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The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature Andrea Crow

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The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature Andrea Crow Ruling Appetites: The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature Andrea Crow Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Andrea Crow All rights reserved ABSTRACT Ruling Appetites: The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature Andrea Crow Ruling Appetites: The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature reveals how eating became inseparable from political and social identity in the early modern English imaginary, and the instrumental role that poets, playwrights, and polemicists played in shaping a growing perception of diet as a primary means of driving social change. From the late Elizabethan period through the Restoration, recurrent harvest failures and unstable infrastructure led to widespread food insecurity and even starvation across England. At once literary producers and concerned social agents, many major early modern authors were closely engaged with some of the worst hunger crises in English history. The pointed and detailed attention to food in early modern literature, from luxurious banquets to bare cupboards, I argue, arose from real concerns over the problem of hunger facing the country. I demonstrate how authors developed literary forms seeking to explain and respond to how changing dietary habits and food distribution practices were reshaping their communities. Moreover, early modern authors turned to food not just as a topical referent or as a metaphorical vehicle but rather as a structural concern that could be materially addressed through literary means. Each chapter of “Ruling Appetites” centers on particular literary techniques—verse forms, stage characters, theatrical set pieces, or narrative tropes—through which authors examined how food influenced economic, social, and political reality. Literary form, in its openness to experimentation and innovation, allowed authors to address how early modern England’s changing dietary culture was transforming its material, social, and imaginative landscape. Table of Contents List of Illustrations .......................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Ch. 1: The Bloody Banquet in the Elizabethan Moor Play ........................................................... 26 Ch. 2: The Starving Bedlamite on the Jacobean Stage ................................................................. 72 Ch. 3: Austerity Measures in the Devotional Poetry of George Herbert and Robert Herrick .... 122 Ch. 4: Transubstantiating Narrators in Radical Pamphlet Literature of the 1640s and 1650s .... 184 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 229 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 237 i List of Illustrations Figure 1: Woodcuts from A New Mad Tom of Bedlam, or, The man in the Moon drinks Claret, With Powder-beef turnep and Caret (1658-1664?) ………………… ……………………….. 119 Figure 2: Detail from George Herbert’s “Lent,” in The Temple (1633) …………….………... 133 Figure 3: Detail from Robert Herrick’s “To keep a true Lent,” in Hesperides (1648) …..….... 134 Figure 4: Detail from George Herbert’s “The Size,” in The Temple (1633) ………………......148 Figure 5: Page from Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (1654) ……………………………... 205 Figure 6: Page from Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (1654) ………………………………208 Figure 7: Frontispiece from Roger Crab’s The English Hermite (1655) ………………………217 Figure 8: Illuminated initial from Roger Crab, The English Hermite (London, 1655) ………. 220 ii Acknowledgements I am grateful to have been supported by a generous community that has energized and honed this project throughout its development. I first want to express deep appreciation for my committee members, Jean Howard, Molly Murray, and my advisor, Julie Crawford. Jean’s enthusiasm for my dissertation from the beginning gave me the confidence to see it through, and she remains a continual inspiration for me of how to live a politically-engaged academic life. I am grateful to Molly for supporting my strange proposal to write a seminar paper on George Herbert’s bulimic poetics, which generated this larger project, and for her kind yet incisive feedback throughout all stages of its development. And finally, many thanks are due to Julie, who models how to combine passion with intellectual rigor, and has helped steady me through both the difficult and joyous stages of the Ph.D. journey. Thank you to the institutions that have supported my research: to Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality for connecting me to a cross-disciplinary community of socially-minded scholars; to the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship program for the opportunity to develop the language skills that have enabled me to pursue this and future projects; to my academic community away from home, including Kimberly Johnson, Richard Preiss, and the University of Utah English department for sponsoring me as a Visiting Scholar and helping me shape my dissertation through its final stages; to the English departments at Gonzaga University and The Ohio State University, especially Alan Farmer, Hannibal Hamlin, Jennifer Higginbotham, and Linda Tredennick, for guiding me into this field; and to the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship Program. iii I am immensely grateful to the friends and colleagues that have worked alongside me, both helping me develop my ideas and invigorating my intellectual life by sharing their projects as well: Atefeh Akbari, Olga Brudastova, Nicole Gervasio, Christopher McKeen, Jason Resnikoff, Megan Reid, Jennifer Rhodes, Aled Roberts, and Rosa Schneider. Additionally, I would not have been able to complete my dissertation or likely even enter a Ph.D. program in the first place were it not for the long and ongoing movement to unionize academic labor. I am grateful to all of my fellow workers driving that effort, particularly John Stobo, Tiffany Yee, the Graduate Workers of Columbia, and the members of UAW-Local 2110. Finally, thanks go to my family for their unflagging belief that I could finish this project and that it was worthwhile. And to Alyssa Greene, whose love, inspiration, and insight saw this project to completion. Thank you. iv Dedication To my family. v Introduction “The excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state; and the wantonness of language, of a sick mind,” Ben Jonson remarks in his 1640 printed commonplace book Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter.1 The connection that Jonson identifies between the excessive consumption of rich foods and the corruption of language is more than incidental. In Jonson’s view, language and eating habits both reveal the inner state of an individual or a nation, and if one is disordered, both are. Diet and words indicate appetites and tastes: people’s use of language reveals whether they are temperate, and a country’s gluttonous, ascetic, or moderate consumption habits can be seen in its literary culture. Some writers, Jonson explains, use a “fleshly stile, when there is much periphrases, and circuit of words.”2 Such a circumlocutory style can be the rhetorical equivalent of a healthy digestion, with words kept productively in “circuit,” but, if not carefully moderated, such “fleshly stile” will “gro[w] fat and corpulent,” weighed down by “arvina orationis,” or a “the fat of the speech.”3 At the same time, a writer can produce overly spare language that is “thin, flagging, poor, starved, scarce covering the bone” of their bare meaning.4 Excessively abstemious speakers, who “strive to have no ill blood or juice” such as superfluous adjectives in their language, that is, “lose their good,” ending up with nothing that will nourish their readers 1 This and all subsequent references to this text taken from Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin Classics, 1988), 373-458, here at 403. 2 Ibid, 436. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 1 either.5 A regulated disposition allows writers to select words that are “proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and picked.”6 For Jonson, a writer’s ability to produce suitable, tasteful, and elegant language is inseparable from their overarching habitus, which encompasses their dietary health. Beauty in speech reflects inward temperance, “springing out of the most retired and inmost parts of us,” and disorderly language reflects an immoderate frame of mind that is also evidenced by one’s indulgence in an “excess of feasts.”7 Jonson’s exposition on the more-than-metaphorical connections between linguistic expression and consumption habits articulates a conceptual shift in English literary and dietary thought that emerged in the late-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. In Ruling Appetites: The Politics of Diet in Early Modern English Literature, I argue that early modern concerns over English consumption practices came to directly shape literary form. Eating habits became understood as materially producing particular social and political conditions, and literary form
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