The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters

ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS IN TUDOR AND STUART THEATERS Rob Wakeman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professors Theresa Coletti and Theodore B. Leinwand Department of English, University of Maryland A pressing challenge for the study of animal ethics in early modern literature is the very breadth of the category “animal,” which occludes the distinct ecological and economic roles of different species. Understanding the significance of deer to a hunter as distinct from the meaning of swine for a London pork vendor requires a historical investigation into humans’ ecological and cultural relationships with individual animals. For the constituents of England’s agricultural networks – shepherds, butchers, fishwives, eaters at tables high and low – animals matter differently. While recent scholarship on food and animal ethics often emphasizes ecological reciprocation, I insist that this mutualism is always out of balance, both across and within species lines. Focusing on drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the anonymous authors of late medieval biblical plays, my research investigates how sixteenth-century theaters use food animals to mediate and negotiate the complexities of a changing meat economy. On the English stage, playwrights use food animals to impress the ethico-political implications of land enclosure, forest emparkment, the search for new fisheries, and air and water pollution from urban slaughterhouses and markets. Concurrent developments in animal husbandry and theatrical production in the period thus led to new ideas about emplacement, embodiment, and the ethics of interspecies interdependence. THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS IN TUDOR AND STUART THEATERS by Rob Wakeman Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Advisory Committee: Professor Theresa Coletti, Co-Chair Professor Theodore B. Leinwand, Co-Chair Professor Kellie Robertson Professor Philip Soergel Professor Scott Trudell ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the product of the dedication, friendship, and love of more people than I can list. Please permit me the space to name just a few. Without the unflagging generosity of my co-chairs, Theresa Coletti and Ted Leinwand, this project would not have been possible. They asked me questions that opened my mind to whole new worlds of thinking; they demanded from me a rigor that has made me a more perceptive reader and insightful writer; and they have never ceased to be my champions, even when I was positive that I would never get to this point. I am honored to work with them and to call myself their student. Kellie Robertson and Scott Trudell have been tireless supporters. Their fierce commitment to graduate student success in the English Department was essential to my development as a scholar and to my emotional wellbeing. I thank Philip Soergel for joining the committee on short notice as the dissertation neared its completion. I am grateful to Maura Brady, Hillary Eklund, David B. Goldstein, Karen Raber, Karl Steel, and Jesse Oak Taylor for reading parts of this manuscript in draft and offering feedback at crucial moments in the writing process. The kindness of faculty who donate their time to read the work of graduate students at other institutions offers a powerful example for all of academia. I also wish to acknowledge the research support provided by the Graduate School at the University of Maryland, the English Department at the University of Maryland, and the BABEL Working Group. A Harman-Ward Dissertation Fellowship and a Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship provided me the financial means to pursue new lines of research in the latter stages of the writing process. Lastly, I owe an enormous debt to my parents for their unfailing belief in me. And to Jim, Bert, Lucy, and Frankie Rose, the four best listeners I have ever known and absolutely the best late-night reading and writing companions. And, above all, to Erin, whose love and spirit kept me going through the hardest stretches. Thank you. --- R.W. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgment INTRODUCTION 1 1. Moral Meat: Shakespeare, Gascoigne, and the 20 Political Ecologies of Predator and Prey 2. The Multispecies F locks of the Chester and 104 Towneley Shepherds’ Plays 3. Jonson’s Leftovers: Animal Pollution in 181 Bartholomew Fair and Every Man In His Humor WORKS CITED 250 1 The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters On the English stages of the long sixteenth century, food animals contributed mightily to the organization of interpersonal and interspecies relations. Their lives, deaths, and afterlives exemplify the ecological, economic, and religious tensions in Tudor and Stuart food networks. Ecclesiastic politics of feasting and fasting days, class struggles that followed the enclosure and emparkment of common lands, and urban pollution associated with animal slaughter all led to changes in the paths that wind from farm to fork. Stories about food in Tudor and Stuart England reflect both the dreams and disgraces of a community. Meals made from animals reflect the divergent, often contradictory values of those who gather at the table to consume them. A feast may be inspired by yearning for divine providence, bounteous nature, or an ancestral Golden Age as much as it may represent loathing of insatiable greed, food-borne bodily corruption, or wanton animal cruelty. Bound up in each meal are responses to central questions of daily life: How will society feed a growing population? What economic opportunities exist for those who produce food? What effect does agricultural pollution have on air and water quality? And how can animals be killed with minimal cruelty? Stories of meat production, distribution, and consumption reveal the asymmetrical effects that deep structural change in the agricultural economy had both within and across species lines. The sixteenth-century stage became a vital site for negotiating the foodshed’s increasingly unequal relationships. Crucially important to the formation of community identity, late medieval and early modern theater inevitably responded to England’s changing agricultural landscape as it evolved from a manorial to a market-based system. 1 With its unique capacity to 1 My thinking about theater as the art form that, first and foremost, centers on questions of what it means to belong to a community derives from the political philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy: “there is no ‘self’ except by virtue of a ‘with,’ which, in fact, structures it.” Although Nancy is 2 model the relationships that make up living systems, theater can theorize and interrogate what it means to be an embodied member of a privileged hunting party in the forest, a Church’s flock on northern pastures, or the feasting and fasting middling sort of urban London. The exhibition of flesh on stage – including the bodies of actors, raw and cooked foodstuffs, and animals used as stage properties – puts pressure on what it means to depend on animal others for the nourishment of one’s own body. The staging of the meal from farm to fork also connects playgoers to broad cultural narratives that encompass family, local, and national traditions. 2 Both on and off stage, the shape of commensality gives the meal an aesthetic form – sometimes refined, sometimes raucous, sometimes worshipful, sometimes irreverent – appropriate to its court, country, or city setting. Since Caroline Walker Bynum’s groundbreaking work on the religious significance of medieval food and Felicity Heal’s revelatory insights into early modern hospitality, scholars in the humanities have studied the table in terms of the social obligations it engenders. More so than commodity exchanges, acts of hospitality form interpersonal bonds with social ramifications that persist beyond the meal. The practices of eating together as a community adhere to and give form to the ethics of a society that is always coming into being through its foodways. I build on this foundational work on hospitality by arguing that the sharing of meat is not just a medium for interpersonal relations, but a representation of political ecology that elucidates not referring to theater here, this axiom applies: there is no theater without the “with” that enables it, without an acting company, without the audience, without the cultural traditions that make the performance legible. Theater’s emphasis on a shared affective and effective embodied experience links it powerfully with the practice of commensality, which, as anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney writes, “is a crucial cultural institution whereby people who eat together become ‘we,’ as opposed to ‘they.’” Nancy, Being Singular Plural , p. 94; Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self , p. 9. See also, Goldstein, Eating and Ethics , pp. 11, 64. 2 On the patterned structure of meals, see Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal.” 3 relationships among species. When playwrights stage the raising, slaughtering, and eating of animals, they bring a host of social and environmental problems into view. A play’s diverse set of characters – agricultural producers, consumers, moralists, hedonists, eaters, and eaten – have conflicting responses to animals and to the desire, disgust, doubt, and faith produced by meat- eating. With this in mind, I discuss the destruction of animal bodies and the construction of food communities in the forests of William Shakespeare, the London markets

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