Food
"How say you to a fat tripe finely broiled?" asks Grumio of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. Joseph Fiennes, lithe-limbed lead of Shakespeare in Love, looks as if he would faint at such an offer. His six-pack stomach would collapse at the sight of offal. But, thankfully, the film isn't pretending to be accurate. Shakespeare as played by Fiennes is stupid, heterosexual, nice and thin. The Shakespeare who wrote the plays and sonnets, on the contrary, was a genius, bisexual, often unpleasant - and fat.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, the playwright's next biographer, says: "There's no way he could have been a thin man." The Shakespeare who sits as a bust in Holy Trinity, Stratford, is distinctly rubicund. The statue has been said to resemble a pork butcher: thick-faced and prosperous. Hamlet's author was, like his creation, "fat and scant of breath". And, unlike his boisterous contemporary Ben Jonson, he didn't acquire his bulk from hard liquor. His flesh came from food - that much is sure. Yet as for the nuances of Shakespeare's eating, his likes and dislikes, we are mystified.
Meat must have been a mainstay of his diet. Elizabethan Stratford held a large cattle market and the Shakespeare family would have been heavy beef eaters. A young William may even have been involved in the slaughter of cows. Did he draw on this bloody experience for the killing of deer in As You Like It ? We can't be sure. It's fair to suppose, though, that his meaty mind was iron-rich and teeming with red blood. Shakespeare was no starving poet in a garret. He was roast rib of England. His enjoyed his grub.
The plays are dotted with images of the misery of starvation. In The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine is "starved for meat, giddy for lack of sleep", and taunted with the mouth-watering idea of "a piece of beef and mustard". The happy endings of the comedies usually come with a "feast" - a word that appears 104 times in the plays. Relief comes in Act V, along with fruit and pies, a dramatic foreshadowing of the meals playgoers would enjoy after final bows. But this artistic device tells us nothing about Shakespeare's personal tastes - it only shows he didn't want a hungry audience who couldn't concentrate on the play; he saves the most appetite-whetting scenes for last.
The more we seek Shakespeare in his words, the less we find him. Did he have a sweet tooth? Impossible to say. Some of his images of honey and sugar are pleasantly sweet; others are cloying and sickly. Food in the plays suits the characters, not the author. That's Shakespeare's genius. His acute awareness of eating is sublimated in a thousand different incidental details.
There is the elegiac repast shared by Falstaff and Shallow in Henry IV, Part Two, with roasted pippins from the orchard and "a dish of caraways". Capulet's feast includes a date and quince pastry. In Cymbeline, root vegetables are cut into shapes of the alphabet and delicately "sauced". Richard III calls for fresh strawberries, while Falstaff dines on capon, anchovies and an "intolerable deal of sack". Titus Andronicus serves up human heads in a pie. But what did Shakespeare eat after he put down his pen? Any of the above . . .
Shakespeare's eggs
An egg is "full of meat", in Mercutio's words. Take a dozen and do with them as you please. Buttered a la Henry IV. Sunny-side up, like the "young fry of treachery" in Macbeth. Or use them for money, as in The Winter's Tale. But make sure they are evenly cooked, or else be "damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side".
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