![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Literary-Tourist-under-Lockdown-4.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Over the past twenty years or so I\u2019ve walked in the invariably chilly Shakespeare birthday procession to lay flowers on Shakespeare\u2019s grave and so on to a grand lunch in Shakespeare\u2019s honour, rubbing shoulders with mayoral chains, national treasures, and occasional ambassadors. Before then, though, far from the Warwickshire epicentre of Bardolatry, deep in the American mid-West, I once gave a Shakespeare dinner to mark the date.\u00a0 Inspired by an American book washed up in the town\u2019s second-hand bookshop, I concocted an enormously complicated menu which I inflicted on local Shakespearians.\u00a0 The preparations involved (squeamishly) taking out a contract on a local baby goat. I sourced edible musk, the only rosemary bush in Indiana, and a plastic mould for making a life-sized ice-swan.\u00a0 The menu ran to sack and claret, manchet-bread and sallets of scallions, boiled leeks, herbs and flowers, salmons pickled in red wine, roast kid stoffado with a pudding in his belly, and a dysshe full of snow, pausing for appropriate diversions and amusements before moving onto a formal \u2018banquet\u2019 featuring ipocras, shell-bread, dates stuffed with callishones, spiced peaches and the inevitable apples, and a gilded marchpane.\u00a0 There was a 4-page menu, garnished throughout with quotations from Shakespeare.<\/p>\n
Two very different traditions of eating in honour of Shakespeare\u2019s Birthday have emerged over the last two and a half centuries in Britain and America.\u00a0 In Britain the tradition of celebrating Shakespeare\u2019s birthday with an annual dinner pre-dates David Garrick\u2019s Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 by at least fifteen years. By 1755 there was at least one group celebrating the date, according to verses \u2018On the annual meeting of some Gentlemen to celebrate SHAKESPEAR\u2019S BIRTHDAY,\u2019 published in The London Magazine<\/em>. Garrick\u2019s Jubilee featured a great deal of dining on an unprecedented scale, including a Shakespearean breakfast and a banquet for upwards of 700. By 1827 the newly-formed Shakespeare Club in Stratford was providing not only a pageant and a procession, but a dinner for 200, followed by a public breakfast the day after.\u00a0 By 1830, the dinner was for 300, and the public breakfast was packed out, largely because, as usual, it was pouring with rain. The public breakfast at the White Swan on the next day (April 24th<\/sup>) was served to yet another 200, and the day concluded with a private dinner for the Royal Shakespearean Club and their guests for a mere 100, followed by toasts, presentations and songs.\u00a0 Apart from the sheer size of these dining events, what they had in common was the snob-value of the food, theatrically profuse in range, amount, and luxuriousness.\u00a0 This pattern persisted later in the century and in other clubs, as William Harris\u2019s history of the Birmingham Shakespeare Club makes clear.\u00a0 Founded in about 1860 on the back of an older club which had regularly held dinners to celebrate the Birthday, they ran large-scale celebrations for the 1864 tercentenary, which included a \u2018soiree\u2019 for 250 on the 22nd<\/sup> (to which even ladies were invited) grandly provided with \u2018special cards of invitation\u2019, \u2018an illustrated programme\u2019, souvenir \u2018ornamental badges\u2019, a shrine mounted on a stage which held a bust of the Bard, a bust flanked with painted views of the church, the birthplace, Shakespeare surrounded by all his characters, and, mysteriously, \u2018some oil-paintings\u2019 and \u2018Shakespeare photographs,\u2019 all tastefully decorated with masses of symbolic evergreens.\u00a0\u00a0 There were addresses, a performance of an original cantata, readings from the plays, and performances of Shakespeare songs, a public breakfast, and finally, an Anniversary dinner for 250 persons on the evening of the 23rd.<\/p>\n None of these menus required any historical research on the part of the cooks.\u00a0 No antiquarian desire to recreate a Shakespearean cuisine was involved. Instead, the sheer scale of the food on these occasions was meant simultaneously to demonstrate the wealth and importance of the guests and the importance and abundance of Shakespeare, the whole combined in a rite of national consumption.\u00a0 It would not be the English but the Americans who would translate this nationalist metaphorics of food into more self-conscious ceremonies of consumption.\u00a0 This impulse can be seen at its crudest and most exuberant in the all-male social event given on April 24th<\/sup>, 1891 by \u2018The Britons of New York\u2019 their \u2018Annual Banquet of St George\u2019s Society at Delmonico\u2019s\u2019. The pi\u00e8ce de resistance was two enormous sides of roast beef each weighing approximately 100 lbs (c. 50kg), followed by a large amount of plum pudding.\u00a0 At first glance, this dinner, flown with ex-pat nationalism, seems to have little to do with Shakespeare\u2019s Birthday, except that one of the toasts given was to \u2018The Memory and Genius of Shakespeare.\u2019\u00a0 But in fact \u2018each topic on the toast list was adorned by a Shakespearean quotation\u2019 and it is this practice of extensive quotation which distinguishes nineteenth-century American habits of eating in honour of the Bard. The Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1851 and still extant, provides an example of this habit.\u00a0 Membership of the club was men-only and by invitation. In addition to its regular reading meetings, at which members could expect light refreshments \u2018soup, terrapin, salad and cheese, an ice, or meringue\u2019 or \u2018oysters, salad, and ale,\u2019 followed by a demitasse and cigars, the club organised annual dinners, interrupted only by the Civil War years.\u00a0 These dinners, originally given in December, were moved on the tercentenary in 1864 to April, becoming Birthday celebrations, despite the difficulties \u2013 loudly lamented \u2013 of getting enough of interest to eat in that chilly and dismal month. Like the Birthday dinners being held in Britain, these annual dinners were the occasion for a display of profusion and luxury, for menus which translated into another medium the perceived richness and amplitude of Shakespeare\u2019s works.\u00a0 What sets these dinners apart from their English predecessors is the practice of constructing \u2018a bill of fare\u2019, which took \u2018infinite delight in weaving quotations from the plays into the evening\u2019s scheduled proceedings.\u2019 The menu of the Montreal Club in 1884 for dinner given for 21 uses quotation from the plays to comment upon the courses and conduct of this gargantuan feast. Shakespeare is made to remark slyly and jovially here to his fellow-diners on the pleasures of cessation between courses of this monstrous feast, on the possibility of indigestion after lobster, on the diuretic effects of asparagus, on the laxative effects of fruit, on the excellence and skill of the cooking, and finally to wish them a pious goodnight.<\/p>\n These masculine gatherings were very different to the gatherings of all-female Shakespeare clubs.\u00a0 If the men were enjoying extraordinarily protracted dinners in the private rooms of hotels or clubs, followed by toast after toast, the women were typically arranging to meet at each others\u2019 homes in rotation. If the Shakespeare club of Aberdeen, North Dakota, is anything to go by, they were markedly more abstemious.\u00a0 In 1910, for example, after some years of serving \u2018dainty refreshments\u2019, the club agreed that every other meeting would offer a supper \u2018to be served at 6.30, limited to six articles of eatables.\u2019\u00a0 Such modesty, however, masked fiercely competitive catering, eloquently attested to by the minutes.\u00a0 By the 1920s and 30s they were organising three formal dinners, one in October, one at Christmas, and one as a \u2018guest day\u2019 (which may have coincided with the Birthday), complete with an extensive musical and dramatic programme.\u00a0 The Aberdeen Club\u2019s interest in \u2018daintiness\u2019 as opposed to deliberately antiquarian gargantuanness is probably not merely a reflection of changing times and the lack of professional kitchens.\u00a0 However different in its expression, this female Club was re-stating the notion of Shakespearean \u2018refinements\u2019 of intellect and the palate, here in a feminocentric fashion and setting.\u00a0 This was common to women\u2019s clubs more generally.\u00a0 A little book published in Pasadena in the 1950s, entitled Dainties that are bred in a book: the Shakespeare Club cook book, <\/em>dedicated \u2018to those women whose vision, loyalty, and service, brought the Shakespeare club into being,\u2019 deploys quotations from Shakespeare throughout that taken together imagine an orderly domestic universe, evoking the business of catering and cooking, delicious homely meals, a perpetual round of generous hospitality.\u00a0 If the men\u2019s dinners take as their core comedic figure Falstaff and their core narrative a combination of Falstaff\u2019s drinking at the Boar\u2019s Head and Justice Shallow\u2019s dinner for him in Gloucestershire, the women\u2019s meetings take Perdita or Mistress Ford as their presiding genius \u2013 the Queen of the sheep-shearing feast, the merriest wife in Windsor.<\/p>\n None of these exercises in Shakespearean eating, however, demonstrate much desire to eat actual Elizabethan English food.\u00a0 With the exception of gestures towards \u2018the roast beef of old England\u2019, the recipes and menus are contemporary in conception. It would take the best part of 100 years for Shakespeare enthusiasts to develop a taste for antiquarian cookery, and it would emerge as a delight of American ladies. Which brings me back to the book I found in that second-hand book shop. Entitled Dining with William Shakespeare <\/em>and published in 1976, it took its inception from a social event run for the Eugene Oregon Shakespeare Club in 1966.\u00a0 The Oregon club had been founded as a women-only group in 1908, and was formally constituted as a club in 1912.\u00a0 In 1966, the author invited the club back to her home after a performance of Twelfth Night <\/em>for \u2018an after-theatre Shakespeare collation\u2019 cooked up from recipes drawn from a reprint of Platt\u2019s Delightes for Ladies. <\/em>The antiquarian impulse did not exhaust itself with the menu, but extended itself to the table-setting. Predictably, a quotation-menu presented the dinner as a feast for the intellect and imagination. Madge Lorwin\u2019s Renaissance parties caught on immediately.\u00a0 In quick succession over the next ten years she produced an Elizabethan feast with a \u2018Shakespeare quotation menu\u2019 for 400 in association with the University of Oregon Museum; another Elizabethan feast for 200 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Ben Jonson\u2019s birth, this time with Elizabethan music and costumed waiters; and at least another two for the Ashland Renaissance Institute\u2019s Shakespeare Festival.<\/p>\n A much more scholarly production than the Pasadena cookbook, Lorwin\u2019s book nevertheless shares with it a strong sense of the domestic, the biographical, the marital, the comedic, merrieness, and the seasonal:\u00a0 the menus include \u2018A Bill of Fare to Celebrate Shakespeare\u2019s Birthday\u2019, \u2018A Dinner to Honor Mistress Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway\u2019, \u2018A Feast for Beatrice and Benedick\u2019, \u2018A May Day Feast\u2019, \u2018A Dinner for Rosalind and Orlando\u2019, and \u2018A Midsummer Night\u2019s Banquet\u2019.\u00a0 This eminently practical cookbook provides a script for food-theatre, but it is also a piece of historical imagination, almost a form of historical fiction.\u00a0 It\u2019s only those who are a long, long way from Stratford-upon-Avon who must travel to Merrie England by travelling back into their own country\u2019s pre-history, and so it is only they who customarily use Shakespeare\u2019s texts and Shakespeare\u2019s food as the necessary vehicle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I walked past Shakespeare\u2019s deserted Birthplace on April 23 this year, I thought back to past celebrations of Shakespeare\u2019s birthday\u2026 Over the past … Continue reading