The Invention of Shakespeare, and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel;

Author:Stephen Orgel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812298369
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

8

Food for Thought

The banquet scene in The Tempest is one of a number of evocations of The Aeneid that re-enact the events of the crucial European epic of empire. Many of these allusions are ironic or subversive: the Neapolitans returning from Tunis argue over whether it is the ancient Carthage, and invoking “widow Dido” they implicitly declare Virgil’s Dido a fiction; and Prospero, near the play’s conclusion ventriloquizing Ovid’s Medea, articulates the play’s celebration of the power of metamorphosis and storytelling, as against conquest and dynastic rule. In Virgil, the shipwreck victims’ banquet is immediately attacked by harpies, who render the food inedible. In Shakespeare the harpy is Ariel, and what he delivers to the hungry Neapolitans is only memory, couched in the severest moral terms. This is Prospero’s banquet, revenge eaten cold. But the scene is also one of the most elaborate theatrical spectacles in the play, food for the eye, not at all disappointing or delusory for an audience.

Literary banquets more often than not include unpleasant surprises—the surprise is generally the point of the feast, as in The Tempest, tragic for the characters, but for audiences a satisfying climax to a theatrical meal. The chief classic models are the banquet Tantalus serves the gods, at which the meat is the body of his son Pelops; and the meal Pelops’s son Atreus prepares for his brother Thyestes, at which Thyestes is served the bodies of his sons. The Atreus scene is refigured, rather perfunctorily, as the concluding act of vengeance in Titus Andronicus—perfunctorily precisely because the scene was a classic, and an educated Elizabethan audience already knew what Saturninus and Tamora were eating; moreover, for anyone without a classical education, Titus spells out his plan in advance. Feasts ending badly are also imperial foundation myths, like the feast offered by Romulus to his neighbors across the Tiber, which concluded, as it was intended to do, with the abduction of the Sabine women to populate the new empire.

Shakespearean dinners especially are rarely comforting and convivial. The meal offered by Petruchio to his bride on their honeymoon is a cruel tease, with course after course rejected over the protests of the starving Kate. The banquet prepared by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth for the visiting Duncan is served offstage, an ironically festive background for a scene in which the hosts plan the murder of their guest; and at a subsequent banquet Macbeth is crowded out of his own table by the ghost of the murdered (and aptly named) Banquo. Antony and Cleopatra spar over who should invite whom to dinner; and then Antony, the guest, loses his appetite for anything except the sight of Cleopatra—the point of this banquet, obviously, was never the food. Timon of Athens belittles his feast—“there is an idle banquet attends you”—but then entertains his guests so lavishly that it is clear none of them will be able to reciprocate, or will wish to, or, when he is destitute, do. Capulet similarly unknowingly prepares his own downfall with

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