Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the PlaysA 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. |
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... Roman. Coriolanus's sense of self is located in his stoicism, a philosophy that aimed to decouple the human mind from the body, something he shares with Shakespeare's More, but whereas More's detachment is heroic, in Coriolanus ...
... Roman savagery via allusion to the Roman Catholic belief that they eat the body of Christ. Although, as Michael Schoenfeldt noted, George Herbert identified consumption of the Eucharist as a the ultimate nutritive act (Schoenfeldt 1999 ...
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
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Contents
11 | |
Celtic Acquaintance and Alterity | 37 |
Vegetarianism and the Melancholic | 57 |
Famine and Abstinence Class War and Foreign Foodstuff | 81 |
Profane Consumption | 105 |
Conclusion | 127 |
Index | 155 |