“I will not eat with you”: destructive commensality in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing
The antagonistic outcasts Don John and Shylock both initially avoid joining the communal dinner table in the first acts of Much Ado about Nothing and The Merchant of Venice, voicing critiques of the group’s unregulated appetite. Naturally, this marks their separation from the wider communities of the plays; their choice of isolation, like the men themselves, stands distinct from the pattern of increasing social integration in Shakespearean comedies (Smith, 34). Eating in early modern England was considered just as much as a communal as an individual act (Goldstein, 6), yet it is a communal act fraught with tension, exclusion and the demarcation of boundaries between the self and other. And in Shakespeare this communal act is “a spectacularly failed endeavour”, as argued by David Goldstein, one of the few current critics devoted to the study of eating in Shakespeare (Goldstein, 23). The initial separation of Don John and Shylock from the communal feasting reminds and reinforces the boundaries of commensality: eating together might tighten internal solidarity, but it occurs “because commensality first allows the limits of the group to be redrawn” (Gringon, 163). A further potential failure of commensality is introduced when Don John and Shylock eventually attend their respective feasts, desiring to dine not only on the food but on their companions (literally deriving from ‘breaking bread together’). This essay, like those two outsiders, will focus not simply on the what of eating but the who: who is eating at the table, who is excluded, and who, sometimes, is themselves being eaten.
The issue of who eats together is foregrounded immediately on Shylock’s initial appearance on stage, when Bassanio invites him to dinner to meet Antonio (Merchant, 1.3.31). The shared table holds the potential to elide some of the distinctions between the two sides: as Jordan Rosenblum puts it, “the sharing of food simultaneously builds an ‘in-group’ and excludes an ‘out-group’” (Rosenblum, 10), and here Shylock, for once, would be ‘in’. Moreover, at this point in the play, Shylock has not been entirely othered: he attributes devilry to pork before he is ever associated with the devil himself (an association which occurs no less than seven times after this point). The very act of eating is one in which we must recognise the constitutive parts and substances that form our being: to eat, we could argue, is to accept the other into ourselves. Bassanio’s proposed meal at least superficially aligns with this notion of acceptance, and an humanist conception of the ideal banquet, which aims to reconcile groups differing cultural groups and status classes in convivial conversation and shared dining: we might look to the idealised feast in More’s Utopia, which prioritises the creation of festive, educated and ethically edifying table talk amongst the entire community above drawing strict distinctions between the eaters’ ranks (More, 144-5). Yet Shylock rejects not only Bassanio’s invitation, but also his suggestion of fraternisation between disparate individuals, by phrasing his refusal in abstract terms and repeated structures which strictly demarcate the limits of “I” and “you”, defined in the most collective sense as Jew and Christian: “I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (Merchant, 1.3.35-6). Moreover, when Shylock sarcastically agrees with Bassanio: “Yes — to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into?” (Merchant, 1.3.32-3), the New Testament account Shylock uses to justify the Jewish prohibition of pork is one which conveys a fear of contamination, of letting boundaries erode. The pigs of this gospel story are not merely associated with demons but implanted with them, implying that the Christians who consume them thus likewise have devilry embedded within. Shylock’s insistence on rapid contamination within a group, here from a small herd of biblical pigs which contaminate all swine with devilry, and his focus on the demonic threat in wrong consumption, raises fears about disparate individuals eating around one table.
Don John’s initial avoidance of the feast is not explicit but implied by his explanation of his melancholy, interrupted by Borachio’s arrival “from a great supper” and Don John’s eventual conclusion after hearing Borachio’s tale of Claudio’s love, “Let us to the great supper; their cheer is the greater that I am subdued” (Ado, 1.3.66-7). Yet a critique of unregulated appetites is nonetheless established, through pointed contrast with the only prior portrayal of eating in Much Ado: Beatrice’s twisted praise of the “excellent stomach” of the “very valiant trencherman”, Signior Benedick, whose success in battle she attributes to his excessive and, it is implied, cannibalistic appetite (Ado, 1.1.49-50). Like The Merchant, the play draws links between the questionable substances inside a man’s stomach with his character, implying Benedick’s failure of discrimination while also emphasising the mortality of this battle hero, turned into a stuffed man with a contemptible filling, as Beatrice jibes, “but for the stuffing – well, we are all mortal” (Ado, 1.1.56-7). In contrast, Don John’s declaration that he must only “eat when I have stomach” (Ado, 1.3.14) establishes his moderate consumption, suggesting restraint, autonomy and the ability to self-regulate. Moreover, since Shakespeare removed Don John’s motivations from the play’s sources, the antagonist is less multi-dimensional and more defined by his melancholic temperament: here we see him as one who corrects rather than relishes in his faults, as fasting was seen as the appropriate alleviation for the excess of melancholic humour he displays (Fitzpatrick, 58).
Unregulated appetites lie at the heart of both critiques of the communal meals, linking Don John and Shylock to the anticonvival tradition, which viewed feasting and revelry as excessive and indiscriminate (Lanier, 139). As these anticonvival critiques emanate from the mouths of the antagonists, audiences might initially assume the two plays are chronicling the triumph of conviviality: a final celebration of feasting would demolish both these two outcasts and their arguments. Yet in both cases, the resolution born out of celebratory feasts, which frequently formed the endpoint of social integration in festive comedies, is curiously absent. From the opening image of Salerio blowing over his soup, and figuratively over the seas which hold Antonio’s risk-laden ships (Merchant, 1.1.22-23), The Merchant of Venice is infused with food references which are fraught with dramatic tension. Yet food is almost entirely absent from the stage – befitting, Goldstein argues, for a play in which eating is portrayed as “profoundly unredemptive, unconstructive, and unsustaining” (Goldstein, 67). The dinner at Antonio’s house, involving a large array of the major characters, is elaborately set up to be a scene of central importance: Gratiano and Lorenzo both conclude their attempts to cheer Antonio with the anticipation of meeting again at dinner; it is Shylock’s rejection of Bassanio’s invitation which first marks out the violent divide between them; and Shylock’s unexpected turn, announcing his attendance in his very next scene, provides not only an intriguing contradiction but builds suspense through his violent, cannibalistic imagery – “I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian” (2.5.14-15). Whether by reaching towards an ideal of cultural resolution or by facilitating vengeance as in Titus Andronicus or contemporary revenge dramas like The Spanish Tragedy, we expect this feast to be a moment of dramatic importance, and also potentially a site for moral correction, as both reconciliation and revenge feasts can act as ethical exemplum, even if the latter is a negative one (Lanier, 142). For this event to occur off-stage is thus particularly striking, and the lack of resolution from the dinner itself raises questions over the potential of commensal dialogue to improve relations. No forward plot motion occurs at the feast itself, and no clear ethical conclusions seem to be derived from it, as the main ramification of Shylock’s attendance is through his absence from the house which enables Jessica’s elopement.
We find a similar absence of resolution in the celebrations in Much Ado about Nothing, although here it is not the lack of staged eating but the conspicuous abundance of revelry and consumption, an ironic twist on the title, which seems to deter resolution. References to feasting recur throughout: in the first act alone we have “I will not fail him at supper; for indeed he hath made great preparation”, “the fool will eat no supper” “Come, let us to the banquet”, “I came yonder from a great supper” and “Let us to the great supper”. Yet despite the seemingly ever-present celebrations and feasts, and the repeated emphasis on their greatness, the play nonetheless fails, as Peter Kanelos notes, to generate the ‘festive' spirit associated with Shakespeare’s comedies of this period by critics such as C.L. Barber (Kanelos, 59). This befits a play in which we are presented with what is considered luxurious, while also asked to question its worth. We might attribute this unfulfilling feasting in Much Ado to the non-organic nature of the celebrations: Don Pedro arrives in Messina like his historical source, the Spanish conquerer Piero of Aragon, and references throughout the play suggest the unusual nature of the celebrations which follow which do not align with the organic, periodic feast days of local culture. Beatrice, pointing to the lavishness of their current festivities, refuses the prospect of marriage to Don Pedro because he is “too costly to wear every day”, and she reminds us of their Spanish origins when drawing on the Spanish city of Seville to call Claudio a “civil orange” (Kanelos, 58). This element of colonial pressure in the excessive festivities prevent the feasts of this play seeming truly celebratory, reminding us more perhaps of Timon of Athens than the pastoral feasting in As You Like It.
Appetite and consumption for Don John and Shylock is selfish, gleefully destructive and exacted against their own kind, with their social interactions expressed in the terms and metaphors of this destructive appetite. We might look to find how widely this view of consumption is enacted in the plays as a whole. In Much Ado, Count Claudio frequently compliments Hero in alimentary terms, marking her as both praise-worthy and edible, such as declaring her to be “the sweetest lady” (1.1.179). Claudio’s classification of Hero not only as an object but as food in particular is an important distinction: not simply used or looked upon but consumed, food is an inherently perishable item, whether through ingestion or decay. When an animal becomes food, it is no longer defined only by its intrinsic qualities but also by its relation to the humans who consume it (Goldstein, 2013, 8). Thus when Claudio refers to his love as an edible substance, Shakespeare connects his passion with eating, suggesting that Claudio’s love places Hero on track for destruction through being consumed and subsumed into him. At their aborted wedding service, Claudio addresses her as another form of perishing food, throwing his fiancé back to her father as a “rotten orange”. He thus conjoins the two nearly antithetical evocations of oranges to early modern audiences: first, a luxury item associated with the well-documented fashion for orangeries amongst the English aristocracy (Thirsk, 21) and second, connoting the common and the diseased, evidenced in an association between orange-sellers and prostitutes so potent that Claudio’s insult was redacted from most productions from Garrick (1748) until the early twentieth century (McEachern, 258). The insult displays just how convinced Claudio is by Borachio’s depiction of Hero as a “contaminated stale” (2.2.19): the direct meaning of Borachio’s words indicates a prostitute, and moreover both “contaminated” and “stale” could describe ruined food that is no longer desirable. The parallels to Hero are evident: accused of deception, she is like the orange which symbolised deception due to its pocked skin which not only evoked venereal diseases, but also concealed the taste within (McEachern, 258). She is likewise also an object that constantly wavers on the fragile line between priceless and worthless, between desirable and despicable, and in this moment between an aristocrat’s wife and a common prostitute. Yet it is Claudio’s own consumptive love that is implicated, as it contains a similar conjunction between desire and derision, leaving Hero’s place vacillating between the two, permanently at risk of perishing.
Through these metaphors of consumption embedded into the language of courtship, Shakespeare exposes a consumptive selfishness underlying the social relationships. In the opening scene, Beatrice explains Benedick’s martial prowess on his prodigious stomach, and thus when she conflates his skills in battle and in sex (“And a good soldier to a lady”), she similarly equates his indiscriminate carnal desire with the cannibalistic appetite of a man who eats those he kills. Yet Kanelos’ claim that Benedick approaches relationships with the same selfishly male appetite with which he approaches food and battle, and thus must be reformed by the virtuous Beatrice, obscures the violence of Beatrice’s contributions due to its focus on specifically masculine consumption. It is Beatrice who speaks first of “eating his killing”; Beatrice who as Lady Disdain finds Benedick to be “meet food”; and Beatrice who finally concludes that if she were a man, to exact revenge on Claudio she would “eat his heart in the market-place” (Ado, 1.1.115-6 and 4.2.304-5). Unlike Hero, Beatrice turns the food metaphors back towards the men who brandish them: Lady Disdain’s sharp wit feeds not only on Benedick, but also Claudio, who she jibes is a “civil orange” and a “Count Comfect, a sweet gallant”, and the sour Don John, a gentleman whose “tartly” looks she mocks. Indeed, Beatrice uses the shared domain of eating, like the ideal shared table, to elide the differences between herself and Benedick. In the opening scene, her mocking questions, “how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all his killing” (1.1.39-42), shifts the cannibalism from him to her with barely a moment for the messenger’s stunned silence. Beatrice consistently translates praise of Benedick’s masculine martial deeds into the more typically feminine culinary domain, tainting the messenger’s undiluted praise with implications of the sinful and the comic. Similarly, when Benedick attempts to provoke a declaration of love from Beatrice by swearing conventionally and masculinely “By my sword” that she loves him, Beatrice quickly exchanges the military domain for an alimentary one, “Do not swear and eat it” (4.1.272-3). And while Beatrice brings Benedick’s martial deeds into the language of food and sex, her wit allows her to enter the military domain, with their “merry war” and “skirmish of wit” (1.1.59-60).
Thus we can see how for Beatrice and Benedick, the alimentary domain becomes one which they share, demonstrated by the configuring of both as animal prey when their friends lay the trap for them, suggesting that through falling in love, they are ‘caught’ and opened up to being consumed. Contrastingly, in The Merchant Shylock uses the shared domain of food to justify pursuing the same vengeful desires as he imagines the Christians do, in his famous speech which is charged with metaphors tied to consumption: from baiting fish to poisoning, from his certainty that Antonio’s human flesh might not nourish him but at least “will feed my revenge” to his assertion of shared humanity as all are “fed with the same food”, Shylock ties Jews and Christians together through their hunger, in this case for violently feasting on one another’s pain (3.2.49-55). We can how his rejection of Bassanio’s dinner invitation foreshadowed this moment, as in citing the New Testament as his source, Shylock aligns with the Christians enough to wield their own religious text against them. What they share (here a basis of knowledge of the Christian Bible) is used not to reconcile but to attack, a methodology which is ultimately targeted against Shylock, as in court Portia wields Jewish scripture against the Jew.
Douglas Lanier identifies in Shakespeare the motif of the “broken banquet”, where a feast is begun and then somehow disrupted or delayed, and examples range from the two interrupted dinners in The Taming of the Shrew to Macbeth’s initially idealised coronation feast, with the King declaring his intention to “mingle with society”, whose conviviality is destroyed by the interruption of Banquo’s ghost (Lanier, 141-2). Don John and Shylock both delay their attendance to the shared table until they are motivated by cannibalistic desire rather than commensality, and perhaps this predicts the delay of the feasts themselves. The ‘missing’ meal in The Merchant is arguably only completed in the final court scene, where Shylock attempts to feast not on the food of Antonio’s house, but directly on his body. When they first establish the bond, Shylock compares Antonio’s flesh to that of edible animals: “not so estimable, profitable neither / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats” (2.1.165-6). In the court scene, with its vivid focus on Shylock whetting his knife to cut the “pound of flesh”, we are reminded of a butcher cutting into his meat; this is made more explicit by Antonio, who compares himself to food, the “tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death”, a homonym for the ‘meat’ he is, and the “weakest kind of fruit” (4.1.114-5). By the end of the scene, Shylock himself is devoured, his money and his religion, which he sees as constitutive parts of himself, eaten away by the state. Similarly, the aborted wedding service in Much Ado resembles a feast on Hero. Through the metaphors of consumption, Hero has been altered from a luxury which one single man desires to consume to one that has been over-consumed: the increase in eating metaphors during and in the immediate aftermath of the failed wedding (from Leonato and the friar as well as Claudio) mirrors Hero’s transformation into an object of communal consumption, not consumed sexually as Claudio fears, but the object of communal mockery in the mouths of all. Don Pedro remarking on the mourners who have prayed at Hero’s faux-funeral, announces solemnly that “the wolves have prey’d”, and indeed they have made Hero their prey (Ado, 5.3.25).
Both plays thus approach the topic of food as a common domain and both deal with the destructive elements of a commensality that both excludes certain members, and is used to feed on one another. In The Merchant commensality is used primarily as a justification for destructive acts, with the commonality among humanity defined as violent appetite, the shared table seemingly ‘missing’ from the play but in fact spread throughout to make all the characters filled with hunger and potentially edible. In contrast, in Much Ado, the risk of being consumed is dangerous only when it lacks mutuality, and the status of commensality in that play is redeemed through the shared table’s ability to unite characters, not through the ever-present festivities, but through the shared alimentary domain within which Benedick and Beatrice interact, mutually consuming and opening themselves up to consumption.