ABSTRACT
Feasts are regularly important throughout Shakespeare, but are so obvious that one accepts them without thought. Since meals are powerful expressions of human community, Shakespeare presents them only when he wishes to emphasize in a special way the ‘ethical implications’ of community, successful or not. A pattern emerges, in which Shakespeare uses meals to dramatize conflict rather than conviviality. Shakespeare’s stage directions suggest the great superficial difference between the two meals. In order, to underscore the distance between Katherina and Petruchio, Shakespeare arranges for that most ordinary of human activities, a meal, to be frustrated. To conclude, a pattern emerges in which Shakespeare stages meals rarely and uses them to defeat the expectations of the audience, to dramatize disunity by presenting it in a context associated with unity. Shakespeare uses the most ordinary and common human rituals, those of eating and drinking, as focal points for themes of conviviality and conflict, but he stages the rituals rarely.
