• 영어영문학
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• 제57권1호
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• pp.171-190
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• 2011

Shakespeare's plays deploy an interesting array of food signs in a way to illuminate the historical process of what Stephen Mennell has described as "the civilizing of appetite"-a process in which the changes of food choices and eating habits took place in response to the changes in people's way of life and personality structure over the long-term modern period since the middle ages. Shakespeare's plays suggest that the civilizing of appetite in early modern England was heavily affected by the forces of social mobility as well as the nascent market economy. The Capulets' costly preparation of Juliet's wedding banquet is a showcase of conspicuous consumption which was a structural necessity for the ruling class in Shakespeare's time. Some fifteen years later, the same kinds of foodstuffs are included in a shepherd's shopping list for the sheepshearing festival in Winter's Tale. This is a significant coincidence to prove that food was an important source of emulation and contest among different social classes; and that the rich diet of the upper class gave impetus to social mobility. The Elizabethan subjects, especially among the elite noblemen, were interpellated by the ideology of food that equated the quality of food and the eater's social identity. Faced with bankruptcy as a consequence of his extravagant consumption habit, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice testifies to the gripping ideology of food onto early modern people, while Poor Tom in King Lear presents a comic parody of the rich people's conspicuous waste. Also in Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Winsor, Shakespeare uses food as a metaphor for class-motivated social struggles.