Meads, Chris. Banquets
Set Forth: Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama. The Revels Plays Companion
Library. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. x+258 pp.. ISBN 0 7190 5567 9.
Nunn, Hillary. "Review
of Chris Meads, Banquets Set Forth: Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama".
Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004) 12.1-5 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/10-1/revmeads.htm>.
Chris Meads's tantalizing book offers a vivid account of the early modern
stage’s fondness for banquet scenes, exploring an amazing number of dramatic
incidents that unfold in the presence of these food-laden tables. Meads lists
an astounding ninety-nine plays staged between 1585 and 1642 that contain
banquet scenes, pointing out that at least fifteen dramas feature more than
one banquet in the course of their action. According to Meads, the rituals
of the banquet offered playwrights an efficient method for foregrounding questions
of social order, particularly in revenge tragedies, while at other times the
decadent, tempting nature of the food itself served as an evocative backdrop
for seduction scenes. The versatility of the banquet setting, Mead argues,
explains its enduring popularity on the early modern stage because the food,
not to mention the rituals of eating and hospitality, added layers of meaning
to the drama, establishing a visual shorthand for communicating with the playhouse
audience.
The book's first four chapters offer intriguing discussions of the role
that banqueting played in early modern society. Meads defines the term banquet
precisely, pointing out that a banquet served as a light repast or perhaps
the final course of a feast rather than a feast in itself. Meads' survey of
cookery books shows that banquets often featured highly spiced and intensely
sweet foods, and he makes clear that authors ranging from Plato and Seneca
to Ovid and Spenser called upon banquet scenes to illustrate themes of hospitality,
sensuality, and revenge. In these works, as well as in staged dramas, the
banquet's selection of foods provided clues as to the host's disposition and
social status. As the book's examination of stage directions associated with
banquet scenes make clear, however, the plays' texts often fail to specify
which foods should be presented. Early modern recountings of the furnishings
at court banquets, along with notations from playhouse records, show that
properties ranging from wood to paper might have stood in place of food –
which, Meads points out, rarely needs to be ingested in the course of the
action. Historical sources provide Meads with the ingredients for concocting
one particularly intriguing solution to the problem of furnishing rare and
expensive fruits like the grapes in Doctor Faustus and The Duchess
of Malfi's infamous apricots. Marchpane – that amazingly moldable, edible,
and even durable concoction of sugar and ground almonds – could have stood
in for these and other foods, and the Court of Revels accounts for 1573-74
suggest that grocers in fact furnished significant quantities of the necessary
ingredients for dramatic productions.
In the remaining five chapters, Meads offers an impressive number of readings
of individual banquet scenes, addressing the plays in chronological groupings.
This approach proves effective for the earliest plays under discussion; it
underscores the structural significance of The Spanish Tragedy's early
banquet, which establishes an atmosphere of ordered, stately celebration that
the remainder of the play systematically destroys, and it makes clear the
banquet's increasing association with matters of politics and revenge with
its subsequent readings of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany and Titus
Andronicus. Linking the plays' banquets to early modern discussions of
gluttony, these readings of tragedies soon give way to treatments of Elizabethan
comedies, where banquets highlight themes of rejuvenation and reconciliation,
as in As You Like It, and disguise and chaos, as in The Wisdom of
Doctor Dodypoll. The sheer number of Heywood plays with banquet scenes
lends unity to the book's second chronological grouping, underscoring the
immense flexibility and apparent popularity of the banquet set piece in both
comic and tragic drama.
The chronological organization proves less useful later in the book, however,
where chapter titles like "Mainly Middleton" and "Fletcher
and Company" effectively prevent any sustained examination of the variations
displayed in the era's banquet scenes. The final chapter, for example, examines
what Meads calls a "revival" of supernatural banquets in the Caroline
era, but makes no mention of how these later scenes might have called upon
earlier haunted banquets in Macbeth or even The Spanish Tragedy.
The book's organization also forces Meads to bring up – and quickly drop –
the complicated questions of dating, authorship, and collaboration that his
approach invokes. Thematic groupings of plays that would foster extended study
of, say, banquets of seduction or scenes of cannibalism may well have proven
more productive. In addition, the book lacks a concluding chapter and offers
no larger evaluation of the impact of banquet scenes in the early modern period,
nor does it offer any information regarding the device's fate in the Restoration.
Even with these reservations, Meads has provided a valuable book for those
interested in the role of banquets and other set pieces onstage. His appendix
of plays that include banquet scenes will prove an extremely helpful resource
to all those interested in his subject, and the huge amount of research presented,
as well as the brief but cogent readings of often-overlooked plays, makes
Banquets Set Forth a useful contribution to the study of dramatic set
pieces in the early modern era. Opting for coverage over depth, the book provides
a valuable starting point for future explorations of the banquet's continually
shifting capacity to epitomize social structures, and to reflect individual
motivations, on the early modern stage.
Responses to this piece intended for the
Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.
