As well as using food
and meals to create character and add dramatic impact, Shakespeare litters his
plays with food references used metaphorically.
Perhaps that is no surprise given Shakespeare's interest in playing with
the English language and finding ever more inventive ways to express ideas and
thought. Whether it be Falstaff's
derogatory description of the cowardly men he has pressed to fight for him as
"toasts-and-butter" (Henry IV
Part One, IV, 2, 20), or Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream using
the image of a "double cherry" (III, 2, 209) to describe her former
intimacy with Hermia, such images add poetry and resonance to Shakespeare's
language.
Two plays - Hamlet
and Much Ado About Nothing - make particularly interesting use of food
metaphors and imagery.
Hamlet (c. 1600), probably
Shakespeare's best known play, tells of the eponymous protagonist's attempt to avenge
the murder of his father by his uncle Claudius, who has subsequently taken the
throne of Denmark and married his brother's widow, Gertrude. Hamlet's tragedy lies in his inability to act
quickly and decisively - his delay, whilst the trigger for beautiful,
philosophical musings (“To be or not to be” being one such example), also leads,
both directly and indirectly, to an extremely high corpse count by the end of
the play, with eight characters dying either on or off stage, including
Hamlet. In a play obsessed with life and
death, the body and the soul, the frailty of human flesh and the divinity of
human reason, it is perhaps no surprise that the characters, and particularly
Hamlet, are preoccupied with images of food and eating, an activity that Hamlet
notes puts us on a par with animals:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. What is a man
If his chief good and market of his
time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. (IV, 4, 33-35)
At the start of the
play Hamlet – not yet apprized of the truth of his father's death, but
decidedly unhappy at his mother's prompt remarriage to his uncle - bitterly
tells his best friend Horatio, who comments on the short period of time between
Hamlet's father's funeral and his mother's remarriage: "The funeral baked
meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (I, 2, 180-81). When, three scenes later, Hamlet encounters
the ghost of his dead father, he learns the reality of his father's death,
namely that he was murdered by Claudius whilst sleeping one afternoon in his
orchard. The ghost describes how his
brother poured poison into his ear which "with a sudden vigour it doth
posset / And curd, like eager droppings into milk, / The thin and wholesome
blood" (I, 5, 68-70). A posset was
a popular drink made of hot milk curdled with wine or ale, and sometimes
spiced, whilst curd is a dairy product created by curdling milk with rennet or
an acidic substance such as lemon juice and subsequently used as the basis of
cheese. In both cases the food
references illustrate the effect the poison has on the king's blood, thus
causing his death.
The Murder of King Hamlet by his brother, Claudius
Later, in Act III,
Scene 3, as Hamlet watches his uncle pray and considers whether to kill him or
not - concluding that this is not the time as to kill someone in the act of
prayer would send their soul to heaven, a fate Hamlet does not want for his
murderous uncle - he laments the fact that Claudius killed his father without
warning, giving him no time to repent of his sins and prepare his soul,
describing his father as being “full of bread” (III, 3, 80), an echo of Ezekiel
16: 49 where it is a reference to the sin of gluttony. The Biblical reference – and its interpretation
– may explain the ghost’s description of how, because he was given no time to
repent his sins before his death, he is currently in Purgatory where he is
“confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature
/ Are burnt and purged away” (I, 5, 11-13): fasting would be the entirely
appropriate punishment for the sin of gluttony.
And in Act IV, Scene 3, after he has killed Polonius, his girlfriend
Ophelia’s father, who was hiding behind the tapestry in the Queen’s chamber and
eavesdropping on a conversation between Gertrude and Hamlet, Hamlet uses food
analogies to describe Death as the great equaliser. When asked by his uncle
where Polonius’s body is, Hamlet wittily states: “At supper... Not where he
eats, but where a is eaten” (17-19), and then proceeds to describe how “A man
may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and / eat of the fish that hath
fed of that worm” (25-26).
Much Ado About Nothing – probably written a year or two
before Hamlet – a comedy of warring
couples and foolish misunderstandings, is also steeped in food metaphors, but
to an entirely different end. Beatrice
and Benedick, one of the play’s central couples who, at the start, delight in
hating one another and share a mutual antipathy to love and marriage, but who
through trickery are persuaded to fall in love, use references to food and
eating as part of their self-proclaimed “merry war” against one another (I, 1,
57). When they meet up at the beginning
of the play, after Benedick has been away fighting, Benedick declares his
surprise that Beatrice – whom he dubs “Lady Disdain” is still alive. She retorts: “Is it possible disdain should
die while she hath / such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?” (I, 1,
112-113) Later on, after a bruising
encounter with Beatrice at a masked party, Benedick declares to his superior,
Don Pedro, that he will not hang around in Beatrice’s presence: “O God, sir,
here’s a dish I love not; I cannot / endure my Lady Tongue. (II, 1, 251-52)
As well as these
general images of food and feeding, Shakespeare makes use of the image of an
orange at two points in the play. When
the young soldier Claudio – half of the other central couple in the play – is
sulking because he thinks Don Pedro has courted Beatrice’s meek cousin, Hero,
for himself, rather than for Claudio as he had promised, Beatrice notes of
him:
The count is neither sad, nor sick,
nor merry
nor well; but civil count, civil as an
orange, and something
of that jealous complexion. (II, 1, 269-271)
Here the Seville
orange metaphor encapsulates Beatrice’s sharp wit and tart satire, as well as
the rather unattractive sulky jealousy that characterises the easily gulled
Claudio. But the image of an orange will
be used later in the play for far more cruel ends. Persuaded to believe (wrongly) that Hero has
been unfaithful to him, Claudio rejects her on their wedding day, comparing her
to a “rotten orange” (IV, 1, 30) which looks virtuous and honourable on the outside,
but is decayed and corrupt within. Fortunately,
since Much Ado is a comedy, Claudio is
led to see the error of his ways and to realize that Hero is as chaste and pure
within as she appears on the outside.
In honour of the fact
that Beatrice uses her orange metaphor appropriately – unlike the foolish
Claudio – I also responded metaphorically to these metaphorical references and
devised a cake for this great female wit.
BEATRICE’S CIVIL
ORANGE CAKE (makes approximately 8 slices)
Ingredients:
200g soft butter
200g golden caster
sugar
2 large eggs
40g plain flour
2 tablespoons Seville
marmalade
140g ground almonds
Grated zest and juice
of 1 orange
6 tablespoons
(approx) of icing sugar
Method:
Line a loaf tin with
greaseproof paper or baking parchment.
Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Gently beat in the eggs one at a time, adding
some of the flour between each addition to stop the mixture curdling. Then fold in the marmalade, orange zest (not
the juice) and ground almonds.
Spoon the mixture
into the lined cake tin, lightly smoothing the top, and bake for 45-60 minutes
at 180C / Gas mark 4, until a skewer leaves the cake without any mixture stuck
to it.
Leave the cake to
cool in its tin.
When the cake is cold
remove it from the tin. Make an icing by
mixing the sieved icing sugar with sufficient orange juice to make a thin,
smooth paste. Drizzle this over the top
of the cake and leave to set.
