by Claire Kimball, Production Dramaturg
The latter half of the sixteenth century in England witnessed a surge in published cookery books; they often concentrated on the tastes, secrets, and confections of the upper classes and elite princes. For the most part, the early modern English diet consisted of meat, fish, bread, and wine, but cookery or “housewife” books also included recipes that called for fruits, restricted meats like Red Deer, and the popular but expensive luxury of sugar. Within these cookbooks, one could find recipes for meat pies, savory puddings, sauces, candied and preserved fruits or vegetables, as well as various alcoholic drinks like meads and ales. In The English Housewife (1615), Gervase Markham helpfully prescribes the typical menu for the “great feasts of princes” but also lists how a reader might adapt the requirements for “a more humble feast” – to which he still recommends about sixteen meat dishes (Best 123).
“Banquet in a Formal Palace Garden” by Lodewijk Toeput (Wikimedia Commons)
“[And] banquets to, here may you find your dishes how to frame, In addition to the main feast, early modern English diners enjoyed the banquet dessert course. These were post-supper retirements, often attended only by the men, which developed out of the medieval tradition of clearing the table for a finale of wine and spices (Thong 108). The feasts of the wealthy featured hearty meats and pottages, but a typical banquet afterward would include various nuts, candied fruit and preserves called “sweetmeats” or succade, and confectionary “dainties.” Servants would clear away the food and tables while guests would retire to another room or locale on the grounds for a new setting of delicacies and aphrodisiacs that would heat the body like parsnips, pine nuts, oysters, and the potent but dangerous Spanish fly (Evans 98). Even the word banquet (or “banket”) was heavily linked to the idea of a dessert presentation:
Succad, Marmalad, Marchpane to, & each thing els by name”
– The Treasury of Commodius Conceits and Hidden Secrets (1584)
In fact, as cookery books transitioned from the sixteenth into the early seventeenth century, their marketing toward women shifted: whereas these books had emphasized their recipes , household upkeep, and even medicinal advice during the Tudor reign, the very titles of “housewife” and ladies’ books under King James I began to incorporate the importance of acquiring and understanding sugary conceits and “banquetting stuffe”.* These intimate tables, decorated with marzipan figures and spiced fancies, eventually gave rise to a more romantic and sexual connotation – what Chris Meads defines as the “love-banquet”:
It began in comedy, found its way into tragicomedy, and on into tragedy as the period progressed … Banquet scenes where the banquets are preambles to seduction, or venues for assignations, abound in the drama, and certainly such banquets enjoyed the same reputation in society at large. To the spiced and sweetened food were attributed aphrodisiac qualities. Eringoes (the candied roots of the sea-holly plant), often mentioned specifically in banquet scenes, were one such delicacy with the supposed potential to provoke desire in the eaters. The intimate love-banquet, with its tacit agenda of sexual conquest and its characteristic secrecy, was a compelling device full of obvious dramatic potential of which many playwrights were eager to make theatrical capital. (32)
This dramatic play on the intimate love-banquet makes an important appearance in The Bloody Banquet when the Young Queen invites her lover, Tymethes, to a secret liaison. Upon his blindfolded
arrival, her servants present him with a banquet full of sweet delicacies to please him and kindle his
sexual desire:
“Loud Musick, Enter Roxano, Mazeres with the 4 servants, with dishes of sweete meates …” (E1r)
What’s more, the language of food and consumption are an intrinsic element throughout The Bloody Banquet’s text: shepherds pontificate on ravenous wolves, a mother and her infant children starve for food in the forest, characters poison goblets and bottles of wine, and the play concludes with a violent banquet scene of cannibalism.
“Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine” by Osias Beert the Elder (Wikimedia Commons)
When Brave Spirits Theatre opens the play in the coming weeks, audiences will undoubtedly recognize the more overt images of lust and avarice in its performance. It’s important to examine, however, some of the early modern overtones of status and seduction that we have lost over time. We have few notions of privilege when we think of candied fruits or venison, but seeing The Bloody Banquet in performance may help to reshape our sense of such connotations and how they influence the world of the usurping Tyrant, the banished Lydians, and the adulterous Queen. As an audience, we will finally have the opportunity to explore the text’s fascination with hunger and forbidden desire; we may discover what those threads can evoke when we see the play’s horrific, bloody finale.
A blood pudding
Take the blood of a hog whilst it is warm, and steep in it a quart, or more, of great oatmeal grits, and at the end of three days with your hands take the grits out of the blood, and drain them clean; then put to those grits more than a quart of the best cream warmed on the fire; then take mother of thyme, parsley, spinach, succor, endive, sorrel, and strawberry leaves, of each a few chopped exceedingly small, and mix them with the grits, and also a little fennel seed finely beaten; then add a little pepper, cloves and mace, salt, and great store of suet finely shred, and well beaten; then therewith fill your farmes, and boil them, as hath been before described. – The English Housewife**
* see A.W. Oxford’s English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 (Oxford University Press, 1913)
** ed. Michael R. Best, pg 73
Best, Michael R., ed. The English Housewife. Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
D., T. The bloodie banquet A tragedie. London : Printed by Thomas Cotes, 1639.
Evans, Jennifer. Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Modern Medicine in Early Modern England. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2014.
Meads, Chris. Banquets Set Forth: Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.
Partridge, John. The treasurie of commodious conceits, and hidden secretes Commonlie called The good huswiues closet of prouision, for the health of her household. London: Printed by Richard Jones, 1584. Web. 1 July. 2015. <http://www.povertystudies.org>
Thong, Tracy. “Performances of the Banquet Course in Early Modern Drama.” Renaissance Food From Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. ed. Joan Fitzpatrick. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010. 107-125.