ABSTRACT
The connection between food and theatrical performance is not unfamiliar to individuals of the twenty-first century. Today, audiences often attend dinner theatres, plays, operas, and other popular entertainments, which serve food during the course of the performance or at least before the show and during intermission. However, during the lavish feasts of the Middle Ages, food did not just accompany a performance; food was a performance exhibited on special occasions when wealthy nobles shared their bounty with strangers, tenants, and guests. Feasting and festivity were inextricably fused in medieval hospitality; the one did not exist without the other. Hospitality was not only an important tradition rooted in Christian tenets of charity and practiced theoretically by every stratum of society; it also gave aristocrats an opportunity for an elaborate and costly display of their power in an age that communicated not only through ocular but also through tactile and gustatory media. The early Tudors, like any European nobility of the late Middle Ages, publicized their magnificence on state occasions and holidays by inviting all classes of their citizenry – as well as foreign ambassadors – to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see wildly excessive amounts of food, drink, and revelry. All five senses were engaged: visitors were immersed in mouthwatering aromas, crammed with succulent meats, and surfeited with free-flowing drink as they were simultaneously delighted by costly disguisings, comic interludes, and soothing music. No boundaries were erected between the kitchen and the tiring house until later in the sixteenth century, when professional actors built separate structures to house their plays. In fact, as will be demonstrated, edible and human performance shared the same theatrical conventions precisely because they were both threads in the complex design of regal hospitality.
