Abstract
This chapter turns from the stage to the temporal and geographical environs of London’s theaters. I focus on the spectacle of the “great eater” Nicholas Wood of Kent, whose extreme gluttony John Taylor attempted to turn into a public show at the Bear Garden in 1630. When Wood declined, Taylor wrote an account of Wood’s “teeth and stomacks exploits,” a stand-in for this theatrical no-show. How is Kent’s local fame distinct from the wider celebrity Taylor seeks to generate? What kind of “publics” might be imagined to consume these performances? How does Wood’s insatiable “maw” anchor Taylor’s literary-historical account of spectacular gluttony? And how is Wood’s bestial embodiment leveraged to secure the fame of “The Water Poet” himself? Mobilizing accounts of the social and physical dimensions of competitive eating, historical food studies, and critical perspectives on theatrical “publics,” I argue Taylor stages Wood’s gluttonous anti-commensality as a form of anti-theatricality.
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Notes
- 1.
The Great Eater of Kent or Part of the Admirable Teeth and Stomacks Exploits of Nicholas Wood of Harrison in the County of Kent (London, 1630), 6. Further references to this text are by page number only.
- 2.
Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 56.
- 3.
It is possible Wood was uncertain of his abilities given that he’d recently lost most of his teeth eating a quarter of mutton, bones, and all.
- 4.
See for instance, Capp, The World of John Taylor, 43–45.
- 5.
Ibid., 15.
- 6.
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. W.R. Woudhuysen (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 1.1.1–3.
- 7.
Preiss, “John Taylor, William Fennor and the ‘Trial of Wit’,” Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 50–78, 51.
- 8.
Stage, Stake and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.
- 9.
Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold, 7; Erica Fudge especially has made this case in Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern Culture (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2000), 11–33.
- 10.
See for instance Erica Fudge, “Saying Nothing but Concerning the Same: On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Fudge (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 70–86.
- 11.
Taylor clearly knew the text intimately, especially since it was a precursor to his own travel narratives.
- 12.
Goldstein’s Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) makes the case that eating was principally an ethical practice, and that a significant number of Shakespeare’s staged eating scenes or references to eating concern themselves with failed commensality.
- 13.
Preiss, “John Taylor, William Fennor and the ‘Trial of Wit’,” 51.
- 14.
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
- 15.
Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23–32.
- 16.
Perceiving Animals, 19.
- 17.
For example, in her unpublished essay for the 2018 Shakespeare Association of America, “Court Scandal and Theater as Negative Publicity Machine,” Melissa Rohrer detailed the many subtle allusions to the Frances Howard affair that pepper plays of the period, noting that in this fashion unspeakable scandals could be spoken about, often to criticize elite behavior while escaping censorship.
- 18.
I’m grateful to Musa Gurnis and Allison Deuterman for suggesting this insight and language.
- 19.
There are at least three possible syndromes (Prader-Willi, Kleine-Levin, and Bardet-Biedl) that include hyperphagia as a side-effect, plus a number of less rare physiological (and psychological) conditions.
- 20.
Enquiries into human nature in VI. anatomic praelections in the new theatre of the Royal College of Physicians in London (London, 1680).
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Raber, K. (2021). Celebrity No-Show: The Great Eater of Kent. In: Deutermann, A.K., Hunter, M., Gurnis, M. (eds) Publicity and the Early Modern Stage. Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52332-9_8
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