• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.651-674
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• 2011

This paper approaches Sir Thomas More, Coriolanus, Pericles in terms of the relationship of food to national identity. These three plays examine ways in which food is essential to what constitutes English national identity, and food shortages give rise to riots thereby throwing everyday life into disorder. In Sir Thomas More food shortages are caused by foreign foodstuff and foreign habits of consumption. Rioting Londoners fear that the European foreigners' strange dietary habits would do harm on English food, the English body and English economy. In Coriolanus starvation is the primary trigger for the enmity between the senators and citizens. Menenius employs the fable of the belly to quell the hungry citizens' anger and to emphasize the senators' role as a store of nutrition to feed the body, that is, the citizens. Coriolanus' contempt for the body's need comes to a devastating end. In Pericles the famine is brought about by the gluttonous consumption of specific foods. The problem of greedy consumption becomes that of living in the cannibalistic situation where mothers are willing to eat their children and married couples one another. Pericles feeds the hungry people with bread, and is also saved from starvation by the fishermen after shipwreck. In this way the three plays provide the examples of Shakespeare's notion on healthy food and feeding.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.361-381
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• 2018

Shakespeare reflects/refracts the controversial spirit of his age in the epistemological and political skepticism of his Roman plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Skepticism doubts all received truth and suspends judgment, and it often takes the form of mental jousting on both sides of a question. Renaissance skepticism was strengthened by rhetorical education. Arguing on both sides of the question (in utramquem partem) was a practice taught in Shakespeare's grammar school in order to enhance students' mental abilities in logic and dialectic. This rhetorical exercise seldom leads to a third-term resolution: it just reveals all the apparent and hidden aspects of a problem at issue. Shakespeare's Roman plays, especially his Julius Caesar, demonstrate this skeptical attitude, leaving the judgment to the audience.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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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.