The imagery of appetite, consumption, and digestion that saturates Jacobean drama find its most extreme form in metaphors of cannibalization. This paper will look past those excesses to examine two of the several literal examples of human... more
The imagery of appetite, consumption, and digestion that saturates Jacobean drama find its most extreme form in metaphors of cannibalization. This paper will look past those excesses to examine two of the several literal examples of human flesh being treated as foodstuff to determine what these depictions divulge about social anxieties in the period, and the reaction to those anxieties. The first is Middleton and Dekker’s revenge tragedy The Bloody Banquet, which, unsurprisingly, contains the most fully consummated cannibal feast in all early modern drama and manifests the destabilization of society caused by the Protestant Reformation. The second is Fletcher and Massinger’s travel comedy The Sea Voyage, where the feast—attempted but foiled—is a humorous reaction to serious anxieties resulting from England’s interaction with the New World. Because the circumstance, tone, and outcome of these two depictions of cannibalistic behavior are essentially opposite, taken together they give a uniquely broad picture of the functions of dramatizations of cannibalism in literature of the period.
