ABSTRACT
Embedded in William Shakespeare’s food – a performative material onstage that evokes sometimes intense visceral responses – are the complexities of a network of global and local actors. Shakespeare’s food embodies the inverse relationship between nationalism on the one hand and the increasingly global reach of the British imperial appetite on the other hand, a conflict that continues to press upon the present. This chapter deals with four very separate points: here, there, then, and now, and there are potential binaries involved with these four issues. “Ecocriticism, like feminism, post-colonial or multi-cultural theory, addresses injustices felt in the body—the body of experience, of community, of land,” combining affect theory, ecocriticism, and performance theory is reasonable. Joan Thirsk pointed out in a 1999 essay introducing a Folger exhibition on food in Shakespeare’s England that the shift away from the local to a global supermarket is one that began in Shakespeare’s time.
