by Claire Kimball, Production Dramaturg
When we examine cannibalism in an early modern play like The Bloody Banquet, we are effectively probing a nexus of ideas about corporeality, morality, and identity …
A depiction of a Scythian warrior
The source story for The Bloody Banquet from William Warner originally labeled the tyrant, Armatrites, as a Scythian lord. This would have immediately cast him as a rather barbarous cannibal by reputation. During the early modern period, Scythians were typically associated with anthropophagy and this kind of Scythian “otherness” was a means to divide the purportedly civilized culture of England from the brutal and savage nature of curious foreigners.* Characterizing Scythians as uncouth and stupid cannibals “not only created the trope of cannibalism in the Central Asian steppes but helped to establish precedents regarding who cannibals were, what they were like, and where they lived” (Watson 32). That is to say, eventually, it did not really matter where the Scythians lived or which peoples populated their culture, so long as everyone recognized the established line between appropriate social mores and the abhorred taboos of being a “Scythian.”
Philomela and Tereus
But even early modern England had a complicated relationship with eating human bodies. Apothecaries usedmumia – or pieces of mummified human remains from both imported and local corpses – to heal physical ailments (Noble 1). In addition, early modern works drew direct inspiration from the prominent Greek mythologies which also featured the eating of bodies. The Cronos legend, for example, describes how the Titan father figure eats all of his children in an attempt to protect himself from their treachery in the future. Tantalus feeds his son, Pelops, to the gods as a meal, and (in some versions) the Titans devour the new-born Dionysus, sparing only his heart for eventual rebirth. These strange tales of sacrifice and consumption were a part of the fabric of Greek tradition and, as such, claimed an incredible influence over the later Renaissance interests in art and storytelling. Early modern English playwrights imported facets of Seneca’s shocking tragedies and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus pulls directly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Philomela, raped and mutilated to silence by her brother-in-law, Tereus, joins with her sister to surreptitiously feed Tereus his son. The source story for The Bloody Banquet from William Warner originally labeled the tyrant, Armatrites, as a Scythian lord. This would have immediately cast him as a rather barbarous cannibal by reputation. During the early modern period, Scythians were typically associated with anthropophagy and this kind of Scythian “otherness” was a means to divide the purportedly civilized culture of England from the brutal and savage nature of curious foreigners.* Characterizing Scythians as uncouth and stupid cannibals “not only created the trope of cannibalism in the Central Asian steppes but helped to establish precedents regarding who cannibals were, what they were like, and where they lived” (Watson 32). That is to say, eventually, it did not really matter where the Scythians lived or which peoples populated their culture, so long as everyone recognized the established line between appropriate social mores and the abhorred taboos of being a “Scythian.”
Warner’s story of the Scythian in Pan his syrinx, or pipe compact of seven reedes, however, sidesteps the familiar theme of feeding offenders their own children and focuses instead on two modes of forbidden bodily consumption: immoral coitus and punitive cannibalism. The tyrant Armatrites (whom Dekker and Middleton present as a powerful Cilician king rather than a barbarous Scythian) commands that his Queen eat the dead body of her lover as penance for her adultery. The Queen is silent for the duration of her meal and, as such, the playwrights subsume her plight into the significant tales of antiquity: as she consumes, she says nothing and so conforms to “a larger fantasy, first proposed in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, in which male vocal triumph requires females absence” (Enterline 205).
1557 engraving by Theodor de Bry
Though this horrific display of cannibalism was meant at the time to be as abhorrent and spectacular as it will appear to contemporary audiences today, these themes of sexual transgression and corporeal violation have been weaving their way through the subconscious of human creative thought for millennia. At the time of The Bloody Banquet, cannibalism served to demarcate the difference between the civilized and enlightened “us” of English culture and the uncultured and brutish “them” of mysterious foreign lands. Those same convenient constructs of otherness persist today when we tell ourselves that “we” are not the ones who eat other people, especially not as punishment, because that is an impossible line we would never cross. In drawing from classic themes and merging them into their own created worlds, however, playwrights like Dekker and Middleton began to fracture the unstable boundaries of that constructed otherness. Eating another person’s body could not remain isolated to an ancient story of a bygone age or even an archetype of foreign barbarians. Rather, as companies enacted plays like The Bloody Banquet with English actors for English audiences, the tropes of bodily consumption became an uncomfortable, fascinating aspect of their own seventeenth century sense of self.
* See Martine Mar-Sixtus by R.W. (1591) and John King’s Lecture