My English teacher used to disparage Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us was too systematic for the honest amateur with dottle in his ashtray, the sort who took his pupils through Antony and Cleopatra in the morning and watched from his shooting stick as they toiled at sports in the afternoon. Still, you can make a case for treating Shakespeare as a force of nature and going about the plays as a natural scientist would, by instance and inventory. There's something of this in Joan Fitzpatrick's approach, 75 years after Spurgeon. In an intriguing essay in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare (Ashgate, £50), Fitzpatrick lists six references in the plays to honey before moving on methodically to occurrences of 'flesh, fish and fowl'. Even so, her research leads away from the plays to the dietary assumptions of the day, and she ends by asking what an early modern audience might have made of Caliban ('neither clearly bestial, nor clearly cultured') on the basis of his diet.

LRB 24 June 2010 | PDF Download