Dissertation

TITLE

Eating Disorder: Food and Class in Early Modern England

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction: Literary Traditions, Food Culture, and Class Theories

1 Understanding Class in Early Modern England

2 Sack, Cider, Herring, and Pudding: The Food Life of Fallen Courtiers from Jack Wilton to Falstaff

3 Eating Your Way to the Top, Working Your Way to the Table: Labor, Food, and Identity in Jack of Newbury

4 Traversing the Alimentary Topography of London and Performing the Commerce of Food in The Shoemaker’s Holiday

5 Give Us This Day our Daily Bread: The Politics of Want and the Failure of Hospitality in Coriolanus

Epilogue: Having the Cromwells for Dinner: Food and Class into the Seventeenth Century

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 the labels “sack drinker” and “beer drinker” might prove more accurate ways of designating class than “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 sets up a theoretical framework for exploring the literary and historical contexts of food and class in early modern England. After discussing the material and performative aspects of food and its relationship to the literary representation of class, my argument begins by outlining four historical forces that transformed how food was understood along class lines: law, religion, print, and nature. For the first, I turn to sumptuary laws that legalized eating according to status, income, and profession as well as to the legislated economy of fish days and proclamations on housekeeping that insisted on an older form of culinary and social ordering. Next, I look at 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. Thirdly, I consider the importance of the increasing popularity of cookbooks and the way they disseminated representations of certain kinds of upper-class foods and feasts to the classes below. And finally, I outline the importance of the series of bad harvests and crop failures that defined the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here we see how forces of nature conspire with several other human forces – the market, land policy, transportation, war – to create food scarcity, which then produces hunger, riot, death and other forms of disorder while sharpening the distinction between plenty and want from top to bottom. The cultural import of these topics 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 and ritual theory.

I begin in chapter one, “Understanding Class in Early Modern England,” by considering multiple definitions of various classes and the relations among classes. Theories of class and class relations in early modern England, including those by Louis B. Wright, J. H. Hexter, Theodore Leinwand, Ian Archer, Ralph Berry, Keith Wrightson, Stever Rappaport, Andrew McRae, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White provide the framework for understanding the rest of the dissertation. Working through a range of social documents including royal proclamations, sermons, cookbooks, agricultural manuals, and trial records, I explore the complexity of the early modern class structure and challenge previously held beliefs about literary representations of “the poor,” “the middling sort,” and “the gentry.”

Chapter two, “Sack, Cider, Herring, and Pudding: The Food Life of Fallen Courtiers from Jack Wilton to Falstaff” uses Thomas Nashe’s representation of the food-obsessed courtier in The Unfortunate Traveller as a springboard into an analysis of 1 Henry IV. Thinking about Nashe’s epicurean hierarchies, we see how mock titles based on food and drink, such as “Baron of Double Beer,” “King of the Cans,” and “Lord High Regent of Rashers of the Coals and Red-herring Cobs,” do more than add mere comedy but are instead a way of using food to make sense of class in a fictional narrative of sharp downward mobility and in a historical time when the semantic and material demarcations of previous eras were becoming outmoded. This in turn helps make sense of the continually shifting and eternally ambiguous identity of Falstaff we find in 1 Henry IV . 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 knight errant and errant knight through the cornucopia of food inspired insults, figurative language, and word games that feed the dialogue of the play. We see, however, that while such language is often used to discredit Falstaff, the language of overabundance is what is celebratory about the play as well. Understanding the significance of that contradiction is key to understanding how food works in the play life of the courtier.

Chapter three, “Eating Your Way to the Top, Working Your Way to the Table: Labor, Food, and Identity in Jack of Newbury ,” continues the discussion of fallen aristocrats from the previous chapter by beginning with a discussion of how accomplished men of trade step in to fill the food and feasting gap left by the gentry on their way down. 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. What complicates the issue is trying to reconcile Jack’s pride in his alimentary generosity to his workers with the way he uses their work as a form of entertainment when he feasts those above him on the social ladder.

Chapter four, “Traversing the Alimentary Topography of London and Performing the Commerce of Food in The Shoemaker’s Holiday ” draws on the ideas raised in chapter three by looking at a very different kind of tradesman hero. Shifting to the urban setting of London and to staged drama from written narrative, I explore the importance of money and markets at the heart of the relationship between food and class in the workshop and the city. Challenging previous readings that focus on the purely communal aspects of food in Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s, I consider ignored details that demonstrate class strife more than class unity. And yet, I argue that Dekker’s protagonist, 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.

Chapter five, “Give Us This Day our Daily Bread: The Politics of Want and the Failure of Hospitality in Coriolanus,” considers both the physical and performative aspects of food in a play that is essentially about the absence of food. I uncover the political and social dynamic of food for the city officials and military heroes as well as the hungry citizens by going beyond the cannibalism or psychological feeding of previous readings. 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 as a way of tying together issues of tradesmen and courtiers delineated in the previous four chapters.

The epilogue, “Having the Cromwells for Dinner: Food into the Seventeenth Century,” concludes by tying the various food issues and class issues addressed in this dissertation to later incidences of food, politics and class and class in the seventeenth century. Using the hunger and food riots of Coriolanus as a springboard into a discussion of early seventeenth-century food issues, I briefly consider the range of literary works that we inherit from Shakespeare, Dekker, Deloney, and Nashe in their treatment of food and class. Then I focus 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.