding in the plays, in
particular views about diet. It is not an exhaustive study of the plays nor is it a
definitive study of food and feeding in the early modern period. It would be neither
possible nor desirable in a book–length study to provide the reader with a roller–
coaster ride through Shakespeare’s treatment of food and feeding and so my aim
has been to consider those plays I think most clearly signal Shakespeare’s interest
in food, specifically the sliding scale from the most ordinary to the most exotic
manifestations of food and feeding, and most clearly engage with some of the other
things being written about the subject prior to and during the early modern period.
The book began life as a study of food in Shakespeare and Elizabethan culinary
culture but it soon became clear that this was too large a topic for one book and so
the main, though by no means exclusive, focus is on Shakespeare and early modern
dietaries, outlined below. Also outlined below is the early modern perception of
Galen’s model of humoral theory which dominated early modern thinking about
how the body works and the role of diet. While it is crucial to understand the early
modern view of the body and humoral theory, and reference will be made to this
throughout the book’s main chapters, this is not a study of the humours or
medicine per se. Readers who desire more detailed analyses of the humours are
advised to consult studies by Gail Kern Paster and Jonathan Sawday who, amongst
others, have located early modern ideas of selfhood in the context of that period’s
understanding of the body (Paster 2004; Sawday 1995). While these studies have
served to advance our understanding of the complex relationship between
subjectivity, the body, and social structures regulating consumption in the
Renaissance they have not attended to contemporary dietary literature, an
immensely popular and influential genre. Ken Albala’s study provides an
important introduction to the genre (Albala 2002) but this book is the first to
explore early modern dietaries to better understand the uses of food and feeding in
Shakespeare’s drama.
In ancient physiological theory, still current in the early modern period, it was
believed that human personalities could be divided into four essential types
(sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic) derived from the four cardinal
humours. These were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black
2 Food in Shakespeare
bile); the variant mixtures of these humours in different persons determined their
‘complexions’, or ‘temperaments’, their physical and mental qualities, and their
dispositions. The ideal person had the ideally proportioned mixture of the four; a
predominance of one produced a person who was sanguine (Latin sanguis,
‘blood’), phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. In the early modern period Galen’s
model of humoral theory dominated. As late as 1653 Nicholas Culpepper’s
translation of, and commentary upon, Galen’s Art of physick outlined the specific
characteristics of each complexion, characteristics broadly typical of those outlined
in dietaries. The sanguine man or woman is considered one
in whose body heat and moisture abounds ... such are usually of a middle Stature, strong
composed Bodies, Fleshy but not Fat, great veins, smooth Skins, hot and moist in
feeling, their Body is Hairy, if they be Men they have soon Beards ... there is a redness
intermingled with white in their Cheeks, their hair is usually of a blackish brown, yet
sometimes flaxed, their Appetite is good, their Digestion quick. ... As for their
Conditions they are merry cheerful Creatures, bounteful, pitiful, merciful, courteous,
bold, trusty, given much to the games of Venus ... . (Galen & Culpepper 1653, F2v–F3r)
What the sanguine man should eat and drink and, perhaps more importantly, what
he should avoid eating and drinking, is also outlined:
They need not be very scrupulous in the quality of their Diet, provided they exceed not
in quantity, because the Digestive Vertue is so strong. Excess in small Beer engendreth
clammy and sweet Flegm in such Complexions, which by stopping the pores of the
Body, engenders Quotidian Agues, the Chollick and stone, and pains in the Back.
Inordinate drinking of strong Beer, Ale and Wine, breeds hot Rhewms Scabs and Itch,
St. Anthonies fire ... Inflamations, Feavers, and red pimples. Violent Exercise is to be
avoided because it inflames the Blood, and breeds one–day Feavers. (Galen &
Culpepper 1653, F2v–F3r)
The choleric man or woman is considered hot and dry, usually short, also hairy (at
least the men were), not fat, and with yellow, red, or blonde curly hair and tawny
skin; they also have a nasty disposition: “they dream of fighting, quarelling, fire,
and burning”, not especially surprising perhaps given that “they are usually
costive”, that is, constipated (Galen & Culpepper 1653, F3v). Such individuals are
advised to avoid fasting: “let such eat meates hard of Digestion, as Beef, Pork, &c.
and leave Danties for weaker Stomachs” (Galen & Culpepper 1653, F3v). The
moderate consumption of small, that is weak, beer “cools the fiery heat of his
Nature” but such a person should avoid wine and strong beer “for they inflame the
liver and breed burning and hectick feavers, Choller and hot Dropsies, and bring a
man to his Grave in the prime of his Age”. As with the sanguine person, too much
exercise is thought to be harmful. The melancholy person is considered cold and
dry “usually slender and not very tall” with little hair on their bodies and the hair
on their heads usually “dusky brown” in colour. They are prone to bad dreams and
“Covetous, self–lovers, cowards . . . fearful, careful, solitary . . . stubborn,