ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the representation of food in early modern outlaw plays, with a particular focus on John Fletcher's Beggar's Bush (1622) and Philip Massinger's The Guardian (1633). These texts draw upon elements of the Robin Hood legend, but also adopt tropes from rogue literature, or “coney-catching pamphlets”, which purported to describe the lives of contemporary vagabonds. Critics have often read the plays as pure fantasy, detached from the conditions of life in early modern England. But attention to the representation of food reveals a more nuanced situation. This chapter scrutinizes the ways in which these texts deploy issues of sustenance in order to blur the lines between outlaws, beggars and actors. It emphasizes the fundamental significance of both fantasies of consumption and the material reality of hunger to these performances. It argues that this complex fusion of genres and identities is rooted in the class politics of early modern England.