ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s familiarity with fish as food, commodity, and metaphor is evident throughout the corpus, often emerging in tense dialogue characterized by misogyny, vulgarity, and dark humor—and nowhere more so than in his use of fishponds as metaphors for the corruption of the flesh. Because of its ubiquity and odoriferous intimacy fish is fodder for witty commentary on issues of embodiment pertaining to food, sex, and death by characters of all kinds. A peculiar set of metaphorical associations hovers around fishponds, which Shakespeare consistently associates with sexuality. In this contextual reading of Shakespeare’s metaphorical gestures to fishponds in a handful of plays, from Twelfth Night to The Winter’s Tale, this chapter explores a complex set of cultural associations between fish, fishponds, theater, and sexuality. Such metaphors reference a significant chapter in the environmental history of Europe, for while the late-medieval European aquaculture boom had gone bust by the time Shakespeare came of age it also transformed freshwater ecosystems all over Europe. The boom in aquaculture and fish markets also familiarized Europeans with various fish species that were raised for the table in intensive aquaculture operations associated with specific locales, such as Southwark.
