“What’s this? Mutton?”: Food, Bodies, and Inn-Yard Performance Spaces in Early Shakespearean Drama

Abstract

Between c. 1575 and 1599, formal playhouses were constructed in the yards of five London inns (four in the City and one just outside). Research by theatre historians such as Herbert Berry and David Kathman has uncovered fascinating information about these inn-yard playhouses, but, despite the fact that Shakespeare may have cut his thespian and playwriting teeth in some of them, they have suffered from critical neglect. Their location at the heart of catering establishments meant that they were characterised by uniquely aromatic smellscapes and this opens a window to a completely different kind of early modern theatre, one in which visceral and intellectual responses jostled in playgoers' bodies and minds. Evidence from The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus suggest that Shakespeare created and exploited a synergy between culinary triggers and dramatic action in these plays. Important food-based scenes in both plays are shaped to interact culinarily (both stage inn-appropriate food properties: roast meat and a meat pie) and temporally (both properties are staged when supper cooking had reached its crescendo) with these performance venues. A hungry, supper-anticipating audience bathed in cooking aromas was, for example, likely to feel unexpected empathy for a starving shrew when she, like them, is denied roast mutton. Lacking the smell to seduce them to a sympathetic mind set, this empathy would have been absent in spectators watching the play at purpose-built (and kitchen-less) theatres. Thinking about inn-yard playhouses in this way raises exciting questions about the reception of early Shakespearean drama.

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