Hunger on the Stage
Hunger on the Stage
Edited by
Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Hunger on the Stage, Edited by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-595-9, ISBN (13): 9781847185952
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii
Introduction ................................................................................................ ix
Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain
Part I: Hunger in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
Chapter One................................................................................................. 2
“I speak this in hunger for bread”: hunger in King Lear and Coriolanus
Pascale Drouet
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17
“Food of Love”: Hunger and Desire in Shakespeare’s Comedies
Vanasay Khamphommala
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 30
“I have a punk after supper, as good as a roasted apple”: The Cannibal
Relationship of Prostitutes and their Clients on the English Renaissance
Stage
Frédérique Fouassier
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 45
“You saw me eat and drink my last”: Theatricalizing Female SelfStarvation in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607)
Denis Lagae-Devoldère
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 56
Child Pasties and Devoured Hearts: Anthropophagous Feasts
and Theatrical Cruelty in England and France (late 16th – early 17th
centuries)
Christian Biet
vi
Table of Contents
Part II: The Victorian Stage
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 78
Hunger and Theatrical Activity in Victorian London
Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101
“Who is coming to tea?” Aspects of Hunger in Three Victorian Plays:
The Lights o’London, Widower’s Houses and The Importance of Being
Earnest
Julie Vatain
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 115
Hunger, Dandyism and Compulsive Consumption in The Importance
of Being Earnest
Ignacio Ramos Gay
Part III: From Colonial to Post-Colonial Stages
Staging the Irish Famine
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 132
“... how feeble and inexpressive is the word!”: Staging the Irish Famine
Chris Morash
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 149
“You’ll be hungry all the time”: Traces of the Irish Famine in Samuel
Beckett’s Endgame and Not I
Hélène Lecossois
Jamaica’s Hungry Wars
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 161
Fred D’Aguiar’s A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death:
Comic Food Fights and Tragic Languages
Kerry-Jane Wallart
Part IV: American Cannibals
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 178
E Pluribus Edimus: Cannibalism on the American Stage
John Bak
Hunger on the Stage
vii
Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 212
“We shall eat. We shall drink.” Thirst or Eugene O’Neill’s Raft
of the Medusa
Thierry Dubost
Part V: Voracity in contemporary drama
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 228
Starved Clowns in George Tabori’s Holocaust Memory Play
The Cannibals
Andreas Häcker
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 257
Taking a Bite of the Big Apple: Martin Crimp’s The Treatment
Vicky Angelaki
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 268
“We're all bloody hungry”: Images of Hunger and the Construction
of the Gendered Self in Sarah Kane's Blasted
Aleks Sierz
General Bibliography .............................................................................. 281
Contributors............................................................................................. 286
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Ill. 1: “Grande anthropophagie bleue”, Hommage à Tennessee Williams
Yves Klein (1960)
Ill. 2: “Hungerkünstler/ The Hunger Artists,” Theater der Freien
Hansestadt Bremen (1977), © Volker G. Ullrich/Dramaturgie Theater
Bremen
Ill. 3: The Cannibals, Thalia Theater Hamburg (1973), © Ute Schendel
Ill. 4: The Cannibals, Schiller-Theater Berlin 1969 © Ute Schendel
Ill. 5: The Cannibals, Schiller-Theater Berlin 1969 © Deutsches
Theatermuseum München / Archiv Ilse Buhs
Ill. 6: The Cannibals, Schiller-Theater Berlin 1969 © Deutsches
Theatermuseum München / Archiv Ilse Buhs
Ill. 7 : The Cannibals, Thalia Theater Hamburg 1973 © Ute Schendel
Ill. 8: “Hungerkünstler/ The Hunger Artists,” Theater der Freien
Hansestadt Bremen (1977), © Volker G. Ullrich/Dramaturgie Theater
Bremen
INTRODUCTION
In his short story “The Hunger Artist,” Kafka imagined the theatrical
career of a “professional faster” whose performance consists merely in
displaying his own starving body before an avid audience. Kafka thus
paradoxically suggested that hunger, mere emptiness working its way
through declining bodies, may be a privileged theatrical object. Thus is the
original vocation of theatre (thea: eyesight) strangely subverted, as a mere
lack is offered to the spectator’s gaze. On the one hand, vacuity becomes
some sort of matrix, whence the network of theatrical images proliferates;
on the other hand, this vacuity is embodied in the actor’s flesh which is
displayed as a suffering body, implicating the (usually well-fed) spectator
as uncomfortable voyeur. Hunger therefore inevitably raises the question
of its representability, and of the modalities of its staging, as well as issues
of reception.
Hunger often signals an anchorage in socio-historical reality, and
invites extreme situations on stage, articulating large-scale cataclysms
(famines, the devastation of war) with personal tragedies (hunger-strikes,
anorexia, etc.) in which characters experience the tenuousness of their own
lives. It is often solicited as an agent of deregulation and distortion of
social rituals, revealing the remnants of barbaric impulses which lie
dormant beneath the polish of “civilisation”, and blurring the lines
between human and inhuman. Thus is the ritual of the Eucharist
monstrously literalized and distorted into cannibalism, while the exquisite
ceremony of tea, a cultural icon of Englishness which exalts the subjection
of individual appetite to social rule, deteriorates into compulsive
devouring (Wilde, D’Aguiar). Whether in the comic or in the tragic mode,
staged hunger finally metaphorizes various other kinds of starvation—
material greed, spiritual, emotional, sexual starvation, and even linguistic
insufficiency. The displayed starving body is thus turned into a semiotic
surface—conjuring up the etymology of body as “chest” (O.E. bodig).
This volume, which originated in a conference held at La Sorbonne
(University of Paris IV) in January 2007, explores the aesthetic and ethical
issues raised by hunger on the stage in the English-speaking world. It
investigates the paradox of the hypervisibility of the thinning body and
x
Introduction
shows how, throughout history, hunger has given shape to innovative,
powerfully transgressive dramaturgies.
From early theatrical moments in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the
famished body offers itself as a literal expression of poverty, and
articulates contemporary preoccupations: in King Lear, Poor Tom exposes
his emaciated body, while the starving plebeians’ protest in Coriolanus
mirror contemporary peasant revolts in the Midlands, confirming Bacon’s
claim that “the rebellions of the belly are the worst.” Yet there’s more to it.
Social dire, the first obvious implication of the famished body, is
immediately subsumed and turned into a metaphor that enables the
playwrights of that era to bypass censorship and break taboos (Drouet).
Hunger in the Renaissance period comes to metaphorize the socio-political
and imperialist cravings of a humanity discovering its inhuman essence
(Biet), while the famished body also comes in lieu of the erotically
deprived body (Khamphommala). A cruel vision, the starving body
paradoxically offers a more politically acceptable representation of
frustration than the sexually famished body whose display would seriously
infringe decorum. In Heywood’s Woman Killed with Kindness, the
extremist and climactic exhibition of self-inflicted hunger also reads as a
means of emancipation from the prevailing patriarchal order (LagaeDevoldère). The critique of patriarchy is also implicit in the treatment of
prostitutes in Renaissance drama. In a number of plays, prostitutes are
frequently fantasized by their own clients as insatiable and all-devouring;
however, these plays expose the fantasy for what it is and reverse the
perspective, envisaging the prostitutes as passive objects of their clients’
cannibalistic consumption (Fouassier). Hunger, therefore, in its eminently
transgressive visual and ideological capacity, appears from these early
stages as quintessentially linked to the definition of man as a political,
moral and metaphysical subject.
In Victorian theatres, hunger on the stage is a stark, literal reality, with
underpaid, overworked actors usually performing on empty stomachs.
Taking the cultural historian’s view, Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière changes
the perspective and looks at the sociology of hunger amongst actors and
audiences alike. Meanwhile, in Victorian plays, hunger reflects the moral
and economic preoccupations of the time, raising issues of class,
marginality and inclusion. A source of pathos in melodrama (Sims’ The
Lights O’London), hunger is used as an instrument of social critique in the
emerging political drama (Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses), while witty
comedies such as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest turn to the
theme satirically, exposing the hypocrisy of social conventions and
celebrating the pleasures of a sophisticated individualism (Vatain). In the
Hunger on the Stage
xi
latter play, Ignacio Ramos-Gay investigates the politics of dandyism,
showing how compulsive eating transcends its natural aim to mirror
insatiable appetites in such censored provinces as patrimony, sexuality or
social promotion.
While hunger in the plays of Victorian England reveals the cracks at
the heart of the Empire’s power, it also haunts colonial and post-colonial
drama, exposing the exploitative nature of the Empire’s alleged civilising
enterprise, and displaying the stigmata which the colonial experience
inflicts on culturally, emotionally and linguistically famished peoples. In
Ireland, the critical consensus according to which the trauma of the
Famine borders on the inexpressible and remains largely underrepresented in Irish culture has been increasingly challenged by recent
research in the fields of history and literature; however, such is not the
case with theatre, where only a handful of plays have attempted to stage
the “Great Hunger” over the past century and a half—most of which are
rarely performed. Surveying existing “famine plays”, Christopher Morash
argues that all of these works are marked by a characteristic inadequacy, a
sense of their own feebleness and inexpressiveness, of their inability to
represent absence through presence. While other discourses—political,
economic, theological, aesthetic—intervene at each historical point in the
attempt to stage the Irish Famine, encoding the Famine in their own
symbolic systems, the body of the actor exceeds these symbolic systems,
thus producing a failure of representation. It is, then, hardly surprising that
traces of the Irish Famine should surface in the drama of the playwright
who envisages his entire oeuvre as an exercise in failure. Beckett’s
Endgame and Not I, in particular, can be envisaged as a diptych, deploying
sophisticated dramaturgical and discursive strategies to recycle the
familiar tropes of Famine narratives, which work as repressed, ghostly
hypotexts to the plays (Lecossois). Taking its title from Yeats’s poem,
Fred D’Aguiar’s A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death looks back
towards Ireland’s colonial memory to evoke the participation of Jamaican
soldiers in the Empire’s military engagement in World War II, replaying
the Yeatsian tragedy as farce, and troping the Empire as ever-hungry, alldevouring hellmouth (Wallart).
American stages display a similar interest in both literal and
metaphorical hunger. A survey of the last three centuries shows that
hunger has been a recurrent theme in the American theatre, particularly
under the radical guise of cannibalism, as in O’Neill’s subversive early
play Thirst (Dubost). Two directions are explored by American dramatists:
hunger reads either as a symbol for lack of transcendence (empty stomachs
pointing to empty skies), or as a bitter comment on the “new nation’s
xii
Introduction
colonising efforts to enslave its native and imported peoples”, a telling
sign of the racial insecurities in America (Bak). In both cases, hunger on
the stage is a challenge to American audiences, frontally attacking their
political and puritanical sensibilities.
The final part of this book concentrates on recent theatre and shows
how our world is haunted by the modern modes of devouring that have
made it a traumatic as well as traumatized world. The staging of the Shoah
with the liminal shock-images of George Tabori’s starved clowns (Häcker)
engraves contemporary theatre in a post-Adornian aesthetics. Contemporary
theatre displays the certainty that “we come after”, as George Steiner puts
it in Language and Silence. Martin Crimp’s metaphor of commercial
gluttony that leads the protagonists of The Treatment to literally ingest
Anne and her story (Angelaki) reads as a powerful though euphemized
image of the all-devouring inhumanity that lies at the heart of humanity.
This sample of plays shows that on the contemporary stage no measured,
rational, i.e. “normal” eating can be found: hunger constantly spectacularizes
itself, therefore becoming a sign beckoning towards other realities.
Starving bodies, found in such plays as Edward Bond’s early grandnarrative plays (The Fool) and post-traumatic plays (Coffee) or Howard
Barker’s mythical frescoes (The Last Supper) and history playlets (Il Faut
Manger), turn into taboo-breaking modern cannibals. The contemporary
stage is replete with these modern Calibans (a near-anagram of Cannibal):
oscillating between stark anorexia and ogrish predation (respectively Cate
and Ian in Kane’s Blasted), Sarah Kane’s polymorphous hunger invents a
poetics of monstrousness and of lack (Sierz). From holocaust images to the
pangs of love experienced as void—and Roland Barthes’s comparison of
the forlorn lover with the prisoner at Dachau works as an omnipresent
hypotext (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments)—, from spiritual hunger to
global politics, contemporary theatre creates a language of hunger based
on farcical tragedy, “in-yer-face” images and verbal dispossession:
Vacuity inside. Vacuity outside. Debased Eucharists dedicated to empty
skies.
E. A.-P. and A. P.
PART ONE
HUNGER IN ELIZABETHAN
AND JACOBEAN DRAMA
CHAPTER ONE
“I SPEAK THIS IN HUNGER FOR BREAD1”:
REPRESENTING AND STAGING HUNGER
IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR
AND CORIOLANUS
PASCALE DROUET,
UNIVERSITY OF POITIERS
Why make a connection between King Lear (1605) and Coriolanus
(1608)? Of course they are both tragedies and they were both staged in
early Jacobean England. But, more importantly, three main themes bind
them together: ingratitude, banishment and unnaturalness. Moreover, the
flaw of judgement which respectively triggers the falls of Lear and
Coriolanus hinges on the issue of language, with its excesses and its
(in)adequacy to express inner thoughts. Interestingly, the two plays offer
reversed perspectives on this issue. Lear attaches too much value to the
rhetoric of flattery and is thus blind to hypocrisy; conversely, Coriolanus
attaches too little value to it and rejects even the merest form of
demagogy. Hunger affects those rejected by society (the famished
plebeians of the nascent Roman republic confronted with the explosion of
corn price; the bedlamites allowed to leave the asylum daily to beg for
means of subsistence) and is to be read as a sign of cyclical precariousness
or structural marginality, itself in turn a stumbling block in the natural and
political order—rumbling noises in people’s stomachs indicate that there is
something rotten in the body politic.
In both King Lear and Coriolanus, representing hunger raises the
question of credibility and survival. Appetite never intersects with
appetence: in other words, eating is only envisaged as a basic need, never
as a pleasurable, sensuous experience; as for satiety, it is clearly out of
reach.2 Food is a question of life or death as the First Citizen’s question, at
the very beginning of the Roman tragedy, testifies: “You are all resolved
rather to die than to famish?” (Cor., 1.1.4-5). As for Edgar, the betrayed
Hunger on the Stage
3
brother in King Lear, he has to make sure that his persona of a raw-boned
madman (Tom of Bedlam) is convincing, otherwise he incurs death for
bypassing his sentence of banishment. Thus, the representation of hunger
is caught in a pattern of mise en abyme. Before hunger is physically
experienced by Edgar, it is counterfeited and works as a costume;
paradoxically, it brings substance to the new character Edgar has to play.
Artful impersonation in King Lear is paralleled with open rebellion in
Coriolanus. Finally, hunger can only be successfully staged if the social
field and the theatrical field interact, i.e. the discourse of experiencing
hunger must be validated by the actor’s thin and weakened body.
I will first argue that Shakespeare drew his inspiration from the sociohistorical context of Jacobean England to deal with the “vital stake”3
(Fischler 9) of food. Those suffering from hunger in James I’s kingdom
are the half-naked insane from Bedlam asylum who need to beg for their
food (Edgar / Poor Tom in King Lear) and the famished peasants who rise
up in the Midlands (the plebeians in Coriolanus) and prove Francis
Bacon’s analysis to be right: “the rebellions of the belly are the worst.”
(Bacon 44) I will then focus specifically on the representation of dearth on
stage, with early twenty-first century French productions by Philippe
Adrien and André Engel (Le Roi Lear), and Jean Boillot and Christian
Schiaretti (Coriolan). I will emphasize the dialectics of revolt and
subjection, nutritional deficiency and abundance, the edible and the
inedible, and the playwright’s recurrent use of counterpoint. Finally, I will
analyse the way hunger provides food for fantasy, and argue that the
suffering of empty stomachs pervades the sphere of fantasy and
contaminates it with unnatural images, and that the almost unbearable lack
of food and the failure of both nourishing earth and human charity create
cannibalistic images and pervert “the semiotics of food” (Jeanneret 17).
“The country gives me proof and precedent” (KL, 3.2.13):
Jacobean England as a theatre of hunger
In Fat King, Lean Beggar. Representations of Poverty in the Age of
Shakespeare, William C. Carroll brings out the other side of Renaissance
England: “Hunger and deprivation never disappeared in the Tudor-Stuart
period, even when harvests and other economic conditions were good; and
when such conditions were bad, the poor died in the streets, and the
beggars and vagabonds of the kingdom multiplied” (Carroll 23). The
origin of the penury affecting the destitute is to be found both in human
action and natural causes, microcosm and macrocosm. The “cracking of
the cosmos”4 as Yves Bonnefoy puts it (Bonnefoy 83), the bad weather
4
Chapter One
fatal to harvests, and the misconceptions of nature—of which the simpleminded are an example—are connected with human negligence, uncertain
charity and abuse of power current in human society. This is what
Shakespeare’s two tragedies bring to light.
To bypass his banishment on pain of death, Edgar uses ruse and
radically changes his appearance:
…Whiles I may ’scape,
I will preserve myself; and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast; my face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky. (KL, 2.3.5-12)
He has no means of escape but to look the part, and to do so he explicitly
refers to Jacobean Bedlam beggars, intending to follow their example:
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. (KL, 2.3.13-20)
The “numb’d and mortified bare arms” that might be “affected by
gangrene or necrosis”5 may point to both lack of health care and
nutritional deficiency. As for the oxymoronic phrase “enforce their
charity,” it gives an idea of how difficult it is to beg for alms. Poor Tom is
the victim of the evolution of mentalities concerning charity; he finds
himself caught between medieval individual charity and the statecontrolled charity set up in early modern times when, as Michel Foucault
explains, “God’s presence is no longer felt behind the rags of the poor.”6
(Foucault 1972, 88, my translation) What progressively disappears is “the
fear of refusing starving Jesus a piece of bread, the very fear that had
sustained the whole Christian mythology of charity and endowed the great
medieval ritual of hospitality with absolute meaning.”7 (Foucault 1972, 88,
my translation) But Bedlam—which could have been a model of statecontrolled charity—proves a failure; the bedlamites are set free and sent to
beg for food outside the asylum which is unable to support them.8 Thomas
Hunger on the Stage
5
Dekker painted a vitriolic picture of it in the first part of The Honest
Whore (1604). In this play, one of the inmates clearly—though madly—
voices his daily experience of starvation: “Alas! I am a poor man: a very
poor man! I am starved, and have had no meat by this light, ever since the
great flood; I am a poor man” (Dekker 181). His body, all skin and bones
because of malnutrition, is exhibited as a piece of evidence: “. . . for look
you, here be my guts: these are my ribs — you may look through my ribs
— see how my guts come out! These are my red guts, my very guts, oh,
oh” (Dekker 182). He later quarrels with another inmate so violently that
he tears him to pieces for the sake of a few crumbs of “porridge” (Dekker
183). This suggests that instead of curing madness, Bedlam sustains it. In
Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, Piero
Camporesi notes that mental imbalance is indeed fuelled by hunger: “The
most effective and upsetting drug, bitterest and most ferocious, has always
been hunger, creator of unfathomable disturbances of mind and
imagination. Further lifelike and convincing dreams grew out of this
forced hallucination, compensating for the everyday poverty” (Camporesi
125).
In Coriolanus, there can be no hallucination as the citizens have a burst
of energy and envisage radical action to survive: “Let us kill him
[Coriolanus], and we’ll have corn at our own price” (Cor., 1.1.10-11). The
Roman tragedy opens with the famished plebeians’ claims. Menenius tries
to make them believe that the cause of their misery is natural or divine,
rather than socio-political; he interprets dearth as a sign of retribution—
“For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it” (Cor., 1.1.69-70).
But the rioters accuse the patricians and denounce their responsibility:
“They [the helms o’th’ state] ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish,
and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the
rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the
poor” (Cor., 1.1.76-81). Unlike Menenius’, their discourse brings to the
fore the two meanings of “dearth,” i.e. scarcity of food and costliness. In
Dearth, public policy and social disturbance in England, 1550-1800, R. B.
Outhwaite clarifies :
…dearth was usually reserved for sharp elevation in the prices of [more]
basic products — bread and beer — and the grainstuffs from which they
derived. When in sixteenth-and-seventeenth century England men spoke of
dearth, they were commenting on the prices of these goods reaching
alarmingly high levels, levels that were likely to have dangerous social,
and perhaps political, consequences. (Outhwaite 3)
6
Chapter One
To a Jacobean audience, the Roman citizens’ riot may have sounded as
a transposition of the peasants’ revolts that had broken out in the Midlands
in 1607 and 1608 due to bad harvests, the soaring of food prices and the
perverse consequences of the Poor Law Statutes (see Parker 34-37). In
Coriolanus, the rioters win their claims on both the political and
physiological levels—they are granted tribunes and given corn gratis—
and their experience of hunger goes no further. Piero Camporesi insists on
the long-term consequences of nutritional disorders and deficiency:
The disasters of a hunger epidemic, of a seven-year famine […] left marks
too profound to be wiped out from one day to the next. The ‘triumph of
plenty’ […] was just a literary topos: a triumphalistic hyperbole which
bore little resemblance to the reality of things. The accelerated
deterioration of the physical and mental health during the years of
stupefying starvation was for many people an irreversible process towards
intellectual disorder and degradation that the return to ‘normal’—to the
low level of daily undernourishment—would not succeed in wiping out. As
from a tormented physiological labyrinth, one exited with difficulty from
this alimentary chaos; one re-emerged very slowly from the muddy
darkness of the voyage through the realm of hardship and indigence. The
harm caused to the sick body of this feverish society was often irreparable.
(Camporesi 78-79)
Spectators have no access to the deterioration at work in the weakened
body; what comes first on stage is what they can hear and see. The play is
not meant to offer a minute socio-historical analysis of hunger; instead,
Jacobean topical references, as shared knowledge, create connivance
between actors and spectators, participate in the economy of the play and
give substance to dramatic illusion.
“[They] suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain” (Cor., 1.1.77-78):
staging starvation with abundance in the wings
Some Shakespearean characters are remembered for their particular
bodies; it is impossible to picture either a lean Falstaff (1 Henry IV) or a
fat Casca (Julius Cæsar). In both King Lear and Coriolanus, many text
clues work as stage directions and suggest that the leanness of the body
must be seen on stage, at least to validate the character’s speech and
perception. The plebeians are resolved to die rather than to famish because
they are starving; the strength of their conviction must be in reverse
proportion to the health of their bodies. In his soliloquy, Edgar announces
Hunger on the Stage
7
that he is about to counterfeit a Bedlam beggar with “presented
nakedness” (KL, 2.3.11), and indeed he is later viewed by Lear as “a poor,
bare forked animal” (KL, 3.4.105-106) epitomizing the “poor naked
wretches” (KL, 3.4.28) he has just evoked. Here, nakedness can only be
synonymous with leanness. In staging the two tragedies, the challenge is
thus to show starvation at work, as if the body itself became a stage on
which hunger had the leading role.
Four early twenty-first French productions can be compared in two
pairs. In Le Roi Lear directed by André Engel (Théâtre National Populaire
de Villeurbanne, 30 May 2006), Edgar was played by Jérôme Kircher, an
actor who, once he had taken off his clothes, presented a body with no
sign of thinness whatsoever; his persona was not as convincing as it could
have been. On the other hand, in Philippe Adrien’s production
(Cartoucherie, Théâtre de la Tempête, 3 October 2002), Olivier Constant
with his lean body looked the part better. Spectators could not only see
“[his] houseless head[s] and unfed sides” (KL, 3.4.30), but also “[his]
loop’d and window’d raggedness” (KL, 3.4.31) as he was half-dressed
with rudimentary breeches made of hessian, the holes and patching of
which could symbolically mirror nutritional troubles. Walking crabwise
and crouching, he epitomized the human being “brought near to beast”
(KL, 2.3.9) out of destitution and deficiency. The Roman tragedy too
inspired contrasted productions. Christian Schiaretti’s Coriolan (Théâtre
Populaire de Villeurbanne, 23 November 2006) began with plebeians who
wore beautiful Elizabethan velvet breeches at odds with their poverty,
hunger and determination to kill. Besides, they were armed only with
clubs, not with oblong pikes i.e. weapons symbolic of extreme meagreness
(Lagae-Devoldère 20). Yet the balance was restored in a contrapuntal way
with Menenius / Roland Bertin’s Falstaffian stoutness. It was as if, on
stage, he became the very embodiment of the belly of his fable, “idle and
inactive, / Still cupboarding the viand” (Cor., 1.1.96-97). He later
presented “the map of [his] microcosm” (Cor., 2.1.60) to the embittered
tribunes while sitting with an oversized table napkin tied up around his
neck and treating himself to some delicious food and wine. In Jean
Boillot’s production (Le Théâtre, Scène Nationale de Poitiers, 18 October
2004), the Roman people was represented in an original, unparalleled way.
It was condensed into a single actress, Anne Rejony, whose lean body
with very tight clothes evoked a mummy, a sort of androgynous being who
thus became an allegory of famine.
The dialectics of the fat and the lean, which brings into play the choice
of appropriate actors’ bodies with the possibility—or not—to change their
diet intentionally, must be visible on stage. The actors’ bodies must reflect
8
Chapter One
the binary oppositions that Shakespeare lends to some of his characters
and his recurrent use of counterpoints. In Coriolanus, the contrapuntal
pattern works on three levels: plebeians versus patricians, Roman dearth
versus Volscian granaries full of corn, Coriolanus’s banishment versus
Aufidius’s banquet. Hunger is first evoked via the people’s uprising and
via their resolute reaction which is not belied by the saying “words are
wasted on a starving man.” The rioters’ rhetoric of radicalism is to be
opposed to a rhetoric of flexibility and conciliation which seems to go
hand in hand with a good meal. According to Menenius, “The veins
unfilled, our blood is cold, and then / We pout upon the morning, are unapt
/ To give or to forgive; but when we have stuffed / These pipes and these
conveyances of our blood / With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
/ Than in our priest-like fasts” (Cor., 5.1.51-56). The lack of food the
plebeians—unlike the patricians—suffer from is highlighted by the binary
dialectics of deficiency and abundance, with a new version of the quarrel
between Lenten and non-Lenten, of the combat between Lent and Carnival
as an implicit backdrop:
We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority
surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity
while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely, but
they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our
misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance
is a gain to them. (Cor., 1.1.14-21)
The stocks in patrician houses are fantasized about as if they were
horns of plenty, lands of milk and honey. The starving citizens project
onto the patricians what Stephen Greenblatt calls “a dream of
superabundance” (Greenblatt 41). To pacify them, Menenius wrong-foots
them: he addresses them as if they were guests at a meal and gives them an
appetite with words. In doing so, he incongruously shifts banqueting
codes. When banquets are organized, Michel Jeanneret argues,
“conversation is the real food: it changes the language of the body into
anodyne formulae and, by sublimating appetites, culture systematically
neutralizes nature. Words make the feast disappear” (Jeanneret 47-48). As
his banishment becomes imminent, Coriolanus anticipates a drastic
reduction of food with only “a grain a day” (Cor., 3.3.91). But his arrival
at Aufidius’s place, where “the feast smells well” (Cor., 4.5.5), paves the
way for reversal. Indeed, with alliances reversing, the one who
“appear[ed] not like a guest” (Cor., 4.5.6) is turned into the privileged host
of the feast which is going full swing off stage. This reported episode in
turn serves as a foil to the Volcian soldiers’ camp meal and their “table
Hunger on the Stage
9
talk,”9 in Bakhtin’s sense, centred on Coriolanus. The lieutenant tells
Aufidius: “Your soldiers use him as the grace fore meat, / Their talk at
table, and their thanks at the end” (Cor., 4.7.2-3). Coriolanus is now a
name powerful enough to vie with sustenance, indeed to symbolize
appetence and satiety; he is both sacralised and de-sacralised in this report
evoking a “grotesque symposium” (Bakhtin 284).
In King Lear, it is the (bad) quality of the food, not its (fantasized)
quantity as in Coriolanus, which makes hunger stand out. Images of
repletion are replaced with evocations of ersatz food; cornucopia gives
way to the inedible or to “what is biologically [but] not culturally edible”
(Fischler 31, my translation). To lend credibility to his “Tom of Bedlam”
persona, Edgar lists what he feeds on: “Poor Tom; that eats the swimming
frog, the toad, the tadpole [sic], the wall-newt, and the water; that in the
fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets;
swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the
standing pool” (KL, 3.4.126-131). Such nutritional debasement certainly
mirrors mental imbalance, but it further reflects banishment from society
and the drastic fall within the Great Chain of Being. Claude Fischler’s
analysis comes to mind: “Incorporating food means, both on the real and
imaginary planes, incorporating all or parts of its properties: we become
what we eat. Identity is based on incorporation” (Fischler 66, my
translation). As regards Edgar, it is his persona which is built on what he
ingests, which is all the more convincing in the light of Fischler’s
conclusion: “it is not only that the eater incorporates the properties of the
food: symmetrically, we can say that ingesting food integrates the eater
into a culinary system and consequently into the group that use that
system” (Fischler 66, my translation). Poor Tom’s food is so revolting that
it verges on unnaturalness—quite significantly bits and pieces of such
food are mentioned again in Macbeth (1606) as ingredients to be thrown
into the witches’ bubbling cauldron.
“Those pelican daughters” (KL, 3.4.74):
unnatural hunger and cannibalistic images
In King Lear as in Coriolanus, hunger and starvation can be read as the
consequences of unnatural individual attitudes or policies, such as
refusing—instead of offering—elementary hospitality and banishing close
relatives or war heroes. To ask for refuge (Coriolanus to Aufidius) and to
offer refuge (Gloucester to Lear) are considered as transgressions and are
punishable by death; the themes of ingratitude and treason loom large
either in the political sphere (Coriolanus) or in the domestic one (King
10
Chapter One
Lear). Coriolanus is banished by his motherland, but he previously
pronounces himself against the free distribution of corn to the famished
citizens as if “food was related to work,” as if eating “concluded work and
struggle and was their crown of glory” (Bakhtin 280). Work and struggle
are values he is unable to transpose from the battlefield to the city. As for
Lear, his simple request, “on my knee I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me
raiment, bed and food” (KL, 2.4.152-153), is turned down, but he himself
banished loyal Kent, his own innocent daughter and took too little care of
the poor during his reign. His neglect of the destitute could be paralleled
with his distaste for Cordelia’s rhetoric of “plainness” (KL, 1.1.128). The
subplot presents a similar pattern: Gloucester is thrown out of his own
house, but he himself sentenced his legitimate son Edgar to banishment.
Thus, the dialectics of rejection and welcome, of the metaphorically
vomited one and the literally fed one, cannot be dissociated from the
recurrent lex talionis pattern and suggests that unnaturalness is a question
of viewpoint and perspective. The feeling of injustice and the experience
of starvation that ensue banishment emerge through images of devoration
which at times verge on cannibalism. The brotherly betrayal Edgar suffers
makes short work of his identity, and this is why Edgar’s answer to the
herald is: “Know, my name is lost; / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn, and
canker-bit” (KL, 5.3.120-121). Banished from Rome, Coriolanus has
symbolically lost his Roman patronymic of Caius Martius and explains to
Aufidius: “Only that name [Coriolanus] remains. / The cruelty and envy of
the people, / Permitted by our dastard nobles, who / Have all forsook me,
hath devoured the rest [Caius Martius]” (Cor., 4.5.74-77). This metaphor
echoes that of the plebeians picturing the patricians as ogres—“If the wars
eat us not up, they will” (Cor., 1.1.81-82). Romans are turned into
cannibals and the devouring battlefield substitutes itself for the nourishing
earth, thus bringing to mind Falstaff’s “food for powder, food for powder,
they’ll [such pitiful rascals] fill a pit as well as better” in 2 Henry IV
(4.2.65-66).
Such unnatural reversal is made particularly visible in King Lear. At
the beginning of the tragedy, the kingdom is presented as a land of plenty
and the fatherly legacy is synonymous with benediction. Lear tells
Goneril: “Of all these bounds, even from this line to this, / With shadowy
forests and with champains rich’d, / With plenteous rivers and wideskirted meads, / We make thee lady: to thine and Albany’s issues / Be this
perpetual” (KL, 1.1.62-66). But when Lear is confronted with filial
ingratitude, he turns from a nourishing figure to an annihilating one, and
his words read like a variation on God’s curse on Cain, banishing him
from the fertile earth (Gen., 4, 11-12): “Hear, Nature, hear! Dear Goddess,
Hunger on the Stage
11
hear! / Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend / To make this creature
fruitful! / Into her womb convey sterility! / Dry up in her the organs of
increase, / And from her derogate body never spring / A babe to honour
her!” (KL, 1.4.273-279). If “eating and drinking . . . are part of the great
cycle of fertility” (Jeanneret 24), Lear’s malediction can be regarded as a
form of symmetrical retribution—has he not just been denied room and
board? The monstrosity of this malediction, which assimilates Lear to a
potential ogre, recalls the terms that the king used previously to curse
Cordelia, when Lear claimed that he would rather favour the barbarous
Scythian, “he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite”
(KL, 1.1.116-117) than his ungrateful daughter. Cannibalistic images
multiply as the play unfolds. The reference to the Scythian is followed by
the proverb of the hedge-sparrow eaten by those he has fed (KL, 1.4.213214) and the famous metaphor of the “pelican daughters” (KL, 3.4.74), and
this in turn gives way to Albany’s pessimistic generalisation: “Humanity
must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (KL, 4.2.49-50).
To a lesser extent, such unnatural hunger is presented in the grotesque
mode, in the medieval tradition of culinary humour. Kent is about to beat
Oswald to a pulp, to “carbonado [his] shanks” (KL, 2.2.35-36); Aufidius’s
first servingman draws a portrait of Coriolanus as a comic cook-warrior
who “scotched him [Aufidius] and knotched him like a carbonado” (Cor.,
4.5.191-192).
These images of cannibalism are supplemented with cannibalistic
images—the literal meaning of the word is swallowed up by its
metaphorical meaning and vanishes. This particularly applies to the
vocabulary of food in both tragedies. Corn, bread, milk and eggs are
mainly mentioned in metaphors which, referring to mental images rather
than to the food itself, betray the lack of basic nutriments. In King Lear,
milk—known for its nutritional virtues and essential to growth—is
referred to in a derogatory way and turned into an insult pointing to the
lack of courage and virility; Albany is reduced to “a milk-livered man”
(KL, 4.2.50). In Coriolanus, the image of breast-feeding is perverted by
the image of blood-letting which is said to be aesthetically superior by
Volumnia (Cor., 1.3.40-44)—who thus appears as an unnatural mother.
Via the recurrent motif of eggs, King Lear brings out the dialectics of
substance and hollowness. Eggs are never mentioned as nutriments and,
what is more, only their whites—not their yolks i.e. their central part—are
alluded to, not to be eaten but to serve as a soothing balm for Gloucester’s
bleeding eye-sockets which have just been hollowed out—a further
instance of hollowness. The symbolic significance of the egg in King Lear
diverges from the biblical exegesis according to which the egg, as life
12
Chapter One
receptacle, symbolises hope for new birth or resurrection. The egg, a sheer
shell, is a symbol of fragility, likely to crack. Edgar uses the shell simile to
paint Gloucester’s imaginary fall; the fool turns it into an enigma to
emphasize the split of the realm—“Give me an egg and I’ll give you two
crowns” (KL, 1.4.152-153). The conclusion that the fool delivers to the
king is: “now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now;
I am a Fool, thou art nothing” (KL, 1.4.189-191). The “O without a figure”
can be deciphered as the representation of the empty shell of an egg,
whereas the food and substance are symbolised by the fool, since “fool”
can designate “a desert made of eggs and cream.”10 The extended
metaphor of the egg enhances a process of unnatural reversal relegating
the king to the bottom of the hierarchical ladder—even below his fool—
and associating him with “He that keeps nor crust nor crumb, / Weary of
all, shall want some” (KL, 1.4.195-196).
Finally, the two plays are pervaded throughout by the motif of
contamination, especially that of corn contaminated by rye grass. As
Edgar / Poor Tom enumerates the unnatural food he is forced to eat, the
fantasy of poisoned and poisoning nutrients crops up: the fiends who
persecute him have allegedly “set ratsbane by his porridge” (KL, 3.4.54)
and “mildew[ed] the white wheat” (KL, 3.4.115). The obsessive fear of
infected crops—the basis of food—is shared by Coriolanus and voiced via
an extended metaphor, with corn standing for patricians and rye for
plebeians; the latter are
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves [the patricians] have ploughed for, sowed, and
scattered
By mingling them with us, the honoured number
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars. (Cor., 3.1.73-76)
This metaphorical infection touches on a practice prevalent in times of
dearth: the mixture of rye and corn to bake bread, which according to
proportions could lead to more or less serious intoxication. As Camporesi
puts it, “When bread was made in this desperate way with the most impure
and heterogeneous mixtures, every pernicious adventure was possible, and
the ‘evil’ darnel, ‘often causes people to beat their heads / against the
walls’” (Camporesi 123). It comes as no surprise that Lear’s crown of wild
grasses and flowers should be composed of
… rank fumiter and furrow weeds,
[With] hardocks, hemlocks, bettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Hunger on the Stage
13
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn. (KL, 4.4.5-6)
All these are substitutes necessary to survival in times of famine and
symbolic of a world upside down. It will be possible to have real bread
only when imposture and chaos give way to justice and harmony. Since
then bread is bound to remain virtual and symbolic, standing for a proof of
integrity and firmness in Albany’s words—“There is my pledge; I’ll make
it on thy [Edmund’s] heart, / Ere I taste bread, thou art nothing less / Than
I have here proclaim’d thee” (KL, 5.3.94-96).
In King Lear, dearth is part of the apocalyptic vision Edmund delivers
to his brother Edgar:
I promise you the effects he writes of succeed unhappily; as of
unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions
of ancient amities; divisions in state; menaces and maledictions against
King and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation
of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what. (KL, 1.2.140-46)
His condensed prediction of unnatural events is, in fact, no other than the
programme of the tragedy. “Dearth” could be regarded here as one of the
three dark riders of the Apocalypse—War, Plague and Hunger. Yet
nutritional deficiency is the consequence of many misdeeds which all have
human causes—one of which is denied hospitality. Two characters tell us
that basic mutual aid can only be evoked in an oxymoronic mode: Edgar /
Poor Tom who, like Bedlam beggars, “Sometime with lunatic bans,
sometime with prayers” (KL, 2.3.19), intends to “Enforce [his] charity”
(KL, 2.3.20), and Kent / Caius who “to this hard house, / […] [will] return
and force / Their scanted courtesy” (KL, 3.2.62-67). They may voice
Shakespeare’s nostalgia for the medieval conception of charity.
In Coriolanus, dearth is epitomized by the famished citizens to whom
Shakespeare rather substantially lends voice in the very first lines of the
play. Despite Coriolanus’s reluctance, the rioters win their claim not only
with the election of tribunes but also with the free distribution of corn—
and at that point Shakespeare diverges from Plutarch. Coriolanus is
opposed to “our so frank donation” (Cor., 3.1.132) or “the Senate’s
courtesy” (Cor., 3.1.134) because he links food with courage and work; he
thus could stand for the “new sensibility to poverty” depicted by Michel
Foucault as
14
Chapter One
an experience of pathos […] which is no longer associated with the
glorification of pain or a salvation common to Poverty and Charity, but
which mostly reminds man of his duties towards society and singles out the
destitute as both consequence of disorder and obstacle to order. So the
point is no longer to extol misery via the gesture which relieves it, but
quite simply to suppress it. (Foucault 1972, 83, my translation)
With the two tragedies paralleled and with Coriolanus’s particular
ambivalence (the Senate distribute corn gratis to the plebeians but he
whom they mean to elect Consul disapproves of their initiative), the
audience is invited to question the evolution of the notion of charity and
the validity of a secularized charitable system brought under state control.
Bibliography
Bacon, Francis. 1597, 1612. Essays. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd,
1972.
Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene
Iswolsky. Cambridge: Mass: The Massachussetts Institute of
Technology Press, 1968.
Bonnefoy, Yves. Shakespeare and the French Poet. Edited by John
Naughton. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Camporesi, Piero. Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern
Europe. Translated by David Gentilcore. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1989.
Carroll, William C. Fat King, Lean Beggar. Representations of Poverty in
the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1996.
Cépède, Michel et Gounelle, Hugues. La faim. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, Que sais-je?, 1970.
Dekker, Thomas. 1604. The Honest Whore, Part the First. In Thomas
Dekker, edited by Ernest Rhys. London: T. Fisher Unwin, The
Mermaid Series, date unspecified.
Fischler, Claude. L’Homnivore. Le goût, la cuisine, le corps. Paris:
Éditions Odile Jacob, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard,
Tel, 1972.
—. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
Translated by Richard Howard. London: Routledge, 2002.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negociations. The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997.
Hunger on the Stage
15
Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the
Renaissance. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991.
Lagae-Devoldère, Denis. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. William
Shakespeare. Paris: Armand Colin-CNED, 2006.
Malaguzzi, Silvia. Boire et manger. Traditions et symboles. French
translation by Dominique Férault. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2006.
Montanari, Massimo. La faim et l’abondance. Histoire de l’alimentation
en Europe. French translation by Monique Aymard. Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1995.
Outhwaite, R. B. Dearth, public policy and social disturbance in England,
1550-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Shakespeare, William. 1597. The First Part of King Henry IV. Edited by
A. R. Humphreys. London: Routledge, The Arden Shakespeare, 1992.
—. 1605. King Lear. Edited by Kenneth Muir. London and New York:
Routledge, The Arden Shakespeare, 1993.
—. 1605. The History of King Lear. Edited by Stanley Wells. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 2001.
—. 1608. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Edited by R. Brian Parker. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 1994.
Notes
1
Cor., 1.1.22-23.
My argument is indebted to Michel Cépède and Hugues Gounelle’s useful
definitions: “Appetite: the physiological state generally linked to nutritional
deficiency correlative to the sensation of hunger.” “Appetence: the physiological
state of a subject who […] experiences satisfaction or pleasure when eating.”
“Satiety: the physiological state opposed to that of appetite.” Cépède and
Gournelle, 7-8, my translation. (“Appétit : état physiologique généralement lié au
déficit alimentaire corrélatif à la sensation de faim.” “Appétence: état
physiologique d’un sujet qui […] éprouve une satisfaction ou un plaisir à la
consommation.” “Satiété: état physiologique inverse de l’appétit.”)
3
“L’enjeu vital.”
4
“Les craquements du cosmos.”
5
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (London: Book
Club Associates, 1979), art. “mortified”, 4.
6
“Dieu ne se cache plus sous les haillons du pauvre.” Since the published
translation of Foucault’s book (see bibliography) departs significantly from the
original text, especially in the chapter on “The Great Confinement,” I am
supplying my own translation of relevant passages.
2
16
7
Chapter One
“La peur de refuser un morceau de pain à Jésus mourant de faim, cette crainte qui
avait animé toute la mythologie chrétienne de la charité, et donné son sens absolu
au grand rituel médiéval de l’hospitalité.”
8
The original name of Bedlam asylum was Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem.
Patents suffering from mental disorder were first admitted a year after its
foundation in 1274.
9
“The grotesque symposium [or table talk] does not have to respect hierarchical
distinctions; it freely blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher,
the spiritual and the material. There are no mésalliance in its case.” (Bakthin 285286)
10
Stanley Wells’ note, 147, in KL 132.
CHAPTER TWO
“FOOD OF LOVE”: HUNGER AND DESIRE
IN SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES
VANASAY KHAMPHOMMALA,
UNIVERSITY OF PARIS-SORBONNE
In the opening lines of Twelfth Night, hunger and sexual desire appear
inextricably linked:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
(TN, 1.1.1-3)1
Though the analogy may initially seem transparent, it triggers a series
of reversals: sounds become tastes, airy nothings are given shapes and
gastronomy veers to gluttony. Orsino literally feasts on music and thereby
reveals a distempered sensibility in which bulimia and erotomania
converge in a double ecstasy underlined by the polysemic use of the verb
to die. The metaphor of food is immediately introduced as a problematic
trope that both creates and resolves a series of tensions.
This ambiguity first pertains to the stomach and what is hidden within
it. The body, common vehicle of both hunger and sexual desire, is
presented as an interface where dietary and erotic patterns commingle. The
ambiguity of the body also rests on its ability to represent the mental
processes of desire and hunger as physical phenomena. In terms of
dramaturgy, hunger and desire therefore raise the central question of the
link between mind and body: whereas they resist representation as
psychological phenomena, their bodily counterparts invite spectacular, and
even obscene treatments on stage. The use of the food metaphor to express
sexual desire would therefore seem to rest on anatomy as well as
dramaturgy: while preserving its bodily implications, hunger would offer,
18
Chapter Two
if not a respectable, at least an acceptable substitute to erotic desire on
stage.
The need to metaphorize sexual desire is strongly felt in Shakespeare’s
comedies in which its representation stumbles on a twofold obstacle. First,
the economy of comedies traditionally consists in frustrating the
protagonists’ desires until the dénouement, which most of the time
consists in the promise of a wedding feast that puts an end to sexual
frustration while filling stomachs. But beyond reasons of decorum, the
impossibility of staging sexual satisfaction on the Elizabethan stage is also
explained by its aesthetics, especially the use of transvestite actors to play
female parts. The absence of female bodies onstage precludes the
revelation of naked bodies which would unveil, with the anatomy of the
actors, the inauthenticity of the art of theatre itself. The metaphorization of
bodies and their desires thus serves the need to blur all references to a
female anatomy which is a fabrication created on stage and that any
exhibition of desire would shatter. However, if the rhetoric of food is
indeed a veil modestly drawn on sexual desire to avoid its frontal
representation, Shakespeare weaves a veil that often appears to be seethrough. What light does the food metaphor throw on the erotic stakes of
Shakespeare’s comedies? I will first suggest that hunger works as a
crucible in which Shakespeare merges rhetorical topoi that seem at first
incompatible and even contradictory. I will then analyze how this
specificity provokes a radicalization and a series of reversals that hinge on
the carnivalesque potentialities of the food metaphor. Finally, I will
consider the food metaphor as an anti-metaphor, a meta-theatrical device
that both veils and unveils the duplicity of the actor’s body.
Hunger as a metaphor: a rhetorical ragout
The metaphor of hunger may at first appear to be a cliché that
conforms to popular beliefs connecting dietary and erotic practices. The
notion that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach is amply
documented in anthropology, and Shakespeare’s characters often illustrate
such theories: their diet is anchored in the habits of Renaissance England
and its Christian culture in which gluttony is never far from lust.2 In an
atmosphere where restriction was the norm, the calendar of feasts offered
regular if not frequent occasions to satisfy a variety of appetites, and to
transgress an ethos mostly based on austerity (Laroque 89). Twelfth night
was one of these occasions of permitted debauchery, much to the
displeasure of the virtuous Malvolio, who seeks to banish sweets, along
with other pleasures, from the house of his mistress (“Dost thou think