Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (review)

The subtitle of this valuable, tightly organized, but ultimately frustrating book leads its reader to believe that Food in Shakespeare will study the plays in light of the genre of Renaissance dietaries. Luckily the book does not deliver on its promise. As soon as Fitzpatrick strays from the dietary writers, the book’s analyses become much weightier and more satisfying.

Food in Shakespeare divides almost cleanly into two parts. The first three chapters discuss the second Henriad, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale by looking at how the foods and culinary behaviors highlighted in these works — Falstaff’s surfeits, Fluellen’s leek, Lady Macbeth’s breast milk, Arden’s deer, Bohemia’s bears — are treated in the period’s popular and oft-reprinted dietary manuals, which were curious and fascinating compilations of medical advice about diet, heavily influenced by the science and psychology of the humors. The writers Andrew Boorde, William Bullein, Thomas Elyot, and Thomas Cogan figure prominently in the book. This is a worthy idea (although it unfortunately excludes the rich and influential Continental dietary tradition), but Fitzpatrick’s use of the evidence ends up contributing little to our knowledge of the plays. Two problems seem to be at work. The first concerns the dietaries themselves, which, as Fitzpatrick takes care to point out, are notoriously dialogic. Generalizing from them, except in the vaguest ways (gluttony and abstinence are both bad for one’s health; moderation is good), proves dangerous. Fitzpatrick’s interpretation of the episode at the end of Henry V in which Captain Fluellen makes the pompous Pistol eat a leek as punishment for insulting his Welsh heritage provides an example of these dangers. Citing evidence that some dietary writers considered raw leeks to be poisonous, she urges us to view the scene as a more “dark and aggressive encounter” (44) than the usual comedic interpretations allow. But at least one of the quoted dietaries believes raw leeks well-suited to the digestion of a rustic of Pistol’s ilk (43), which would heighten rather than darken the scene’s humor by underscoring the gulf between Pistol’s pretentiousness and his class. The encounter may well be “dark and aggressive,” but not based on this evidence.

The second and more pressing problem concerns Fitzpatrick’s argumentation. Her 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. Sometimes Fitzpatrick provides several dietary perspectives on the use of a food (e.g., figs in relation to Henry V), without establishing relevance to the scene at hand. At other times, the dietaries are taken simply to mark commonplace beliefs, rather than as information strategically deployed in order to produce meaning. For example, in discussing Prince Hal’s rejection of Falstaff at the close of 2 Henry IV, Fitzpatrick quotes one dietary writer’s admonition that “olde folkes must feede sparingly and moderately” (33) as an explanation for the Prince’s vicious injunction to Falstaff to “leave gourmandizing; know that the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men” (33). We do well to note that Henry’s assertion jibes with a medical opinion, but the fact itself is less interesting than the play’s use of it. What matters here is rather how Henry manipulates cultural mores, turning ethical and medical opprobrium into a tool that abruptly distances the prince from the icon of his youthful dissolution. But Fitzpatrick takes the connection at face value, explaining that Shakespeare is “indebted to the notion of the drunkard as an undesirable companion to a ruler” (33–34). She ends the chapter by covering familiar ground, arguing that Falstaff “remains a gloriously ambivalent representation of...