Dissertation

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction    Class Structures and Food Culture Transformed by the Reformation

Part I    Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: The Politics of Want

Introduction: Dearth, Hunger, and Government Response
1    Crop Failure and the Failure of Hospitality in Coriolanus
2    Patrician Fantasies of Self-Consumption: Having the Poor Devour Themselves so the Rich Don’t Have To

Part II    Eating Your Way to the Top and Sweeping the Crumbs Below: Tradesmen, Hospitality, and Labor

Introduction: The Rhetoric of Improvement, the Rhetoric of Hospitality
3    Traversing the Alimentary Topography of London and Performing the Commerce of Food in The Shoemaker’s Holiday
4     Setting a Place for Jack of Newbury: Bourgeois Propagandist, Labor Sympathizer, or Courtly Climber?

Part III    Upper Crusts: Courtiers and Abundance

Introduction:   Hospitality and Moderation Preached from the Pulpit
5     King-size It!: Learning Moderation in Henry IV, Part I
6     Reading the Page and Feeding the Page: Court Patronage and The Unfortunate Traveller

Epilogue    ‘Palates as Fanatical as Some of Their Brains’: Having the Cromwells for Dinner

ABSTRACT

In the induction of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly awakens from a drunken sleep to find himself tricked and transported to a lord’s chamber.   Sly, now dressed as a lord, calls for a pot of small ale and, arguing that he never in his whole life drank sack, refuses the expensive drink and the candied fruits that are offered him.   He defends his lowly choices, protesting that he is “by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd, and now by present profession a tinker.”   Not only does Sly reveal a varied and indefinable class status (depending on education, birth, or profession), he also defines himself by what he does and does not eat and drink: beer not wine and jellied beef rather than dainties.   My dissertation originates from Sly’s way of thinking – that a class labeled “sack drinkers” might set up a much clearer and more precise distinction from the “beer drinkers” than the juxtaposition of terms at once linguistically confined, culturally specific, and socially ambiguous, such as lord and laborer.

The goal of this work is to investigate how, in early modern English literature, food was the location of class struggle and class ordering, class anxieties were often expressed in alimentary terms, and eating and drinking became the actions through which class identity was negotiated and class relations established.   Works of prose fiction and drama by Shakespeare, Dekker, Deloney, and Nashe are put in dialogue with cookbooks, ballads, household records, sermons, royal proclamations, and other contemporary materials to create arguments about the interdependence of dearth and hospitality, business and food, and court rituals and culinary identities.   Early modern historians and literary scholars continue to debate the idea of class in the period and have developed a variety of hierarchical schemes, but quite often class comes down to the same terms – land, money, profession, family.   By using food, I hope to help create a more accurate and complex picture of class in the period, replacing such imprecise terms as “bourgeois” and “middling sort” and such misunderstood labels as “gentry” or “the poor” with more concrete specifics grounded in the nuances of material culture.

The introduction to my dissertation develops the literary and historical context of food and class in early modern England while developing a theoretical framework for discussing each.   After discussing the widespread use of food and class in the drama, poetry, and prose fiction of the period, my argument begins with the previously neglected relationship between secular and religious meals, between hearth and altar, and between the laborer’s table and the Lord’s (both God and noble) board.   I argue that Reformation changes to both the practice and understanding of the Eucharist altered ideas about the secular meal.   From questions of the nature of sustenance to what makes a worthy guest, food, and people’s treatment of it, was transformed on domestic tables as it was transformed in the sacred celebration.   Beyond this central religious debate, however, we find myriad and multiple locations where food and class intersect: sumptuary laws, commercialized hospitality, food riots, enclosure, fish days, and exploration and colonization.   The cultural force of each is taken up before finally turning to the hybrid theoretical structure of my dissertation, a structure equally invested in materialist and historicist readings as in performance studies, ritual theory, and social anthropology.

Section One, “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: The Politics of Plenty and Want,” addresses the physical realm of food markets by exploring representations of hunger and class relations produced by the dialectic of plenty and want in a time of great scarcity and great economic growth.   First, the chapter establishes the historical background of the period in terms of grain shortages, restrictions on food producers, and injunctions against grain hording.   Then, looking at Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, I uncover the political and social dynamic of food in Coriolanus that, beyond cannibalism or psychological feeding, has so far been little discussed as a topic unto itself.   Instead of just focusing on the grain shortage that opens the play, I juxtapose that with the political hospitality of Aufidius to Coriolanus and the way class identity trumps national or cultural identity.   The second chapter is devoted to John Taylor’s Rabelaisian “Great Eater of Kent,” his anti-Rabelaisian “Jack-a-Lent,” and Robert Herrick’s poetry.   Looking across genres in the early seventeenth-century, I consider the threatening portrayals of the hungry poor against what Peter Stallybrass calls the “patrician fantasies” of poets like Herrick.  

Section Two, “Eating Your Way to the Top and Sweeping the Crumbs Below: Tradesmen, Hospitality, and Labor,” begins with the idea that accomplished men of trade step in to fill the gap left by men of greater social standing who abandon their hospitality duties in the countryside for reveling in London.   In providing hospitality, these men of work and commerce not only gain admiration for labor over leisure but also generate a new image of the tradesman hero who feasts colleagues as well as kings.   Using the rhetoric of improvement found in cookbooks and agriculture manuals as a springboard into a discussion of Thomas Dekker’s TheShoemaker’s Holiday and Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury , I consider how these texts take their audiences into the world of trade and manufacturing and into the lives of laborers and masters who are overtly conscious of the uses to which food can be put for self-improvement, the importance of food in labor relations, and the relationship between class identity and food.   Dekker’s protagonist, I argue, while continually debating and denying the everyday board he owes his laborers constructs himself as a man who fully understands how to use feasting and dining to improve London trade markets and align himself with those in power for the sake of those in his care.   In Deloney, we see a tradesman hero who prides himself on his alimentary generosity to his workers but insists on using their work as a form of entertainment when he feasts those above him on the social ladder.

Section Three, “Upper Crusts: Courtiers and Abundance,” moves one more rung up the ladder to address courtiers.   The decline in aristocratic hospitality and religious injunctions for moderation provide the framework for my discussion of disposed court figures and their relationship to food.   In the first chapter, I take up the continually shifting and eternally ambiguous identity of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I .   I argue that, because food and drink are not only what Falstaff consumes – and immoderately at that – but also what he is, Shakespeare maintains Falstaff’s ambiguity as both aristocrat and commoner through his use of food and drink and through the cornucopia of food metaphors, similes, insults, symbols, and word games that feed the dialogue of the play.   He is repeatedly described in food terms, and these descriptions are used to discredit him, and yet such descriptions are part of what is celebratory about the play as well.   In the second chapter of this final section, I consider how Thomas Nashe’s picaresque Unfortunate Traveller closely links textual and culinary wares both in Nashe’s signature linguistic games and by making the court page’s search for food the reason for the narrative.   Moreover, I argue that the work is simultaneously a courtly jest of the downtrodden, a critique of the courtly who abandon their homes – and the hospitality for the poor which is their responsibility – to embark on journeys to London, and a poignant reminder of the role of the household and home in the nation’s stability.  

The epilogue, “‘Palates as Fanatical as Some of Their Brains’: Having the Cromwells for Dinner,” focuses on The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth , Commonly Called Joan Cromwel, the Wife of the Late Usurper – a political treatise bundled with a cookbook .   Addressing questions of nationality, gender, power, and class, this chapter considers how taste is made and resisted by looking at a work that attempts to blame a man’s political aggression and a country’s downfall on his wife’s cooking.   A nation, whose empire was built up by Elizabeth I, a woman claiming to have the stomach of a king, is here seen as undone by the cooking of Elizabeth Cromwell, a woman with the tastes of a commoner.