“‘If you can Mock A Leek, You can Eat a Leek’: Cultural Resonances in Shakespearean Foodstuffs”

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England experienced considerable social, economic, and political upheavals. Not surprisingly, therefore, Shakespeare's works illuminate the bounties and deprivations linked to contemporaneous global expansion, enclosure laws, crop failures, and population shifts. Food in the plays often intersects with conflict, moreover, emphasizing and interrogating rampant societal changes and the tensions accompanying them. Such disputes reveal close convergences between dietary options and tense loci of interpersonal disputations. This chapter discusses how plays such as Henry V, Taming of the Shrew, and Coriolanus weave such issues into the tensions explored in early modern drama.