Dining with Shakespeare

Today's post is by Richard, who researched Shakespearean food for a 'show and tell' type session we had a couple of months ago. I get hungry just reading about it!

In the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, culinary customs were quite remarkably divided between rich and poor, as are those of today. In the houses of the well-to-do, servants prepared the food in separate areas (sometimes at great distance from the dining halls). The kitchens had great brick ovens and fireplaces where meat, fish and poultry were cooked over coals by spit-roasting, boiling, smoking, frying or baking.

Fresh food was purchased from dedicated livestock, poultry, fish and vegetable markets on a more-or-less daily basis. Fire shovels, barrels and tubs were kept in a pantry, there was a buttery (storage area for wines and provisions), wet and dry larders, a spicery, a mealhouse for grain, a sieving or boiling house, and coals were stored in a squillerie with brass pots and pans, pewter vessels, herbs, covered dishes and a court cupboard.)

Meat was usually beef, coney (rabbit), kid, lamb, mutton, pork, veal, and venison. Common dishes were meat pie, sausage, and sheep’s feet.

Methods of preserving fresh meat were by salting, vinegar soaking (with verjuice), saucing, spicing, or by burying for one or two days after wrapping in cloth. Spices, known as “good powders” included aniseed, bay leaf, cinnamon, clove, cubeb (a Java berry tasting like allspice), fennel, ground ginger, mace, nutmeg and pepper. Some of these were introduced as a result of the voyages of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Fish was consumed widely by poorer folk living near waterways and coastal areas, especially during the long winters when meat was scarce. It included conger eel, gurner, haddock, herring, lamprey (a type of eel), pilchard, mackerel, pike, salmon, sturgeon, tench and whiting;  crustaceans such as cockle, crab, lobster, mussel  and shrimp were also widely enjoyed. 

Poultry included bittern, blackbird, brant (wild goose), crane, dove, duck, dunbird (wild duck), fowl (chicken), goose, knot(sandpiper), lark, mallard, olicet, partridge, peewit, pelican, plover, quail, sheldrake, sparrow, swan , teal, turkey and widgeon (duck.)

Vegetables were most widely consumed by the less well-off in country areas. Much of what was used either grew wild or was home-produced. Artichoke, asparagus, bean, beetroot, cabbage, carrot, cucumber, gourd, horseradish, lettuce, melon, olive, pea, pumpkin, rape (canola) and skirret (water parsnip) were commonplace.  There was much use of herbs such as borage, chervil, clary(sage), cowslip, and sowthistle, plus greens, which included the leaves of avens, borage, dandelion, dittany and hyssop (both mints), laver (purple seaweed) orach (red and green), pellitory (climbing nettle), purslane (pinkish fleshy stems), rocket, rose hip (fruit of the rose) and St John’s wort (brown stalks, narrow leaves). Root plants like ginger and galingale (a kind of sedge with aromatic rhizomes) were also popular.

Fruit was mainly consumed fresh by the common people, again in country areas - apricot, blaunderelle (apple), bullace (wild damson plum), cherry, cornel, currant, gooseberry, grape, lemon, medlar apple, mulberry, peach, pear, raspberry and strawberry.

It must be stressed that the common folk in towns and cities, more so than those in the country, had a constant battle in getting enough of any sort of food to survive, hence the high mortality rate at an early age.

Mainly used by the well-to-do were garlic, leek, onion and tomato (the last-named introduced with corn, potato and yam following New World voyages by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, along with corn and the addiction of smoking. It took some time for these to gain popularity.)

There was also extensive use of eggs and of bread – made from wheat for the gentry; made from acorns, barley, lentils, oats and rye for the common folk. Sugar and honey were less used by the poor, who generally had a healthier diet if they got enough to eat, because they ate more vegetables and herbs and the less starchy breads. 

Dietary deficiency, combined with almost all desserts and fruit being cooked in pies, led to the upper classes lacking in vitamin C and consequently, they suffered from myriad skin diseases, scurvy, rickets and bad teeth. It even became acceptable to have black teeth in society, with the very fashionable even exaggerating (don’t laugh!) their blackened appearance cosmetically!

Desserts were mainly the indulgences of the upper classes –cakes (banbury, lemon, shrewsbury and  violet),  comfit (sugar coated seeds), custard, eringo (thistle), flan, fruit mince pie,  gingerbread, marchpane (marzipan), puddings (almond, green, quaking and rice ), sillibub, sucket (candied peel), and sugar bread. (Fruit pudding usually accompanied roast beef, long before Yorkshire pudding was devised.) All these sweetenings contributed to rapidly deteriorating teeth.

Food colouring was effected with alkanet (bright red dye from roots), pulverised sandalwood (it coloured the food dark red) soaked spinach (green), and turnsale, which produced a purple dye. A thickening agent was almond milk, obtained by steeping almonds in milk, broth or wine. Another was ambergris, the grey substance produced by whales and centuries later, used in the production of perfumes. 

Beverages – mainly ale, beer, buttermilk, milk and water for the hoi polloi; spirits, stepony (raisin wine), whey and wine made from dandelion and berry such as blackberry and elderberry for the gentry. 

Tea and coffee became known in England only in the seventeenth century.

Culinary offerings included:

Beef, collared

Black pudding

Blackbird, baked

Broth

Bullock’s Neck

Calf’s head with oysters

Capon boiled with oysters

Carp Pie

Chicken Pie

Duck, boiled

Eggs, fricassee of

Flounder, boiled

Gammon Pie

Goose blood pudding

Goose, baked

Haggis

Hen with oysters

Lamprey Pie

Larks, baked

Liver Pudding

Lobsters

Mutton, boiled

Partridge, boiled

Pig Pie

Pig, roasted

Pigeon Pie

Pike with oysters

Potato Pie

Rabbit, boiled

Red Deer Pie

Shellfish

Shrimp Pie

Swan, baked

Trout, stewed

Turkey, baked

Veal Fillet

Veal, roasted

Venison, roasted 

When entertaining, the tables of the well-to-do groaned under the many dishes, often decorated with crane, peacock and swan feathers, (the cooked birds arranged on platters with their heads still attached) candles and flowers. There were drinking vessels of pewter, gold, silver, horn, leather, glass and earthenware. The only table utensil was a personal knife – diners then used their fingers to convey food to their mouths. It would be many years before the table manners of today became de rigueur. Such doyennes of early twentieth-century etiquette as Emily Post would have been absolutely horrified at the goings-on at table in Shakespearean times. The proliferation of cutlery and crockery to the point of confusion at modern banquets is probably the result!

Comedy

Starting this Saturday, we shall devote two of our monthly meetings to a reading of The Comedy of Errors. (The usual place - the State Library of Western Australia - and the usual time - 2.00pm.) All are welcome, so come and check us out if you think you might like to join the Club, or if you're a visitor to Perth and would like to meet fellow lovers of the Bard and his works.

Our playleaders are Frances and Rachel, and I'm reading Dromio of Ephesus - yippee! As a sixty-nine year old female I wouldn't pass the physical to perform this role, but the beauty of our club's readings is that anyone of either gender or from any of the seven ages (well, the last five of them, anyway!) can play any part.

Shakespeare WA did a great version of this play as part of their Shakespeare in the Park Season this year. You can read my review on Artshub.

World-wide celebrations!

Traditionally, Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated on St George’s day, 23 April. We know he was baptised on 26 April, and given that many baptisms took place three days after birth, we may well be right. Besides, Shakespeare died on 23 April so celebrating his birth and death on the same day tidies things up!

We of the Perth Shakespeare Club had a very pleasant little birthday party last Saturday, when we shared research into what life was like in Shakespeare’s time. I hope to turn at least some of the contributions into blog posts over the next couple of months.

Bloggers from all over the world are celebrating this week with special blog posts for the Bard’s birthday, so we joined in by asking members of the Perth Shakespeare Club to contribute a sentence or two on why they love Shakespeare.

Frances, our president, sets the ball rolling.

Frances: I joined the Shakespeare Club to ensure that each year, at the very least, I read two or three plays right through. Then came the pleasures of the language, the characters, the plots, the themes, followed soon by the realisation that any given scene, or single speech, could lead to considerations of myth, folk lore, philosophy, social history, exploration, and how the plays could all come alive in performance -- an endless chain of fascinating ideas. But it always comes back to language -- that is the real joy: the glorious use of the English language.

And here’s what a few other members have to say!

Elaine: I love Shakespeare because his words are for all times and for all seasons.

June: Shakespeare's birthday is a time to remember him for the legacy he left to the world. Full of fun and intrigue, love and hate, his plays and sonnets still touch the imagination and bring history to life. Happy Birthday William!

Rachel: I love Shakespeare because he connects me to a continuing culture, and also because he doesn't tell us what to think – he tells us what to think about!

Rae: I enjoy Shakespeare because his works are relevant to the present day world.

Richard: My first exposure to Shakespeare was via Julius Caesar in school at age fourteen, and nearly sixty years later, my enthusiasm hasn't waned.

Roy: I like Shakespeare for his characterisations. ‘Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them’. Who else could write those words!

Satima: I love Shakespeare because of his deep understanding of human nature and his ability to depict it with all its highs and lows. He enriched our language, our culture and our souls.

Turab: I love Shakespeare because if his ability to express in words the whole range of human emotions.

Thanks to the contributors!

To read more celebratory blogs, go to www.HappyBirthdayShakespeare.com where the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has a list of links to blogs by Shakespeare fans world-wide.

By the way, did you know you can download a copy of Shakespeare’s will (wherein he makes the famous bequest of his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife) at http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/dol/images/examples/pdfs/shakespeare.pdf

Shakespeare's birthday!

This month's meeting (usual place, usual time - see the column at left!) will be a social gathering to celebrate the Bard's birthday. All welcome!

Film review: Coriolanus (2011 - The Weinstein Co)

Our president, Frances Dharmalingam, recently saw this film, which stars Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler and Brian Cox. Fiennes was also the producer: the screenplay was adapted by John Logan.

This filmed verion of Coriolanus could be cited as a perfect refutation of frequently-expressed doubts about using Shakespearean language in a modern setting. Although the script had been rigorously cut, what dialogue remained was original text (as insisted upon by Ralph Fiennes) and it worked. The delivery was entirely 21st century in style, the speakers unfettered by any unnecessary reverence for iambic pentameter, and, despite the occasional archaism of vocabulary or usage, expressed timelessly the thoughts and feelings of characters who could have existed in ancient Rome, Elizabethan England, or present-day Belgrade.

It was one of the finest modernizations of a Shakespeare play I have seen, with clever use of technology to further the action – TV broadcasts and Skype in place of clunky “messengers” up-dating the news.

The leading roles were perfectly cast – Coriolanus frozen in his arrogance, Menenius the fatherly figure Coriolanus so obviously needed but didn’t recognise, the two duplicitous tribunes Sicinius and Brutus – and of course Volumnia. What an impressive portrayal! This mother had dominated and moulded her son, and lived out her own ambitions through him. The only major character about whom I had any reservations was Aufidius. His darker, less trustworthy qualities became apparent only at the very last moment.

The crowds were huge and the director achieved a nice balance between the formless, threatening mass of the people and the individual rabble rousers who led the fickle sway of opinion. The scenes of civil unrest and the war episodes displayed the advantage of film over theatre. Where the latter would have to rely on conventional symbols – a few banners, suggestions of crowd action with Noises Off – the film showed us from endlessly varied angles the absolute reality of riots and battles in the 21st century. Of course the weapons were horrifyingly efficient, but the violence of war was as it has always been since before the days of gunfire, while in the house-to-house Search and Destroy missions there were echoes of ageless hand-to-hand combat, and at one point in the early rioting the police moved against the crowd with shields interlocked, suggestive of the old Roman “tortoise” formation. So for me the uncompromisingly modern interpretation had layers of timelessness, just as the psychology of the characters would have been true in any century.

Although the play does not, in so many words, give details of Coriolanus’s upbringing, the film established the separation between his family and the common folk. Shots of dilapidated buildings, stagnant puddles, piles of refuse and graffiti in the city contrasted with the elegant luxury of his family home, set in a quiet shady garden. Volumnia with her daughter-in-law and grandson, and then with Coriolanus himself, showed her strongly ambitious dominance, and when he capitulated to her pleas to spare Rome one could feel the unbearable tension and the final collapse, when Coriolanus knew that this could lead only to disaster. 'Oh mother, mother, What have you done?' summarised his apprehension of doom. Through the whole film, his facial expressions were extraordinarily limited, and yet he conveyed fierce intensity of feeling. Although never in any way a likeable character, he evoked (from me, anyway) sympathy as he moved inevitably to his fate, unable to change. A particularly memorable moment also was Coriolanus’s response to his sentence of exile. 'There is a world elsewhere' was spoken with all the contempt he had expressed to the citizens and yet it was coloured by a wrenching sense of loss, which made all the more believable his decision eventually to join Rome’s enemies.

This was a superb film in which the direction and the acting combined to bring to vivid life a fascinating play.

Frances Dharmalingam reviews Propellor's 'The Winters Tale'

A few weeks ago, Satima kindly invited me to accompany her to a performance of The Winter’s Tale, given by the English all-male group Propellor as part of the Festival of Perth. Their version was a fine example of effective story-telling. The narrative was plain throughout and could have been readily followed without much prior knowledge of the plot, thanks to clever staging and some fine acting.

The extreme contrast between the play’s two halves was strongly exploited. The court of Sicilia was claustrophobic, a setting closed in by dark metallic walls which reflected the action back upon itself. Colours were dull, lighting hard, the actors moving formally and with control. It was easy to believe that Leontes’s mad obsessive jealousy and rage could flourish in this ambience. All was presided over by a huge, changing, malevolent moon, reminding one of its associations with lunacy. The atmosphere thus engendered added to the horror of Leontes’ s cruelty, chillingly emphasised by Hermione’s bloodied skirt after childbirth in prison. The king’s emotional and physical decline and his repentant grief after the death of his son and (as he thinks) his wife followed convincingly, along with Paulina’s unrelenting determination that he continue indefinitely to pay for his sins.

The terrifyingly loud and vivid storm on the shores of Bohemia brought us to the turning point of the play. Here in the ensuing calm, all was golden sunlight and good humour, with no enclosing walls. The celebrations at the end of shearing in a rural community were always accompanied by feasting, dancing, singing, music and much youthful flirtation and merry-making. The age-old customs are all in the text; but this production was set some time in the later 20th century. The musical instruments, the dancing, choice of songs and particularly the noise level in performance, were more raucous Big Day Out than earthy Harvest Home, and the 17th century literary conventions of the pastoral idyll were dispensed with. There were some lovely moments of hilarity, particularly in connection with the flock of 'sheep' (in Arran jumpers) and the gulling of the Clown by Autolycus, when his money and even the gormless lad’s clothes were dextrously appropriated by the beguilingly glib rogue, but the more romantic and poetic qualities of the scene were sacrificed. Perdita delivered her lines and presented her flowers almost perfunctorily, and Florizel’s passionate declarations were muted, as if they were judged not to chime with the tone of the scene as a whole.

The return to Sicilia was neatly accomplished and the finale contained all the necessary tension to hold the audience right till the final resolution.

We were made conscious of Time (as a major theme of the play) in a number of ways. At the start of each half there was the loud ticking of a clock; the moon’s passage from full to half to dark; the changing seasons – all subtle but tangible reminders – and the lovely starry sky for the final scene, without the menacing moon.

I thought it a clever decision to have the same actor play both Mamillius and Perdita. With no change other than (obviously) the costume, the two characters’ 'family likeness' was a gentle addition to the concept of the reunion. Mamillius as a character is easily overlooked, since he appears only early in the play, but this echo, through Perdita, kept him in our minds, along with the surprise ending: when all but Leontes had left the stage, the king had a sudden brief glimpse of him, the dead son who surely would not have been forgotten. The director also gave Mamillius the speech normally delivered by Time (as a character), so he linked the two parts of the play as he described the passing of sixteen years with the help of toy models.

When I saw this company’s performances of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night some years ago, I was struck by the skill with which male actors could create absolutely convincing female characters with only their dramatic abilities; there was no compromise at all with wigs, padding or make-up to help. In this play again there were no wigs for the leading roles, but the women of the court wore head-scarves and were given long dresses, which did not really add anything. Overall I felt that the female characters were less successfully realised than the main male characters. Hermione certainly spoke with vigour and firmness in her own defence at trial, but lacked the warmth and charm one might have expected in the early and final scenes. Paulina was almost martial in her bearing – suitably unbending in punishing Leontes – but again, failed to elicit from me the sympathy I would have expected to feel for her as one deprived of her husband and forced to hide her affections for the mistress to whom she was devoted. These are minor quibbles, though. I was left, after the show, with much to admire and even more to ponder over, in terms of the company’s interpretation and presentation. It was a memorable evening, and the strength of this production, for me, lay not only in the actual performance, but also in its leading me back to the text and a re-consideration of how I think about it.

Another year, a few more plays!

We had a fun meeting in February - our first for the year - with readings of noteworthy scenes and speeches prepared by Frances, our president. I read the nurse's speech from Romeo and Juliet: the one in which she tells a tale of Juliet's infancy. I love the nurse! She's one of my favourits characters. Many thanks to Frances for researching the selected passages from the Bard's works. I'm sure we all learnt a great deal.

It's our AGM on March 17 (We'll be choosing plays to read for the year as well as electing office-bearers) and we celebrate the Bard's birthday at next month's meeting on 21 April. That's always a bit of a celebration so it's a fun meeting to come to and try out if the club is your "thing". However, new members are welcome at any time. This year, as usual, all our meetings will be held at the State Library of Western Australia on the third Saturday of each month at 2.00pm.