Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 153174, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00584.

Shakespeare and Food: A Review Essay

David B. Goldstein*
York University

Abstract

The study of food in Shakespeare does not constitute a coherent body of criticism;
indeed, for some it barely counts as a legitimate one. As of this writing, only one
book specifically devoted to the subject has been published; the most important
work exists in scattered articles. Yet since at least 1935, authors have noted the
ubiquity and power of food in Shakespeares work. This article reviews the
critical literature on the subject, emphasizing recent scholarship, and asks why
interest in food as a topic of analysis is, and should be, increasing in Shakespeare
studies.

Introduction
The study of food in Shakespeare does not constitute a coherent body of
criticism. For some it barely counts as a legitimate one. As of this writing,
only one book specifically devoted to the subject has been published; the
most important work exists in miscellaneous articles. All too frequently, in old
writers as well as new, we run up against the truisms that Shakespeares
references to the customs of the table are but few and scattered (Rothschild 195), that drink was more interesting than food to him (Thirsk
88), and that one would do better to pursue questions of eating in the
works of the epicurean Ben Jonson than in those of his rival. And it is
true that Jonson, along with a handful of contemporaries such as Coryat,
Dekker, Marston, and Herrick, provides us with a particularly rich trove
of culinary and digestive subject matter, figuration, and philosophy. Bruce
Boehrer, in The Fury of Mens Gullets, demonstrated the intrinsic importance of digestion in Jonsons work. But while Jonson does foreground
food and its attendant activities eating, digestion, excretion, purgation
more overtly than Shakespeare, or indeed than nearly anybody else,
attention to the one has tended to dampen discussion of the other. Shakespeare has a great many things to say to us about food, and they are
different things from Jonson, if we would only listen.
The notion that Shakespeare has little to say about food compared to
his contemporaries is one side of the story, but ultimately not a very
compelling one. In fact, assertions of the ubiquity and power of food in
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154 Shakespeare and Food

Shakespeares work find deep roots in the critical tradition, dating back at
least seventy years (see below). And more recently, emerging discourses
on women, the body, and domesticity have watered the ground for a
growth spurt in thinking about questions of food. We may say of the field
what Stephen Mennell and his coauthors wrote of sociology fifteen years
ago:
Until quite recently, few sociologists have given much attention to food and
eating as topics of serious intellectual interest. . . . [One] reason may be that
food has long belonged to the domestic sphere, formed part of womens work,
and thus seemed of lower status than the public spheres of the economy and
polity; sociologys search for respectability in the academy was perhaps for a
long time unlikely to be furthered by investigations of such unprestigious
activities as cooking. (1)

This is by now an oft-told narrative, in literary studies as in other disciplines,

but it bears recollecting. The recent critical engagement with aspects of
humanity traditionally conceived as unprestigious an incomplete list of
those under current analysis in the field would include sex, women,
domesticity, nonverbal practice, physicality and bodily knowledge, nonliterary texts (or more properly, texts that are not self-consciously literary),
manuscripts, low culture, ephemera, and racial, ethnic, and religious
others leads us readily to food, which touches upon all these facets of
culture. But it is also important to recognize, contra Mennells formulation,
that in talking about food we are always talking about the center as well
as the periphery, the public spheres of the economy and polity as well as
the lower status of women and the home. The public and private spheres
of Renaissance existence are separable only according to the crudest of
viewpoints; they are more properly conceived as zones of multivalent
experience that undergo constant interchange and mutual transformation.
To study food is thus to privilege both margin and center, or to collapse
the two. Hamlet, as he so often does, indicates this collapse when, blurring
the boundaries between consuming and consumed, personal and political,
he describes Polonius as being not where he eats, but where a is eaten;
a certain convocation of politic worms are een at him (4.3.1921).1
Still, work on food lags behind writing about other discourses of the
body in Shakespeare, such as sex and medicine, as well as writing about
food in other periods and disciplines. Major studies such as Maggie
Kilgours From Communion to Cannibalism, Michel Jeannerets A Feast of
Words, Terrence Caves The Cornucopian Text, and Wendy Walls Staging
Domesticity, all form a sophisticated theoretical and practical grounding for
understanding the importance of food-related issues in English and
European Renaissance literature, but interestingly none of these works
addresses Shakespeare himself at any length (Walls book discusses both
food and Shakespeare, but rarely food in Shakespeare). Studies of food in
eighteenth century and romantic literature have steadily gained traction
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Shakespeare and Food 155

(e.g., Gigante; Morton), and the range of work on post-colonial and

modern food in literary and cultural studies is now too vast to enumerate
here. French, Italian, and Spanish critics have developed a lively discourse
on food in Renaissance studies and elsewhere. Beyond our own discipline,
scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, and other fields now publish
widely on issues of food and eating. Strikingly, such scholars turn often
to literature for insights into the cultural meanings of food, but rarely do
they turn to actual literary critics when thinking through multi-disciplinary
questions. The anthropologist Mary Douglas compared the structure of
the meal to poetic verse (7980), and Claude Lvi-Strauss argued that
food was best comprehended through an understanding of metaphor (Raw
34942). E. N. Anderson, in his recent survey of culinary anthropology,
follows suit by making numerous references to literary works, but he does
not appear to find it useful to consult scholars of those works. Literary
critics eat and write about eating too, and should consider demanding a
place at the table.
Analyses of food in Shakespeares plays and poems are scattered
throughout the critical and interdisciplinary landscape like Hansel and
Gretels breadcrumbs, beckoning any scholar to head off into meadow and
forest to gather their fragmentary evidence. To define a field by accretion
is problematic when the field is so new indeed, so new as not to be a
field at all. The following discussion aims neither to define a fixed thing
in retrospect, nor to codify a collection of ideas that fittingly resist codification. It rather tries to be formative, to glimpse a shaping of disparate
approaches, a flitting movement through the trees. Further, I have by no
means attempted to include all extant work on the subject, but will rather
seek to give a sense of the range, focus, and flow of the most substantial
approaches. And for all its latency and infancy, the study of food in
Shakespeare does exhibit recognizable contours.
My chief contention here will be the (I suspect) provocative claim that
nearly all critics of food in Shakespeare are concerned ultimately with the
relationship between eating and ethics, whether or not they discuss that
relationship explicitly. Thinking about food, I will suggest, lends itself
directly to thinking about the ethical subject, about obligation and
otherness. Critics of food in Shakespeare almost inevitably find themselves
addressing such issues, approaching food as an ethical intervention into the
domain of the subject, one which forces the subject both to define itself
and to articulate its relation to any number of others and objects. The
fundamental question of food in Shakespeare is one of obligation: of the
self to itself, of the self to animate and inanimate others, and ultimately,
of the self to the divine limit that Emmanuel Levinas called the absolutely
other . However, since the question of ethics in food is rarely explored
as such, there has been very little attention given among Shakespeareans
as to why food and ethics afford a close pairing, or how ethics signifies
in relation to food. Although this is not the place to analyze the reasons
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156 Shakespeare and Food

for the pairing, I hope at least to remedy the fact that the ethical foundation of food studies in Shakespeare as well as in literature more generally
has gone mostly unnoticed.
In order to help give a sense both of the state of Shakespearean food
criticism and to gesture toward some of the questions it has yet to ask, in
this survey I will group authors into five rough affinities, along with the
caveats that most of the critics here straddle more than one grouping,
some dont really fit into any of them, and no grouping can communicate
the richness of the range of individual works. These groups I shall call
image analysis; sex and gender; economy; science, religion, and the body;
and synthesis.2 But while the works here attend to food from a variety of
different perspectives, I will contend that nearly all critics of Shakespeare
and food are occupied with ethical concerns. Each author here struggles,
in one form or another, with the basic question of what it means to eat
another living thing.
Why Food?
Before questioning the shape of field or forest, it is worth asking an even
more basic question: why should we concern ourselves at all with the
notion of a distinct inquiry into the study of food in Shakespeare? Is food
an appropriate hermeneutic?
Let us consider several answers, the first of which is purely practical.
Interest in food has increased dramatically of late for a variety of reasons
that perhaps include the decline of kitchen-learning as an assumed element
of female knowledge, the increased acceptability of cooking as an amateur
pursuit for men (it has always been an acceptable professional one), the
increasing divergence between food producers (e.g., farmers and ranchers)
and consumers, the publicizing of the negative impact of industrial food
policies, and an increase in certain kinds of leisure time throughout the
industrialized world. From the success of individual entrepreneurs like
Martha Stewart and media ventures such as the TV Food Network, to
the rise in the market share of cookbooks, to the popularity of food
journalists and academics like Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and Eric
Schlosser, to the explosion of scholarly writing about food in other
disciplines, awareness among both scholars and the general public of the
politics and aesthetics of food has expanded. As interest and information
about food increase, it stands to reason that our own field will respond to
these concerns in multifarious ways.
A second reason why food is emerging as a legitimate object of study
also helps explain the multiplicity of current approaches, both in Shakespeare and in literary studies generally. This reason stems from the fact
that food is not precisely an object, a thing one simply eats, digests, and
excretes. It is more properly a function or relationship, inhabiting a nexus
between earth and human, idea and sustenance, divinity and mundanity,
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ideology and instrument. Food has no a priori existence; a food only

becomes a food when created as such. A cow becomes beef when it is
translated into culturally legible nutriment, a transformation that includes
not only ranching, butchering, packaging, cooking, and presentation, but
also the psychic work of establishing divisions between things we imagine
as food and things we dont (witness the dog in North America as compared
with the Philippines, or the cow in Hindu India as compared with North
America). Depending upon choices made in that cows preparation and
presentation, the resulting beef may function in many ways, may share in
one or another complex code. (For structuralist analyses of food as code,
see Barthes; Lvi-Strauss, Culinary Triangle; Douglas). It may carry a set
of relationships relating to strategies of power, as does the piece of beef
and mustard with which Grumio and Petruchio torture Katherine in
Taming of the Shrew (4.3.23). It may reinforce patriarchal and gender
boundaries, as in Adrianas association of cooking with housewifely duty
in The Comedy of Errors; or it may disturb them, as in Lady Macbeths
willful transubstantiation of her milk to gall. It may trace a politics of
commensality, as in The Merry Wives of Windsors proper country suppers,
or much darker contours of xenophobia, as in Shylocks rejection of
Christian Venice on account, among other things, of pork-eating. It may
communicate information about regional or national identity, as in the
Duke of Orleans comment about the English being shrowdly out of beef
on the night before Agincourt (H5 3.7.152). It may mark class tensions, as
in the plebian struggles of Coriolanus. In addition to such content-related
issues, thinking about food also and perhaps especially elicits questions
of form, such as the rhetorical function of the grocery list in 1 Henry IV,
or the Eucharistic implications of the cannibalism of Titus Andronicus, or
the relation between devourment and satire in Troilus and Cressida. In any
case, food is less a fixed object than a range of functions or a shifting set
of signifiers, somewhat the way clothes on and off the early modern stage
served as signifiers for complex determinations about status and gender
( Jones and Stallybrass), but perhaps still more complex, since food is
ingested rather than worn, literally becoming the body that consumed it.
To interpret the multiple significations of food in a literary context, one
must remain open to a certain methodological flexibility.
This process of literal and figurative transformation brings us to a third
way in which food is hard to discuss in clearly bounded terms. For food
is not only involved in production and consumption, but in the material
formation of the human being it creates the materials out of which the
body is constructed. As Leon Kass puts it, the edible object is thoroughly
transformed by and re-formed into the eater (26). The early moderns
were of course well aware that we are, in manifold senses, what we eat,
and that what we eat becomes what we are. In fact, Renaissance thinkers
took this idea one step further, imagining us as devourers of ourselves. As
Sir Thomas Browne informs us,
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158 Shakespeare and Food

We are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely
of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for
all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouth: this frame
wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured
our selves. (qtd. in Hillman 70)

The act of human eating, according to Browne, is inherently reflexive: we

consume ourselves because we have mouths. Food effects the transformation
of the outside world into the human body, serving as a reminder that
otherness is really another word for sameness.3 Food is a conduit of
biological and cultural meaning rather than a static fact, and it is a way
both of shaping and destroying the self. Whenever we eat, we devour our
selves.
Brownes insight about cannibalism opens a window into a fourth
major reason why the study of food in early modernity is so complex,
and that is its association with religion. Much writing on the Eucharist in
early modern England focuses on doctrinal arguments without addressing
that the Eucharist was, at its core, a morsel and a sip. The notion that a
bite of food might have transubstantive and cannibalistic properties produced much consternation in Tudor-Stuart England, providing both a
rallying point for Protestant disgust of Catholicism and a transcendent
term of faith for embattled Catholics. Stephen Greenblatt chronicles the
culinary consequences of Eucharistic belief in his essay The Mousetrap,
which examines what he terms the problem of the leftover, or the fact
that a wafer can at once constitute a perfect spiritual act and a material
substance that might accidentally be eaten by, say, a mouse (Gallagher and
Greenblatt 144). The consequences of the Eucharistic wobble, the liminal
space between the eternal and the ephemeral, may be life-threatening (as
in the case of martyrs like Anne Askew) or metaphysically confounding
as in the case, Greenblatt suggests, of Hamlet. In denying transubstantiation,
the Reformation did not solve the problem, but rather distributed it across
the entire discourse of food via metaphors of community, using the
notion of breaking bread to signify the national body of worshippers.
This approach to food may be said to culminate in the personified Houses
of Pride and Temperance of Spensers Faerie Queene. But the tension
between community and physical decay between the whole and the
leftover permeates the language of food in Shakespeare as well.
In his defense of the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of literature, Leslie
Fielder writes that Literary criticism is always becoming something
else, for the simple reason that literature is always something else
(564). The same may be said of food, and this I believe is the final and
most pointed answer to the question Why food? Food is by definition
liminal. It is always on the way to being transformed into something else
through digestion, metaphor, or other biological and cultural mechanisms.
In the way that literature is always pointing away from itself to the world,
so food engages in the same process, but on an even more global level.
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Shakespeare and Food 159

To investigate food is to investigate the motions and notions of culture. It

is perhaps because of this opening out of food that most critics in this
survey do not tend to analyze food in Shakespeare for its own sake; they
ask not Why food? but rather Where does food get us? Food opens a
window the window of the mouth into speech, violence, desire,
power. Whatever their methodologies, critics approach food as a way of
entering a crucial set of concerns about the limits and contours of the
human. They ask, How can we glimpse, through the operation of food,
a broader discourse such as economy, gender, the body, race? By now
it may be clear that I do not necessarily believe that any of these discourses are broader than that of food, but that all of them are imbricated
in food; they are, however, rather more privileged in the current critical
environment. But when critics are drawn to food because it tells us about
something else, they are acknowledging that food is both at the core of
existence and, because of this, opens the individual to all other relationships: eating necessarily implies and illuminates the relation of one animal
to other living beings (Kass 11). And it is this implication of relationship
that in turn opens the study of food to the realm of ethics. The question
of where boundaries are drawn between humans and other humans,
and between humans and other animals, always involves judgments about
obligations to and rejection of those others. As Elspeth Probyn puts it,
eating allows us to rethink the ethics of bodies (3). For Levinas, ethics
literally begins with eating: Only a subject that eats can be for-the-other
(74).
The Critics
image analysis

We may properly begin our survey with the 1935 publication of Caroline
Spurgeons Shakespeares Imagery and What It Tells Us. Spurgeon inaugurates
the first category of research I outlined in the introduction, that of image
analysis. Her marriage of New Criticism with what she terms psychology
(not to be confused with psychoanalysis) leads her to an interest in the
furniture of [Shakespeares] mind, in what the stuff of images tells
us . . . first as helping to reveal to us the man himself, and secondly as
throwing fresh light on the individual plays (4, 11). Spurgeon, whose
work consists mainly of cataloguing and grouping images, but who also
explores relations between images that shed fresh light, makes three
discoveries relevant to any survey. First, she identifies food, drink, eating,
and cooking as forming one of the largest constellation of images in the
Shakespearean corpus. Second, she argues that Shakespeares interest in
food is not only broad but deep: he exhibits both an extreme sensitiveness
about the quality, cooking, freshness and cleanliness of food (123) and a
profound knowledge of cooking: This work-a-day kitchen is, next to the
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160 Shakespeare and Food

orchard or garden, the atmosphere in which Shakespeares mind moved

most easily (115). Third, she sees that food is by and large used negatively
or darkly, a theme that will be picked up by most later critics (85).
Unfortunately, the limits of Spurgeons critical perspective are exposed by
her reductive interpretation of psychology in a literary context; she has been
ridiculed, for example, for arguing that one of Shakespeares image-clusters,
the dog-sugar-flattery grouping, stemmed from the playwrights personal
dislike of dogs (Morse 125; Jackson). This literal-minded reading has the
effect of obscuring her major contribution to an understanding of the
importance of food and drink imagery in the plays.
Spurgeons image-centered approach dominates, in one way or another,
many of the critics who follow her. Maurice Charneys work on Antony
and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, for example, showed that food forms a major
part of the image-structures of these entertainments. Charneys interest
was not so much in shedding light on Shakespeares psychology as in
uncovering the ways in which both verbal and non-verbal imagery
function in dramatic terms. Thus in Antony and Cleopatra, Charney argues,
food and drink play a central role in creating an important symbolic
contrast between Egypt and Rome, and convey information about
Cleopatras sexuality (102). In concert with references to disease, images
of food in Coriolanus serve as a commentary on the plebian-patrician
conflict and on the function of war as a devourer (157). Here, food
operates as a way of reinforcing symbolic networks within the drama that
in turn undergird the plays ultimate function as a work of theater.
One article deserving of special mention is Ruth Morses Unfit for
Human Consumption: Shakespeares Unnatural Food. A successor to
Spurgeons concern with image clusters and her interest in the dark side
of food, Morses article takes a synoptic and wide-ranging look at the
imagery of forbidden or nauseating food, and especially of cannibalism,
which appears in some form in nearly every one of the plays.4 Her
conclusions, however, take her in entirely different directions from Spurgeon:
her interests are in the intersection of gender, psychology, politics, and
ethics. In Shakespeares plays, Morse argues, objectionable ingestion
turns out to exhibit a particularly intimate relation to the themes of
witchcraft, madness, and treason (125). Morses approach is one of the
first to make explicit the ethical valences of food in Shakespeares plays.
For her, food images have a systematic force which stems from a central
concern with the divide between the human and the animal; in other
words, Shakespeare demonstrates the moral status of his characters by
means of showing us what and how they eat.
sex and gender

During the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, along with Shakespeare studies more
broadly, food scholarship turned away from the cataloguing impulse of
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earlier work toward more ideologically overt versions of image-criticism,

in which the operating assumptions of critical analysis are questioned, and
imagery is analyzed according to a particular methodology or applied to
a particular set of questions about human relationships. It is with these
approaches that we begin to see an explicitly ethical concern, though
often unacknowledged as such. Yet these revisionary efforts build securely
upon the foundations set by earlier critics even while breaking with them.
The first of these involves critics of sex and gender, especially those
influenced by psychoanalysis. The relationship of food to psychoanalytic
thought is mostly subterranean; although Freud identifies food as the
genesis of the pleasure principle (237), he proves vastly more interested in
food as a metaphor for sex than in its value qua food for the developing
ego. Later theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Anna Freud give more
careful study to the role of food in self-construction, but still nearly always
in the service of understanding sexuality. Thus it is not surprising that
Shakespearean psychoanalytic critics, when they explore metaphors and
images of food, do so on the way to insights about sex. Their answer to
Where does food get us? tends to be to a deeper understanding of sex
and gender.
Janet Adelmans influential essay on Coriolanus, which builds upon
Charneys work but takes his concerns in a different direction, combines
image-study with feminst psychoanalytic methodology to demonstrate the
close connections between food, femininity, and male vulnerability in the
play (14664).5 In Adelmans account, Coriolanus and Macbeth figure
maternal presence as devastating to the masculine identity of the son, [and]
strikingly figure theater as allied with this dangerous female presence
(163). Adelmans interest in food moves to the foreground at the close of
the essay, with her discussion of the ethical issue of the rigidity with which
Coriolanus draws boundaries among different groups. The taking in of
food, Adelman argues, following Freud, is the primary acknowledgement
of ones dependence on the world, and as such, it is the primary token
of ones vulnerability. But this openness to the world is reversed by
Coriolanuss mother Volumnia, who transforms the act of eating into an
aggressive expelling attitudes [that are] echoed perfectly in her son
(149). The result of this matrix of beliefs about feeding and dependence
is a play whose language works to define and separate, to limit, almost as
rigidly as Coriolanus himself does, a play that gives us a world of isolates
(164). Coriolanus, in Adelmans reading, uses food as a central image to
illustrate the destabilizing consequences of drawing uncompromising
boundaries between groups men and women, aristocrats and plebians.
Food becomes an object of disgust for Coriolanus because of its ability,
indeed its necessity, to cross such boundaries. Adelman frames this
boundary rigidity largely in gender terms, but her argument may be
generalized to all sorts of boundary-making; we will see Stanley Cavell
interpret her work in just this way.
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162 Shakespeare and Food

Another play that attracts critics of gender to questions of food is Timon

of Athens. A trio of articles in the 1980s set the terms for the debate.
Copplia Kahns approach, influenced by psychoanalysis, feminism, new
historicism, and image analysis, is the first to examine closely the plays
images of food and feeding. Kahn studies the pervasive rhetoric of orality
in the play to read Timon as a fantasy of maternal bounty and maternal
betrayal (136) in which the main characters prodigality, in Jody Greenes
summation of Kahns argument, becomes a compensatory and agonistic
attempt to usurp the place of the absent mother (179). Kahn goes on to
set the play against the backdrop of Stuart patronage as a circulation of
maternal bounty, signified by the nourishment of breast milk, in the
absence of an actual mother. Michael Chorost relies upon a more anthropological methodology, utilizing Marcel Mausss analysis of the Pacific
Northwest potlatch to figure Timon as a play about paternal rather than
maternal giftgiving. Jody Greene employs New Historicism and Queer
Theory in order to revise both critics by reading the plays food imagery
and language of orality in terms of sexual and economic consumption
a total consumption that reduces the bonds of alliance which tenuously
hold men together to nothing but a pile of waste (184). Greenes focus
is on how culinary language works to form a pessimistic discourse of
patronage in the play; she argues that images of feeding and breeding
literalize the grim suggestion . . . that parasitism, usury, and sodomy are
not indeed the nightmare mirror-image of Elizabethan sociopolitical and
economic relations, but are rather the truth of those relations (191). Thus
food gets us to the question of the interrelationships between gift-giving,
sodomy, and patronage. Although Greene seems to end her argument
with this interconnection, and although she dismisses what she terms
moral criticism of the play, her article nevertheless ends with a nod
toward the plays ethical terrain in terms of the obligation of one group
to another. [H]uman societies, writes Greene, have realized the absolute
necessity of the promise of mutual obligation and temporal duration
offered by giving with interest (191). Although Greene leaves this last
angle unexplored, it becomes a central concern of Daniel Rosss article
on the play, which traces images of culinary, sexual, and economic
consumption (in the earlier mode of image analysis) in order to argue that
Timon presents us with a bitterness about the ethical state of humanity
that is of a piece with King Lear. Whether the exchange be food, money,
or sex, giving with interest participates in a complex economy that is
also an ethical one Timon of Athens, we might say, renders the ethical
obligations of exchange through a particularly vivid critique of orality.
economy

As with Freud, so too Marx placed food issues at the center of his arguments about economy, only to dismiss them in favor of other relationships.
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Marx names eating, drinking, and procreating as a humans most animal

functions, those that bring the human closest to the nature from which
he or she lives. But because these three are such natural needs, Marx fails
to see them as also constructed, implicated in notions of economy, private
ownership, estrangement, and fetishism: they are what humans have left
once they have become estranged from their labor. In contemporary
society, where the most intimate aspects of food consumption have
become sites for spectacular acts of economic and political manipulation,
this should strike us as naive. But it may help explain why Marxist critics
and theorists have tended not to express interest in food as an object of
study. The great exceptions to this generalization are Mikhail Bakhtin and
Georges Bataille (Walter Benjamin also wrote widely about food, but
those works have only recently been translated into English). Although
Batailles influence in turn on Shakespeare criticism has been limited,
Bakhtins has been sizeable. Yet even Bakhtins ideological descendants
tend to shy away from food when discussing Shakespeare.
A case in point is Michael Bristols Funeral Bakd-Meats: Carnival
and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet, whose gastronomic title belies the actual
content of his argument. Bristol begins by arguing both that Hamlet
. . . typifies Shakespeares use of Carnival as the basis of his dramatic art,
and that food forms a fundamental element of that art: Meat is the link
between the living and the dead; in the wedding feast/funeral banquet
[of Act 1], the continuity of social life is affirmed over the finite individual
(350, 357). But Bristol only glances past the role of food in the play,
focusing instead upon the function of Claudius as a lord of misrule and
upon the festive process of the play as a whole. Chris Fitters examination
of Romeo and Juliet in relation to the grain harvests of 159497 (perhaps
the most catastrophic in English history) and the riots and famines they
triggered (157) contains a more thoroughgoing concern with food. Fitter
argues that Romeo and Juliet, with its food motif and its scenic juxtaposition
of hunger with careless patrician feasting, seems to refer to the climate
of anxiety of the late 1590s (159). Fitter is again asking the question of
where food gets us: The opposition of feasting and hunger that Shakespeare has woven through his play, he maintains, is but one element in
its sustained populist sensitization to social inequity (177). Food in
Romeo and Juliet provides one example of the ethical struggle over socioeconomic inequity that consumes its author, with his genius for moral
complication (163).
A somewhat fuller account of food in Shakespeare from an economic
perspective, but one which nevertheless reaches similar conclusions about
the connection between food and socio-economic pressures, may be
found in Kim Halls work on The Merchant of Venice. Food is not often
seen to play a major role in the image-landscape of The Merchant, but Hall,
who has written eloquently on other aspects of food in early modern
England, demonstrates its relevance to the play. Hall places the play within
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164 Shakespeare and Food

a context of dearth (the same terrible grain harvests Fitter notes), xenophobic racism (Elizabeth ordered all blacks recently brought into England
to be rounded up and returned in 1596), and nascent colonialism (one
of Richard Hakluyts arguments for colonization played upon the fear that
England might run out of food). In her reading, Shylocks close association
with the rhetoric of cannibalism as well as Lancelots accusation that
Jessicas conversion to Christianity will raise the price of hogs indicates
a pervasive fear in the play of a society in danger of running out of food
and eating up itself a fear that is then marshaled to justify the oppression
of racial and cultural others within the play. Hall spends only a few pages
on the rhetoric of eating in the play, moving rapidly toward the more
trammeled critical ground of The Merchants economic language. For Hall,
the answer to the question of where food gets us in the play is that it
crystallizes the relation between economy and xenophobia in Shakespeares England, and shows us how the play negotiates the ethical issues
inherent in drawing lines between different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups.
science, religion, and the body

If the fourth grouping seems particularly motley, such a lumpy section

title belies the fact that all of the approaches discussed here share three
concerns: discourses of the body (especially humoralism), the methodology
of New Historicism (especially in using contemporaneous texts that are not
self-consciously literary to shed light on the uses of food in Shakespeares
work), and a set of ethical questions that differ in subtle ways from other
critics in this survey. Rather than focus upon issues of how food relates
to the drawing of lines among groups, most of these scholars are more
interested in the boundaries of the self. They foreground questions of
subjectivity, agency, gluttony, self-restraint, or to use Foucaults phrase, the
alimentary regimen as a mode of problematization of behavior (98). This
area of exploration is also both the most recent and most voluminous area
of study in the survey (and of course some of the authors Ive grouped
under other headings have affinities with this one as well).
I find at least three reasons for the burgeoning of interest in historical
and body-oriented approaches: first, this parallels the influence of New
Historicism upon the discipline as a whole; second, food lends itself to
historicized analysis, since the relationships that inhere in food are often
generated by the exigencies of events and social patterns; and third, historians themselves have become extremely interested in food over the past
decade. The University of Illinois, Columbia University, the University of
California, and Greenwood have each started a book series on the history
and culture of food. Three major compendia of food history The Oxford
Companion to Food, Food: A Culinary History and The Cambridge World
History of Food have appeared in English since 1999, joining a handful
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Shakespeare and Food 165

of other volumes on the subject (Davidson and Vannithone; Flandrin,

Montanari, and Sonnenfeld; Kiple and Ornelas). Specialists have followed
suit. The year 2007 alone saw the publication of a new history of British
food, a paradigm-changing volume on food in early modern England by
the pioneering agricultural historian Joan Thirsk, and two works by the
prolific culinary historian of early modern Europe, Ken Albala (Beans;
Banquet). Literary scholars thus have a wide array of new works of history
upon which to draw in analyses of Shakespeare.
Even the casual reader, when asked to consider the character most
closely associated with food in Shakespeare, will probably think of Falstaff.
The doughty and doughy, fat-witted knight is synonymous with Shakespearean gluttony and excess. Yet comparatively few critics have taken up
the role that food plays in Falstaff s character (scholars have addressed
Falstaff s fatness and drunkenness, but rarely his gastronomic pursuits as
such). In her revisionist account of early modern images of Puritanism,
Kristen Poole provides a reading of Falstaff as the first in the tradition of
the stage puritan or puritan bellygod (15) that does much to redress this
oversight. Rather than the abstemious, somber figures that they present to
us in stereotyped retrospect, Poole argues, In early modern literature, it is
the drunken, gluttonous, and lascivious puritan who predominates (12). The
puritan exemplified the grotesque body as described by Bakhtin: a bundle
of contradictions, a figure ever expanding beyond its confines both physically, symbolically, and linguistically. The character of Falstaff, influenced
by the caricatures of the Marprelate controversy, both catalyzed and
epitomized the early modern representation of the stage puritan . . . [thus]
bringing the dynamics of religious controversy into a burgeoning sphere
of print culture (21). As a grotesque figure, Falstaff becomes the community
which can, through jest, ingest its leaders (40). His role in the play is at
once to provide a kind of moral compass that itself destabilizes the plays
ethical bearings; he is the plays religion and its irreverence.
Joan Fitzpatricks 2007 monograph, Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern
Dietaries and the Plays, constitutes the first book-length discussion of our
subject, and thus will occupy more of our time here. Writing five years
after Albalas first book, which focused on the genre of the early modern
European dietary, Fitzpatrick writes that her volume began life as a study
of food in Shakespeare and Elizabethan culinary culture, but ultimately
narrows its emphasis to the question of how dietaries and certain other
aspects of Tudor food culture inform the plays (Eating Right; Fitzpatrick
1). This emphasis on the dietaries in turn provokes a further narrowing:
the author looks especially at how the preoccupation with moderation
evident in the dietaries (5) relates to the copious excess and strangeness
of food and feeding in some of the plays. Fitzpatrick analyzes twelve
plays, with each chapter addressing a particular cultural phenomenon that
intersects with the constellation of food references in a particular group
of works. Fitzpatrick begins with a discussion of Falstaff s excessive
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166 Shakespeare and Food

consumption in the second Henriad as compared to Prince Hals more

abstemious diet, then proceeds in the next chapter to a consideration of
Celtic alterity in relation to culinary practice in Henry V (the figs and
leeks about which Pistol and Fluellen trade angry insults) and the altogether
stranger witches cauldron in Macbeth. Chapter three investigates vegetarianism and melancholia in As You Like It and The Winters Tale. The fourth
and most satisfying chapter discusses the political and military implications
of food in Sir Thomas More, Coriolanus, and Pericles, by way of a rehearsal
of prejudices about cannibalism in outlying areas of Britain. The last
chapter, on Hamlet, Timon of Athens, and Titus Andronicus, focuses on
profane consumption, the foods one ought not eat.
Food in Shakespeare proves an illuminating yet frustrating read. On the
one hand, the book is a trove of information both from the dietaries and
from many other aspects of Elizabethan culinary culture. We learn a great
deal, for example, about what William Bullein thought about figs (very
wholesome, especially with nuts), or Thomas Cogans beliefs regarding
leeks (fine for rustics, but otherwise toxic) (39, 43). The book at times
reads like a series of thoughtful footnotes to perplexing food-related passages
in the play. On the other hand, one finds relatively little in the way of
analysis here more Spurgeon than Adelman. As I wrote in a review of
the book, Fitzpatricks
use of the dietaries rarely opens new perspectives on the plays, either because
the information is not brought to bear so as to produce novel interpretations,
or because the interpretations could be established without any recourse to the
dietaries, or both. (Book Review 693)

This failing is partly due to the fact that, like Spurgeon, Fitzpatrick is to
an extent mapping new terrain, more why food than where does food
get us, and so a certain amount of cataloguing simply noticing interesting
nodal points is probably in order.
Food in Shakespeare is most useful in two respects. First, Fitzpatrick alerts
us to the importance of food in several plays that have been understudied
in this context. Her work should provide a tantalizing entry point for
critics interested in Macbeth, As You Like It, The Winters Tale, Sir Thomas
More, and other works that do not usually spring to mind when we
consider food in the plays. Second, as with most of the other critics in
this study, Fitzpatricks concerns are ultimately ethical in nature, and here
she provides a thoughtful map for reading the plays in light of the dietaries
preoccupation with moderation and gluttony, which often also overlapped
with those of society (5).6 Fitzpatrick considers the plays in light of the
alimentary regime that governed all of a good Elizabethans choices about
temperate living, both as a citizen and a Christian. As she points out in
her discussion of Falstaff, The glutton is primarily a sinner and his intemperance regarding food and drink . . . leave him more vulnerable than his
fellow-man to other sins (18). This attention to ethical issues of gluttony
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and temperance parallels that of other scholars who have devoted articles
to food in individual plays. Peter Parolins excellent and wide-ranging
Cloyless Sauce: The Pleasurable Politics of Food in Antony and Cleopatra,
for instance, reads the play in light of early modern discourses about how
improper forms of eating were believed to dismantle identity (214). To
imagine Shakespearean eating as existing on a continuum of temperance
is to develop tentative steps toward an ethics of eating in the plays; Fitzpatrick shows us the path.
Thus far, I have discussed only Shakespeares plays; this is because
almost no one has written about food in Shakespeares poems. A key
exception to this scholarly blind spot is Michael Schoenfeldts work on
inwardness in the Sonnets. Schoenfeldt explains the lack of critical attention
to bodily needs in the Sonnets as a function of Shakespeares extreme
subtlety in relation to the vocabulary of physiological process; his reevaluation of sonnet 94, They that have the power to hurt, seeks to analyze
links between the corollary appetites for food and love (33). He aims to
demonstrate how Shakespeare asks the genre of the sonnet a genre
traditionally dedicated to articulating passion to investigate instead the
dangers that passions pose to health of mind and body, and to describe a
corollary longing for stasis and self-control (34). His approach is heavily
indebted to, and extensively develops, the notion of the humoral body
elaborated by Gail Kern Paster (Body), Mary Floyd-Wilson, and others.
But whereas critics of early modern psycho-physiology tend to focus on
sex, excretion, and the medical side of ingestion, Schoenfeldt seems
somewhat more interested in gastronomic processes.7 Schoenfeldt notes a
larger meditation in the Sonnets on nourishment, appetite, and identity
(80) from which sonnet 94 emerges, presenting us with the ideal of
imperturbable self-containment, of the textured subjectivity that can
emerge from the fastidious regulation of desire (745). His reading of the
sonnets privileges the conflict of the self shredded by the contrary vectors
of its ethical knowledge and its desires (89). As usual, food (and, for
Schoenfeldt, medicine and other elements of physiological process)
becomes a site of ethical negotiation. In Schoenfeldts work, this site is
primarily that which marks the limit of the self in relation to the world
the constant war between the self as desiring and as sovereign, staged
physiologically and psychologically through humoralism, and spiritually
through Christianity.
synthesis

As much as the authors in this study exuberantly cross whatever critical

boundaries might be set for them, some critics are so explicit about the
use of heterogeneous methodologies and about the areas of knowledge
they wish to illuminate that they demand a separate group. At the same
time, the relationship between food and ethics begins to loom large, as if
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168 Shakespeare and Food

the more avenues one takes in approaching food, the more those roads
point to the ethical negotiation of the self with the other.
One of the most recent works on our subject, Robert Appelbaums
Aguecheeks Beef, Belchs Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature,
Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns is the first work of literary
criticism to focus on food in early modern English literature and culture,
with a good deal of the text given over to Shakespeare: two chapters
devoted largely to Twelfth Night and Hamlet, alongside briefer mentions of
Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Tempest, and a handful of others. With
the possible exception of Fitzpatrick, Appelbaum is the only critic of our
study who does not ask Where does food get us, but rather seems
interested in exploring food for its own sake, in its manifold cultural
imbrications, throughout the early modern period. Unfortunately, it is
also the least coherent work in our survey; as its title suggests, the book
approaches its subject like a miscellany, and while both sweeping and
erudite, it lacks a sustained analysis of food in Shakespeares plays.
While Appelbaums methodologies are numerous he quotes from a
host of classical and modern theorists, Seneca to Freud to Lvi-Strauss
he is motivated primarily by the question of civility, or as Norbert Elias
puts it, the connections between changes in the structure of society and
changes in the structure of peoples behaviour and psychical habitus (xiii).
Thus his guiding lights are New Historicism (especially in its interest in
dietaries, humoralism, and the bodys alimentary regime) and especially
Eliass theory of the civilizing process, which Appelbaum seeks to revise
throughout the book. The questions Appelbaum thus tends to ask are thus
what I would call tangentially ethical what role does food play in the
formation of societal obligation? What is the relation and responsibility of
the body to the cultural structures that teach it how to function?
Shakespeare performs a structurally important double function in
Aguecheeks Beef, both framing the issues of the book and forming the basis
for a theory more implied than developed of what might be termed
comic versus tragic food (29). His concept of comic food seems located
in two ideas: first that, following Henri Bergson, laughter occurs when
humanity is transformed into automatism, and that food lends itself to
this transformation by suggesting that humans are simply machines whose
function depends upon their diet. Secondly, as Appelbaum writes in chapter
six of the study during a discussion of Sir Toby Belchs bodily discharges
(1.5.1201), comic food is funny because it makes us laugh at that which
would normally embarrass us, because it violates, in an appropriate context, the sense of shame and the ideology of decorum that are inherent
to the memories of our civilized bodies (218). Tragic food, by contrast,
explored via Hamlet, transforms brilliant vitality into loathsome death
and decay (23). The incongruity of the automatized human turns into
the multicourse feast of the great chain of being (27), in which a king
may indeed go a progress through the guts of a beggar. Appelbaum stops
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short of explaining why the same things that are funny and vital in Twelfth
Night are tragic and disgusting in Hamlet. His argument is based on a
binary reversal rather than a discussion of the discourses underlying that
reversal, and whose precondition is, at any rate, the stability of the line
between Shakespearean comedy and tragedy. My sense is that Appelbaums
arguments, when applied to, say, Lancelots quip that Jessicas conversion
will raise the price of hogs, would leave us with more questions than
answers.
A very different, yet hugely influential approach to our subject, and one
of the earlier articles in our survey, is Stanley Cavells famous essay on
Coriolanus, Who Does the Wolfe Love? Coriolanus and the Interpretations
of Politics. Since we have already discussed criticism on the play, I will
not belabor Cavells analysis of its food imagery (which draws sustenance
from Adelmans reading). But although the article is concerned with
image analysis, sex and gender, economic circulation, religion (Coriolanus
is compared to Christ), and the body, Cavells argument ultimately drives
toward a series of points about the relation between food, language,
community, and theater:
Coriolanus cannot imagine, or cannot accept, that there is a way to partake of
one another, incorporate one another, that is necessary to the formation rather
than to the extinction of a community. . . . The play Coriolanus asks us to try
to imagine it, imagine a beneficial, mutual consumption, arguing in effect that
this is what the formation of an audience is. (As if vorare were next to orare.)
(263)

For Cavell, the answer to Where does food get us? is something like to
the formation of the city, of civility, of the public sphere. Food leads to
language, which leads to commensalism, and from there to obligation.
The question raised by Coriolanus is what it is to know that others, that
we, have bodies. To recognize that another person has a body is to
recognize that it opens, is vulnerable. To recognize that our own bodies
open (when we put food inside them or when we speak) is to recognize
our own vulnerability as well as our ability to engage in the exchange that
creates society. Cavells masterful essay demonstrates clearly one of the
stakes of food for Shakespeare: food constitutes the grounds for the
sharing of language.
Cavells work helps prepare us for that of his student, David Hillman.
Food is not the organizing principle of Shakespeares Entrails: Belief, Skepticism
and the Interior of the Body. But it is hard to write about guts without
studying the food that goes into them. For Hillman, food gets us into the
bodys interior. His techniques for entering the body combine image
analysis, philosophical questioning in the tradition of Cavell and
Nietzsche, an inquiry into inwardness influenced by Freud and, more
recently, Katharine Maus, with the humoralism of Paster and Schoenfeldt
and, more generally, of the New Historicist interest in self-regulation. Sex
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170 Shakespeare and Food

gender, science, religion, and the body all play a role in his understanding
of the concept of visceral knowledge in Shakespeares plays: that is to
say, knowledge experienced in as well as knowledge of the interior of the
body (1). Hillman takes us through the guts of four plays: Troilus and
Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winters Tale. Each play is carefully
dissected to expose the complex and conflicting relationship between
interior and exterior, enclosure and disclosure.
In the course of his analysis, Hillman attempts to offer a sustained
reading of how food functions in Shakespeares plays, at once philosophical
and bodily: Shakespeares Entrails means to chart an alimentary progression
which mirrors the trajectory of the plays relation to skepticism (168). In
the chapter on Troilus and Cressida (based upon an earlier article that stands
as the most important essay on food in that play), Hillman parses its huge
volume of food imagery (Spurgeon identified the play as Shakespeares
most culinary) to show that, As in Nietzsche, the alimentary process is
here a central metaphor for any manifestation of a will to power (73), and
that the plays exploration of disgust is closely connected to its meditation
on the origins of literary and theatrical genre itself. Hillman views Hamlet
as a revision of the acidic satire of Troilus (a thesis made problematic by
the likelihood that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet first). In his account, the
play works to recover the possibility of a meaningful kind of language
(79) through, among other strategies, radical attempts to overcome loss
or separateness either by entering the very guts of the other or by taking the
others flesh into ones own guts (109). The intense images of cannibalism
and decayed or leftover food that populate Hamlet images also catalogued,
to different effect, by Appelbaum and Fitzpatrick carry the weight of
the vexed problem of how (or if) the interior can ever communicate with
the exterior, how the self can open itself to the other. Although his
argument about King Lear is less directly relevant for our purposes, Hillmans
reading of the Winters Tale frames it as a narrative of a recovery or
rediscovery of the rightness and pleasure of eating. Leontes exclamation at
the discovery of Hermiones statue If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful
as eating provides a fitting moment of closure for Hillmans book, and for
our survey. The idea of an art as lawful as eating both aligns eating with art,
and wraps eating up with justice. Is eating always lawful? Titus Andronicus,
Hamlet, and a host of other plays suggest that it is not. Shakespeares uses
of food and eating therefore beg the question of what kind of an act
eating, like art, actually is. Shakespeare takes nothing about eating for
granted; it is our job as critics to follow suit.8
Ideas for Future Research
The combined efforts of these critics are exciting for their achievements
as well as for the avenues of inquiry that remain underexplored. Indeed
nearly all avenues of inquiry remain underexplored. But choosing among
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relative equals, I would suggest the following four areas for further
research. The first, which builds most directly upon the present state of
the field, is a fuller analysis of how food signifies and functions, and what
practices and ideas it encodes, within and across the plays, especially in
plays whose culinary and gastronomic imagery remain largely undiscussed.
Second, how does food function in theatrical and performance practice,
as clothes, scenery, and other staged objects do? Third, we can continue
to explore the role of food in Shakespeares poems, and to ask why they
have been less frequently discussed than the plays. The fourth avenue
involves developing a greater understanding of Shakespeares uses of food
in relation to a range of historical and theoretical accounts of eating, and
especially, I would suggest, to the ethical account, which permeates work
on food in Shakespeare but is so rarely explicitly addressed. Ultimately,
how can we fashion a more synoptic, multivalent, even multidisciplinary
approach to the study of food in Shakespeare, without sacrificing flexibility
and capaciousness? How do we answer the question Where does food get
us without brushing aside the food that got us there? How do we nurture
food criticism into an art as lawful as eating?
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my colleagues Deanne Williams and Elizabeth Pentland
for their invaluable feedback on an early draft of the essay, and to Amanpreet Dhami and Anthony Hicks for their assistance with the gathering
of sources.
Short Biography
David B. Goldstein is an assistant professor of English at York University.
A former restaurant critic, he has published widely on topics relating to
food and culture. His article The Cook and the Cannibal: Titus Andronicus
and the New World is forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies, and he is currently
at work on a book about food, rhetoric, and ethics in early modern
England.
Notes
* Correspondence address: English Department, York University, 301E Stong College, 4700
Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: dgolds@yorku.ca.
1

Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the 1974 Riverside edition.
A sixth category, with which this essay will not concern itself, is epitomized by J. A.
Rothschilds list of foods that appear in Shakespeare, or more recently by the entry on food in
the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, which spends most of its time discussing Elizabethan
dining habits. This group of scholars treats food in the plays as a mirror in which to make out
the culinary customs of Tudor England, rather than as a set of instruments with dramatic and
literary functions.
2

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3

I thank my colleague Marcus Boon for this insight.

Cannibalism as a practice in Shakespeare has garnered a great deal of interest so much so
that it probably deserves a separate article. The current popularity among scholars of Titus
Andronicus, with its cannibal feast, has contributed in large part to this efflorescence (cf. Goldstein,
Cook and Cannibal).
5
Another example of gender critique that, like Adelmans essay, builds upon prior work while
introducing a more pronounced ethical interest is Anthony Lewiss discussion of cannibalism
and incest imagery in Pericles, which follows, perhaps incidentally (he does not quote it), upon
a brief article by Mythili Kaul in the earlier image-cataloguing mode. Lewis argues that Pericles
enacts one theme: the personal, familial, and governmental obligation to nourish self, relations,
and citizens. Images of eating become the medium through which we must interpret the
action of this obligation (147, 154).
6
Thirsk, however, points out that different dietaries treated gluttony differently (cf. 18, 19, 37, 79).
7
See, for example, Pasters The Body Embarrassed. However, see also her early essay on Coriolanus,
which adumbrates the relationship between digestion, appetite, and the ideological construction
of the city (Starve).
8
Almost alone among major articles on the subject, the methodology of Joseph Candidos
Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors is more rooted in structuralist anthropology than historicist (except for a brief discussion of the Elizabethan midday meal), psychoanalytic, or image-centered criticism. Instead, through a combination of source-analysis and an
interest in what might be termed social symbolism (ultimately descended from the work of
Douglas and Lvi-Strauss), Candido analyzes the various failed meals of the play in light of the
family dynamics they expose. The author examines the idea, quietly implied in Shakespeares
Plautine source, of human longing and its connection with food and dining (204).
4

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