| dc.description.abstract | The politics of food are naturally central to many early modern plays in part because of unstable supply and means of distribution in London. Food is a type of property that can represent a great deal of power, especially in times of scarcity. Drama, as a widely viewed popular form, had great power to affect and reflect common understandings of how bodies were constituted through actions like eating and drinking. Early modern dramatic characters use food and consumption to wield, reveal, and limit power within early modern drama; the consumers of drama did the same within early modern English culture. This study seeks new understandings of how early modern identities were established and maintained through food. In addition to all the things we might expect about the experience of food, its vital importance, availability, perishability, and cost would have been conspicuous to the early modern viewers. The eleven plays analyzed here, selected for the prominence and significance of food and consumption in their plots, include Christopher Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus (1588); Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV (1597), 2 Henry IV (1597), Measure for Measure (1604), Titus Andronicus (1594), and Timon of Athens (1607); Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603); Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613); John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1613); and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Magnetic Lady (1632). Knowledge taken for granted by the contemporaries of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, and Heywood has faded alongside the popularity and availability of many food and drink items, and readers have replaced such knowledge with assumptions informed by their own culture's food beliefs and practices. This dissertation argues that the material components of appetite reflect and recast early modern power structures within drama, destabilizing the patterns of control and ownership in the food market economy, causing political dysfunction in England's body politic, constructing and revealing the social archetype of the pregnant woman, and exploring the social acceptability of extreme forms of justice. | |
