For somebody
we don’t know very much about, we know an awful lot about Shakespeare. Unfortunately,
much of what we don’t know is the big stuff such as what year he became an
actor, when he evolved into a writer and how he engaged in the writing process.
What we do
know is mostly incidental; details that hint at personality or provide a social
context. That’s pretty much the case with recent archaeological research at New
Place, in Stratford. Bought by Shakespeare in 1597, New Place had
over twenty rooms and ten fireplaces, an impressive frontage, Great Chamber and
Gallery. Sadly it was demolished in 1759 when its owner, the Rev Francis
Gastrell became irritated by tourists. He also destroyed a mulberry tree supposedly
planted by Shakespeare. Both of which actions caused him to be chased out of
town, and quite right too.
Excavations have revealed that its kitchen
was built on generous scale and along with fragments of plates, cups and other
utensils, evidence was found of an oven, cold store and brew house. Since water
was unsafe to drink, the brewery was where small beer was made – people
drinking up to a gallon a day, topped off with wine. Less
spectacularly, the kitchen was also where foodstuffs were pickled or salted.
The latter hardly sounds like the stuff of
drama - and food, its preparation, consumption and social signification, doesn’t
feature much in Shakespeare’s work. The banquet scene in Macbeth is famous because of Banquo’s ghost and other matters; what
was on the menu is never mentioned. Similarly the fantasy feast that Prospero
conjures in The Tempest is less about food and more important as proof of his powers to inflict ever stranger
torments.
It might be that Shakespeare couldn’t be
bothered to describe what was anyway visible to the audience on stage. Or it
might be that he simply wasn’t bothered about food. Given how sharply he
observed almost every aspect of life, it’s curious that an area so vital to
existence should have been ignored. Most of the references to food are slight,
such as when Bottom admonishes his fellow actors to ‘eat no onions nor garlic,
for we are to utter sweet breath.’ Similarly allusive is Cleopatra’s remark to Charmian
that her former opinions belong to ‘salad days/When I was green in judgment.’
For Shakespeare, ‘salad days’ would have been
synonymous with spring and early summer when vegetables were first becoming
available – that phase of the year when cold is dispelled, sap rises, vigour
returns, animals are turned out into lush pastures and the world falls in love
for the first time all over again.
Cleopatra’s ‘green’ judgment may have smacked
of immaturity, but the colour also symbolizes fertility. And after the long
days of winter, drab and barren, spring fever could be forgiven. In medieval times, few fresh things would have
been available to eat during the harsh months except leek, brassicas and one or
two root crops. This is about as exciting as it sounds, with the diet of
ordinary people supplemented by grains such as wheat, oat, rye and barley and
occasional fish or meat.
It may have been healthier than the modern
Western diet, but it must have been dull, so the arrival of salad days would
have had an appeal unimaginable today when the concept of seasonality is a
little hard to grasp with everything being in season somewhere and our shops
full of foodstuffs from the other side of the globe.
As it happens, globalization was in part
driven by European demand for exotic condiments to flavour plain fare. And
although expensive and generally only affordable by the rich, when robbed by Autolycus, the Clown in The Winter’s Tale was on his way to buy
rice, mace, nutmeg and ginger, along with saffron, prunes and raisins for a sheep
shearing feast.
The spices he hoped to buy, would have
originally reached Europe along the Silk Road, but by Shakespeare’s day were mostly
brought by sea, trade initially dominated by the Dutch East India Company
founded in 1602. The Levant Company had been formed in 1581, helping import
almost 250 tons of sugar annually, mostly from Morocco. The majority of this
seems to have been consumed by Queen Elizabeth, whose teeth turned black as a
consequence.
Speaking of the perils of sea voyages in The Merchant of Venice, Salarino describes
his anxiety about ships foundering on rocks, with spices scattered ‘on the
stream’ and silks enrobing roaring water. We’re not told what cargos Antonio’s ships
were carrying, but Shylock reports they were in Tripoli, Mexico, the Indies and
England. That one of his ships was in South America shouldn’t come as a
surprise; Columbus was after all searching for a westward route to India when
he chanced upon the Americas and subsequent travellers brought back coffee,
potatoes and tobacco, all of which have remained more or less harmful addictions
ever since.
It was on a voyage to the Virginia colonies
that the Sea Venture was wrecked off Bermuda and accounts of the ten months
passengers and crew spent on the island is thought to have inspired The Tempest. In that play, Shakespeare
explores, amongst other things, the power relationship between those that
produce food (in medieval times the peasantry) and those by whom it is consumed
(landowners and a rising urban population)
– for it is abused Caliban, whose land has been stolen from him that
knows the ‘fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.’ Bookish, unworldly,
Prospero wouldn’t have survived without Caliban’s intimate understanding of the
island. Nor would the drunks, for whom Caliban promises to dig pignuts with his
long nails and to show where crabs grow, as well as clustering filberts and how
to snare the nimble marmoset and where to catch young scamels from the rock –
without ever explaining what a scamel is or was.
Caliban was more hunter-gatherer than farmer,
but he is one of the few characters in all Shakespeare’s plays defined by their
association with food or its production. The countryside in his work is almost
always a place of refuge or regeneration; it’s not generally a place where we
see serious work. The sheep shearing feast for which the Clown is off to buy
food is more an excuse for song and dance, including one danced by twelve
satyrs, with no real sense of the shepherd’s life.
The Clown’s father had found abandoned
Perdita while out looking for his two best sheep, scared from the flock by
‘boiled brain’ adolescents. Grown into young womanhood, her language is
suffused with images drawn from the natural world and she is the play’s healing
presence, but when declaring she will ‘milk my ewes and weep’ she has more in common with
Marie-Antoinette’s pastoral fantasies at Versailles than real shepherding.
Like rural Bohemia with its improbable sea
coast, the Forest of Arden in As You Like
It is also a place of refuge and regeneration. It’s also peopled with
shepherds, but in contrast, Corin talks vividly of fells (fleece) that are
greasy and says his hands are often ‘tarred over with surgery of our sheep’ -
words rooted in reality. And when he states he’s a ‘true labourer’ who
earns ‘that I eat and get that I wear’ and that his greatest pride ‘is to see
my ewes graze and my lambs suck’, he seems to be speaking with an authentic
voice.
In the same play, Silvius explains that in
his desperate love for Phoebe he would be satisfied to ‘glean the broken ears
after the man/That the main harvest reaps’. It’s a deeply touching expression
and a rare allusion to life in the fields - but for every figment of speech in
Shakespeare drawn from agriculture, there are infinitely more relating to
finance and law – or the natural world away from farming, for that matter.
This is curious, since both Shakespeare’s
grandfathers were farmers and his mother inherited a farm at Wilmcote, a few
miles from Stratford. The town itself would have been surrounded by farmland
and even London little more than a collection of villages. He must have been
familiar with the routines of farming life, but perhaps the absence of
agricultural characters suggests an increasing disconnectedness from his roots
– that he was a creature of the town not working countryside. Grain shortages in Coriolanus cause the plebeians to riot,
but his focus is on the masses, not the growers of corn beyond the city wall. In
this regard, Shakespeare and his urbanite audience were already becoming modern;
these days food is a commodity provided from elsewhere and produced by means
unknown.
Perhaps Shakespeare was merely reflecting his
audience back to itself, with few ploughboys, milk maids or swineherds amongst
the groundlings. Perhaps, but with a few notable exceptions, dramatists and
novelists tend not to feature the wearying routines of agriculture. Poets are
different, but then they would be.
Back in my own small piece of countryside
where pigs helped clear our field of brambles, we have created a kitchen garden.
This is shared with five other families. Digging over the ground, we also
turned archaeologists finding Victorian bottles, tons of broken crockery,
hundreds of clay pipe stems and a mass of rusted metal.
A mid-nineteenth century tithe map shows our
field was in those days divided into allotments. Not surprisingly, the greatest
number of clay pipe stems have been found where we have our vegetable plots –
the soil being light and well-drained and of sunny aspect. Lower down it
becomes heavier with clay; higher up was the site of the old lane. Where we
dig, unknown people once dug – and smoked as they worked, discarding bits of
their pipes as the fragile stems snapped.
Winter is on its way out. A farmer kindly
dumped a load of cow muck over the hedge which has been spread on the beds. A
few crops have already been planted. More planting will follow. Then we await
our salad days.
Photo: allotment in July 2015
