ABSTRACT
In 1994, Jody Greene lamented that “amid the flurry of recent publications on the subject of sodomy and male homosexuality in Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens has received remarkably little attention” (178). The lament remains potent 20 years later—and not just for queer readings of the play. Indeed, as Todd Borlik notes more generally about the play in this volume, “Timon has long been the black sheep among Shakespeare’s mature tragedies.” While it is therefore gratifying to see two articles on Timon of Athens in this book, big questions from this play remain unanswered among teachers and scholars. What exactly is going on with men and meat in this admittedly atypical Shakespearean play? In an age such as ours, racked by anxieties about our overconsumption and still deeply troubled by relationships still very consistently imagined as transgressions of boundaries regarding appropriate relations among men, what does this play have to say about diet, power, and male relationships, and exactly how and where is ecophobia involved? I argue in this chapter for seeing queer and green as inextricably intertwined and for the necessity of doing green early modern scholarship with an eye to the stomach and to the ways that food, environment, and queer issues in Timon of Athens work together.
