Abstract
Boy Would I were in an alehouse in London. I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety. (Henry V, 3.2.10–11)1
Here the Boy in Henry V, on the night before Agincourt, expresses his homesick longing to be out of danger, in a familiar alehouse, drinking a pot of ale. Far from the ‘vasty fields of France’ (1.Prologue.10), the national drink comes to represent shelter and safety; an alehouse in England, a pot of ale that is home. The Boy is of course killed the next day, so he never makes it home, and his pot of ale remains eternally untasted.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Select Bibliography
Ayto, John (1990) The Diner’s Dictionary: Word Origins of Food and Drink (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Brown, Cedric C. (2004), ‘Drink as a Social Marker in Seventeenth Century England’ in Adam Smyth (ed.) A Pleasing Synne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), pp. 3–20.
Brown, Pete (2010) Man Walks into a Pub: A Social History of Beer (London: Pan Books).
Brown, Pete (2014) Shakespeare’s Local (London: Macmillan).
Chesterton, A. K. (1934) Brave Enterprise: A History of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (London: J. Miles & Co. Ltd).
Cornell, Martyn (2015) Strange Tales of Ale (Stroud: Amberly Publishing).
Desmet, Christy (2012) ‘Helen Faucit and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1879’, Critical Survey, 24.2: 4–21.
Fallon, David (2015) ‘His Father John Shakespeare’ in Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (eds) The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 26–39.
Frye, Roland Mushat (1967) Shakespeare’s Life and Times: A Pictorial Record (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Holderness, Graham (ed.) (1988) The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Holderness, Graham and Bryan Loughrey (1991) ‘Shakespearean Features’ in Jean E. Marsden (ed.) The Appropriation of Shakespeare (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf), pp. 141–59.
Longhurst, Derek (1988) ‘“You Base Football-Player!”: Shakespeare in Contemporary Popular Culture’ in Graham Holderness (ed.) The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 59–73.
Markham, Gervase (1623) Countrey Contentments, or the English Huswife (London: R. Jackson).
Mulryne, J. R. and Margaret Shewring (eds) (1997) Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Oliver, Garrett (ed.) (2011) The Oxford Companion to Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Orlin, Lena Cowen (2014) ‘Anne by Indirection’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65.4: 421–454.
Randall, Thomas (1613) ‘High and Mightie Commendation of the Vertue of a Pot of Goode Ale’, quoted in Anonymous (2012) In Praise of Ale (Los Angeles: Library of Alexandria).
Reinars Jonathan (1998) ‘The Social History of a Midland Business: Flower & Sons Breweries, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1870–1914’, unpublished PhD thesis, available online http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/4308.
Schoenbaum, Samuel (1975) Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Schoenbaum, Samuel (1991) Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Wallop, Harry (2014) ‘The Perfect Pub: Is There One Left in England?’ The Daily Telegraph, 15 October.
Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor (eds) (1988) William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Holderness, G., Loughrey, B. (2016). Ales, Beers, Shakespeares. In: Shellard, D., Keenan, S. (eds) Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58316-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58316-1_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58315-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58316-1
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)