A Place at Shakespeare's Table: Hunger in Early Modern England
This groundbreaking study of Shakespeare and hunger uncovers the complex specter of food insecurity--and, in turn, systemic inequality--in his work.
Early modern England was no stranger to hunger. Rampant food crises due to a combination of failed harvests, price inflation, food hoarding, and enclosure ravaged the country from the 1580s to 1620s. We now know this system of hunger as food insecurity, a term that describes a person's irregular access to nutritious food and a phenomenon created by social inequities, exploitative labor practices, and systemic racism. A Place at Shakespeare's Table argues that Shakespeare himself profited from this system of hunger. Using an interdisciplinary framework of food justice studies, gender studies, labor studies, premodern critical race studies, and religious studies, this book explores Shakespeare's poetics of scarcity, a poetics rife with paradox that at once uncovers and obfuscates food crises in Tudor and Stuart England. Through innovatively rich and historically informed analyses of The Sonnets, As You Like It, Coriolanus, and Antony & Cleopatra placed in conversation with early modern famine sermons, husbandry manuals, royal proclamations, and other extra-literary texts, Lauren Shook grapples with how Shakespeare simultaneously champions the hungry while participating in the systemic nature of food insecurity with which the twenty-first-century world still wrestles. To achieve food security for all, we must investigate the political, religious, social, and even literary systems that sustain food insecurity.
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