This article could have been about the verb, which is used to describe, variously, Jupiter’s eagle (in Cymbeline), Berowne’s stereotypical lover (in Love’s Labour’s Lost), and the dangerously ambitious Worcester (in Henry IV part I). However, I will continue to mine the rich depository of Shakespeare’s foodstuffs and concentrate on the noun. It occurs eight times, almost always in the mouths of comic characters. Twice, for example, we find it spoken by figures the folio stage headings call “Clown”: a shepherd in The Winter’s Tale and Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure.

Before we discuss these passages, I would like my reader to imagine a prune. In Elizabethan times, this subspecies of plum was served dried as a delicacy. Small, round, and wrinkly, it seems to have been considered reminiscent of a testicle. Pompey, describing the quite possibly fictitious visit of constable Elbow’s wife to a house of ill repute, says that “she came in great with child; and longing – saving your honour’s reverence – for stew’d prunes”. The prunes in question, on which Pompey dwells so fulsomely as to drive a frustrated Angelo from the court, are a transparent reference to male sexual favours, underlined by the use of “stew’d”, a culinary term synonymous with low-life and immorality.

The simple shepherd, although in conversation with the far from pure Autolycus (famous now as an early purveyor of the “dildo”) is not quite so lewd as Pompey when it comes to fruit. Whereas Pompey details how Mrs Elbow supposedly sat “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes”, the shepherd innocently thinks about the feast’s need for “four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’the sun”. Note that these are fresh prunes (in contrast to the sun-dried grapes), and thus, one imagines, less prone to insalubrious insinuations.

My last reference to prunes is given to us by Falstaff, a frequent figure in these articles, not least because of his great appetite for food and drink. Participating in the ‘Pompey’ tradition, the old knight tells the Hostess that “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune”, where “stew’d prune” is the fruity synonym of ‘prostitute’. In Henry IV part II, the same equivalence lies behind Doll’s tyrade against Pistol, when she, in the presence of Falstaff and others, accuses the hot-blooded captain of living “upon moldy stewed prunes and dried cakes”. Of course, only one of these nouns actually refers to a foodstuff, and so Doll’s phrase provides a final example of how objects answering one bodily need may represent the satiation of another, and thus a whole network of moral judgments founded on the humble “prunus domestica”.

This word, used twenty-two times (including the stage directions) in Shakespeare’s works, does not refer to a piece of furniture, but rather a profession. You would, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, find drawers in a tavern, drawing. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, puns on the many meanings of the verb.

MERCUTIO Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says ‘God send me no need of thee!’ and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.

The ‘drawer’, of course, refers to the barman, the ‘tapster’, who – as the OED puts it – “draws liquor for customers”. Mercutio’s banter with Benvolio puns on the differing situations of drawing a sword and drawing a pint: strangely, his is the only use of the word that does not occur in a scene with Falstaff, another character very able to distinguish between swords and beverages. That said, it is not Falstaff who speaks about drawers in these scenes, but rather his royal companion, Prince Hal.

PRINCE. I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers; and can call them all by their Christian names, as, Tom, Dick, and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but a corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy,–by the Lord, so they call me;–and, when I am King of England, I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.

For Hal, the drawer is more than an unremarkable figure useful for a pun but nor more like he is for Mercutio. Instead, the drawer represents another world, that the young prince enters into with both a wry smile and an eye on his future role as king. This speech occurs early in Henry IV Part I, and is paralleled by another episode in Part II where Hal and Poins disguise themselves as Drawers to trick Falstaff. This comic venture then becomes more serious when Hal becomes King Henry and, on the eve of Agincourt, once more alters his dress and blends in with the common people, culminating with his dawn meditation on “ceremony”. That great speech has its roots here in the tavern, where the prince’s fascination with the many echelons of society, the trappings of a profession and the “Tom, Dick and Francis” beneath them, begins with “a leash of drawers”.

“Good dawning to thee, friend: art of this house?” So Oswald greets the disguised Kent in King Lear, providing us with the first of eight uses of the word “Dawn” in Shakespeare’s works and a neat example of his own superciliousness. By calling Kent (disguised and serving as one of Lear’s entourage) “thee”, and not the more polite “you”, Oswald immediately gets off on the wrong foot. Kent replies to the greeting with a laconic “Ay”, and then precipitates a brawl with a man he knows as “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats” and much more. Oswald’s morning begins badly, and Kent – much to the humiliation of the former King – finishes his in the stocks.

The little episode between Kent and Oswald functions by betraying the hope and freshness that a new morning represents. Their brawl is yet another sign of the erosion of Lear’s power. In contrast to this, the disguised Duke Vincentio – another leader who delegates his power, albeit more successfully than Lear – reassures the Provost, with a statesman’s eye for symbolism, that “As near the dawning .. as it is, / You shall hear more ere morning”. This intimation is part of a sequence of night-time scenes in Measure for Measure, during which the disguised Duke unravels the orders of his corrupt deputy, Angelo, and so saves Claudio from execution for adultery, even as he prepares his own reappearance in Vienna. Frequent references to the fact that “it is almost clear dawn” rush the audience through a sequence of scenes that culminate with the final Duke’s dispensation of justice “like power divine”.

From dawn, to sun, to God, the same sequence of thoughts runs through another leader who disguises himself: Henry V. Wrapped in a common soldier’s garb, he reprises a theme of his sleepless father’s in Henry IV pt II, musing on “Ceremony” before the battle of Agincourt. Just as his father contrasted the poor “ship-boy’s” capacity to sleep in a storm when “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, Henry V imagines the slave

…Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave…

Hyperion was one of the Greek titans, ultimately associated with the sun in Greek mythology, and here by Shakespeare. This personification of the sun as Hyperion also makes both sun and titan similar to King Henry, who will simself soon be helped “to his horse” by a servant. Hyperion, as a titan, was cast down by the younger Gods (the Olympians, led by Zeus against Chronos), and one cannot help but wonder whether the King’s comparison between himself and the sun-titan does not also carry a hint of night-time anxiety. After all, his father was “uneasy” under a crown that he took from a weak Richard II.

There are other dawns in Shakespeare’s works, but I will not analyse them in such detail as these three mornings. Many of these other examples are sinister: Titus Andronicus, in words that become very ironic indeed, praises the morning of the hunt which will finish with his daughter raped and mutilated; Marcellus, trying to work out why the Ghost disappeared at the start of Hamlet, describes the cockerel’s role at “dawning”; and, finally, Iachimo, having stolen Imogen’s bracelet, crawls back into the trunk to await the dawn and the fulfilment of his plot in Cymbeline.

Sinister or not, all these examples are part of one of the most complex stage illusions of Shakespeare’s works: the compression of time. Criticised for this by later neoclassicists like Rymer, his use of little words like dawn or night, or phrases like “The clock hath stricken three” (a very anachronistic moment in Julius Caesar), alert us to shifts of time as much as other phrases alert us to shifts of place. With these words, though, comes more than additional detail, but an atmosphere. After all, Iachimo’s nascent plot is all the more powerful for proceeding just before dawn, and Henry V’s battleside worries soon dissipate with the coming light. Later, facing down a French messenger, the young King delivers a celestial threat, which operates not on the pale light of morning, but the stifling warmth of midday.

A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work:
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.

Having dealt with onions last week, garlic seemed the next logical step. Whereas onions were much associated with womanly weeping, garlics have a rather more intimate range of uses. There are only four examples of the word in all Shakespeare’s works, and all four refer to the smell of this vegetable. Dorcas, one of Bohemia’s shepherdess, for example, teases her friend Mopsa when she declares a need for “garlic, to mend her kissing with!”

A rather less innocent mix of garlics and osculation is made in Measure for Measure by the “fantastic” of the play, Lucio. When speaking to a friar who, unbeknownst to him, is actually the disguised Duke Vincentio, Lucio offers a lewd, unsubstantiated account of Vincentio’s doings:

The duke, I say to thee again, would eat mutton on Fridays. He’s not past it; yet, and, I say to thee, he would mouth with a beggar though she smelt brown bread and garlic. Say that I said so.–Farewell.

Quite why brown bread and garlic should be associated is a mystery to me, and perhaps material for another article. Of equal interest here, though, is the link between garlic and the poor. One finds the same association in Coriolanus, whose eponymous hero doesn’t quite have to ask beggars for their votes, but he does have to meet many a plebian and is afterwards flattered by Menenius for his ability to stand “The breath of garlic-eaters”.

Last but not least, we have a mystified Hotspur, who, having spent some time with Glendower and his fantastic stories of “dreamer Merlin” and “skimble-skamble stuff” declares that,

… I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have hi talk to me
In any summer-house in Christendom.

“Cates” was an Elizabethan word for delicacies (delicates), and the fact the proud and noble Hotspur would prefer the peasant’s garlic over Glendower and sweets is strong language indeed. In fact, he would not only take garlic, but also cheese into the bargain as well, and become positively French to avoid the Welsh lord’s ramblings.

On which note, I end my own ramblings, with the disclaimer that all attribution of garlic and cheese to the French is entirely of my own whimsical fabrication, and has no roots whatsoever in the language of Shakespeare.

Foodstuffs have been a fruitful source of inspiration for these little articles. We have, for example, already sampled the delights of “Capon” and “Cake” (and even “whale” and “shark” for those more adventurous gastronomes). Today’s article, however, marks our first foray into Shakespeare’s mention of raw ingredients.

Onion appears five times in Shakespeare’s works, and all but one reference deals with their capacity to make the chef’s eyes water. Lafeu’s, “Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon” is perhaps the simplest of all such uses of the bulb (I would have typed vegetable, but such a categorisation is apparently quite contentious). Other characters, when speaking about onions’ lacrimose properties, display a peculiar tendency to associate them with women. After all, as Lear puts it “women’s weapons” are “water drops”. The eunuch in Antony and Cleopatra talks of the tear-inducing alium twice. Here, as Antony discusses the forthcoming war against Octavius, he declares:

ENOBARBUS. What mean you, sir,
To give them this discomfort? Look, they weep;
And I, an ass, am onion-ey’d: for shame,
Transform us not to women.

Similarly, a Lord in The Taming of the Shrew advises on how to acquire the woman’s gift of crying with the aid of an onion:

LORD … And if the boy have not a woman’s gift
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift,
Which, in a napkin being close convey’d,
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.
See this dispatch’d with all the haste thou canst;
Anon I’ll give thee more instructions.

Peculiarly, all the references to onions in Shakespeare’s works, whether they deal with crying or women or neither of these, are made by men. My last example is no exception, and is taken from Bottom’s advice to his fellow Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is thankfully free from the misogyny of lord and eunuch, and instead displays a touching regard for the lord and ladies’ sense of smell.

BOTTOM … In any case, let Thisbe have clean linen; and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion’s claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say it is a sweet comedy. No more words: away! go; away!

Thanks to these lines, when it comes to the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at the play’s conclusion, one thing of which we can now be sure is that the eyes of the assembled gentry are weeping tears of laughter, and not, as Lafeu puts it ‘smelling Onions’.

Bagpipes are, for Shakespeare, an instrument that inspires emotion. Falstaff, in the first of my three passages, mentions the instrument in the midst of some tavern banter with young Prince Hal:

FALSTAFF … ‘Sblood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear.
PRINCE HENRY Or an old lion, or a lover’s lute.
FALSTAFF Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe.

For the curious, a Lincolnshire bagpipe – no pictures of which exist in the public domain – consists of only a single “drone” (or pipe) along with the usual mouthpiece and bag. It has a rather mixed reputation: Samuel Pepys wrote in 1667 that Lincolnshire bagpipes made “barbarous music”, whilst a linguist noted in 1875 that “Licolnshire bagpipes” was a colloquialism for the croaking of frogs. The instrument may indeed have been associated with melancholia, but such a range of other opinions suggests that Falstaff’s line, rather like Falstaff himself, has a few playful ambiguities to it.

The music of bagpipes does not fare too well in my second example either. Autolycus’s music is described by a servant as so delightful that after having heard it “the bagpipe could not move you”. Again, here, the emotional properties of bagpipes are alluded to, but immediately dismissed from the pastoral world of Bohemia, a land which, unlike Perdita’s homeland, does not know such grim emotion.

I will conclude with perhaps the most curious mention of bagpipes of them all. Shylock is better known for his melancholic and brooding speeches than for his humour; yet it is he who turns the equally melancholy bagpipe to surreal comic effect. The intent of his speech – to demonstrate at Antonio’s trial that his lethal demand for a pound of flesh is based upon a fixed and inalterable humour – is deadly serious, yet one cannot help but awkwardly smile at his choice of illustration.

SHYLOCK … Some men there are love not a gaping pig;
Some that are mad if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose,
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be render’d,
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig;
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a wauling bagpipe; but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodg’d hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answered?