Ah, Thanksgiving. That time of year for being with family and friends and for cooking ridiculous amounts delicious food…turkey and cranberries and sweet potatoes topped with globs of marshmallows and pumpkin pie! But is it possible to draw a connecting line between today’s epicurean extravaganza and foodie fetes in Shakespeare’s England? Absolutely. While Shakespeare wrote all of his plays well before the Plymouth colonists celebrated their first harvest with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621, giving birth to the Thanksgiving legend, the New World and its foods were no strangers to Elizabethans. And neither was the concept of a harvest festival. English harvest festivals abounded in the latter quarter of the Elizabethan calendar. November 11th marked the feast of St. Martin, and November 30th was the feast of St. Andrew, both denoting the end of the harvest season and the coming on of winter. On these days, Elizabethans would get together and stuff their faces, much as we do today.
In fact, a lot of what we consider traditional American holiday staples originated in England: stuffing the turkey with bread and dried fruit, apple pies, and even gingerbread houses. This is due to the intermingling of ingredients and cooking techniques which took place as Europeans explored the Americas and brought back various new items to their home countries, putting their own unique spins on them. The first turkeys arrived in England in the early sixteenth century by way of Spanish traders from the New World. These birds caught on quickly, being larger than the chicken and tastier than the swan or the peacock. Tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, maize, beans, pumpkins, coffee, and chocolate, to name just a few, were some of the other imports. Furthermore, spices such as ginger, cinnamon, and mace had previously arrived in England during the Middle Ages, brought from the east by crusaders.
Indeed, you could say that Shakespeare was living during a pretty gastronomically exciting time. Elizabethans were taking full advantage of the spice trade, comparatively new in the history of the country, and now they also had a plethora of new products flowing in from the New World with which to experiment. While there are definitely plenty of recipes from the time which seem less than appealing to our modern palettes, some don’t sound half bad. Take this recipe for baked quinces (a relative of the pear), for example, from A Book of Cookrye, published in 1591: “Core your Quinces and fair pare them, perboyle them in seething licour, Wine or water, or halfe wine and half water and season them with Sinamon and sugar, and put halfe a dozen Cloves into your Pyes amongst them, and halfe a dozen spoonful of rosewater, put in good of sugar. If you will bake them a slighter waye, you maye put in Muscadell to spare Sugar.” Mmm.
There are many food references in Shakespeare’s plays, often used in a metaphorical sense. Interestingly, the word “corn” appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays. In 2 Henry VI, Duchess Eleanor questions her husband, “Why droops my lord, like over-ripen’d corn” (1.2.1)? Yet, in these cases, Shakespeare was not actually referring to the American corn with which we are familiar. Instead, “corn,” in the early modern context, meant “grain.” In this sense, corn provides a useful metaphor in several scenes for striking down an enemy. A harvest reference appears in 3 Henry VI, when King Edward speaks of cutting down his enemies “like to autumn’s corn” (5.7.3). In Henry VIII, Archbishop Cranmer predicts of the infant Queen Elizabeth that her foes will “shake like a field of beaten corn” (5.5.31). And while there are numerous references to feasting in Shakespeare’s works, along with several feast scenes featured in the plays, when specific foods are mentioned it is usually by “low” or comic characters. The Clown in The Winter’s Tale, for instance, describes his grocery list for a feast as follows: “Let me see: what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pounds of sugar, five pound of currants, rice […]. I must have saffron to color the warden pies; mace; dates […]; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger […]; four pounds of pruins, and as many of raisins o’ th’ sun” (4.3.36-49). Also, there are many more references to wine, beer, and other alcoholic beverages than there are to chewable foods. For a nifty collection of each and every reference to food of all sorts in Shakespeare, from almond to zucchini, take a look at this site.
So, while Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have missed out on the traditional American Thanksgiving – which was only established on its current date in 1941 – and the joys of fifteen pound turkeys, French’s green bean casserole, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Black Friday, they were certainly familiar with the concept of coming together with those closest to them as the autumn drew to a close, enjoying the fruits of the harvest and celebrating with good food and good cheer. And Shakespeare, as he usually does, has some good advice to offer upon the occasion:
“O Lord that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.”
- 2 Henry VI, 1.1.19-20.
Natalie A.
PS. Should you want to try your hand at Renaissance cooking, HistoricalFoods.com offers recipes for “gilded marchpane” – a fantastical marzipan centerpiece favored by the Tudors – and even “buttered beere,” which I’ve been wanting to try since the first time Harry Potter sampled the stuff in Hogsmeade. And, if you wish to expand your horizons to the Stuart period, you can even try “roast wild boar,” “plague-water” (helpful for keeping away that pesky pestilence), and “toast of divers sorts.”
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
"Marvelous sweet music!"
In the course of my research, I frequently come across fun/entertaining/goofy items related to my current topic of investigation which, unfortunately, are not quite scholarly enough to incorporate into my educational writing for “Rehearsal Tools of the ASC.” Thus, I am discovering that this blog is the perfect outlet to share these random, bite-size bits and clips of information in a slightly less formal environment. Take, for example, what I have most recently been writing about: music. In searching out all there is to know on Shakespeare and music, I’ve become more and more aware of just how large a role this particular combination still plays in popular culture. A search for “Shakespeare” under the “Music” category on Amazon.com returns 884 results, encompassing everything from compilations of music popular in Shakespeare’s day to the Shakespeare in Love soundtrack; from Baby Einstein: Baby Shakespeare to Are You Shakespearienced? Heck, a person has only to turn on the radio to hear some toe-tapping Shakespeare. (A slightly different ending for Romeo and Juliet perhaps, but who hasn’t always wanted things to work out for those two, anyway?)
If one starts to pay attention, in fact, Shakespeare begins to turn up all over the place in music. Just listen closely to the lyrics in the Disney classic, Beauty and the Beast. In “The Mob Song” the evil Gaston encourages those torch and pitchfork wielding townspeople to “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” This is the same advice which Lady Macbeth offers her husband when he has second thoughts about their plot to kill King Duncan: “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail” (Macbeth, 1.7.60-62). There’s an entire song in the hippie musical Hair based on Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” monologue (Hamlet, 2.2). And people still walk down the aisle to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from his incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
All this is not, however, a new phenomenon. Practically since Shakespeare’s plays were first staged, it seems that people have had a fascination with turning Shakespeare into music and adding music to Shakespeare. Composer Benjamin Britten said, “I feel that everyone ought to set Shakespeare to music in order just to get to know the incredible beauty and intensity of these words." In 1960, Britten himself turned A Midsummer Night’s Dream into an opera, which still enjoys popularity today. A trailer for the English Touring Opera’s Spring 2010 production, featuring Thisbe’s “Asleep, my love?” speech (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.319) may be seen here.
When it comes to the whole Shakespeare/music trend, though, one of my personal favorites has to be Kenneth Branagh’s movie musical of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Yes, it’s cheesy, and sometimes borders on the bizarre, but it’s also a lot of fun. Set in a 1930’s-inspired Navarre, it features such hits of that decade as Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” and Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Showbusiness” (belted out by the always hilarious Nathan Lane as the clown Costard). Check out the film’s whacky rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” featuring Kenneth Branagh, Alessandro Nivola, Matthew Lillard, and Adrien Lester as the besotted Berowne, King Ferdinand, Longaville, and Dumaine, respectively, along with the objects of their affection.
Another 30’s-set, yet ever so slightly darker, Shakespeare is Ian McKellen’s Richard III, which plays out in an alternate universe Great Britain controlled by a fascist government. The movie opens cheerily enough, though, with Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” set to a swinging big band melody. The romantic, youthful tone of the lyrics provides a stark contrast to the dark, bitter mood Richard soon provides. In addition to Ian McKellen skulking about, keep an eye out also for Maggie Smith, Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent, and Robert Downey, Jr.
This is just a very (very, very) small sampling of some ways in which Shakespeare’s words have inspired a variety of musical outpourings. Some have been masterful…some not so much…and some have been just plain weird. But they have all entertained countless numbers of people – in addition to providing an entertaining diversion for me in the process of sorting through scholarly articles and primary sources. Shakespeare not only brought music to the stage in his day, but has since conquered Broadway and the pop charts, been turned into musical entertainment for the big screen and TV, inspired composers from Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, and has spoken to almost every generation since his death through the musical medium. Pretty talented for a fellow who’s been dead for almost four hundred years…and who definitely never heard of Taylor Swift.
Natalie A.
If one starts to pay attention, in fact, Shakespeare begins to turn up all over the place in music. Just listen closely to the lyrics in the Disney classic, Beauty and the Beast. In “The Mob Song” the evil Gaston encourages those torch and pitchfork wielding townspeople to “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” This is the same advice which Lady Macbeth offers her husband when he has second thoughts about their plot to kill King Duncan: “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail” (Macbeth, 1.7.60-62). There’s an entire song in the hippie musical Hair based on Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” monologue (Hamlet, 2.2). And people still walk down the aisle to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from his incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
All this is not, however, a new phenomenon. Practically since Shakespeare’s plays were first staged, it seems that people have had a fascination with turning Shakespeare into music and adding music to Shakespeare. Composer Benjamin Britten said, “I feel that everyone ought to set Shakespeare to music in order just to get to know the incredible beauty and intensity of these words." In 1960, Britten himself turned A Midsummer Night’s Dream into an opera, which still enjoys popularity today. A trailer for the English Touring Opera’s Spring 2010 production, featuring Thisbe’s “Asleep, my love?” speech (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.319) may be seen here.
When it comes to the whole Shakespeare/music trend, though, one of my personal favorites has to be Kenneth Branagh’s movie musical of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Yes, it’s cheesy, and sometimes borders on the bizarre, but it’s also a lot of fun. Set in a 1930’s-inspired Navarre, it features such hits of that decade as Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” and Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Showbusiness” (belted out by the always hilarious Nathan Lane as the clown Costard). Check out the film’s whacky rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” featuring Kenneth Branagh, Alessandro Nivola, Matthew Lillard, and Adrien Lester as the besotted Berowne, King Ferdinand, Longaville, and Dumaine, respectively, along with the objects of their affection.
Another 30’s-set, yet ever so slightly darker, Shakespeare is Ian McKellen’s Richard III, which plays out in an alternate universe Great Britain controlled by a fascist government. The movie opens cheerily enough, though, with Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” set to a swinging big band melody. The romantic, youthful tone of the lyrics provides a stark contrast to the dark, bitter mood Richard soon provides. In addition to Ian McKellen skulking about, keep an eye out also for Maggie Smith, Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent, and Robert Downey, Jr.
This is just a very (very, very) small sampling of some ways in which Shakespeare’s words have inspired a variety of musical outpourings. Some have been masterful…some not so much…and some have been just plain weird. But they have all entertained countless numbers of people – in addition to providing an entertaining diversion for me in the process of sorting through scholarly articles and primary sources. Shakespeare not only brought music to the stage in his day, but has since conquered Broadway and the pop charts, been turned into musical entertainment for the big screen and TV, inspired composers from Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, and has spoken to almost every generation since his death through the musical medium. Pretty talented for a fellow who’s been dead for almost four hundred years…and who definitely never heard of Taylor Swift.
Natalie A.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
A Festival of Theses!
On Monday, the 8th of November, I had the opportunity to attend the Fall Thesis Project Festival at Blackfriars Playhouse, where graduate students in Mary Baldwin College’s MLITT/MFA program in Shakespeare and Performance presented on their various research topics. A day-long “Thesis Festival” might not, at first, sound like a rollicking good time, but it proved to be a day full of very enjoyable and interesting presentations.
The subjects which were examined covered a broad range, providing a colorful bouquet of Shakespearean topics ready to be admired. There was everything from What to Expect When Staging the Expecting: Pregnancy in Early Modern Drama to Miranda as “Native”: An Exploration of Sexual Politics and Cultural Hegemony in Caribbean and African Postcolonial Adaptations of The Tempest to Rosalind and Cleopatra: The Androgyne in Performance, to name just a few. For a detailed account of each presentation, see the official ASC liveblogs of the event: Session 1, Session 2, and Session 3.
One which was particularly attention-grabbing to me was ‘SBlood, Zounds, and Marry: Oaths as Indicators of Character Change on the Early Modern Stage, presented by David C. Santangelo. While a word like “Zounds!” (a contraction of “God’s wounds”) may seem pretty tame to us today, four hundred years ago such an exclamation would have caused quite a stir in the playhouse. During his talk, Santangelo also examined the ways in which a character’s use of oaths within a play can reveal essential elements of his or her character. As an example he used Iago, whose oaths reveal in turn his crudeness and his cleverness throughout Othello. His exclamation, “By Janus” (1.2.33), for instance, is significant in that Janus is a two-faced god, just as Iago himself is a two-faced character.
Another entertaining presentation was Andrea Kelley’s If the Shrew Fits: Chronology, Misogyny, and Dichotomy in the Taming Plays. Kelley opened her talk with a hilarious YouTube video chronicling the transformation of various film Kates, including Elizabeth Taylor in a 1967 The Taming of the Shrew, Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, and Shirley Henderson in a modern re-telling (see it here). She then discussed how different versions of this story are prevalent throughout history, but they don’t necessarily represent realistic marriages of their times, just as modern sitcoms don’t exactly portray accurate husband-wife relationships. Kelley used different texts on marriage from Shakespeare’s day through the middle of the 18th century to illustrate both the more romantic and the slightly harsher views on how to tame a shrew, so to speak. (One offered this endearing advice in oh-so witty rhyme form: “Rub a dub, kill her with a club.” Hmm.)
Of course, these are just two out of eleven; all of the theses were well-presented and engaging, whether they were on a topic I was interested in, only vaguely aware of, or knew absolutely nothing about. There was also X-Treme Casting, about the practice of using as few as five actors to put on a Shakespeare play, and Ford, and Jonson, and Middleton, Oh My!, which featured some hilarious performances by other students in the Mary Baldwin program as a geriatric John Ford and irascible Ben Jonson, among others, and which asked the question: Why do we study Shakespeare more than any of these other playwrights, anyway?
The high level of scholarship which is happening constantly in and around the American Shakespeare Center is something I was completely unaware of until I became an intern in the Education Department, and it is something which I believe the general public is largely unconscious of as well. I have found that, when I inform people that I am working as an intern at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, the typical response is, “Oh, you mean at Blackfriars?” The fact is that the Blackfriars Playhouse is a part of a larger, vital vehicle for sharing a love of Shakespeare and early modern theatre and for educating both scholars and the average citizen on this subject. This is something I am becoming more and more aware of as I work here. Unless a person is in-the-know in some way, they could see the Blackfriars Playhouse as simply a theatre. Of course, it is a theatre – and a great one! – but it is also a venue for the sharing of some amazing research, all of which is open and available to a curious public. One would absolutely not have to know a thing about Shakespeare and performance to have a great time at an event like the Fall Thesis Festival. There’s almost always some neat education event happening at Blackfriars. So don’t be intimidated – go check it out!
Natalie A.
The subjects which were examined covered a broad range, providing a colorful bouquet of Shakespearean topics ready to be admired. There was everything from What to Expect When Staging the Expecting: Pregnancy in Early Modern Drama to Miranda as “Native”: An Exploration of Sexual Politics and Cultural Hegemony in Caribbean and African Postcolonial Adaptations of The Tempest to Rosalind and Cleopatra: The Androgyne in Performance, to name just a few. For a detailed account of each presentation, see the official ASC liveblogs of the event: Session 1, Session 2, and Session 3.
One which was particularly attention-grabbing to me was ‘SBlood, Zounds, and Marry: Oaths as Indicators of Character Change on the Early Modern Stage, presented by David C. Santangelo. While a word like “Zounds!” (a contraction of “God’s wounds”) may seem pretty tame to us today, four hundred years ago such an exclamation would have caused quite a stir in the playhouse. During his talk, Santangelo also examined the ways in which a character’s use of oaths within a play can reveal essential elements of his or her character. As an example he used Iago, whose oaths reveal in turn his crudeness and his cleverness throughout Othello. His exclamation, “By Janus” (1.2.33), for instance, is significant in that Janus is a two-faced god, just as Iago himself is a two-faced character.
Another entertaining presentation was Andrea Kelley’s If the Shrew Fits: Chronology, Misogyny, and Dichotomy in the Taming Plays. Kelley opened her talk with a hilarious YouTube video chronicling the transformation of various film Kates, including Elizabeth Taylor in a 1967 The Taming of the Shrew, Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, and Shirley Henderson in a modern re-telling (see it here). She then discussed how different versions of this story are prevalent throughout history, but they don’t necessarily represent realistic marriages of their times, just as modern sitcoms don’t exactly portray accurate husband-wife relationships. Kelley used different texts on marriage from Shakespeare’s day through the middle of the 18th century to illustrate both the more romantic and the slightly harsher views on how to tame a shrew, so to speak. (One offered this endearing advice in oh-so witty rhyme form: “Rub a dub, kill her with a club.” Hmm.)
Of course, these are just two out of eleven; all of the theses were well-presented and engaging, whether they were on a topic I was interested in, only vaguely aware of, or knew absolutely nothing about. There was also X-Treme Casting, about the practice of using as few as five actors to put on a Shakespeare play, and Ford, and Jonson, and Middleton, Oh My!, which featured some hilarious performances by other students in the Mary Baldwin program as a geriatric John Ford and irascible Ben Jonson, among others, and which asked the question: Why do we study Shakespeare more than any of these other playwrights, anyway?
The high level of scholarship which is happening constantly in and around the American Shakespeare Center is something I was completely unaware of until I became an intern in the Education Department, and it is something which I believe the general public is largely unconscious of as well. I have found that, when I inform people that I am working as an intern at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, the typical response is, “Oh, you mean at Blackfriars?” The fact is that the Blackfriars Playhouse is a part of a larger, vital vehicle for sharing a love of Shakespeare and early modern theatre and for educating both scholars and the average citizen on this subject. This is something I am becoming more and more aware of as I work here. Unless a person is in-the-know in some way, they could see the Blackfriars Playhouse as simply a theatre. Of course, it is a theatre – and a great one! – but it is also a venue for the sharing of some amazing research, all of which is open and available to a curious public. One would absolutely not have to know a thing about Shakespeare and performance to have a great time at an event like the Fall Thesis Festival. There’s almost always some neat education event happening at Blackfriars. So don’t be intimidated – go check it out!
Natalie A.
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