ABSTRACT
The Sea Voyage reads—and plays—like a social experiment. We are made to witness what happens when a ship carrying French pirates, self-styled gallants, and a woman kidnapped by the captain wreck on an uninhabited island without any material possessions or the proofs of social status those possessions bring with them. Lacking food, medical supplies, and sources of pleasure and distraction beyond their own withering wit, the men struggle to sustain themselves. At first, they complain of pangs in their stomachs and yearn for something—anything—to eat. Then, they imagine rocks and mud turning into food, especially the sorts of dishes that were thought in early modern England to enhance sexual performance. Here, as throughout the play, hunger is code for sexual appetite. Nowhere is this correlation more visceral than in what is arguably the play’s most disturbing set-piece: growing ever more desperate, Lamure, Morillat, and Franville enlist the Surgeon to help them cannibalize the famished Aminta after she falls asleep. They fantasize about how she will taste and joke about whether they should wake her and kill her “in a chase” because hunting her for sport would make her flesh taste “sweeter” (III.i. 116). The shipmaster arrives just in time to preempt the violence, and the situation he sees looks a lot like attempted rape: “They would have ravished her upon my life” (III.i. 159). Aminta, who woke up of her own accord and has been trying to reason with the men for almost thirty lines, responds: “Forgive ’em; ’twas their hungers” (160).
