ABSTRACT
The Antony and Cleopatra story has always been about food. Plutarch reports that Antony loved “to drinke like a good fellow with every body, to sit with the souldiers when they dine, and to eate and drinke with them souldierlike” (4); Cleopatra, he notes, produced in her first dinner for Antony “such passing sumptuous fare that no tongue can expresse it” (26). Together, they had a habit of “feasting ech other by turnes, and in cost, exceeding all measure and reason” (Plutarch 27). In early modern England, Thomas Elyot also interpreted Antony and Cleopatra in relation to food. Writing about the evils of intemperance, Elyot chooses Antony to exemplify vice: he “lyved in most prodigall riotte, and thinkyng all thinge in the see, the lande, and the ayre to be made for satisfienge his gloteny, he devoured all flesshe and fysshe that mought be anywhere founden” (2: 347). In contrast to Antony, Elyot cites Augustus Caesar as a model of sobriety who controlled his appetite because he knew “the inconveniences that alway do happen by ingurgitations and excessife fedinges” (2: 337). When Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, then, he inherited a powerful tradition in which his characters were evaluated in relation to their attitudes toward food. Shakespeare exploits this tradition, using attitudes toward food not only to define characters but also to structure the play’s political conflict and to suggest competing ideas about what constitutes value.
