Food in Shakespeare

Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays

Joan Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317134312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

A study of common and exotic food in Shakespeare's plays, this is the first book to explore early modern English dietary literature to understand better the significance of food in Shakespearean drama. Food in Shakespeare provides for modern readers and audiences an historically accurate account of the range of, and conflicts between, contemporary ideas that informed the representations of food in the plays. It also focuses on the social and moral implications of familiar and strange foodstuff in Shakespeare's works. This new approach provides substantial fresh readings of Hamlet, Macbeth, As you Like It, The Winter's Tale, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Pericles, Timon of Athens, and the co-authored Sir Thomas More. Among the dietaries explored are Andrew Boorde's A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Healthe (1547), William Bullein's The Gouernement of Healthe (1595), Thomas Elyot's The Castle of Helthe (1595) and Thomas Cogan's The Hauen of Health (1636). These dieteries were republished several times in the early modern period; together they typify the genre's condemnation of surfeit and the tendency to blame human disease on feeding practices. This study directs scholarly attention to the importance of early modern dietaries, analyzing their role in wider culture as well as their intersection with dramatic art. In the dietaries food and drink are indices of one's position in relation to complex ideas about rank, nationality, and spiritual well-being; careful consumption might correct moral as well as physical shortcomings. The dietaries are an eclectic genre: some contain recipes for the reader to try, others give tips on more general lifestyle choices, but all offer advice on how to maintain good health via diet. Although some are more stern and humourless than others, the overwhelming impression is that of food as an ally in the battle against disease and ill-health as well as a potential enemy.

Chapter 1

Familiar Extremes: The Case of Sir John Oldcastle

1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4, Henry 5 and The Merry Wives of Windsor

In 1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4, and The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare’s fat knight, Sir John Oldcastle, commonly known as Falstaff, eats the kind of foodstuff that would have been familiar to most playgoers but in quantities setting him apart from the majority who could not afford to consume so much.1 Excessive consumption was denounced by early modern dietaries which focused on the harm over-eating did to the body, a tactic also often used by religious texts where the physical as well as the spiritual consequences of gluttony were outlined in an effort to encourage good Christians to avoid intemperance. As we shall see, excessive consumption of alcohol and food was often aligned with sexual excess, a phenomenon most fully developed in 2 Henry 4. Just as overeating was condemned, so too abstinence was considered harmful to the body and the soul: moderation in all things was a recurring focus. By considering what eating too much, and eating too little, meant to the Elizabethans in the context of early modern literature’s most infamous glutton we can perhaps uncover some of the conflicting attitudes toward the enjoyment of food and drink in the period. 1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4 and, briefly, Henry 5 are here considered together and as a group, with each play distinct yet building upon the last. The view held by Nicholas Grene that “each sequent play is written with a full consciousness of what has gone before, and this awareness of previous history shared by characters and audience becomes a part of the substance of the drama” (Grene 2002, 164), seems especially convincing when considering Sir John since knowledge of this figure from 1 Henry 4 encourages specific audience expectations in his subsequent appearance. This chapter will trace Sir John as an historical figure and compare this with his role in the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor as part of the contention that genre plays a part in the presentation of this important figure.2

Gregory the Great, the sixth century saint and Pope, formulated the seven deadly sins and listed the five ways by which one might commit the sin of gluttony: prae-propere: by eating too soon; laute: by eating too expensively; Nimis: by eating too much; Ardente: by eating too eagerly; Studiose: by eating too daintily (Delany 1909). The last meal enjoyed by Françoise Mitterrand, the former President of France, might be considered, even by those not particularly ascetic, as especially indulgent. In France it is illegal to hunt, buy, or eat ortolans (tiny birds, each around the size of a thumb) but Mitterrand, in the final stages of cancer, had arranged for three of the birds to be served at a New Year’s Eve dinner prepared for friends and family. The means of preparing and eating ortolan is at best exotic and at worst disgusting: the birds are over-fed, drowned in Armagnac, and eaten whole.3 Inspiration for the dish might lie with the nation’s long-standing relationship to decidedly visceral consumption. The food historian T. Sarah Peterson noted how, during the sixteenth century, the French, in an effort to emphasize their continuity with the culinary culture of classical antiquity consumed those parts of animals hitherto not commonly eaten and prepared ‘high’ or gamy meat cooked very rare: “Fashion setters crunched on ears; blood from meat nearly oozed from the mouth; livers silken with fat melted on the tongue; and the taste for pronouncedly high meat, decomposed to the fine point just this side of maggoty … was cultivated …” (Peterson 1994, 96). Yet a distinct lack of squeamishness when it came to food was not exclusive to the French in this period since, as Joan Thirsk pointed out, the English “ate every part of the animals that came their way: eyes, snouts, brains lungs, and feet, the noses, lips, and palates of calves and steers, ox cheeks, the udders and tongues of young cattle, and lambs’ stones” (Thirsk 1999, 13). In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus Tamora is informed by Titus that she “daintily hath fed” upon the flesh of her two sons, Demetrius and Chiron, which he has baked in a pie (5.3.60), an example of what I have termed profane consumption and which will be considered in detail in chapter 6. Sir John is never guilty of eating the exotic, be it the flesh of minute and rare birds or human flesh, but he is certainly guilty of Nimis, eating too much, and most likely guilty also of Praepropere, eating too soon, and Ardente, eating too eagerly.

What Eating Too Much Meant to the Elizabethans

In William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman Gula, or Gluttony, enters an alehouse on his way to attend confession. Here he drinks more than a gallon of ale before urinating and vomiting, a recurring feature of his sinful life which he later repents (5.304–391). Langland’s glutton is also an oath-maker, both “sin[s] of the mouth”, as J.A.W. Bennett pointed out (Langland 1976, 173n314). In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner, himself a vain and corrupt figure, describes the drunken antics of three young revellers who frequent taverns and prostitutes and, in an allusion to the forbidden fruit of Genesis (2:16), warns “O glotonye, ful of cursednesse! / O cause first of oure confusioun! / O original of oure dampnacioun” (Chaucer 1988, lines 498–500). He laments the pervasiveness of the sin, claiming that if a man knew how many miseries followed from excess and gluttony, he would be more moderate in his diet, and he describes the typical drunkard as ugly, with sour breath (512–20, 551–2). Readers of the Latin emblems of Andreas Alciatus would have found the sin represented by the guzzling pelican that feeds upon its own parent (Daly, Callahan & Cuttler 1985, no. 91, 96) while theatre audiences would have been familiar with the allegorical figure of gluttony from the morality tradition since the sin made an appearance in a range of plays including the anonymous Mary Magdalene, Henry Medwall’s Nature John Skelton’s Good Order and Thomas Lupton’s All for Money (Houle 1972). In the mid-1590s, playgoers at the Rose theatre could see Christopher Marlowe’s personification of the sin in Doctor Faustus:

GLUTTONY. Who, I, sir? I am Gluttony. My parents are all dead, and the devil a penny they have left me but a bare pension, and that is thirty meals a day, and ten bevers—a small trifle to suffice nature. O, I come of a royal parentage. My grandfather was a gammon of bacon, my grandmother a hogshead of claret wine. My godfathers were these: Peter Pickle-herring and Martin Martlemas-beef. O, but my godmother, she was a jolly gentlewoman, and well beloved in every good town and city; her name was Mistress Margery March-beer. Now, Faustus, thou hast heard all my progeny, wilt thou bid me to supper?

FAUSTUS. No, I’ll see thee hanged. Thou wilt eat up all my victuals.

GLUTTONY. Then the devil choke thee!

FAUSTUS. Choke thyself, glutton!

(Marlowe 1993, ‘A-Text’ 2.3.140–154)

But nowhere is the figure of Gluttony delineated with such characteristic attention to detail and liveliness than in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene when the seven deadly sins parade through Lucifera’s court (1.4.18–37). Lucifera is a demonic queen who resides in the House of Pride and herself embodies that particular sin, the others represented by her six counsellors. The first of these is Idlenesse and after him comes Gluttony:

Deformed creature, on a filthie swyne,

His belly was vp-blowne with luxury,

And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne,

And like a Crane his necke was long and fyne,

With which he swallowd vp excessiue feast,

For want whereof poore people oft did pyne;

And all the way, most like a brutish beast,

He spued vp his gorge, that all did him deteast.

(1.4.21.2–9)

‘Gluttony’ derives from the Latin gluttio, to swallow or gulp down (Glare 1968, ‘gluttio’), but pleasure can be just as important to the glutton as rapid consumption and Spenser alludes to Philoxenus from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics who longed to have the neck of a crane so that he might enjoy his food for longer before it entered his stomach (Aristotle 1952, 331). In Spenser’s figure the focus appears to be on nimis, eating too much, but the other features of gluttony are implied also. Gluttony included excessive drinking as well as an excessive interest in food and so it is fitting that Spenser’s Gluttony, “In greene vine leaues … right fitly clad” (1.4.22.1), should resemble Dionysus, the ivy-wreathed Greek god of wine and intoxication. Spenser’s Gluttony suffers a swollen belly, swollen eyes (an allusion to the psalm “Their eyes stand out with fatness”, 73.7), and excessive sweating. Yet gluttony causes more than mere discomfort:

Full of diseases was his carcas blew,

And a dry dropsie through his flesh did flow:

Which by misdiet daily greater grew:

(1. 4.23.6–8)

As we saw in the introduction, Galenic theory argued that disease was a consequence of humoral disruption and although dropsy was a rather loosely used term in the period (Forbes 1979, 139), the condition—an accumulation of watery fluid in the serous cavities or the connective tissue of the body (OED dropsy n. 1. a)—was generally understood to be provoked by excessive drinking which, ironically, caused an insatiable thirst as well as a distended stomach. In “The Discovery of the Little World” from Microcosmos John Davies referred to the “many dropsy-drie [who] forbeare to drincke / Because they know their ill ‘twould aggravate” (Davies 1603, H2v) and in Thomas Dekker’s If This be not a Good Play, the Diuell is in It, the devil Lurchall says that a lake “cannot slake” the thirst of one of his victims, nor the seas “quench his dropsie” (5.4.255–8). In Dante’s Inferno Master Adam is described as

one shaped like a lute, if only he had been cut short at the groin from the part where a man is forked. The heavy dropsy which, with its ill-digested humor, so unmates the members that the face does not answer to the paunch, made him hold his lips apart, like the hectic who, for thirst, curls the one lip toward the chin and the other upwards. (Alighieri 1971, 30.49)

Like Adam who cannot “move one inch in a hundred years” (Alighieri 1971, 30.79), Spenser’s Gluttony is physically disabled by his indulgence: “Vnfit he was for any worldly thing, / And eke vnhable once to stirre or go” (1.4.23.1–2): he is too fat to walk.4

The early moderns would have been familiar with stories about ancient Roman gluttony at banquets, described by, amongst others, Pliny the Elder and Seneca the Younger, and severely condemned by the satirist Marcus Varro although, as Ludwig Friedlander pointed out, we should bear in mind that there may have been some exaggeration about the extent and profligacy of Roman feasting (Friedlander 1908, 150). Petronius’s Satyricon describes a seemingly never-ending feast with numerous courses, all of them described in great detail, for example:

first we had a pig crowned with a wine-cup, garnished with honey cakes, and liver very well done, and beetroot of course, and pure wholemeal bread … . The next dish was a cold tart, with excellent Spanish wine poured over warm honey. Indeed I ate a lot of the tart, and gave myself such a soaking of honey. … There was a piece of bear on a side dish. Scintilla was rash enough to taste it, and nearly brought up her own inside. I ate over a pound myself, for it tasted like proper wild boar. … To finish up with we had cheese mellowed in new wine, and snails all round, and pieces of tripe, and liver in little dishes, and eggs in caps, and turnip, and mustard, and a dish of forcemeat. (Petronius 1930, 126–7)

Petronius is criticizing the excess of his fellow-Romans, and so too the stoic Seneca warns against those who misunderstand “how sober and abstemious the ‘pleasure’ of Epicurus really is” and indulge in excessive eating and drinking:

The man who has plunged into pleasures, in the midst of his constant belching and drunkenness, because he knows that he is living with pleasure, believes that he is living with virtue as well; for he hears first that pleasure cannot be separated from virtue, then dubs his vices wisdom, and parades what ought to be concealed. (Seneca 1935, 129; 12.1–4)

References to the regular use of emetics by Roman authors and the belief that Romans used vomitoriums at their feasts suggests a people who had given utter abandonment to sensual pleasure.5 Even if we take into account Freidlander’s view that the use of emetics after meals “was then a usual dietetic, like bleeding and purging with our forbears” (Friedlander 1908, 154), the belief that Romans ate so much at a feast that they had to vomit in order to make room for more food and drink would have made a strong impression upon those Christians who followed the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and thought gluttony “the gravest of sins” (Aquinas 1968, 125). Perhaps with the Roman use of emetics in mind, Aquinas noted: “Though vomiting is good when we have eaten overmuch, yet it is sinful to subject oneself to the necessity by lack of moderation” (Aquinas 1968, 133).

The sin of gluttony was regularly condemned from the pulpit in the medieval and early modern period. In the Epistle to the Romans Saint Paul warns: “For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple” (16:18). Similarly Proverbs advises “Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: / For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags” (23:20–21). One should avoid the example of Noah, the first man allowed viticulture, who gets drunk and naked in Genesis (9:20): human consumption of wine has divine approval after the Flood (as does human consumption of animal flesh), but Noah overdoes it. Ecclesiastes states “Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” (10: 17) and when the same book advises “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour” (2: 24), the suggestion is that the immoderate consumption of food and drink should be avoided, not consumption per se, and that industry guards against any inclination to over-indulgence.

The Elizabethan Homyly Against Gluttonie and Dronkennes echoes these biblical admonitions and cites many more but makes a specific link between gluttony and other kinds of excess, warning that God

greuously … punisheth the immoderate abuse of those his creatures whiche he ordeyned to the mayntenaunced of this our needy lyfe, as meates, drynkes, and apparell. And agayne, to shewe the noysome diseases and great mischiefes that commonly doe folowe them that inordinately geue vp them selues to be caryed headlong with suche pleasures as are ioyned eyther with daintie and ouerlarge fare, or else with costly and sumptuous apparell. (Church of England 1563, Oo2r)

The reference to apparel is problematic since what was appropriate in dress was dictated by rank and reinforced by sumptuary laws: those higher up the social scale were permitted to dress more sumptuously than their social inferiors. The message of the homily apparently conflicts with such laws by claiming that, regardless of rank, one should avoid excessive interest in all worldly things, something later made clear: “Saint Paule teacheth vs, whether wee eate or drynke, or whatsoeuer we do, to do all to the glorye of God” (Church of England 1563, Oo6r). The belief seems to be that one sin will lead to another: “If the Israelites had not geuen themselues to belly cheare, they had neuer so often fallen to Idolatrie” (Church of England 1563, Oo5r) and there is, moreover, a sense that inordinate desire for food and drink can lead one to neglect the compassion owed to one’s fellow-man:

Had not the ryche glutton ben so greedely geuen to the pamperyng of his belly, he woulde neuer haue ben so vnmercyfull to the poore Lazarus, neyther had he felt the tormentes of the vnquenchable fyre. What was the cause that GOD so horriblye punyshed Sodome and Gomorra? was it not theyr proude banquettyng and continuall idlenesse, which caused them to bee so lewde of lyfe, and so vnmercyfull towards the poore? What shall we now thynke of the horrible excesse, whereby so manye haue peryshed, and ben brought to destruction? (Church of England 1563, Oo5v)

The sermon then appeals to those not convinced by the argument that gluttony is a sin against God by focusing on its physical effects:

It hurteth the body, it infecteth the mynde, it wasteth the substaunce, and is noyfull to the neyghbours … . Oft commeth sodayne death by banquettyng, sometyme the membres are dissolued, and so the whole body is brought into a miserable state. He that eateth and drynketh vnmeasurablye, kyndleth oft tymes suche an vnnaturall heate in his body, that his appetite is prouoked thereby to desyre more than it shoulde, or els it ouercommeth his stomacke, and fylleth all the bodye full of sluggyshnes, makes it vnlustye and vnfytte to serue either God or man, not nourshyng the body, but hurting it, and laste of all, bryngeth many kyndes of incurable diseases, whereof ensueth sometymes desperate death. (Church of England 1563, Oo6v)

The sin of gluttony will inevitably lead to lust: “So surfettyng and dronkennes bytes by the belly, and causeth continuall gnawyng in the stomacke, brynges men to whoredome and lewdenesse of harte, with daungers vnspeakable …” (Church of England 1563, Oo7v). Too much drinking also harms the mind, causing men to be “strycken with fransie” [frenzie], driven to “nere madnesse” or to become “brutyshe and blockyshe” (Church of England 1563, Oo7v). There is a specific warning that “amonge all sortes of men, excessiue drynkyng is more intollerable in a magistrate or man of aucth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Familiar Extremes: The Case of Sir John Oldcastle
• 2 Celtic Acquaintance and Alterity
• 3 Strange Diets: Vegetarianism and the Melancholic
• 4 Famine and Abstinence, Class War, and Foreign Foodstuff
• 5 Beyond the Pale: Profane Consumption
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index