The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton

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Author: Elena Levy-Navarro

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The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity

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The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton

Elena Levy-Navarro

THE CULTURE OF OBESITY IN EARLY AND LATE MODERNITY

Copyright © Elena Levy-Navarro, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60123-9 ISBN-10: 0-230-60123-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy-Navarro, Elena, 1965– The culture of obesity in early and late modernity: body image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton/by Elena Levy-Navarro. p. cm. ISBN 0-230-60123-5 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Body, Human, in literature. 3. Obesity in literature. 4. Body image in literature. 5. Authors, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—Aesthetics. 6. Aesthetics, Modern—16th century. 7. Aesthetics, Modern—17th century. I. Title. PR428.B63L48 2008 820.9’3561—dc22 2007024338 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: February 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Robb and for Jesse


Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Toward a Constructionist Fat History

1

2

A Time before Fat? Gluttony in Piers Plowman

35

3

Emergence of Fatness Defiant: Skelton at Court

45

4

Lean and Mean: Shakespeare’s Criticism of Thin Privilege

67

5

Boundless Fat in Middleton’s A Game at Chess

111

6

Weigh Me as a Friend: Jonson’s Multiple Constructions of the Fat Body

147

Notes

193

Index

227


Acknowledgments

As I complete this book, I am well aware that it would not have been possible to write it without the help of many people. To begin with, I want to acknowledge my debt to those activists, past and present, who have been fighting against fat prejudice. More specifically, I would like to thank Marilyn Wann, Pattie Smith, and Kathleen LeBesco, whose work has been an inspiration to me. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the assistance I received from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the form of two programs. Although I had not yet conceptualized this book in 1999 when I participated in the NEH Seminar at Ohio State University, “English Reformation: History, Art, and Literature,” the influence of that seminar is evident in the present book, especially in my chapter on Thomas Middleton. John N. King, the director of that seminar, has offered useful advice and direction throughout the years. The 2003 NEH Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Cultural Stress from Reformation to Revolution,” directed by Lori Anne Ferrell and David Cressy, was invaluable for helping me think further about the topic of this book. I benefited greatly from conversations with Lori Anne Ferrell, in particular, on “puritanism” and body size. I have presented versions of these chapters in various conferences over the years. In addition, I have benefited from conversations from scholarly colleagues over the years about some of the themes I explore in this book. I am grateful to the participants of such conferences for their comments and advice. Among others, I would like to thank the following: A. B. Assensoh, Martin Butler, Douglas Brooks, Heather Dubrow, Katie Gilmartin, Stephen Guy-Bray, Susan Koppelman, Julia McCrossin, Ian Munro, Amy Scott-Douglas, Matthew Steggle, and Olga Valbuena. Terry Herring, Joe Jacques, and especially Patricia Fragola offered useful assistance at my home library. Palgrave Macmillan has been a pleasure to work with, and I want to thank all the people I worked with there, including especially Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Julia Cohen. In addition,

x

Acknowledgments

I benefited greatly from the tireless and able efforts of Kristy Lilas and the staff of Macmillan India. This book could not have been written without the assistance of my university. My university, college, and department supported my yearlong sabbatical in 2004–2005, in which I wrote much of the book. For their continued support of my scholarship, I would like to thank Mary Pinkerton and George Savage. I also gratefully acknowledge the assistance I have had from my department. Over the years, I have presented numerous selections from this book at various stages to departmental faculty seminars. I gratefully acknowledge the comments of the following, who regularly attended these seminars: Joseph and Rebecca Hogan, Jerre Collins, George Adams, Ed Erdmann, and Jian Guo. I would also like to thank Marilyn Annucci, Andrea Musher, Marjorie Rhine, and Edith Thornton for their advice and encouragement. I especially acknowledge Geneva Moore for her constant support and encouragement throughout the years—her kindness and commitment to scholarship have been an inspiration to me. My colleague and friend Julie Ann Smith has helped me with the book more than I can say. Not only has she read sections of it, but she discussed much of it with me, and this has helped me formulate my ideas. I greatly value her frankness and critical insight. Her commitment to activism is unparalleled and has been a source of inspiration for me over the years. I cannot possibly thank my family enough for their support. My parents, Helen F. Levy and Bernardo Levy, have offered me continual support over the years. As a child, I learned about the joys of reading from observing my mother, and later, as an adolescent, I learned about the rigors (and, yes, joys) of academic scholarship by watching her make her way through a graduate program in American Culture. I have been fortunate to have her as a reader of much of my work, including the current book. My father has always been an enthusiastic supporter but also—to return to the mundane—the person who kept my technology running. Once, even when my computer crashed, he was miraculously able to recover my material. I must also thank family members Joan Fiddyment, Gary Magruder, Edwin Hamilton, and Liz Levy-Navarro for their support over the years. I dedicate this book to two people who in very different but important ways inspired it. Without my friendship with Jesse G. Swan, this book could not have been conceived, let alone written. In our numerous conversations over the years, he helped me see just how important literary history can be in helping transform our political and aesthetic commitments. It was through such conversations and through my desire to build common cause with him that I came upon fat activism and scholarship.

Acknowledgments

xi

Robert C. Howard has been tirelessly dedicated to me and my project from beginning to end. He has read the book in all of its stages and discussed the argument with me extensively. Equally importantly, he has lived many of its ideas, as when he insists proudly on having his friends and colleagues call him “fat.” Because of the help of all these people, but especially of Jesse and Robb, I can thankfully announce that I am truly fat and flourishing. Although this book could not have been written without the support and assistance of numerous people, it goes without saying, I hope, that every error is my own.


Chapter 1

Toward a Constructionist Fat History I write this book amid the fat panic that is all too pervasive in the twentyfirst century West, especially the United States. I explain this panic by looking to its discursive roots in early modernity, but I do so to offer a counterpoint to our late modern constructions that fuel this panic. A fat history is needed at this particular historical moment to make us consider the bodily categories that have come to seem so natural to many of us. For this reason, we particularly need a history such as the type that has been offered by scholars of queer studies. Such a history needs to interrogate bodily categories, such as “obesity,” “overweight,” and “obesity epidemic,” that are oppressive insofar as they are taken as natural and transhistorical. A fat history would also interrogate the types of emotional, aesthetic, and political attachments we take for granted and, in so doing, help us foster very different types of commitments, attachments, and identifications. Rather than simply feeling, for example, revulsion for the fat body, we can learn to see it in some of its vivified forms as offering a powerful model of defiance of our late modern normative constructions. Such has been my primary aesthetic and political motivation in writing The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton. I. Fat Now I make no pretenses toward writing a study that is objective. Rather, I seek to write a history that is rooted in our own historical moment as I understand it. I also intend my history to intervene in our historical moment

2

The Culture of Obesity

by viewing this moment through the early modern period. The early modern period helps us to observe the moralizing impulse behind our own pathologizing discourse; thus, we understand the degree to which the fat body was, and is, seen as an emblem of excess that threatens to corrupt society from within. Such aspects of our own discourse are often invisible, precisely because bodily categories such as obesity are considered simple, objective facts. As I write this, the United States and other Western countries are experiencing a fat panic fueled by an underlying moralism. The obesity epidemic is such a source of fear because we have learned to consider fat bodies as inherently excessive, slothful, and gluttonous. Fat has been, as historians Hillel Schwartz and Peter N. Stearns explain, a preoccupation of Americans for many years, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century.1 If anything, the fear of fat has intensified in recent years. In 2004, as I began this book, the obesity epidemic was on the pages of many popular news magazines, on our television screens, and yes, on the lips of many a concerned citizen. Cover stories in the National Geographic, US News & World Report, and Time and articles in major newspapers all cried out, Jeremiah-like, against the imminent collapse of American society and, indeed, even civilization itself. Something needed to be done, we were told, and done quickly, if we were not to witness the decline of our society, our nation, or even civilization itself. Predictably, such panic is an almost universal quality of discussions of the so-called obesity epidemic, whether found in diet books, popular exposés, or scientific studies. Many experts, from bureaucrats to medical researchers and practitioners, draw on this panic and even seek to fuel it in their numerous reminders that the obesity epidemic is the greatest threat to our nation or society. Indeed, when we look at speeches from key public health bureaucrats and, to a lesser extent, researchers, they appear to intensify our panic over obesity each and every time another fear occupies our imagination. Whether we are focusing on bioterrorism, terrorism, or the East Asian tsunami, they remind us that the obesity epidemic actually poses a far greater threat to us. In the period after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, several experts warned that the obesity epidemic posed a far greater threat than terrorism. The surgeon general of the United States insisted that this “epidemic” “was every bit as dangerous as terrorism”; indeed, it was the “terror within.”2 Using this same tagline, the surgeon general delivered a speech to “first defenders,” police, and firefighters, in which he declared that “obesity, what I call the terror within” is “a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction.”3 At a time when many were worried over a particular type of “weapon of mass destruction,” bioterrorism, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and


3

Prevention (CDC) predictably warned that the obesity epidemic was a greater threat to the American population.4 All of this is designed to fuel an existing fat panic in a way that has devastating effects on the bodies of those marked as obese. They, after all, have become the terror within, the “ticking time bomb,” to borrow a phrase from diet books. In a similar way, after the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, a respected obesity researcher warned that the obesity epidemic was a “massive tsunami” heading toward our shorelines.5 The surgeon general, speaking just days after the tsunami hit, insisted that “we need to lead a cultural transformation, and we can’t let it be dwarfed by the other headlines of the day.”6 Such statements play on fears all too real in these days of heightened Homeland Security alerts to tell us that we really need to be scared—very scared—of this epidemic. If it is more serious than terrorism, even terrorism using biological agents or weapons of mass destruction, then something obviously needs to be done to defend ourselves from this terror within. Only a most thoroughgoing “cultural transformation” will help us maintain the elusive national security that we are all assumed to desire. Precisely because such language draws on our antifat prejudices, it both encourages and justifies programs that will “help” the fat by intervening to contain and control them. Significantly, such remarks suggest that there is little or no pretense about speaking objectively or rationally about obesity or the obesity epidemic. If obesity and, thus, the obese are pathologized, then they are also understood in moralized terms as that which embodies our cultural excess, corruption, and decadence. Scientific research readily uses such moralizing discourses, especially when it likens the obesity epidemic to one of the worst cataclysms of human history, whether that be the Black Death, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the 2001 terrorist attacks, or the tsunami.7 All of this works to make us fear fat because, we assume, it is killing us from within. Such inflammatory rhetoric is often used to convince us that we need a massive society-wide intervention to save us from this almost assured destruction. In this environment, scientific studies often seem designed to draw on and intensify this fat panic. Numbers are generated that will reinforce our sense that obesity is, indeed, the far greatest threat to society. To fuel the fat panic, obesity must be proven to cause the deaths of huge portions of the population. The controversy around a recent study from researchers at the CDC suggests the degree to which researchers and bureaucrats alike sometimes seek to generate data that will prove once and for all that the obesity epidemic is a singularly catastrophic threat to the United States. In a much publicized study, CDC researchers concluded that obesity “caused” the death of 400,000 people annually in the United States.

4


The conclusion offered what now appears to be a magically derived number designed to frighten people by showing that obesity was the second greatest preventable cause of mortality in the United States. It would also demonstrate that obesity is a growing threat that might very soon surpass the primary preventable cause of mortality—tobacco. The number was designed to encourage us to undergo the same type of massive public health response. From the beginning, researchers and bureaucrats seem never to have been objective, since their goal from the outset has been to frighten us into tending to the obesity epidemic the way society should respond to a massive cataclysm. Even though the methodology and conclusions of the CDC study were questioned by researchers during the internal vetting process, the erroneous findings were still published. Indeed, so convincing were such arguments that a retraction was published in which the figure was reduced to just over 20,000 deaths annually.8 The entire fiasco tells us that the CDC, and especially its director, was not interested in offering an objective assessment of the risks connected to obesity. More money could be acquired, more power gained, if they could frighten us with the magical number of 400,000. Indeed, in that sense, the study succeeded: there has been far more discussion of the 400,000 figure than of the revised conclusions. It seems that science fiction rather than fact now holds sway in the media when it comes to fatness. For now, I am interested in considering how the CDC responded to the errors to their study. Did they apologize for their error? Did they announce that the obesity epidemic is apparently not the massive threat that they had insisted it was? Did they fire or demote the director of the CDC because she had failed to listen to experts within her organization when they questioned the conclusions of the study? No, they justified the study, errors and all, by saying that we need to keep focused on the devastating death toll that the obesity “pandemic” is said to cause in the United States. No scientific proof is needed because we already know that obesity is a massive killer. This case is important because it tells us that a moralizing discourse remains potent even in scientific studies. Even researchers themselves often urge us to undergo what is in essence a moral reform. One prominent researcher, for example, warned: “We need to change society. I see obesity as a subset of the problem that a democratic free society can’t exist unless people in it believe in self-respect and certain moral principles. If we move away from self-respect toward self-pity, we’re going to end up as fat slaves of thin hordes from the east.”9 Nothing less than our national destiny, itself linked to white supremacist discourse, is used to insist that we must undergo an immense moral reform, supervised naturally by a whole host of public health experts.


5

This warning conveniently encapsulates one of the central assumptions of contemporary antifat discourse. That is, the fat body is assumed to embody the excesses of our civilization. As such, no matter how much researchers may attempt to investigate the problem of overweight and obesity with a detached, scientific eye, they respond inevitably with moralistic and aesthetic revulsion and fear. Such responses are only further amplified in the way in which such studies are reported in our news media; whatever scientific conclusion is reported, it is accompanied by multiple images of fat bodies, usually shown eating, with their heads (discretely) cut off on our screens. These bodies serve as an emblem for the disease that prevents us as a nation or society from achieving all we can be. One bureaucrat’s remarks shows how these bodies, like the epidemic itself, are imagined as an obstruction—what she calls “this bottleneck to good health.”10 Such discourse retains the moralizing thrust that first comes into prominence in the early modern period. The fat body is imagined as an obstruction to “progress,” variously understood. Our panic comes from our sense that these very specific fat bodies obstruct what should be our manifest destiny—to progress as a nation or civilization. The fat body, or obesity, is seen as making us soft as a nation and thus as obstructing what should be our destiny. Consider, for example, a March 2004 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, which received quite a bit of media attention. The writers investigated the statistical impact that obesity is likely to have on the longevity of the American population. They concluded that the cumulative longevity of the United States would fall as its people become more fat. The very way the problem is framed reflects the panic of the writers, even as it is designed to instill the same panic in the reader. The researchers begin by insisting that we have been the beneficiaries of a history that marches steadily toward progress. They assert that “life expectancy of humans during the past thousand years has been characterized by a slow, steady increase.”11 Relatedly, the United States has been the beneficiary of this steady increase in longevity, which is taken as a good we must never question. Given this progressivist historiography, the obesity epidemic is seen as a threat to what should be our right to progress ad infinitum. To make this point, antifat discourse repeatedly focuses on historical firsts. For the first time, our longevity will not increase and will even decrease. For the first time, our next generation will live shorter lives than their parents. For the first time, obesity poses a greater threat to the world’s population than “underweight” or famine. All of this is designed to make us panic. As the article warns, “Unless effective population-level interventions to reduce obesity are developed, the steady rise in life expectancy observed in the modern era may soon come to an end and the youth of today may,

6


on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents.”12 Who would not panic at such rhetoric—that is, once it is taken for granted that we must always improve our statistical longevity? Who but the most heartless person, such language suggests, would not want the lives of the next generation, our children, to be happier and, more significantly, longer than our own? This article is typical in the way that it imagines obesity as that which obstructs the progress of civilization, whether understood on a global or national scale. Obesity plays the same role in personal narratives. Obesity is that which obstructs the individual from being all that she can be. It robs her of her birthright to attain an optimal health in which she is finally promised eternal youth or “life” itself. Obesity is the “before” that is associated with disease, old age, and death; thinness is the “after” that is associated with health, youth, and life. The “successful” dieter often sees herself as passing from the one to the other, having left behind the obesity that was the obstruction to all that she deserved to be. We all know such, often temporary, “success” stories: the woman who carries around her “before” photograph to show you just how far she has come, or the woman who keeps her fat jeans as a warning of what she might become if she does not remain vigilant. Such people conform to the narratives we have all heard before—morality tales in which the “after” has become a whole “new me.” Such dieters have achieved on a personal level what we want to achieve on a national level: they have discarded the old, overindulgent, luxurious fat self for the new, restrained, and virtuous thin self. The successful dieter has undergone a moral reform in which she has regained a new, younger, beautiful self. Diet books often depend on such narratives that seem to have the same purpose of the saints’ lives of old. One woman is initially troubled by the realization that people treat her better now that she is thin. She begins to sense that fat people are, indeed, victims of antifat prejudice. Rather than embrace such a conclusion, she, ultimately, concludes, instead, that it is only natural that she should be treated better once she becomes thin. Her weight-loss has made her into a new person: “Now I realize that I wasn’t the same person, because when you’re heavier you’re not as outgoing or sure of yourself.”13 According to the logic of our culture, she has, indeed, transformed herself, having cast off her old self for the new one. From such an (apocalyptic) perspective, it only makes sense that people would treat you differently: you are different, and thankfully so. The “after” is imagined as newly young. In diet commercials, mothers often announce proudly that their diet has made them new, younger, and more vibrant. Where before they could only sit sluggishly on a bench, they proudly tell us how they can now run and play with their children.


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Other women announce with tears of joy that they can now wear the same size dress that they wore in high school. In both cases, the successful dieter sees herself as achieving a renewed (prematernal) youthfulness. Such progressivist narratives make the fat body into the obstruction that must be overcome; it comes to embody disease, degeneration, and even finally death itself.14 These narratives are often framed in different ways depending on the gender of the writer, but in all cases, the successful dieter associates the new thin body with youth, health, and life. Diet books sell just this apocalyptic fantasy to their consumers. The writer of the popular diet book The Zone: A Dietary Road Map uses his own story to convince us that we can all finally overcome death if we follow his “road map” to optimal health. He is living proof that the reader can extend his or her longevity since he has, at the time of writing the book, already overcome his family’s genetic destiny—that “genetic time bomb” or that “sword of Damocles,” which is his supposed predetermined genetic tendency to die young.15 His story tells us that we can all cheat death if we just follow his plan. Obesity is feared precisely because it is the obstacle that prevents us from achieving this optimal health, eternal youthfulness, and vibrancy. All of this is coercive insofar as the goal of optimal health is never questioned. Who but the most selfish person would choose death over life, disease over health, fat over thin? Need I say that this apocalyptic transformation is impossible. No one can be forever young, despite what these diet narratives suggest. Even if a dieter may have temporarily cheated death, death will have its day. The promise of apocalyptic renewal remains all the more powerful for such omnipresent failure. Many look all the more doggedly for the transformation and, as a result, see the fat body that is believed to deny us this with even more fear, revulsion, and contempt. What I have been describing is in some ways a uniquely modern narrative of exceptionalism, whether understood in personal or national terms. It draws, however, on an understanding of the fat body that has a much longer pedigree. Indeed, this set of assumptions goes back to premodern satirical attacks on friars as fat, lazy, and indulgent. They were taken as a blight on the church and society insofar as they gave themselves over to indulgence and excess. Such a set of assumptions take on a more recognizably modern form in the early modern period when such indulgence is associated with the fat body itself. Thomas Middleton, in A Game at Chess (1624), draws on the long-standing anticlerical language in his depiction of the Fat Bishop, but the Fat Bishop is, in his fatness, especially a sign of an excess, corruption, and luxury that threatens to destroy the Protestant state from within. In a related way, William Shakespeare’s Hal, in his triumphalist nationalism, sees Falstaff as an

8


obstacle to his imperialist aims. Our fat panic owes much to such early modern moralizing representations; only now, obesity, rather than fat, comes to be seen as the disease of prosperity and overconsumption. Our obesity epidemic is a reminder that we as a nation have become fat and lazy. Indeed, one popular exposé suggests that as a nation we can only combat this epidemic if we commit ourselves to a moralistic reform directed against those pervasive national sins of “‘sloth” and “gluttony.”16 All in all, fat is taken to be an emblem of our cumulative overconsumption; thus, we as a nation or civilization need to cut the fat, the logic goes, or our civilization will collapse under its own weight. Diet books frequently recommend that we must return to a purer, more natural time before “civilization” corrupted us. Books such as The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat, The Warrior Diet, but also The Zone and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, claim to restore the body to the way it is meant to be, which is, in all these cases, the way it was in the days before civilization.17 Several of these books locate that ideal time in the hunting-gathering days of the Paleolithic era.18 We are not designed to live a modern life; that is, we are not supposed to sit at a desk, eat artificial foods, and drive cars. We are designed, instead, to hunt and gather. To take a typical example, The Zone explains that “Neo-Paleolithic man [sic]” ate “a menu in harmony with human genetic makeup” when “he [sic] was a prolific hunter.”19 Only with the coming of civilization—that is with the cultivation of grain some ten thousand years ago—was this “dietary and genetic harmony . . . disrupted.”20 As the author writes, “The problem, as I’ve said, is that modern man is not genetically adapted to these ‘civilized’ foods.”21 With the emergence of civilization, such diet books insist, comes a fall—from the natural and primitive lifestyle we are supposedly designed to lead—to the artificial and civilized one that threatens our very well-being. The historiography evident here is often developed even further: as civilization advances, we become progressively weaker. First, in the nineteenth century, we begin to eat foods heavy in sugar, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, we eat mass-produced, artificial foods laden with corn syrup.22 We need a nationwide reform to bring us back to the purer, more natural state of being that our bodies need. All of this would seem to be contradictory. On the one hand, the fat body embodies an obstruction to progress; on the other hand, the fat body embodies progress, or at least the ills of the overabundance progress creates, leading inevitably to the degeneration of civilization. Such a contradiction is, however, at the heart of moralizing antifat discourse itself. Middleton’s Fat Bishop or Hal’s Falstaff in 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV are emblems of the decadent luxury of civilization even as they are also


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understood as that which threatens to obstruct the progress of the state. They are both in some ways the terror within because their soft, effeminate, and luxurious lifestyle, manifest in their fat bodies, are a threat to the state. What is needed, then, is the type of reform that the gaunt Hal embodies—that is, a penitent, lean, masculinist militarism, which promises to rescue the nation from the sins of its own excess. By looking at the early modern period, we can better see the moralizing thrust behind our own late modern pathologizing discourse. Too frequently, the latter pretends to be objective even as the imperative of health takes on a moralizing thrust that makes certain bodies, like the fat, dangerous. Like Hal, we want to expel Falstaff and for similar reasons. In what I have written thus far, I have underscored the historiography evident in the understanding of fat. History, therefore, is inescapable when dealing with fat, and history, especially of the type I am writing here, must take a central place in dismantling our contemporary fat panic. Previous scholars have helped us put the contemporary fat panic in perspective by reminding us that it has deeper historical roots. Historians focus especially on the United States, as they suggest the degree to which we as a nation have become especially obsessed with fat as a threat to our national security since the Great War.23 The assumption that fat effeminizes, weakens, and softens is evident in the early modern period, as my discussion of Middleton and Shakespeare suggests. All of this helps us appreciate the way that this antifat discourse is implicit in modernity itself. There is something recognizably modern about the way that Middleton casts the Fat Bishop and Shakespeare’s Hal casts Falstaff as emblems of cumulative excess. I will also argue that there is also something recognizably modern about this notion of time and history as one that marches neatly toward a Protestant national destiny. In fact, we can appreciate the degree to which this antifat discourse is recognizably modern if we remember that scholars have seemed almost inevitably simply to accept the representations of Falstaff or the Fat Bishop as natural. Thus far, few, if any, scholars seem able to consider such representations as constructions or to see fat as a social construction with a history, as this study suggests. Bureaucrats and obesity researchers worry that this epidemic is depriving us of military recruits. As the surgeon general explains, “Our preparedness as a nation depends on our health as individuals,” even as he also notes that “the military needs healthy recruits.’24 One study that examined the weight restrictions currently in place in the military voiced alarm that fewer young people were qualifying for the military. A researcher warned, “As a society, we need to be physically prepared to respond to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or any other emergency.”25 All in all, such calls suggest that the concern about national security is used to make

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people conform to a narrow standard of body type, which differs in significant ways for men and women. In a speech to a police organization, the surgeon general warned them that they had a duty to be lean and mean. This duty, notably, had nothing to do with their job performance: that is, with their ability to carry people out of burning buildings or to shoot suspected terrorists. As “first responders,” they had a duty to be role models and thus to display physically fit, lean bodies.26 Their bodies would seem to be common property. The war is won, national security achieved, when each person fights the terror within—that is, his own private war against obesity. Such cries use the fear that we as a nation are becoming weak and effeminate to urge each person, especially men of military age, to contain and control their body.27 All of this involves a kind of magical thinking in which a nation of strong, contained, and controlled bodies is a nation seemingly impermeable to foreign threats. If civilization is emasculating and weakening us as a nation, then diet books promise to help us recapture a tougher, masculinist past. Such a promise reminds us of the historiography evident in the way in which fat is understood. That is, it is understood as that which blocks us from achieving our manifest destiny. We achieve this in part when we return to the state of nature, but notably, that state of nature is often seen as elementally masculinist and militaristic in form. If we follow diets like The Warrior Diet, The Zone, The Paleo Diet, or even in a different way, The Maker’s Diet, we return to some bygone era that is implicitly masculinist in nature. Frequently, such an era is imagined to be the bygone era of the warrior or hunter, before he was corrupted by effeminizing civilization. The Warrior Diet locates that idealized era in of all things the period of the Roman Empire; thus, the author urges his primarily male readership to adopt the life of a Roman conscript. The Zone, like The Paleo Diet, urges its readers to adopt the life of a hunter from the Paleolithic era. Civilization, such books suggest, has effeminized and weakened men with its artificial food and sedentary lifestyle. What is needed is a wholesale reform, in which men, especially, learn to live the harsher life of the Paleolithic hunter that he is taken to be. That such diets are popular in the post-9/11 world suggests the extent to which this diet culture is playing into popular fears that we as a nation have become soft, our national security weakened by the softness, indulgence, and luxury epitomized by the “fat” body of Bill Clinton.28 We need nothing less than a wholesale cultural transformation in which men especially cast off their overindulgent, lazy, luxurious selves to become harder, more muscular, and violent. The type of reform recommended, interestingly, is as vexed and contradictory at base as is the supposed problem. For one, a return to the


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past is imagined as progress: as one diet insists, “By going backward in time with your diet, you will actually be moving forward.”29 For another, the reform that is needed to return us to this primitive state of nature requires, we soon see, the active intervention of the biohealth regime with its own army of experts. Such a reform, both on the personal and the national level, can only be implemented with the active assistance of numerous experts from scientific researchers to physicians to specialists in nutrition and exercise.30 Diet books that urge a return to an idealized past, whether The Maker’s Diet or The Zone, promise that their regimen accords with the findings of modern medicine. The Zone makes the seemingly contradictory claim that the contemporary humans who are closest to the genetic ideal of “Neo-Paleothic man” are Olympic athletes. The contradiction of this ideal is evident simply in this choice, for the Olympic athlete requires all sorts of expert intervention to be able to achieve “the zone.” The much-needed return to nature requires extensive intervention by the biohealth regime. This contradiction calls attention to the problems inherent in the antifat discourse. It underscores the extent to which the thin body of nature is actually the one that overconsumes. Even though the thin body often expends more resources than the fat one, the fat one is the only one that is marked and made to embody the overindulgence and excess of us all. Certain thin bodies often consume more, indeed ostentatiously more, than their fat counterparts. Part of the appeal of diet books such as The Warrior Diet and Dr. Atkins’ Diet is precisely that they promise to give the reader a more efficient body that not only can, but must, consume a lot. Its metabolic efficiency, so the logic goes, requires that the body consume more food, often more protein or meat that is taken to be the fuel for the warrior. This very same body, furthermore, in its metabolic efficiency, makes a show of its own consumption of other products and services, especially of the fitness industry. The thin body is often the body of overconsumption both because it can eat more calories and richer food and because it often makes a show of its consumption of fitness. Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the New York professionals in the 1980s had changed their lifestyle precisely because they wanted to display this type of overconsumption. Where the professionals had previously eaten salads during their power lunches, they had begun in the 1980s to eat richer, more luxurious and caloric fare. In doing this, they made a show of having the “metabolic capacity of a shrew, that tiny mammal that consumes three times its weight in food each day.”31 The diet books offer just such a fantasy to the reader: Dr. Atkins’ Diet begins by urging the reader to imagine a table full of food, because this is the diet you can eat once your body has become efficient.

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Such overconsumption can remain both invisible and unexamined precisely because the fat body is the emblem of our cumulative overconsumption. As Schwartz observes, “The image of the fat person as a selfish person is a sly, cruel trick of Late Capitalism.”32 Later, he makes the related point that “thin people are capitalism’s ideal consumers, for they can devour without seeming gluttonous; they have morality on their side.”33 It is a sly, cruel trick because the fat body is often associated with the underclass, even as it is made to embody society’s overconsumption. The privilege of the few elite is secured, their overconsumption allowed to be virtuous, precisely because the fat body of the underclass is made into the emblem of our collective overconsumption. Because overconsumption is visible in the bodies of the fat, we often feel that their bodies need to be contained and controlled. At the same time, other forms of overconsumption remain invisible and escape criticism. Who stands to win and who stands to lose if this fat panic takes hold? The losers are quite likely the poor, the working class, and the nonwhite, who are most likely to be considered the “victims” of the obesity epidemic and thus the ones in need of “help.” Many who study obesity in the contemporary United States tend to focus on demographic trends related to obesity; thus, they focus on which groups, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender, are more likely to be obese. In doing this, the group with the lowest rates of obesity—affluent white girls and women—are made into the ideal against which other groups are measured. Studies focus on their mindset, which is assumed to cause their leanness.34 This group is lean, such comparisons suggest, because they are dissatisfied with their bodies, and the comparison implicitly suggests that their nonwhite counterparts need to develop a similar dissatisfaction with their body if the obesity epidemic is to be cured in the nationwide population. This logic is manifest in the popular exposé Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Experts need to “help” nonwhite girls and women; thus the author quotes a study that recommends: “Bodyfat measurement and counseling should be done at an early age to improve this remarkable lack of perception about obesity” (author’s emphasis).35 This help consists of urging the nonwhite to judge their bodies as substandard according to medically accepted standards. More particularly, the help consists of teaching them to hate their bodies, for, as the writer insists, “such sidestepping [by those feminists interested in preventing poor body image and the development of eating disorders] denies poor minority girls a principal—if sometimes unpleasant—psychological incentive to lose weight: that of social stigma.”36 Notice how the author and the obesity researchers he triumphs become the ones who are helping these girls, while others, such as feminists, are “denying” them the help they need.


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Now, I want to turn to a typical way in which the obese body is figured in popular discussions of the obesity epidemic. I take as my examples an article from the National Geographic because it helps us see the way that the fat panic can be used to secure the privilege of the elite few.37 We can see this if we focus especially on the way that the writer positions herself. As is typical of many such pieces, the writer makes herself invisible to the extent to which the fat body is marked and stigmatized. To put it another way, the writer’s objectivity depends on her flamboyant disembodiment, which in turn depends on the way in which the fat body alone is seen as embarrassingly embodied. The position of the writer, however, depends on a very particular modern relationship between the bodies of the objective observer (and reader) and the observed (the obese). The thin body only acquires its privilege by insisting on this relationship between itself and the fat one, I would insist. The thin are more or less invisible to the extent that the fat are rendered embarrassingly (to some, that is) visible. The writers assume the same objectivist positions prevalent in the writing from the biomedical field that they champion. In so doing, they, like the researchers, assert their right to gaze upon, monitor, and judge the body of the fat person, even as their own bodily presence remains invisible and unseen by any critical gaze. In virtually all discussions of the obesity epidemic, the reporter, like the scientist, insists on their bodily absence. The words of the fat person are reported objectively in a way that occludes the human context in which they emerged. We rarely hear anything about the questions asked, nor do we hear about how the writer’s bodily presence may have influenced what was said. In presenting the words of the obese in this way, the articles give the impression that the subject is speaking a truth about her condition. She is made to speak the truth about the obese body that is implicitly seen as somehow true and universal for all times and places. Because the writers remove themselves from the account, the fat body is understood in essentialist terms; it has a singular and objective meaning that appears to be independent of the writer as observer and participant. Such an understanding of the fat body serves the purpose of those who want to secure their own privilege. They are, they can then believe, innately virtuous; their unmarked bodies tell us that, but only because their bodies are implicitly contrasted with their fat counterparts. The 2004 cover story in the National Geographic includes on its title page a photograph of a fat, white, woman.38 We are asked to gaze upon her body, which is quite clearly meant to be an emblem of our cumulative excess. The body sits alone, with the head cut out of view, as is typical in most representations of fat people in exposés. The woman’s legs are pulled to her chest, her elbow rests on one leg, and one manicured hand with

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long red nails lingers idly on her thigh. For those who might not respond to the image with the revulsion that the writer seems to expect, the title and explanation prompts us to think as they do. “Why Are We So Fat?” the title asks, only to answer these questions in the conventional way. That is, we are fat because we have become soft with civilization: “Americans enjoy one of the most luxurious lifestyles on Earth: Our food is plentiful. Our work is automated. Our leisure is effortless. And it’s killing us.”39 The body of the woman in the photograph is made quite literally into an embodiment of the obesity epidemic, one that her pose and her manicured hands tell us is caused by our national sins of sloth and gluttony. This body, to some still the very picture of prosperity, is supposed to represent to those who are properly trained the very picture of a luxury that is killing us all. The article surveys various scientific and medical arguments about what is causing the so-called obesity epidemic, an epidemic that is, of course, never open to question. It asks the question, what is causing the obesity epidemic? Virtually all the experts interviewed, whether they be geneticists or experts in nutritional science, end up indicting our “toxic environment,” in which, we are told, for example, that “bad food is cheap, heavily promoted, and engineered to taste good.”40 The studies seem to have little to do with one another in some way, as one geneticist might conclude that “evolution betrays us,” whereas another scientist might conclude that a particular hormone is responsible for our overeating. Ultimately, the article puts these various studies together to indict our luxurious lifestyle: our “food-rich environment” is killing us.41 A caption to one of the many charts, “USA: Overfed Nation,” tells us, then, “A report earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally confirms what many of us didn’t want to admit: We’re fat because we eat a lot—a whole lot more than we used to.”42 Ultimately, we are told—or perhaps, more accurately, that group of people who “didn’t want to admit” this apparent fact are told—that the “jig is up.”43 The entire story ends by telling us that we have now imported our luxurious lifestyle to the world at large and, thus, obesity has become a global pandemic.44 Overall, the story insists that the United States is corrupted by its overdevelopment, which the fat body is made to embody. What is needed is a thoroughgoing effort at national and, finally, global reform if we are not to fall victim to what seems like an inevitable cataclysm. The National Geographic story addresses an American audience, and more specifically an American audience of professional elites, who are, by and large, either middle class or upper middle class. Its readers are those people who are able to adopt the lifestyle advertised in the pages of the National Geographic, whether that be buying the gas-guzzling SUVs that


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promise easy access to the outdoors or purchasing the various adventure vacations advertised on the pages of the magazine. The writer assumes that the reader shares her white, elite aesthetic, which finds the fat body, no matter how well coiffed, revolting. Both understand that they must engage in a constant fight against fat if they are to assert and secure their privileged status. The tongue-in-cheek comments that pepper the story assume that we all share the same rather trivial experiences, desires, and fears. To offer one example, the writer comments on one study by asking, “So if we take enough leptin, we can all fit into our high school prom outfits?”45 Such a “we” includes all those who went to the prom, value that experience, and, above all, value maintaining the body size that they had in their adolescence. It assumes as well an aesthetic in which any weight gain is seen as an ill in and of itself, regardless of the health implications. Popular discussions of the obesity epidemic frequently include a narrative framing device to put a human face on the disease, as it were. Thus, the person in the narrative becomes an emblem of our cumulative overconsumption. The National Geographic story is organized around the “success” story of a white professional elite. At the beginning of the story, we see her as a “before”—fat and excessive—but by the end of the story, we see her as a successful “after,” who has finally achieved the thin self she so desired with the intervention of medicine. She seems to have been chosen because she bears a complex and ambiguous relationship to the middle-class reader. She is both like them and not like them. Insofar as she is identified by her job, her dress, and her behavior as a professional elite, she is assumed to be like the middle-class reader, but insofar as she is seen as terribly fat, she is fundamentally not like them. She gives a human face to the disease, I imagine the writer believes, but the human face is a largely white, middle-class one. She is like the white elite reader: she has the “efficiency and tact” demanded of her “managerial level job,” she has many devoted friends, and she even, we are told, “dresses stylishly, has long blond hair swept back by a headband, a classic oval face, and fair complexion.”46 All of these are markers of her professional status and her whiteness, but all of these, the disembodied voice warns, mean nothing if you let yourself go. All of a sudden, the writer’s voice breaks her description by pointing to the single most important fact about her body: “But she is—let’s face it—huge.”47 The reader is now asked to distance herself from the fat subject or, alternatively, to understand that she is struggling with what is from a certain white, middle-class perspective considered an “intense emotional issue.”48 Even details about the humiliation of her obesity are designed to play into middle-class white fears. We are supposed to feel how her fat body is an affront to her privilege. The writer offers a detailed list of all the reasons

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that led her to undergo this risky and still experimental, life-threatening and life-altering gastric bypass surgery. Most of them have little or no relationship to “health” in a strict sense. Indeed, one of them—the “humiliation of asking for a seatbelt extender on a plane”—seems really quite trivial unless we share with her the sense that as a member of a privileged class she cannot call attention to her body and certainly not her size. To be marked in this way is a humiliation precisely because it calls attention to the body in a society where privilege comes from having a body that is unmarked. The writer is certain that we share these same values; thus, we are never asked to consider the way that many of her problems come both from her own aesthetic, political, and emotional investment in privilege and from the problems that society creates for those who refuse to conform their bodies to its narrow ideal. We are not to ask why our society insists on creating mass-produced seats that do not accommodate a range of body shapes, sizes, and physical ability, nor are we to question the aesthetic and erotic tastes of our dominant culture (or our own aesthetic and erotic tastes). Instead, we are supposed to look on as this woman mutilates herself and applaud her willingness to undergo this procedure so that she could become this new, thin self. The photographs in the final pages of the article show her in the “before” and “after,” where we are supposed to be sure that she has, indeed, through the help of modern medicine, achieved everything she could possibly desire. The National Geographic article perfectly encapsulates the way that this fat panic serves to legitimize all sorts of overconsumption precisely because the fat person is made to bear the burden of representing our cumulative excess. To return to the “before” and “after” photographs, I should observe that each of them focuses on intensive overconsumption. In the “before” photograph, she is shown in a medical setting with medical monitors attached to her body in a way that tells us that her transformation could only be achieved with intensive and expensive biomedical intervention. In the “after,” she is shown with her new thin body, leaning up against her newly purchased convertible. Despite the fact that these stories claim to sell a healthy and simple lifestyle, they actually sell a lifestyle of a professional elite that depends for its very existence on massive overconsumption. Here, we find the same paradox that is evident in The Zone and, indeed, in discussions of weight loss generally. A return to the ideal state of nature actually requires intensive intervention, especially the intervention from a number of medical, scientific, and nutritional experts. Throughout, the writer writes of a nostalgia for a simpler time, but one only achieved through the constant intervention of specialists. Toward the end of the article, the writer muses, “Perhaps what this country really needs to fight fat is a mom. Make that a vintage mom, with a


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gingham apron tied around her waist as she places a bowl of vegetables on the table next to a skinless roast chicken.”49 Despite claims to the contrary, we are not to return to the way things used to be. Need I point out that the vintage mother was not in the habit of feeding her children skinless roast chicken, as a glimpse at any vintage cookbook would show? What we have, instead, is a particular version of the past that legitimizes the overconsumption of our present biohealth regime. Our new mom may very well be the female expert in nutritional science described in the very next paragraph, inspecting a Big Mac, “like an entomologist classifying a new species.”50 Certainly, the experts’ experiments suggest that we need an expert to tell us what to eat, since they demonstrate that we mindlessly consume whatever is put in front of us.51 The story ends by describing us as cattle; as such, we are in need of the same sort of nutritional engineering to save us from our limitless appetites. As the article explains, “We graze in endless pastures of food while the statistics grow more chilling.”52 Mom—that is, Dr. Mom—needs to intervene to monitor and control our food intake if we are to return to the ideal state of thinness we are all supposed to (and assumed to) desire. This vision of the idealized past might not surprise those who consider exactly what type of “outdoorsy” lifestyle the National Geographic is selling.53 It sells a version of an idealized natural landscape, available only to those few affluent enough to afford it. Here is a world where a privileged few have access to what appears to be an untouched Eden, yet one that really requires intensive scientific and technical management, only executed through the labor of the properly educated natives. The magazine adopts the same attitude toward fat that it adopts toward (unmanaged) nature: in both cases, Eden is lost through excessive overindulgence, but a form of Eden can be regained when scientific experts intervene.54 In this very same issue, two scientists associated with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the National Geographic Society use their expertise to restore the wildlife preserve Loango National Park in Gabon, Africa.55 Like the fat body, the park, “founded” in no small part by the expert, requires constant expert intervention if it is to approximate the Eden it once was.56 The biologist, reporting on the problems in establishing and managing this park, asserts with regret that “before colonial powers intruded, this must have been a true Eden.”57 If it can never be a true Eden again, it can become the next best thing—a paradise for Western tourists. In what follows, the expert describes his efforts to transform the landscape, especially by his efforts to coordinate “trash removal.”58 As he introduces his “Operation Loango” (garbage pickup), we are told, “You can’t expect to have vibrant ecotourism here with dirty beaches, can you?”59 The park will become a new Eden through the continual

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intervention and management of these experts (and through the labor of the locals who must be educated to value a certain brand of conservation). As one expert boasts, “If the park is done right, visitors should feel like the first people to see this place.”60 Both the intervention in the obesity crisis and the intervention in this park require the constant management and intervention of experts. Furthermore, both promise a return to a simple past, but one that in both cases fuels a vibrant biotechnological economy. These two stories come closer and closer in a number of respects. For one, the Gabon project is seen to require, ultimately, from the African population a change in lifestyle identical to that required to keep them thin and healthy: that is, the natives must learn to adopt a more “simple” lifestyle in which they learn to live on resources close to home. In addition, both stories promise the American middle-class readers that they can return to a more ideal, simpler life that will reverse the supposedly corrupting effects of an overdeveloped lifestyle. Perhaps, this begins with a cleansing of our perception; thus, the reader who scores at least 70 percent in the “Diet IQ” test on the National Geographic Web site wins a screensaver depicting a “pleasantly plump hippo,” bathing languorously in the clean water of the Loango National Park.61 Knowledge about proper nutrition will return us to the state of nature in which the hippo will now no longer be an epithet used to malign fat people, but a symbol of the simple life available to all who have the privilege to purchase it. I have offered these examples of the contemporary fat panic to underscore the assumptions that are inherent in terms such as obesity and obesity epidemic. They are not value-neutral or objective terms, and they should not be used as such. Scholars need to stop using terms such as obesity to characterize the bodies of fat characters and people in the early modern period. While they think they are being polite, they are actually reinforcing dangerous modern assumptions. Too many scholars right now use the word obese in a way that reifies and naturalizes our dominant contemporary representational regime. Right now, many scholars refuse to discuss the issue of fat entirely because it is not polite to do so. Alternately, they discuss it in the late modern pathologizing language of obesity.62 Either way, they imply that obesity, in the way we construct it, is a natural, transhistorical construct, relevant for all times and places. We do nothing to interrogate the assumptions behind our late modern bodily norms if we fall back on language that passes as more polite in our culture, especially the objective language of biomedicine. Scholarship that gives us an “obese” Falstaff or a Ben Jonson inevitably reifies and naturalizes those terms. Like the term “homosexual,” the term “obese” brings to bear on this earlier period the assumptions of our modern health regime, one that did not fully emerge until the nineteenth century.


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Jonson is no more an “obese” author than Christopher Marlowe is a “homosexual” one. Early modern scholars would no longer ask for papers on the topic of the early modern “homosexual” (unless the constructed nature of that category itself is foregrounded), yet they have no problem, it seems, asking for papers on the topic of “obesity” in the period.63 In relying on such terminology, we necessarily reify and naturalize a modern, objectivist, and biomedical understanding of the body. In doing this, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity of imagining very different ways in which bodies were constructed, imagined, and experienced in the early modern period. We need more intense imaginative engagement with the fat body and, as such, we must find ways to place ourselves with such bodies rather than against them. For this reason, I would rather have scholars exhibit their horror and revulsion at the fat bodies of the past than treat them with clinical detachment. C. S. Lewis offers us an example of one such visceral reaction to an early modern character. In considering Shakespeare’s “fat” Venus in his Venus and Adonis, he famously likened her to his formidable aunts, who were too pushy, too big, too sweaty, and presumably too fat.64 Thus, we are aware of Lewis’s commitments, even as we are ironically made more aware of the power in his big and pushy aunts. In contrast, scholars who use the term “obese” as a seemingly value-neutral, objective descriptor do not make their commitments as palpable, even as they reinforce the dominant modern representational regime that sees these fat bodies as pathological. Of course, what we really need is more scholars to consider “fat” as a cultural construction, something that is difficult to do without also questioning our own privilege as thin elites. We need to be more aware of how our privilege is asserted to the extent to which we mark and stigmatize fat bodies. II. Why a Fat History? I began this book with a discussion of some of the pervasiveness of the fat panic and the antifat discourse it depends upon so that it would be clear that this book makes no pretenses toward objectivity. I neither try to describe obesity objectively, nor do I even believe that there is an universal or transhistorical phenomenon known as “obesity.” My fat history is embedded in this particular historical moment and is meant to counter the present-day fat panic. Now we need to ask, “Why a fat history?” The answer is that history is at the foundation of modern constructions of fat. To be more specific, our modern constructions of fat depend on a particularly modern view of history. Obesity and the obesity epidemic are always understood in relation to a progressive history according to which

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obesity becomes that which obstructs us from achieving our idealized end. Whether it obstructs the nation or the individual, obesity is seen as that which prevents us from becoming our new, improved self. A particular monolithic and teleological view of history, unique to modernity, serves to secure the privilege of the thin over the fat. A fat history, like a queer history, must be self-conscious about the role that history has played in securing an oppressive norm. As such, it must be written in a form that questions and dismantles a modern teleological view of history that serves to make certain identity positions normative. We can do this in part if we foster attachments to those bodies that are seen as an obstruction to this forward thrust of modern history. Such a modern form of history can be frustrated in part if the scholar places herself within and among the fat bodies. She must resist the temptation to establish herself as an unmarked, presumptively disembodied researcher, who gazes upon and anatomizes the bodies of the obese. The danger that is inherent in popular and scientific discussions of obesity is also apparent in literary discussions of the body. Bruce R. Smith warns that too much literary theory involves the categorization of the body. In adopting an approach that involves categorizing the body, the researcher positions herself over and against the body she analyzes. As Smith writes, “To name something is to turn it into an object, to position the analyst here and it over there so that it can be seen, known, mastered.”65 Certainly, to the extent to which the researchers arrogate to themselves the authority to judge the fat body, they assert their privilege. They are unmarked and even presumptively disembodied to the extent to which the fat body is marked, embodied, and stigmatized. The dangers of taking this position can be overcome if we align ourselves, instead, with the bodies of the defiantly fat. To do so is also to reject any view of history as merely empirical or objective. Peter Stearns’s Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, first published in 1997 and reissued with a new preface in 2002, exposes the difficulty inherent in writing a history that claims to be objective and empirical in nature. In doing so, he must necessarily place himself against the bodies that he investigates. Stearns sees his work as different from other fat histories before him, especially the work of Schwartz, because he is particularly focused on what he sees as hard, empirical facts: “actual trends in weight,” “real weight,” and finally the development of quantifiable “diet standards.”66 He expressly opposes his history to both the work of feminist scholars and the activism of the fat-pride community. Both of these groups are far too subjective, precisely because they alone are taken to have a political motivation in writing. Because he positions himself as politically neutral, they are to be regarded as politically extreme. Indeed, he


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dismisses both groups as having “the confidence of fatness defiant.”67 Given his terms, they are subjective (or extreme), he, objective (and moderate). It soon becomes apparent that Stearns is, instead, aligning himself with the powers that be and with the normative standards surrounding “weight.” Far from having “the confidence of fatness defiant,” he is a “child of the [slimming] culture,” who will continue to participate in the constant battle of the bulge.68 He uses this brief description of himself to make a show of his own conformity to the dominant culture and its confining norm. In our culture, such a position passes as more objective and certainly more moderate; the position of someone who has the “confidence of fatness defiant” is cast as subjective, political, and extreme. His fat history must not be used to question the contemporary fat panic. Indeed, Stearns finally makes it clear that history, more specifically a history committed to empiricism, can assist in the battle against the obesity epidemic. Historians, like other experts, can and should play a central role in the campaigns against obesity.69 Because he wants his fat history to play this role, it must accept and reinforce the pathologizing and moralizing aspects of the antifat discourse. As he writes, “Without jettisoning either the sound medical reasons for watching weight or even some of the larger moral qualities we seek to achieve through a commitment to dieting, we might be able to modify the culture to allow it to work more effectively.”70 In taking this view, he inevitably aligns himself with those in power, especially with those biomedical experts who give “sound medical reasons for watching weight” that presumably are beyond question and are thus an absolute cultural imperative. The historian might just help us finally achieve that elusive goal of losing weight. My own fat history is influenced by scholars of feminism and queer theory who engage in a very different constructionist historical project. All scholars interested in fat studies owe a significant debt to the feminists who first took the subject seriously. Significantly, such scholarship never saw itself as acting objectively, nor did these scholars want merely to accumulate empirical data. They wanted to intervene in the culture in order to undermine those narrow standards of body size applied to women. The authors of Fat is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss, Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America, and The Obsession: The Tyranny of Slenderness, to name just three books, not only suggested, perhaps for the first time, that our ideals of beauty, including that of size, were cultural constructions but also sought to use their work to dismantle these oppressive ideals.71 More recently, Schwartz, Jana Evans Braziel, and Kathleen LeBesco, and Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick have positioned themselves against the moralizing antifat discourse in ways that

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call into question the seemingly universal and transhistorical concept of obesity.72 Rejecting an empiricist and objectivist history, these scholars in one way or another underscore, or even perform, their own emotional, aesthetic, and political allegiance with those who defy this modern representational regime. Such scholarship has profoundly influenced my own history of fat. I, like them, seek to write a fat history that fosters different sorts of attachments to fat people themselves and, especially, to the defiant and outrageous fat people who refuse to be defined by a dominant representational regime that insists that they are pathological and abject. We develop alternative forms of history when we develop alliances with those who are seen as obstructing the imperative in our dominant culture to move “forward” through history. No longer should the thin body be privileged as the paragon of health and beauty; no longer is a forward thrust to history seen as a good in and of itself. In allying ourselves in various ways with those bodies that our culture would place in an undesirable “past,” we defy the logics of modernity and its imperative toward progress. A particularly modern pattern of history promotes certain identities even as it discourages others. Scholars from Benedict Anderson, Frank Kermode, and Erich Auerbach have all insisted that modernity is characterized by a particular linear sense of time (and thus of history).73 Time is conceptualized as linear, where each event or moment is located on an objective chain of causation. Such a sense of time, Anderson argues, influences the type of imaginative commitments prevalent in modernity. In particular, it makes it likely that we will be committed to the nation and its imperialist expansionist goals. We look to some elusive endpoint as offering us a solution to our present-day problems. Kermode made this point in his Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, where he insisted that modernity was riddled with an anxiety over being trapped in an existence he characterized as the “middest” time. Moderns tend to look with expectations for an end-time to solve all the problems we have now, and Kermode viewed with fear and suspicion the apocalyptic impulse that often took steps to make that end-time occur in the here and now. Kermode did not sufficiently appreciate that this particular form of anxiety is a modern one, caused by our reductive, singular sense of linear time. In the older figurative way of thinking, time was conceptualized in multiple ways, and any event such as the Exodus was understood in multiple ways in relation to times past, present, and future. Such premodern, figurative understandings of time invite the individual to discover and create connections between times that are often unexpected; for this reason, Auerbach places at the center of figurative thinking “creative poetic faith.”74 With such multiple ways of thinking temporally, there is no reason to


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focus so exclusively on an “end-time.” The end-time itself takes on very different meanings when it is viewed through a premodern, figurative way of thinking. What are the imperatives of this “objective,” linear view of history? What types of relationships does it make possible, and what types does it make impossible (or, at the very least, impossible to represent)? Queer theory has discussed the way that such a sense of time often has a regulatory effect in modernity. Sedgwick, among others, has considered the way that a particular form of linear history is used to secure the privilege of heterosexuality in our culture. The history of heterosexuality, she explains, “is difficult to construct because it masquerades so readily as History itself.”75 By “History,” Sedgwick means a particular modern form of linear history, where its teleology acts as an imperative. The end of heterosexuality becomes an imperative from which all other attachments are evaluated. Indeed, Annamarie Jagose and Valerie Traub consider the way that sequence makes lesbian identity inconsequential.76 Sexual development is often explained in terms of sequence, where maturation requires the casting off of identities that are seen from the standpoint of the endpoint as immature. From such a view, the lesbian is imagined as that which disrupts sequence and thus as an afterthought or, more frequently, as a flawed identity located in some past. The imperative to move toward the end, or telos, serves an oppressive regulatory function. Lee Edelman has made a very similar point in examining our late modern cultural imperative to embrace what he calls “reproductive futurism.”77 Such a regime requires all of us to look to the future embodied in the idealized and inhuman figure of the Child. We are urged to make all of our commitments, attachments, and identifications secondary to this elusive future. Quite literally, such a regime depends on a view of history as always moving toward tomorrow. If we do not subordinate our commitments, attachments, and pleasures to this future end, we are imagined as that which obstructs progress. We will come, even, to embody what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death.” In his examination of this imperative, Edelman underscores the way that we are engaged in what is in essence an apocalyptic battle between life and death. As Edelman defines it, “queerness” names the side of those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside of the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.78 Such an identity is not defined in any positive sense, but only as that which opposes this cultural imperative to bow down to the future, reproduction, and, I would add, the imperative to sustain health or life we have been considering. If queerness is that which is on the other side of reproductive

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futurism, then fat in today’s culture is fundamentally queer. A fat history will be a history that self-consciously thwarts the regulatory imperative apparent in modern, teleological history. Certainly, it will be a history that is not directed toward a singular (and idealized) end. In her work on queer temporality, Judith Halberstam suggests that many people “will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time.”79 They create an alternative, queer sense of time, I would add, by refusing to live their lives according to a modern, linear sensibility. That is, they refuse to make their presents secondary to an elusive future.80 We find a small example of such a history in Moon and Sedgwick’s brilliant performance piece, “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion.” In it, the co-authors enact identifications that would, by the cultural imperative Edelman describes, be understood as “death.” Understanding what is at stake in the regime that sees both defiantly queer and fat identities as equally emblematic of death, Moon and Sedgwick boldly perform their defiance of the values of life. They refuse to inhabit an exclusive and singular identity position. Thus, they announce in the character of “Michael Moon” that “the subjectivities from which we ourselves are enabled to speak are, it goes without saying, my own experiences of divinity as a fat woman, and Eve’s [Sedgwick’s] as a gay man.”81 Similarly, in a note attached to the end of the piece, they announce that the characters of “Michael Moon” and “Eve Sedgwick” bear no more than an accidental relationship to each author since the piece was written “fully collaboratively.”82 They refuse to fix themselves to a singular, essentialist meaning, even as both enact their complex, imaginative relationship to each other and to their respective identities as “gay” and “fat.” At the same time, they perform perhaps the most underappreciated queer attachment in the piece when they attach themselves to the figure of Divine, a character and persona at the center of many of John Waters’s cult classic films, who, among other queer identities, is, at the time they write, dead. In fostering this attachment, Moon and Sedgwick make a show of their refusal to bow down to a representational regime that always looks toward the future. Both of them are, instead, looking together to a supposedly dead past that is, nonetheless, revitalized and revivified through their present performance. If the imperative Edelman describes is one of “life”—where that in effect means that we place all our attachments, imaginative and otherwise, secondary to a future that never comes—then the queer inhabits the position of “death.” In this sense, the fat is often queer in our culture, although there are fat people who in one way or another position themselves in the camp of life; they do so, for example, when they make a show of their desire to lose weight, of their inability to do so, or when they


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insist that they are “fat but fit.” Certainly, as much as any other queer identities, the fat person is made to embody decay, decline, and finally death. When Moon and Sedgwick form complex commitments to the figure of Divine, they are flouting a culture that would have them judge their respective bodies finally by the absolute imperative of our biohealth regime. Thus, “knowing” that Divine died of obesity, such a regime would have it, we are asked to judge her/his life as a failure. At the very least, we are supposed to acknowledge that Divine is a bad role model for children because s/he, after all, died “too early.” Sander Gilman makes this same point: “Obesity is seen as antithetical to a long life, thus standing for moral as well as purely medical failures.”83 I would go further and say that the obese body has become in our culture the very icon of death. The imperative to embrace reproductive futurism is, in effect, evident in the imperative to embrace optimal health. In the second case, there is a sense that our national future, quantified in demographic statistics, depends on the individual taking every step to make herself as healthy as possible. It follows logically that the fat person must be an emblem of death, a reminder of a failure that must not be. Such logic views the body by its relationship to this end-time, its death; as such, the fat person is seen as accelerating what is conceptualized as a process of decay and aging that can be slowed if one makes the right choices. In a research letter to the Lancet, for example, obesity as a “disease” is seen to have a “pro-aging effect.”84 Elsewhere, the fat body is often simply taken at face value to accelerate the aging process. A recent study, for example, “proves” that the obese body ages faster than its thinner counterpart. On the basic of a singular cellular change, the study maintains finally that “obesity . . . accelerate[s] human ageing.”85 Such a study gives voice to the cultural imperative that everyone must embrace life, where obesity is equated first with aging and ultimately with death. Other statistical studies are made to draw a sharp distinction between the thin and the obese. One, for example, concludes that the ageing process sets in 8.8 years earlier in obese people compared with thin people, on average.86 This study importantly gives voice to a set of associations that are pervasive in our culture. The fat body is the aged body and thus associated with death itself. Ultimately, such a set of associations is laden with moral overtones, in which we must all want to embrace “life” understood as thinness. The fat panic is most intense in discussions of children. We are repeatedly called upon to “rescue” them from this disease.87 The fat child is imagined as a monstrous anomaly precisely because, I would insist, she is imagined as defying this imperative toward reproductive futurism. The child should embody our hopes for the future, but the fat child does quite the opposite. She embodies the imminent death of our civilization,

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the decline of our ever-improving mortality statistics. The fat child is monstrous because she is taken to be an obstruction to this forward march toward the perfect future. Two recent books on childhood obesity—Fed Up!: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity and Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity—begin by focusing on the way in which obesity among children represents a threat to our “collective health.”88 We are in the realm of historical firsts because as we are always being told, “American children are on course to grow into the most obese generation of adults in history.”89 Once again, the language of national security is often used. Parents, then, have been called the “first defenders” in the “battle” against childhood obesity because they have the power to contain and control the epidemic before it overcomes the nation.90 Obese children are monstrous because they are seen as accelerating the aging process and thus, as one section title would have it, they are “Old Before Their Time.”91 The obese child is monstrous because she has prematurely become an adult. The two books suggest that obesity accelerates the maturation process by making them experience puberty sooner. Focusing on girls especially, articles suggest that they experience menarche sooner than previous generations.92 Like the discussions of longevity, such studies suggest an eerie national trend; thus, we learn that “the timing of a first period for American girls is down by about 2.5 months from 25 to 30 years ago. We think that probably has to do with the epidemic of obesity in children—that’s what’s pushing it down.”93 Such relatively small changes are seen as widespread threats to reproductive futurism. Obesity is seen as quite literally accelerating the ageing process and thus robbing the Child of its innocence and future. Very specific bodies are made to bear the burden of acting as the emblem of all these fears. Our fear of the future is projected onto the body of specific fat children. Once again, we notice that books on childhood obesity often focus on a case study that is made to embody all the problems that we as a society are said to be facing. In Generation Extra Large, a chapter, significantly entitled “An Epidemic for a New Age,” describes “Cheryl,” who embodies the monstrous reality of a child who has become old before her time.94 At a young age, we are told, she already looks back on her early childhood years as fondly as older Americans look back at their young adulthood.95 Ultimately, Cheryl announces what we all suspect, “I feel like an old woman.”96 Her story reminds us that this generation has developed a “new” and monstrous age. They are quite literally old before their time—nine- and ten-year-olds with the bodies of fifty-nine-year-olds.97 Cheryl embodies not the “life” we desire but the “death” we are told to expect. As such, they become monstrous anomalies, a sign of our collective national failure.


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A fat history must interrogate such dominant cultural assumptions, but it can only do so if it is written in a way that works against a reductive modern sense of time. To see things according to such a time is to evaluate all attachments according to this end. We must resist the tendency to understand certain bodies as embracing “life” (or “health”) and other bodies as embracing “death” (or “disease”). In part, we can do so if we cultivate attachments that refuse the logic of this regime. To look at the past, then, is one way that we refuse to fetishize the future. We must also, however, look at the past in a way that makes it clear that it is not subordinated to the future. We do so, then, if we refuse to write a linear narrative. Although I will, in fact, argue that the early modern period introduces an antifat discourse that is in some ways recognizable today, I do not believe that that discourse is equivalent. As I have already argued, the late modern antifat discourse is based on a pathological understanding of fat that has its origins in the nineteenth century. While it is useful to use the early modern period to expose the moralizing impulse still alive and well in the contemporary fat panic, it is not useful to insist that there is a direct, one-to-one, or easy progress from the one to the other. I look forward to more historical studies of fat and obesity that will trace the very different constructions of fat in different historical periods as well as in different cultures. I have designed this history in a way that is designed to call attention to the choices we make when we write history. That is, I have focused on the types of choices and interventions that people made even at the inception of an antifat discourse that is to dominate with modernity. It is not the case that the antifat discourse emerged unimpeded, nor is it the case that the fat body was understood by all to be unlovely and excessive. My history focuses on the attachments that the authors made to the fat bodies of their characters. They proudly aligned themselves with the fat body defiant in order to oppose the emerging antifat discourse used by the courtly elite to secure their newly gained authority. John Skelton, but especially Shakespeare and Jonson, calls attention to the way that such privilege is secured by marking and stigmatizing the fat bodies of the underclass. Thus, they expose to view the dehumanizing values of this elite, even as they revel in the bodily outrageousness of their central characters. To examine these attachments, furthermore, is to call into question the kind of assumptions that seem natural by our own late modern constructions. It seems impossible that Skelton, Shakespeare, and Jonson would align themselves with the fat and common against the thin and elite, because we take for granted that the fat body is essentially low, ugly, and unlovely. My own history underscores the importance of examining literature rather than mere objective data because it allows us to appreciate the types of imaginative engagements that people make. An objective description

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of the revulsion toward fat risks giving the impression that history marches along easily and unproblematically toward this modern aesthetic. The blurred line between literary past and present allows us to question our own present assumptions as we engage the authors’ choices and affinities in the early modern works I shall consider. Skelton, Shakespeare, and Jonson respond to the moralistic antifat discourse of the early modern period by showing some of its consequences. In doing so, they align themselves, I argue, with the lower classes against the elite, even as they attach themselves to characters who have bodies that defy elite tastes. Their fat characters are designed to excite revulsion from the audience of civilized elite but in a way that challenges them as well to think and feel differently. Insofar as we are in the midst of a fat panic, where obesity seems innately excessive, such literature still poses a distinct challenge to us. Are we going to identify with a militaristic Hal or are we, instead, going to identify with the indolent and fat Falstaff ? The purpose of the latter identification is not to make Falstaff a hero per se, but to use this attachment to interrogate the assumptions that would privilege the thin body. When we respond to the literature of the past in this way, we refuse to have everything fall along a neat chain of linear causation. We form attachments with fat characters who are seen as obstructions to a particular form of progress. Equally importantly, such a history is not the apocalyptic one found elsewhere, because the early modern period has a complex relationship to the modern one. Yes, in many ways, we share some similarities. In fact, the late modern period in its understanding of fat is certainly influenced by the moralistic overtones of the early modern representational regime I examine in the following chapters. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to look only for one-to-one correspondences or to see the relationship between the one period to the other as one of linear causation. There is not some development, begun in the early modern period, that becomes progressively more moralistic until the late modern one. Importantly, the nature of the moralistic discourse has changed over time depending, I suspect, on the particular anxieties of any specific historical moment. Certainly, an understanding of our own moment would have to consider the pathologizing discourse of fat that emerges in the nineteenth century. It is in this century that the concept of obesity emerges. Such a pathologizing sense is largely absent in the early modern period; instead, the early modern period tends to think exclusively in moralistic terms. The early modern period is useful because it helps us interrogate our assumption that we are simply being objective when we think in terms of “health.” It helps us, in particular, to see the way our own representational regime remains highly moralistic in the way that it responds to the so-called


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obesity epidemic and thus the obese. Nonetheless, the differences between the two periods are important, and I have not tried to collapse the two, only to use the former to help interrogate the latter. When we choose to align ourselves with the defiantly fat body, we help to dismantle the existing representational regime. We do so because we make possible alternative attachments that, from the logic of the dominant representational regime, are seen to be impossible and certainly undesirable. To those who get their power from adopting a position as an unmarked and presumptively disembodied person, the fat body can be usefully offensive, outrageous, and revolting. Recent scholars focus on the revolting nature of the fat body, as is evidenced by the titles of two books—Revolting Bodies and Bodies Out of Bounds.98 I would insist that there is something revolutionary about identifying with the fat body, especially insofar as it is purposefully revolting. In doing this, we work against the pervasive assumption evident in contemporary antifat discourse that the fat body will inevitably excite visceral disgust and loathing. When we appreciate the fat body or form allegiances with it, we frustrate the dominant representational regime and show that it is far from dictating all of our commitments, attachments, and identifications. All these attachments to the fat body, whether ours or others, are fruitfully revolting. They make a lie out of the representational regime that insists that such bodies are essentially ugly, undesirable, and unlovely. As a result, they can help to disrupt the dominant representational regime, offering other sorts of attachments and other sorts of rehumanizing values. In a similar way, we can respond to various statements that seek to instill in us fear of the fat body, which is “out of bounds,” by saying, “Well, of course,” and enjoy it in its boundlessness. We need not give way to those who simply insist that we must obey the regime of biohealth with its imperative to health. Jean Baudrillard seeks to strike us with fear of a body that is “ anomalous.” In the United States, especially, he argues, we now see a form of “fascinating obesity” never before seen.99 As he explains, “It is when the body loses its rule and its stage or scene that it reaches this obscene form of obesity.”100 Significantly too, this body is finally associated with death, where the obese are seen as a sort of living dead: “We may think of [the obese] as having swallowed their own dead bodies while still alive—which makes for too much body and suddenly makes the body seem like too much.”101 Such statements are designed to regulate us, not to mention whom and how we love. To such statements, we can act with the defiance of the outrageous fat character. We can, for example, respond with a simple “How marvelous!” where we marvel at the way that the body in its outrageousness offers marvelous alternatives to a narrow conception of tastes and alliances.

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We can respond in a similar way to the lengthy descriptions of formless, boundless bodies found in the popular literature. An entire chapter of Fat Land focuses on the metaphorical and literal ways in which fat bodies are bodies out of bounds. They come to emblematize “a new boundaryfree culture,” the writer Greg Critser insists.102 His argument leads explicitly to the mean conclusion that we must stop accommodating the fat, something, I must note, that we as a society have yet to do. We must stop providing chairs without arms for fat people, relaxed fit jeans, Lycra pants, and other such boundary-free spaces or apparel. This writer articulates the fear of the fat body as that which refuses to control and contain itself.103 As he writes, certain that we share his aesthetic, moral, and political taste: “Family, school, culture religion —in the late twentieth century, the figurative belt had not only been loosened, it had come off.”104 In such formulations, there is also the seeds of change. That is, the fat body can become the body that dismantles the very terms of this narrow representational regime. All those currently wearing their belts loose—those fat female and male forms that so horrify such writers—are doing much to dismantle this representational regime, as are those who identify with them and form various types of attachments with them. In engaging with the literature of the early modern authors I discuss, we can similarly align ourselves with the boundless, the outrageous, and the revolting in a way that gives the lie to an antifat discourse, both early and late. III. Fat Then The stories of The Culture of Obesity make it clear that fat and, thus, obesity are cultural constructions. Indeed, they tell us that thin privilege itself is a construction that depends on a certain modern construction of the fat body. In what follows, I tell many stories that for convenience sake can be reduced to two interrelated ones. One story, which is a thread throughout this book, is about the emergence of a new modern representational regime in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This representational regime is the one recognizable today in the moralized thrust of the late modern pathologizing discourse. The thin body is granted privilege and is unmarked to the extent to which the fat body is marked, stigmatized, and understood to be the emblem of our collective excess. The second story (or stories) centers on those authors, such as Skelton, Shakespeare, and especially Jonson, who write in defiance of this same representational regime. To borrow from Falstaff ’s famous speech on honor, Shakespeare and Jonson recognize this new regime to be a regime of “trim reckoning.” These authors align themselves with defiant fat figures,


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even as they expose the cruelty that lies behind the regime that secures privilege to the degree that it makes certain bodies emblems of excess. As such, they offer us, late moderns, a choice of deciding with whom we are going to align ourselves. I tell these two interrelated stories to underscore the constructed nature of our own late modern constructions of the fat and the thin body. My second chapter is designed to make this especially clear as it examines what I, somewhat playfully, call a “time before fat.” In calling it this, I mean, of course, that it is a time before the modern representational regime and its stigmatized, moralized understanding of the fat body. Chapter 2, “A Time Before Fat?” makes the important point that it is not natural or inevitable that the sins of gluttony or sloth be associated with the fat body as it is in our own present-day fat panic. In the fourteenthcentury Piers Plowman, gluttony is not associated with any body type at all, but is, instead, understood as profane and profaning behavior. William Langland uses grotesque bodily imagery to describe the character Gluttony, but only in order to underscore the degree to which his sinful behavior renders the sinner a profanation. The grotesque bodily imagery, with its emphasis on excretion, is used to make it clear just how disgusting the sinner becomes. Only later, with modernity, will such visceral disgust be directed at the very specific bodies of the fat. In the chapters that follow, I trace the emergence of this new representational regime. I first examine the way that it comes to being with what I call, following Norbert Elias, the “civilized elite”—a small group of arrivistes that came to power in the early modern courts. What begins as an aesthetic at court grows to influence others outside of court in the emerging bourgeoisie. In other words, the representational regime first begins to affect a relatively small group of people but ultimately spreads to a protobourgeois population. My chapters describe the way that this representational regime of the civilized thin person emerged: first at the court (chapter 3), then among the puritan London citizenry (chapter 5), and finally to the broader civilized elite that includes those at court and the more fashionable citizens in London (chapters 4 and 6). As I tell this story, I focus on the way in which authors expose the new regime for its leanness and meanness, even as they align themselves with those fat bodies that are most marked and stigmatized by the modern representational regime. Even as I tell this story, I also tell the story of the way that some authors offer an aesthetic designed to offend this emerging ideal of civilité. Chapter 3 discusses the way that Skelton writes a poetics that defies the emerging aesthetics of court. The tavern women in The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng ostentatiously defy containment with their “foggy fat”

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bodies. Skelton aligns himself with such bulging female bodies against the harsh, defined lines favored by the court. In chapter 4, I focus on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays to show how he exposes the harshness and predation behind the lean aesthetic promoted at court. The body of Falstaff is to Hal (but not to his tavern companions) a mere superfluity and excess that threatens his own imperialistic aims. He, however, needs Falstaff to embody this excess so that he can make himself appear to be the trim, moralistic figure who selflessly pursues the interests of the state. Shakespeare exposes the predatory nature of this representational regime that needs certain bodies to embody its excess so that it can grant privilege to other (unmarked) bodies such as the thin body of Hal. Equally importantly, Falstaff talks back defiantly and chooses as well to use his fat body in ways that foster alliances with those considered uncivilized and immoral by the civilized elite. Overall, then, the Henry IV plays urge us to consider the implications of our own aesthetic and, more particularly, the implications our privilege has on the bodies of others. In the next chapter, I discuss Middleton’s important play A Game at Chess. Unlike Skelton and Shakespeare, Middleton prizes a puritan bodily aesthetic. According to his ideal, the individual body must be closed, the orifices sealed, if the Protestant nation is to remain protected from the Catholic threat. Middleton is revolted by those bodies that are seen as violating this puritan bodily aesthetic. The threat to the White House, or Protestant England, comes from a Catholic Spain (Black House) most often equated with bodies that refuse to be contained or controlled. The Black Knight has a leaky bottom, and the Fat Bishop, a hypocrite who only pretends to be white, is characterized by a fat that oozes beyond the boundaries of what he should be. A Game at Chess, in the central role it gives to the Fat Bishop, suggests the degree to which the fat body comes to represent all that is threatening for purity and integrity. Fatness is a terror within insofar as it threatens to grow beyond the boundaries of what the English Protestant should be. It is even conceptualized throughout as a threat to the masculinist, English state. Chapter 6 considers Jonson as an author who exposes to view the associations surrounding the category “fat.” More than the other writers, he plays with the multiple ways that the fat body can be understood. In doing this, he ridicules the courtly elite for their singular and essentialist understanding of things and bodies, including the fat body. No bodies, including the fat body, have any meaning, Jonson insists, in and of themselves. He plays with multiple constructions of the fat and the thin body in ways that work against any singular, reductive, and objectivist understanding of it. His late poetry insists on calling attention to his weighty body but in ways that require us to understand it in a more capacious,


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imaginative, and participatory way. In making this point, he attempts to make his readers take more responsibility for the constructions they create. How the fat body is read in either the late poetry or Bartholomew Fair suggests more about the reader's learning and education than it does about the body itself. The supposedly educated audience member is, ultimately, exposed as a mere animal to the degree that he insists on preying upon and using the bodies of others to secure his own privilege. The stories of The Culture of Obesity ask that we as readers make similar interpretative choices. We can always choose to identify with Hal and to see him as growing toward maturity, variously understood, as he casts off Falstaff. Relatedly, we can always choose to see Jonson as enormously ashamed of his fat body and revolted at the figure of fat Ursula in Bartholomew Fair. Alternately, we can choose to identify with and enjoy such fat figures precisely as they revolt against a narrow, lean aesthetic. We do this not because we want to make fatness a static ideal, but because we recognize that in aligning ourselves with such figures, we are make them usefully revolting. In doing so, we refuse to limit our attachments to those who would align with the values of life and health; instead, we would align ourselves with the queer against the straight, with death against a narrowly conceived life, and with a history that offers a pattern for a present that is only now partially conceived.


Chapter 2

A Time before Fat? Gluttony in Piers Plowman The moralism implicit in antifat discourse of the early and late modern periods owes much to the way that the sin of gluttony was understood in the premodern one. In a text such as the fourteenth-century Piers Plowman, the sin of gluttony excites visceral horror because it has the power to profane society as a whole. Those who give themselves over to gluttony make themselves an abomination to society at large. The premodern period differs from the early modern one insofar as that horror attaches to sinful behavior rather than to any essentially understood body type. I focus in this chapter on this difference because doing so helps us better understand our modern, essentialist constructions of fat. In trying to imagine different ways of being, we can begin to think, I hope, in terms other than those that currently dominate the modern representational regime. Unfortunately, we tend to impose our own late modern constructions of fat on other periods, including the premodern one. As Hillel Schwartz explains, the West tends to confuse “gluttony with fatness, fatness with heaviness, and heaviness with overweight. Those are modern confusions.”1 These modern confusions make it likely that we will misread iconographical figures such as Gluttony. Perhaps such a misreading is even more likely because the same grotesque imagery used to characterize gluttony is, in the early modern period, used to characterize the fat body. Gluttony is associated with his swelling “gut” or “womb” in a way that easily reminds us of the very different swelling paunches of early modern characters such as Falstaff and the Fat Bishop. Gluttony is associated with grotesque bodily excrement in a way that recalls the leaking body

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of Jonson’s pig-woman Ursula. This work will demonstrate that these are only superficial similarities because the latter characters depend on a bodily aesthetic that emerges with modernity. Grotesque imagery in William Langland’s Piers Plowman is not used to convince the reader to adopt a closed, contained, and thin body, but rather to encourage the reader to avoid sinful behavior that threatens to profane society as a whole. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “grotesque realism” helps us appreciate exactly why the premodern period is a “time before fat.” Although such grotesque imagery is recognizable in subsequent representations of the fat body, it is used in dramatically different ways in the premodern period. Rather than expressing moments in which the individual grows beyond the confines of the individualized body, the grotesque imagery is used to underscore the extent to which individual behavior threatens to violate the collectivity. To put it another way, there is not yet a concept of the body as an individualized, self-contained object, which is seen as being violated by fat flesh that oozes forth. Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism is particularly useful for us because it was designed from its inception to encourage the modern reader to think beyond various “realisms” that dominated in his day: both socialist realism that was the state-imposed style under Stalinist regime and nineteenth-century realism. In what follows, I focus only on the latter realism, dismissed by Bakhtin in the strongest terms. Rabelais scholars, Bakhtin insists, failed to understand the forms of embodiment found in Rabelais because they viewed him through the lens of a “new form of realism” that Bakhtin dismisses as “petty” or “degenerate” realism.2 It is beyond this project to discuss his relationship to the state-imposed realism of the Soviet regime. It is, nonetheless, helpful to remember that Bakhtin developed his concept of grotesque realism to offer an alternative to such a singular, state-imposed reality. Aware as he was of the devastating consequences that resulted when a state imposed such a singular, official realism, Bakhtin encourages the reader to adopt a very different polyvalent understanding of realism and embodiment.3 Grotesque realism serves the purpose of encouraging the reader to think differently; thus, we should not expect it to have a singular meaning or definition, nor should we criticize it for being a concept that is merely “mystifying.”4 Grotesque realism must mystify because it is meant to get us to think of embodied experiences that are beyond the outlines of what we assume must be. Bakhtin seems influenced by the critique of the nineteenth century and especially nineteenth-century realism offered by the influential Soviet writer György Lukács. In his History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács characterized the nineteenth century as the period in

A Time before Fat?

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which a commodity culture completely penetrated Western, capitalist societies. All things, including the human body, were reified in a way that had devastating consequences, Lukács argued, for human relations. As he writes, “Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”5 Bakhtin draws on this critique as he develops grotesque realism. He demonstrates, especially, that with the advance of modernity, the body itself becomes a thing in ways that affect human relations. With the “new form of realism,” the body becomes a self-enclosed, impermeable object with apparently firm boundaries. It now becomes an “individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade.”6 Aware that such constructs influence what can and cannot be imagined, Bakhtin develops grotesque realism in order to get us to think beyond this “impenetrable façade.” With this new bodily aesthetic, people begin to become horrified at imagining moments in which this supposedly impenetrable façade is violated. Fat, especially in its flabby state, becomes the source of such horror insofar as it is seen as that which violates this façade. Bakhtin uses his rambling descriptions of grotesque realism to get us to think beyond this façade. He focuses on bodily experiences in which bodies promiscuously merge with bodies in a way that gives the lie to the sharp demarcation increasingly valued by the emerging modern bodily aesthetic. He focuses on bodily sites where the sharp boundaries are blurred; thus, he focuses on the orifices that both absorb and expel surrounding matter and the paunch and buttocks that bulge forth to touch the world around them. All of this challenges those who would insist that the body is a self-contained, discrete thing. The premodern period can be a “time before fat” precisely because it is a time before bodily phenomena “acquire an exclusiveness; in other words, they convey a merely individual meaning of the life of one single, limited body.”7 Fat can only come to seem horrific once it is seen as growing beyond the boundaries of what the body should be. This suggests that the revulsion for fat is uniquely modern. In what follows, I briefly examine the allegorical figure of Gluttony in passus 5 of Piers Plowman. I want to consider the figure to demonstrate that fat does not signify in the period and certainly not in the way that we late moderns might understand it. At the same time, my reading is not only a negative one because I underscore how the grotesque imagery associated with Gluttony is used to regulate behavior. Gluttony is a figure of excess, especially sinful excess, and this excess is described in

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grotesque terms. Throughout, the story focuses in detail on what goes in and what comes out. Gluttony drinks and eats excessively, even as he farts, pisses, and pukes excessively. In this, the whole allegorical story conforms to the pattern of gluttony satire generally. As Jill Mann explains, gluttony satire typically juxtaposes lengthy descriptions of “mountains of food” with detailed descriptions of “disease, excrement and vomit.”8 The grotesque imagery serves a regulatory function, especially to encourage the individual to contain and control his appetite before it gets out of hand. Such imagery serves the moralistic purpose of convincing the reader to avoid sinful behavior. If he gives himself over to gluttony, he becomes a profane and profaning object that should be vomited forth with the same violence with which he expels his excess food. Piers Plowman recommends an especially exacting ideal of temperance in which “all except mere sustenance and clothing would be superfluous.”9 As Holy Church teaches the Dreamer in passus 1, “Mesure is medicine though thow muchel yerne. / [Al is nought] good to the goost that the gut asketh.”10 “Gut” here refers not so much to a part of the individualized body, such as the gastrointestinal system, but rather to the site of sin, particularly carnal sin. As the Middle English Dictionary specifies, “gut” can refer to “the stomach or belly as the seat of gluttony.”11 Once he reforms himself at the conclusion of the story, Gluttony adopts practices of ecclesiastically sanctioned fasting designed to restrain the gut. As he explains, “And avowed to faste for hunger or thurste: / ‘Shal nevere fyssh on [the] Fryday defyen in my wombe / Til Abstinence myn Aunte have gyve me leeve, / And yet have I hated hire al my lif tyme.’”12 Such abstinence is directed at containing and controlling his appetites so that Gluttony can contribute to the common good, as he is expected to do.13 Not only should he labor hard for his food, but he should eat only an abstemious daily diet. Langland promotes his social ideal of temperance by using grotesque imagery designed to excite visceral horror in the reader. Piers Plowman, in recommending such an exacting view of temperance, is influenced by contemporary debates over the mendicant orders.14 The mendicant orders had no specific jurisdiction in church and thus no living, except for the alms they received. Some began to criticize them as parasites on the church and state, who took what was not legitimately theirs. More specifically, they questioned whether the mendicants deserved the alms they received. At the heart of these debates, then, lay the question as to who deserved alms and who did not. Such debates led some to distinguish between which poor deserved alms and which poor did not. Only the involuntary poor— those who are poor because they were invalids—were worthy of alms because they were the only group who were believed to be referred to in Jesus’s injunction in Luke

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14:13–14, “But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind / And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.” In contrast, anyone who could work to sustain themselves, including the mendicant orders, were voluntary poor and thus unworthy of alms. In begging for sustenance, the undeserving poor were seen as depriving others of their rightfully deserved alms. Such debates lead to further pressure placed on behavior since, in taking more than his fair share, the glutton is seen as taking food from the mouth of others. As a more exacting ideal of the common good is promoted, the individual has more pressure to regulate and restrain his appetites.15 Grotesque imagery serves to underscore the dangers of an unrestrained appetite and unrestrained consumption. Langland makes this point in part by juxtaposing the actions of the gluttonous tavern world with the actions of the sacred church community. In doing so, he makes it clear that the gluttonous behavior in the former threatens to pollute society as a whole. Gluttony is described as “[a]nd seten so til evensong and songen umwhile, / Til Gloton hadde yglubbed a galon and a gille.”16 Shortly thereafter, we learn that “[h]ise guttes bigonne to gothelen as two gredy sowes; / He pissed a potel in a paternoster while.”17 Both passages juxtapose the sacred and the profane; Gluttony’s bodily behavior is juxtaposed with the devotional rites performed in church. With this ironic juxtaposition of pigs, piss, and Paternoster, it becomes clear that bodily images have little or nothing to do with the types of shame suffered by those who experience their bodies as self-contained and individual entities. That is, Gluttony does not experience his pissing as a profanation of a bounded, individualized self. His pissing is, instead, considered from the vantage point of the greater sacred community. In following his guts, Gluttony can no longer participate in the larger sacred community. He turned his back on that society when he decided to go to the tavern rather to church, as he had originally planned. The description makes it clear that he should be at church rather than in the tavern, but it also suggests that his eating and drinking is his “prayer.” His prayer, then, becomes only piss. If unchecked, he profanes even the most seemingly sacred actions. Grotesque imagery serves to suggest that the individual needs to restrain his behavior. Gluttony is characterized by an excess, which is finally seen as depriving others of what they deserve. When he eats too much, drinks too much, and wallows in sin, he robs others of their rightful portions. The ironic reference to the Paternoster here reminds the dutiful Christian reader of the obligation to “Give us this day our daily bread,” to quote the modern English version. In this case, Gluttony

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ingests more than the simple diet he should, as he eats and drinks to excess. In doing this, he deprives others of their rightful portion. Gluttony literally pisses away what others deserve and need. Langland focuses throughout on the role that the guts have in making Gluttony sin. The guts are primarily the seat of the appetite. When the individual, like Gluttony, follows his guts, he will inevitably adopt sinful behavior characterized by excessive and unnecessary consumption. Gluttony can no longer simply eat what he needs to sustain himself; instead he eats what he wants. In following his limitless appetite, he gives himself over to flamboyant overconsumption. The “two greedy sows,” J. A. W. Bennett explains, recall an image in “a choir-stall in Little Malvern Priory church [that] shows two pigs guzzling in a single pot: the allusion may be to the noise made by such grunting contestants.”18 If this allusion recalls this noise, it also recalls the frenzied struggle between the two beasts to consume the portion of food before the other can. Such an image suggests the extent to which the appetite, located in the amorphous “gut,” will, if unchecked, make the Christian break faith with his neighbors. Gluttony’s guts demand more than he can use; the grotesque emphasis on bodily excretions serves to underscore the author’s moral lesson. Now, I want to turn to a passage that focuses on grotesque imagery to suggest the nature of his sin. After glutting himself in the tavern, Gluttony expels the superfluity by farting, puking, and pissing. Grotesque imagery here demonstrates that Gluttony pollutes all he touches. The entire passage focuses on superfluity—that is, the way that his excessive and sinful behavior makes him waste what he should use according to nature. In expelling the superfluity he consumes, Gluttony does more than simply waste: he also makes himself into a profane and profaning object. Ultimately, even the most desperate beast finds him abhorrent: And seten so til evensong and songen umwhile Til Gloton hadde yglubbed a galon and a gille. Hise guttes bigonne to gothelen as two gredy sowes; He pissed a potel in a paternoster while, And blew [the] rounde ruwet at [the] ruggebones ende That alle that herde that horn helde hir nos[e] after And wisshed it hadde ben wexed with a wispe of firses.19

From here, Gluttony descends into a bestial condition, described, as Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsal aptly indicate, through an “ironic collision of detail.”20 The collision, however, serves to make the point that Gluttony, in following the course of sin, makes himself less than a beast.

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He becomes so because he fails to fulfill the obligation he has to others, the grotesque imagery suggests. The description throughout focuses on the way that he pollutes everything he touches. Because Gluttony is unable to control even his most basic bodily functions, he becomes repellent even to these less-thandiscriminating companions. The foulness of his fart, for example, affects everyone in his midst. We learn, then, that his companions wish that he would be thoroughly cleansed inside out with a “wispe of firses.” Shortly thereafter, Gluttony pukes in the lap of his companion, as this companion tries to help him to his feet. Langland pauses once again to describe the nature of this puke, or more particularly, the way that this puke makes Gluttony offensive to both human and beast: “Is noon so hungry hound in hertford shire / Dorste lape of that levynges, so unlovely [it] smaughte.” Such a description of his bodily excrement makes it clear that he has become offensive even to his beastly tavern companions. The bodily excrement offers us a visible symbol of the way in which he has made himself obnoxious to society by refusing to contain or curtail his consumption. We should remember here the way that the period gave rise to a more exacting ideal of temperance as it reimagined the obligations of the individual to his neighbor. Gluttony becomes foul to others because he wastes what should be given to others. Thus, his behavior is considered foul to the extent to which it flouts the exacting poverty ethic recommended by Piers Plowman. Gluttony transforms what could be useful nourishment, if used correctly, to what is now purely useless superfluity. In this case, what was once food and drink now becomes when spewed forth a substance so foul that even a starving dog would refuse to eat it. Just as he transforms nourishment into something useless and noxious, so too is Gluttony made first useless and finally noxious to those around him. In following the path of sin, he even becomes offensive to his tavern companions, human and beast. Notably, the sin of Gluttony is characterized by the way food that could be given in alms to those who need it is, instead, “yspilt” by his ungoverned and now ungovernable body. As he confesses, “And overseyen me at my soper and som tyme at Nones, / That I, Gloton, girte it up er I hadde gon a myle, / And yspilt that myghte be spared and spended on som hungry; / Over delicatly on [feeste] dayes dronken and eten bothe.”21 With the new, exacting poverty ethic, the individual becomes increasingly more responsible to regulate what comes in and what goes out. His consumed food is conceptualized as that which “myghte be spared and spended on som hungry” or as potential alms. The sin of gluttony is conceptualized as that behavior which almost literally deprives others of their rightful alms. Gluttony breaks with the

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larger sacred community precisely because he refuses to “spare” his excess food for those who need it. In the premodern era, behavior is judged by an exacting social ideal in which all people are directed to render their surplus in alms to the poor. There is little or no concern with Gluttony’s body except insofar as it suggests that he could be contributing toward the common good. Piers Plowman does not tell us that Gluttony is fat. Such concepts of body size seem beside the point. It does, however, tell us that Gluttony is ruled by his “gut” in a way that suggests that he follows his appetites. Size does register in only one respect: that is, it tells us that Gluttony can and thus should be a contributing member of society. The specification that he is a “great churl” tells us that he can be laboring toward the common good. After he drinks so much that he can no longer stand, we look on as Clement the Cobbler tries to lift him. We learn that Gluttony is a “gret churl.” “Great” here could mean fat, but I think it should be read rather as meaning “strong” or even able bodied. By making the point that Gluttony is “great,” Langland is making it clear that under normal circumstance he can take care of himself. Ac Gloton was a gret cherl and grym in the liftyng; And koughed up a cawdel in Clementes lappe. Is noon so hungry hound in hertford shire Dorste lape of that levynges, so unlovely [it] smaughte.22

In the overall context, the specification suggests that the point is not that Gluttony is fat, but that he is able bodied. Because Gluttony is a strong man, he should be working dutifully to provide for his daily bread and to render the excess in alms to the deserving beggars. Instead of doing so, he is consuming so much food that he expels it in excrement. The type of distinctions this passage makes suggests that Langland is engaging with the type of concerns that rose out of contemporary debates over the mendicant orders. In particular, Langland is beginning to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. The able-bodied poor were undeserving of alms, the invalids, deserving. The able-bodied churl has an obligation not only to provide for himself but also to give alms to his poor and deserving neighbors. The able-bodied beggar, who was frequently characterized as “strong,” was considered increasingly to be a disruption and even threat to society.23 Wendy Scase argues that Piers Plowman clearly participates in this new poverty ethic when it elsewhere makes the point that the strong beggar is the one unworthy of alms.24 In the scene displaying the Field of the Folk, the able bodied become a danger to society when they refuse to help in the communal labor. In this

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context, it becomes extremely important for us to know that Gluttony is a great churl because he can provide for himself and his neighbors and thus should be doing so. Worse yet, in giving himself over to his gut, Gluttony makes himself an invalid, who cannot even walk without the assistance of others. Society threatens to disintegrate when people give themselves over to gluttony. Piers Plowman offers us very different representations of the body and bodily phenomena than we might expect from our late modern perspective. The fat body does not signify. Neither the fat body nor fatness is associated with gluttony. Gluttony is, instead, understood as that behavior which is disruptive to society. It can be considered, more specifically, as that behavior which profanes the greater social order. In the representation of Gluttony, grotesque bodily imagery underscores the extent to which gluttony as a sin transforms the glutton by his excess into a profane and profaning object. Ultimately, the glutton threatens the wellbeing not only of the immediate commons but also of the greater sacred community. Indeed, it threatens to unmake society as a whole. Opprobrium does not adhere to specific body types. Indeed, because all individuals are evaluated by how effectively they conform to their broader obligation to the commons, variously understood, anyone can be, and is, a glutton. The friar who eats too lavishly and the laborer who eats too much are gluttons insofar as their behavior is seen as taking away food that should rightfully and properly be given to the deserving poor. In our own late modern period, such a definition would, interestingly, make gluttonous many people who are currently seen as innately and essentially virtuous, precisely because the fat are seen as innately and essentially vicious. Those thin bodies who consume to excess both in quantity and in quality could be seen as gluttonous because their actions deprive others of their fair share. Such people could be seen as characterized by the “gut” as the seat of the appetites, because they put their own wants over the needs of others. I do not want to return to the moralism of Piers Plowman, but if we imagine how the premodern period differs from our own, we get some sense of the dangers of the bodily style still evident in late modern constructions of the “obese” body. While I am suggesting that the premodern period is strikingly different from our own, especially insofar as it does not fetishize the individualized, bodily boundaries, I do believe that the premodern period informs later understandings of the fat body. The horror that attaches to sinful behavior will later attach to sinful bodies. All bodies that are grotesque—that flamboyantly refuse to contain and control themselves to the supposedly fixed boundaries of the individualized body—will be seen as revolting. Our fear of them owes much to this earlier sense that

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gluttony can pollute society as a whole. As such, there becomes a strong sense in which such bodies must be reformed or, worse, expelled from society. Modernity creates a convenient scapegoat in the fat, and in so doing, it allows others to ignore their own social obligations. With Bakhtin, we can turn to the premodern period in order to think beyond the contours of the individualized bodily boundary, not because we want to return to some idealized past, but because we want to explore alternative ways of being. Without the fetishization of such boundaries, what types of relationships can be created?

Chapter 3

Emergence of Fatness Defiant: Skelton at Court John Skelton is an important figure for a constructionist history of fat because he straddles the premodern and early modern periods. In his writing, we can see fat registering for the first time in a way that is recognizably modern. In The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng both Eleanor and a tavern companion are described as fat. Eleanor is described in these words, “She is a tonnysh gyb” (enormously fat), and her tavern companion thus: “All foggy fat she was.”1 The embodiment of the tavern world defies, and even revolts against, the emerging bodily aesthetic that is just beginning to take hold among the courtly elites of Tudor England. Like William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson after him, Skelton expresses his aesthetic, political, and emotional commitment to a messy, corporeal world that revolts against the narrowly conceived values of the court. Skelton suggests a very different way to respond to fat, revolting bodies. I. Constructing Skelton Skelton challenges us as readers to decide whether we are going to align him (and ourselves) with those in power or whether we are going to see him as someone who revolts against that power. Most Skelton scholarship has assumed that he is a consummate insider, who aligned himself with male courtiers of Henry VIII.2 Such assumptions have made it virtually impossible to appreciate the outrageousness of much of his poetry, including the bodily outrageousness at the heart of Elynour Rummynge. Obviously, such a man, and I use the term advisedly, could not have enjoyed the outrageous bodies of these women, and certainly, he could not

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have identified with them. As if to contain the poem, criticism has most frequently considered Elynour Rummynge to be a poetic anatomy of vices in the tradition of Piers Plowman. In contrast, I see Skelton as using the poem to present an outrageous bodily aesthetic that is designed to revolt against the emerging civilized aesthetic of the courtly elite. Much scholarship has assumed that Skelton aligns himself with men in power. A long line of modern scholars makes this point when they assume that Skelton is a modern “man.” As such, Skelton is made to have all the types of identifications and disidentifications that such a modern, essentialized identity requires. A. W. Barnes has recently made precisely this point about the representation of Skelton offered by the influential twentieth-century Skelton biographer H. L. R. Edwards. Edwards’s biography makes Skelton into a “sexual subject”—that is, a heterosexual subject.3 To this, I would add that Skelton is constructed as a “man,” and a gentleman at that, who aligns himself with the men of Henry’s court against the lowly women of the tavern world. Such a set of assumptions makes it impossible for us to see the extent to which Skelton criticizes the emerging courtly aesthetic. Criticism makes him into a “man” in no small measure by positioning him as the cool, rational observer. Skelton is remade into the very image of the modern male critic, who never (well, hardly ever) gets carried away with what he writes. Skelton is a man because he is presumptively disembodied, and he becomes so when he is seen as anatomizing and judging the bodies of the tavern women. Scholarship has repeatedly described Skelton in scientistic and mechanistic language as having an “accurate” and seemingly disembodied “eye.” Most famously, W. H. Auden describes the experience of reading Elynour Rummynge as that of “looking at the human skin through a magnifying glass.”4 Stanley Fish similarly concludes his reading by explaining that “in Eleanor Rumming the vigor is clinical.”5 Edwards makes much the same point when he explains, “The headlong rhyme does not prevent this anonymous ‘lady’ from being caught with an accuracy more deadly than the camera’s.”6 Such language suggests that Skelton is detached from the subject, and more specifically, it suggests that he is the disembodied observer. Indeed, he is the “eye,” the “camera,” the “magnifying glass” that inspects the bodies of the women. At its core, such criticism asserts the naturalness of the category of “man.” Skelton, as a man, is aligned with the modern male critic, the male Henrician courtier, and the modern male scientist, and all of them, furthermore, are defined as “men” to the extent to which they arrogate to themselves the right to mark and judge the body of “woman.” Such a modern Skelton tells us much more about the commitments and attachments of the late modern scholars themselves. Such people see

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identities according to a modern representational regime in which certain bodies are privileged at the expense of others. More particularly, certain bodies are privileged to the extent to which they are granted the right to be disembodied. When they diagnose the bodies of others, including the bodies of the fat and women, as bearing the “stigmata” of embodiment, they make themselves into the presumptively disembodied observer. Such a dynamic is obvious when we consider Maurice Pollet’s description of the poem as describing tavern women who bear the “stigmata of the vice that no doctor could fail to diagnose.”7 Edwards makes a similar point when he sees Skelton as offering a more schematic diagnosis of “that most mysterious of his creation, Woman” in two of his female characters—the old, ugly, fat woman, Eleanor, and the young, pretty, and thin figure of Jane in Phyllyp Sparrowe.8 The critic and the poet assert their position as “man” to the extent to which they offer us a portrait of the embodied “woman.” Such criticism itself seems aware that Skelton might not fit their neat model; thus, frequently, criticism worries that Skelton is not detached enough from his subject. Many critics tell us how not to read the poem. Certainly, Skelton is not to be seen as participating in and enjoying the tavern hubbub. As one critic warns, Yet the poem as a whole is by no means the unthinking, uproarious jig that its heartier advocates would have us believe. Skelton’s eye is too mercilessly exact for that. . . . The picture is painted for us with Flemish precision: it is our task to extract the moral.9

Read properly, the objectifying eye must be placed above the rhythmic body, as we must learn to “extract” the moral from the poem. We can sense throughout that the critic is worried that Skelton is far too interested in bodies and things of a bodily nature. He warns us against becoming too immersed in the tavern world, as Skelton regrettably seems to do. William Nelson is similarly nervous about the poem; thus, he warns, “Skelton’s crime is not that he portrayed Elinor, but that he did it too vividly.”10 Such criticism worries that Skelton is not the detached observer that they want him to be. Indeed, they worry that he may enjoy and possibly even admire the outrageous bodies of the tavern women. Modern criticism, however, instructs readers that they must see Skelton as an imperfect poet precisely because he was not able to remain sufficiently detached from the grotesque bodies of the tavern women. Such readings ignore the discontent and defiance in Skelton’s work. Skelton should be seen, instead, as aligning himself with the women in a way that is designed to offend the emerging courtly aesthetic. The messy

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world of the tavern women, in its commitment to a messy materiality, makes a mockery of the narrow, thin aesthetic of the court. To arrive at this conclusion, we must change our view of Skelton and his biography. Scholarship repeatedly assumes that Skelton was a consummate insider of the court of Henry VIII. A number of biographical “facts” are cited to lead us to this view, but as the revisionist biographer Greg Walker makes clear, these “facts” are far from obvious. Scholarship has simply assumed that Skelton was a court insider because he was the childhood tutor of Henry VIII and because, for a brief period from 1512 to 1513, he seems to have held the title of Orator Regius, or King’s Orator. Such facts only confirmed what some wanted to see, and thus they have ignored other equally important facts. After 1513, Skelton seems to have fallen out of favor; thus, he no longer held the position of Orator Regius, if position it ever had been. After that year, there is no evidence that anyone except Skelton himself used that title when referring to him.11 Skelton received no further preferment at court even as Henry VIII was granting preferment to others. Indeed, Skelton was passed over for positions of learning; foreign-born humanists were recognized for their learning even as Skelton, the childhood tutor of Henry VIII, was not. Clearly, his learning was not valued, Skelton would know, by the time he wrote Elynour Rummynge, typically dated to 1517 because of its references to the famous May Day riots of that year. In the years following 1514, the date of the war with France, Skelton did remain in court, but his position there was rather precarious. In general, it seems that he could stay at court as long as he amused the other more powerful courtiers. As such, Skelton understood, he was a mere ornament, granted none of the dignity or rewards granted to others. That Skelton was given such a seemingly insignificant role was apparent when the newly victorious Henry VIII returned from France. Even as others were generously rewarded, Skelton was commanded to enter into a mock poetic duel, or flytyng, for the amusement of the court.12 Such a commission could only add insult to injury since his opponent was the unlearned Sir Christopher Garnesche, who even required a ghost writer to write his part of the contest. The poems show a Skelton who is keenly aware of the slight; thus, he repeatedly attacks Garnesche for his ignorance even as he makes it clear that his opponent is no match for his own wit and learning. Skelton could not but be aware that Garnesche had something he did not: he, unlike Skelton, had been richly rewarded by the king with gifts of property, an appointment at court, and knighthood. It would be obvious to Skelton that his own learning was of little value to a court that showed equal interest in the ignorant and rude outpourings of an almost illiterate man.


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In this same period, Skelton still hopes for preferment at court, and the poems he writes to Garnesche seem designed to get Henry to appreciate his learning. Skelton makes a show of his own learning even as he expresses considerable disgust and contempt for Garnesche. Thus, Skelton openly complains to Henry that he should not be forced into this humiliating position of responding to a mere ignorant upstart. He, after all, is the person to whom: A kynge to me myn habyte gave At Oxforth, the universyte, Avaunsid I was to that degre; By hole consent of theyr senate, I was made poet lawreate.13

Throughout these poems, Skelton repeatedly calls attention to his considerable learning and to the previous rewards Henry had given him as if to urge the king to give him a position of some gravity at court. Skelton is palpably aware that he is not receiving awards commensurate with his poetic skills and learning. In the last lines of the last poem in the group, Skelton says just this: “My study myght be better spynt; / But for to serve the kynges entent, / Hys noble pleasure and commandemennt, / Scrybbyl thow, scrybyll thow, rayle or wryght, / Wryght what thow wylte, I xall the aquyte.”14 Skelton expresses considerable bitterness at having to “scribble” to serve the “king’s entente.” Reading this line with the appended “[b]y the kingys most noble commandement,” we feel palpably Skelton’s bitterness at having been made into a mere court jester.15 Also around this time, in either 1519 or 1521, Skelton writes the masterful Speke Parott. In it, he accepts that he has become a mere “parrot” that is given no respect by the courtiers.16 Skelton understands that his only function at court is to amuse his foolish “superiors.” Indeed, the courtiers are unable to appreciate the gravity of his poetry because they only see it as a pleasurable pastime.17 All his skills in poetry, his knowledge of languages and classical literature, are wasted on a vain and superficial court. In the first lines, Skelton boldly announces, My name ys Parott, a byrde of Paradyse, By Nature devysed of a wonderowus kynde, Deyntely dyetyd with dyvers delycate spyce, Tyll Eufrates, that flodde, dryvythe me into Ynde, Where men of that contre by fortune me fynde, And send me to great ladyes of estate; Then Parot moste have an almon or a date.

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A cage curyowsly carven, with sylver pynne, Properly payntyd to be my coverture; A myrrour of glasse, that I may tote therein; These maydens full meryly with many a dyvers flowur Fresshely they dresse and make swete my bowur, With “Speke, Parott, I pray yow,” full curteslye they sey, “Parrott ys a goodlye byrde and a prayte popagay.”18

Again, Skelton is distinctly aware at the time he writes Speke Parott that the court does not value his poetry; yet he does not seem to care anymore either. The poem describes this in gendered terms as it insists that the “men of the country” cannot appreciate their good fortune in having discovered such a rare bird as he. Significantly, Speke Parott develops a strategy made further evident in Elynour Rummynge. In both, he begins to understand his situation in gendered terms. As he comes to recognize his reduced status as something less than “man” or “gentleman,” Skelton grows defiant of the masculinist aesthetic dominant at court. Admittedly, there is a difference between aligning himself with the ladies at court and the lowly tavern women; nonetheless, in both cases, he rebels against a courtly aesthetic that privileges coverture. He and the ladies in Speke Parott are described as placed under “coverture” to the extent to which they must serve the whims of the men. He, as a parrot, is literally placed in the coverture of his daintily decorated cage. He is rewarded with a few treats, such an analogy suggests, yet he is always required to serve the pleasures of the court. The word associates his own predicament with that of the ladies, who are, as this legal term suggests, under the “cover,” or authority, of their husbands. The image underscores the extent to which Skelton associates his own position at court with a developing aesthetic that values literal containment. Skelton can express his defiance toward the court, which has made him a parrot, by offering a very different aesthetic that champions bodily bulge over bodily containment. II. Bounded Bodies Now, we need to turn to the courtly aesthetic that Skelton defies in Elynour Rummynge. He expresses his contempt for a new bodily style of civilité, or bodily self-restraint, that Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, Gail Kern Paster, and others describe as emerging in this period. Increasingly, containment and control of the body were valued, especially of the female body. We can see such an aesthetic emerging in this period if we consider the way that fashions for women changed during the time in


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which Skelton wrote. In what follows, we see how courtly fashions for women valued the containment and control of an individualized body as they framed that body in artificial, even architectural, lines. Skelton, sensitive to the emergence of this courtly aesthetic, writes in Elynour Rummynge a poem that defies this aesthetic. Against the taste for contained, controlled, architecturally structured female bodies, Skelton offers outrageous, bulging, and revolting bodies of the tavern women. These bodies may not yet be “fat” per se, but they are protofat to the extent to which they are seen as revolting against a civilized aesthetic. Scholars see this new aesthetic of civilité as emerging within the courts of the Renaissance period. For convenience sake, most scholars date the changing point for this new courtly aesthetic to 1530 when Erasmus’s famous conduct manual for boys, De civilitate morum puerilium, was published in Latin that year (the English publication came out in 1531). The new aesthetic that emerged legitimized a new class of courtiers that came to power in the Renaissance courts. These new courtiers were to some extent self-made men, who used their learning to rise to power. Such a class of people, prevalent in the Tudor courts, sought to establish their superiority over the older, established feudal families. Previously, the feudal lords showed their status by making a show of their excess; thus, they would show forth their “great” bodies and “great” appetites. In contrast, the new courtier made a show of his civilité. There is an increased emphasis placed on what comes to be understood as the individualized, bounded body. Erasmus’s and other such manuals focus on the control and containment of what is presumably an individualized body. The boys are instructed to guard their orifices and to regulate what goes in and what comes out. Bodily execratory functions were performed in private. Such new bodily discipline creates and recreates what will appear to be in subsequent years the natural and firm boundaries of an individualized self. Only when such an aesthetic takes hold will the body come to seem fat, where fat registers as that which violates the boundaries of this new individualized body. Foggy, or “flabby,” fat is especially conspicuous, precisely because it resists all efforts at containment. Scholars have focused for the most part on the conduct manuals when they speak of the new civilized aesthetic, but I want to focus, instead, on the changes in women’s courtly fashions because they suggest the development of a similar aesthetic. Equally importantly, they suggest that this aesthetic could take on a gendered form in which the bodies of women, especially, were placed under coverture. Courtly fashions for ladies increasingly made a show of how the individualized body was controlled and contained. Fashions for women in the period do not seek to diminish the female body; instead, they mold the body into what becomes

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increasingly a more artificial, demarcated whole. We usually think of undergarments especially as serving the role of reducing the body; but in this period, they seem to have the opposite function of making the body a more imposing, albeit sharply delineated, object. The bodily contours of ladies’ clothing will, if anything, become bigger as the century progresses, but bigger in a way that asserts the sharp boundaries of the individualized body. In what follows, it is not a question of contrasting a small courtly aesthetic with a big, lowly one, or the thin courtly body with the fat common one. It is rather a question of contrasting an aesthetic that values the controlled, contained, and individualized body over the uncontrolled, uncontained, grotesque social body. The bodies of Skelton’s tavern women are fat, where one foggy body morphs into the next; the bodies at court, in contrast, are big, where one sculptured body asserts its autonomy over the next. If we examine ladies’ fashions, we can see that they increasingly value bodily self-restraint. The reign of Henry VIII is considered a period of transition in ladies’ fashions. The looser gowns of the middle ages become more structured in this period. Indeed, by the end of Henry’s reign, ladies’ gowns already show the developments in structure and form that will reach their fullest expression in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. New underclothing, including the leather corset and Spanish farthingale, is introduced from Spain. They give more structure to the body; the Spanish farthingale, a boned crinoline, does so by making the skirts flare out in a more imposing triangular shape.19 This undergarment was not generally incorporated into the English wardrobe until the 1530s when its presence is obvious in portraits that focus on the more imposing outline of the lady’s skirt. Even before its more widespread introduction, fashions in the Henrician period begin to outline the body in ways that discipline it. Garments that were originally in one piece become two distinct pieces—the bodice and the skirt. Together, they increasingly emphasize a more artificial silhouette, one that, on the one hand, makes the body larger and grander and, on the other, emphasizes bodily selfcontrol. The change in fashions would also likely encourage a change in the way the lady comports herself. Slouching becomes unlikely, if not yet exactly impossible, in these more structured garments. The more rigid structure of the gown serves to demarcate the body. The skirt becomes larger and larger, even as the bodice becomes ever more tightly constructed. In fact, the tight bodice was probably required in order to hold up what must have been the massive amount of cloth used in the pleated skirt. The overall effect is to make the upper body seem like a hard, impenetrable surface, a surface that in turn is decorated by the most elaborate cloth, jewelry, and ornamentation. Costume historians


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typically believe that this period gave rise to the corset, which was needed to firm the bodice.20 The corset would contribute to a much different aesthetic than would their later Victorian counterparts. The Victorian corset can be said to create softer lines as it both decreases the waist even as it causes the bust and hips to bulge out. Its Henrician counterpart does not reduce the body, but it does control the body. Portraits from the period show little or no bulge from the breasts, as they focus, instead, on a number of geometrical lines that cut across what might otherwise be a fleshly bulge. The overall effect of the clothing is to make the body adopt a hard, protective line, evident as well in the rise of the highly ornamented square neckline that cuts across the front and rises at what seems like a perpendicular angle over the now tightly fitted armhole.21 As early as the 1510s and into the 1520s, such necklines serve the function of a framing device.22 To take another example, the headdress in the period increasingly makes the head take on a more geometrically framed shape. In the previous century, the sugar-loaf headdress dominated, a style that often included the most outrageous protuberances adorned with veils. The Tudor gabled headdress, introduced in the last years of Henry VII, represents a new aesthetic that more sharply frames and thus demarcates the individualized body.23 Under Henry VIII, this gabled headdress becomes increasingly more structured as the head and hair are more bounded. Earlier versions allow more freedom of movement; thus, a portrait of Henry VIII’s mother, Elizabeth of York, shows her with the earlier gabled headdress that has much more obvious looseness of form. The veil hangs in a single piece from the front to the back, and even the more ornamented gabled front consists of ornamented lappets, or front bands worn loose around the face.24 Beneath the headdress the hair seems to have been worn loose, although it is covered by the veil; visible beneath the gable is the very front portion of the hair, although it is parted and combed down in a way that seems to show little or no movement. Already, the headdress suggests the ways in which the body is disciplined, where the body is restrained and restricted by the stiff outer covering of the headdress. In the years in which Skelton writes, the headdress changes so that it frames the head and face with a more artificial, architectural line. In subsequent years, the developments in this headdress will make this discipline even more apparent; thus, the gabled portion becomes a stiff bonnet that completely covers the head. So heavy will this ornamented bonnet become that it will subsequently need to be secured below the chin so that it will stay firmly in place.25 By 1510, Catherine of Aragon wears this version of the gabled headdress.26 Subsequently, those aspects

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of the headdress once allowed to hang free will be tied up to further frame the face and give shape to the head. First, the lappets are twisted and pinned up behind the gable.27 Subsequently, in the 1520s and 1530s, the veil in the back is slashed into two pieces and twisted and pinned up into the bonnet. The entire structure must have with these various developments become fairly heavy and imposing. Most importantly, overall, the structure makes the body into a seemingly impermeable hard object. Even as the structural changes in the gowns trained the body to stand erect and to walk with determination, the headdress would have encouraged a similar bodily self-discipline. All of these developments not only shape the body but give it sharp, artificial, and even architectural lines. Skelton could not help but see, when he wrote Elynour Rummynge, how the court valued what were increasingly imagined as individual, bounded bodies, especially among its ladies. Imagine Skelton looking on with amusement and some contempt as these fashions are introduced at court. Imagine as well that he sees himself as being placed in a similar coverture in an attempt to be contained and controlled. He, like the ladies, must be an ornament, but he, unlike many of these ladies, has none of their power and influence. Skelton would be likely to perceive this new courtly aesthetic and to look at it as both dangerous and contemptible. His recognition of this explains why we have the outlines of the defiantly fat body in Elynour Rummynge. He expresses his defiance of this new civilized, courtly aesthetic by offering a defiantly fat and foggy body. In this, he anticipates an approach that will become even more pervasive in subsequent years as this aesthetic takes hold more broadly. His tavern women are in this sense protofat selves insofar as their bodies refuse to conform to an aesthetic of civilité. III. Bulging Bodies Elynour Rummynge reacts to the way that such fashions contained, controlled, and demarcated the individualized bodies of the ladies. The bulging bodies of the tavern women with their crazy dress defy all efforts to contain and control them. As such, they are designed to offend those who embrace the emerging bodily aesthetic that dominated at court. Certainly, these women are ugly when evaluated by the emerging civilized tastes of the court. My reading of the poem agrees with that of the more recent scholars Peter Herman and John Kelly, who both see Elynour Rummynge as having the purpose to offend. According to Herman, the poem criticizes a bodily aesthetic of civilité that is “soon to be codified.”28 According to Kelly, it offers a vision of a world that operates according to a premodern understanding of the body described by Bakhtin; thus, it


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precedes the emergence of the “conception . . . of an individual as an atomized and autonomous being.”29 Bitter at the court that cannot appreciate his poetry, Skelton writes a poem designed to offend their petty, oppressive aesthetic. In particular, Skelton offers an expansive, grotesque form of embodiment to criticize the narrow aesthetic, political, and emotional commitments of the new civilized court. He focuses on those parts of the body designed to offend precisely because they bulge beyond the boundaries of what the body is supposed to be. In the tavern world, bodies bulge and merge, one into another, even as they consume and excrete. In both cases, the body refuses to be contained to individualized boundaries. Skelton positions himself with the outrageous women against the courtly male viewers, who are a censorious presence in the poem. That is, he places himself within and among those bodies, even as he uses their outrageousness to defy courtly values. Skelton focuses on tavern women’s clothing in a way that makes it clear that they do not ascribe to the confining aesthetic of the court. Their homespun, tattered garbs could not possibly control their bodies, and the women frustratingly seem to like it that way. Skelton presents us with fashions that, from the perspective of the court, are quaint and outdated. The informal shifts they wear flaunt their bulging bodies. If anything, such fashions make them larger and bulkier, even as they allow bold, rough movement that is characteristic of the tavern world. Skelton describes their clothing in a way that underscores the extent to which the women are undone or unloosed. Their torn and tattered clothing exposes their breasts, their legs, and even, in one mishap, the “shap,” or genitals.30 For these women, the idea of restraining their bodies seems the farthest thing from their minds, as they flout the emerging “cultural imperative to bind up, hide, and control the emblematically feminine parts of their bodies.”31 It is for this reason that the fatness of two of them, especially the one described as “[a]ll foggy fat was she,” is important. It signals a refusal to conform to an ideal in which the body, especially the female one, should be bound. Importantly, the fat of the one tavern-woman is foggy and thus is seen as that which refuses most explicitly all attempts to control and bind it. In its flabbiness, it refuses all containment, even of the looser garments the women wear. To the degree that the courtly, masculinist reader is invested in a civilized, bodily aesthetic that binds and delineates the individualized body, he will find the tavern women comical, dangerously subversive, or downright demonic. They, after all, represent to such a reader the very unmaking of his aesthetic of civilized bodily restraint. I focus now on the moments in which the body bulges forth in ways that such a reader

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would find unacceptable. To avoid falling into the essentialism that is apparent in much Skelton criticism, however, I will avoid reading the women’s bodies as having any essentialized meanings. We cannot understand them in essentialist ways without imposing on the poem a supposedly singular, objective perspective. Skelton refuses any singular perspective as he moves suddenly from one perspective to another and from one body to another. Just as the bodies refuse to be contained, so the poem refuses to be contained by any single perspective. Certainly, no singular perspective is reified in the course of the poem, nor is any singular perspective associated with the author’s supposedly detached view. For our purposes, I focus on two perspectives presented in the poem: the judgmental perspective of the courtly eye that cannot help but feel disdain and disgust at the women and the joyful communal perspective of the women, who, with one important exception, show no concern for civilized restraint as they joyfully mingle body with body. Because Skelton plays with multiple perspectives in this poem, it is difficult to pin him down, but we do know that he spends a good portion of the poem explicitly addressing and ultimately criticizing the perspective of the male civilized courtier. Not only does Skelton show a palpable pleasure in provoking such a reader with bodies he knows this reader finds revolting, he also calls attention to his own role as the one who dares to revel in the grotesque embodiment of the tavern world.32 Thus, Skelton expresses his own aesthetic and moral independence from a court that he sees as embracing a petty and confining aesthetic. His political, aesthetic, and emotional commitment, I am arguing, lies with these lowly women against these courtly men. Given Skelton’s commitment, we too can come to consider where and with whom we want to align ourselves. We can choose to align ourselves with the grotesque bodies of the women, aware especially that their form of embodiment serves the useful purpose of helping us question late modern, essentialist constructions of bodies. We can begin unraveling the poem by considering Skelton’s rather lengthy description of Eleanor’s garb. This passage has been taken by many critics as self-evident proof that Eleanor is essentially ugly and thus that Skelton must be using her as an exemplum against the dangers of gluttony.33 Such scholars see virtually no difference between the grotesque body of Gluttony in the tavern scene in Piers Plowman and the grotesque body of Eleanor; or, if they do, Skelton is taken to be the worse poet because his love of grotesque detail works against his supposed moralistic aim.34 Her clothing tells us, instead, that Eleanor is the grotesque genius of the tavern world, a sixteenth-century Wife of Bath, albeit one dressed in fashions less current and fabric more than a little worse


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for wear. Like the Wife of Bath, Eleanor likes to dress in the brightest, most gay fabrics, and like the Wife of Bath, she is larger than life, certainly larger than the petty civilized courtier who finds her wanting. Everything Eleanor values and enjoys flies in the face of the emerging aesthetic values of civilité. Where the court values clothing that shapes the body, if not one that confines it, Eleanor values clothing that makes her body big and loud. Where the court values clothing that disciplines the body by making big movement unlikely, if not impossible, Eleanor values clothing that flows and moves with her body. Skelton even suggests that she is a throwback to a bygone era before the introduction of the new aesthetic of civilité when he tells us that she wears clothing that is forty years old. Although the court values bodily discrimination and delineation, Eleanor values bodily expansion of all sorts. She embodies Skelton’s own defiant dilatory style: his style notably accumulates detail upon detail in loose, paratactic constructions that make no discrimination between one detail and the next. In Eleanor’s tavern, bodies mingle with bodies in a way that does not allow individual bodies to be easily separated and individualized. Similarly, Eleanor’s dress reminds us that she is one of Patricia Parker’s literary fat ladies who multiply continuously without any apparent end. Eleanor keeps adding more and more material to her garments in a way that makes her bigger and bulkier. She is more like a feudal lord who establishes her status by establishing her greatness. In this case, her greatness comes from her crazy accumulation of cloth that refuses any and all confinement. The following description shows Skelton’s defiance of the courtly aesthetic as Eleanor makes it clear that she does not care a whit for what such civilized men think. Eleanor intentionally embraces an aesthetic that disregards the petty civilized aesthetic of the court. With the rejoinder “[a]nd yet,” used elsewhere in the poem, Skelton tells the courtly reader that such women show you no concern: And yet she wyll jet, Like a joyly fet In her furred flocket, And graye russet rocket, With symper-the-cocket. Her huke of Lyncolne grene, It had ben hers, I wene, More than fourty yere; And so doth it apere, For the grene bare thredes Loke lyke sere wedes, Wydered lyke hay, The woll worne away.

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And yet I dare saye She thinketh herself gaye Upon the holye daye, Whan she doth her aray, And gyrdeth in her gytes Stytched and pranked with pletes; Her kyrtell Brystowe red, With clothes upon her hed That wey a sowe of led, Wrythen in wonder wyse After the Sarasyns gyse, With a whym-wham Knyt with a trim-tram Upon her brayne-pan, Lyke an Egypcyan Lapped about.35

Her clothing embodies the “crazy disorder” that C. S. Lewis considered to be at the heart of the poem, but it is a crazy disorder that creates the form of defiant grotesque embodiment that laughs at its alternative.36 Eleanor sports quaint fashions that would be closer to the loose gowns popular in the previous generation. The multiple layers she wears, which show no sign of being molded to her big body, make Eleanor a bigger, more bulging figure. Her aesthetic values big and bold colors, which also highlight rather than cover her large figure. With her crazy headdress and numerous pleats and folds in her garments, Eleanor defies any effort to contain and control her in a sharply delineated, artificial silhouette. Her clothing is described as joyfully undone, or, perhaps more accurately, as participating in a process of undoing. The fabric she wears seems almost to be returning to its natural condition as it unravels right before our eyes. Thus, we look on to see how her coat of Lincoln green becomes mere “green bare threads” that “[l]oke lyke sere wedes, / Wydered lyke hay” (look like burned weeds / withered like hay). Clearly, Eleanor embodies a grotesque aesthetic that does not value hardness, solidity, sharp lines, or bodily self-control. She embodies an aesthetic much closer to Bakhtin’s grotesque realism. The description seems designed to elicit very different responses from readers depending on the bodily aesthetic they hold. For those who value restraint of body, Eleanor is absurd, horrific, and perhaps even dangerous. For others, she offers an alternative form of grotesque embodiment that defiantly revels in its own refusal to be contained. The second type of reader might see in her a grotesque fecundity apparent in the way that her bulging body fertilizes all it touches. Rather than standing apart from her, as the judgmental courtier


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does, such a reader might embrace her bulging bulk in an effort to participate in her transformative power. Eleanor’s headdress most dramatically and flamboyantly flouts the emerging courtly aesthetic. It, after all, is wrapped around and around her head in anything but an orderly fashion. It has no recognizable counterpoint. Not only is it unique from the more structured gabled Tudor headdresses I described above, but it is also different from the more simple cloth headdresses worn by the merchants or peasants during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII.37 Their headdresses of homespun linen were pinned neatly to their heads.38 Skelton signals to us that Eleanor is, indeed, unique when he associates her headdress with the exotic turbanstyle headdresses of the Egyptians and Saracens.39 It exemplifies her aesthetic of dilation, in which accumulation is valued as an end in itself. Her headdress, like the tattered but gay apparel Eleanor wears, flouts the emerging aesthetic of the court because it celebrates bulging excess rather than sharply delineated lines. Importantly, Skelton calls attention to the way that he is flouting the courtly aesthetic with the simple rejoinder “[a]nd yet.” Despite your judgments, Skelton seems to say, Eleanor still “thinketh her selfe gaye / Upon the holye daye.” Ultimately, her own extravagant and imposing figure serves to make the aesthetic judgments of the implied courtly reader seem petty and diminutive. Throughout, Skelton aligns himself with Eleanor against the judgmental, courtly reader. In his “I dare say,” Skelton makes a show of the fact that he enjoys flouting the courtly aesthetic. The new ideal of civilité is concerned with erecting and maintaining clear boundaries around the individualized body. In her crazy disorder, Eleanor continually breaks down any such boundaries. She is in constant movement that brings her into contact with everything she touches. She is associated with dirt, but a dirt that suggests that she is a symbol of grotesque fecundity. Skelton focuses on Eleanor’s large and imposing stride, in which her body merges with the earth around her. Far from seeming to violate the integrity of her individualized self, her heels, “[a]s brode as two wheles,” step over the fallow in a way that promises to transform Eleanor, the land, and, potentially at least, the responsive reader.40 As Skelton writes, “Her shone smered wyth talowe, / Gresed upon dyrt / That baudeth her skyrt.”41 From the perspective of those who align themselves with court, such dirt is unacceptable. Her own skirt, covered now with a mix of grease and dirt, might seem to the civilized courtier only hideously ugly or amusing. Others can see the extent to which this dirt, even as it mixes with her clothing, offers a grotesque fecundity. With each step, Eleanor fertilizes the earth, even as her body is smeared with this fecund combination of tallow and dirt. That her skirt is also smeared with this

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fecund mixture only reinforces the sense in which Eleanor comes to represent a communal life force. Her outrageous embodiment can only be contained or controlled if the community is itself diminished. Skelton repeatedly gives voice to the courtly perspective that finds these women ugly in their outrageousness, but each time he does so he also makes it clear that the women ignore or flout such a confining, civilized aesthetic. The juxtaposition can also be seen as exposing the extent to which the courtly aesthetic is a sterile one by contrast. More particularly, the courtly perspective is associated with the discriminating eye, whereas the tavern women are associated with the undiscriminating, grotesque body. In underscoring this dynamic, Skelton is calling attention to the extent to which the new ideal of civilité privileges those who are increasingly unmarked and thus presumptively disembodied. Throughout the poem, the voice of the male courtier interrupts in an attempt to impose his judgment on the women: “A man would have pytty / To se howe she is gumbed, / Fyngered and thumbed,” or similarly, “Ones hed wold have aked / To se her naked.”42 At such moments, Skelton gives voice to the censorious male courtier, who finds their whole embodied existence an affront to his refined senses. The courtly reader does not think in terms of sense impression, whether taste, smell, or touch, but only in terms of the more detached and judgmental sight. That is, he is someone who places himself against the object he views, even as he makes women into a discrete bodily objects that must please him. The women are defiantly indifferent to censorious judgment, as when Skelton announces that “[t]hey care not what men say!”43 In particular, they are indifferent to, and ultimately defy, all efforts to contain and control their bodies. Even when Skelton describes supposedly individual bodies, as when he describes that of Eleanor or fat Maud, he shows them mingling and merging with each other. They are brought together through their desire to consume the frothy, shit-fermented ale that Eleanor makes. In this, they are shown to mingle with each other and with the earth outside, as they consume the droppings of chicken shit that Eleanor includes in her brew. Relatedly, their bodies bulge and ooze in ways that refuse containment. Skelton describes such details in a way that makes it clear that they are an affront to the judgmental, civilized courtier. Notably, Eleanor’s “droopy” and “dropsy” body refuses to be contained by any neat, definite form. Maud, stricken by palsy, is a similarly grotesque being, precisely because she refuses bodily containment: Her face glystryng lyke glas, All foggy fat she was; She had also the gout In all her joyntes about;


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Her breth was soure and stale And smelled all of ale. Such a bedfellaw Wold make one cast his craw. But yet, for all that, She dranke on the mash fat.44

Skelton carefully juxtaposes two aesthetics: the civilized aesthetic that sees such bodies as an affront to refined sensibility and an alternative, grotesque aesthetic. The male courtier intrudes onto the poem to tell us that he will “cast his craw” if forced to take Maud as his bedfellow; thus, Skelton places both perspectives side by side in a way that insists that the grotesque embodiment of the tavern is an affront to the civilized, courtly aesthetic. If he were to have sex with her, he would participate in the same grotesque embodiment represented by the oozing bodies of the tavern women. Skelton uses the rejoinder “[b]ut yet” to express a willful defiance of just such a petty, courtly aesthetic. Maud enjoys her oozing, drooping, and revolting body, just as she enjoys her mash fat. Skelton is clearly playing off the sensibility of the courtly viewer in a way that defies his developing bodily aesthetic. The bodies of the Henrician ladies are increasingly molded, shaped, and disciplined by the clothing. The bodies of the tavern women, in contrast, burst forth from their clothing. For this reason, the prefix “un” seems most typical of descriptions of these tavern women: “unlaced,” “unbraced,” and generally undone. As Skelton writes, “Some wenches come unlased, / Some huswyves come unbrased, / Wyth theyr naked pappes, / That flyppes and flappes, / It wygges and it wagges / Lyke tawny saffron bagges.”45 Their bodies are seen as defying all efforts at containment, as their flipping, flapping, wigging, wagging paps “unlase” and “unbrase” what they presumably wear. Such descriptions focus on the vitality of the body, as it defies all efforts to contain it. Even when Skelton focuses on the clothing itself, it is seen as encouraging freedom of movement. We look at Margery Mylkeducke as “[h]er kyrtell she dyd uptucke / An ynche above her kne, / Her legges that ye myght se.”46 Quite in contrast to the tight bodice of the dresses at court, the tattered clothing of the tavern women permit free movement of their bodies, including those parts that should to the civilized mind be covered and confined. Their clothing allows them to merge bodies with bodies with little or no concern for an emerging sense of civilized discretion. As we might expect, breasts and legs are not the only parts of the body that burst forth in the tavern. The women have little or no concern to policing the boundaries of their bodies.47 The tavern is a place filled with consumption and excretion, both done without any sense of civilized

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propriety. One woman, for example, simply pisses where she sits, simultaneously consuming and excreting without any concern to regulate her bodily processes. Another figure—a “rybbye,” or hag—first limps in and finally falls down to reveal her “shap” for all to see. Once again, she shows little or no concern to contain her orifices; when Eleanor tries to help her to her feet, the women’s shap belts out “quake, quake” in Eleanor’s face.48 All of this reminds us of the grotesque bodily imagery in the tavern scene in Piers Plowman, except that here it loses its moralistic aim. Skelton celebrates grotesque embodiment, as he vigorously offers one detail after another of their revolting bodies. Certainly, no one in the tavern world seems to be troubled by the way in which bodies touch bodies, and no one there seems too concerned to urge this hag, for example, to cover up. Eleanor notably seems more concerned about picking her up from the floor. At the same time, the women are seen as self-consciously defying the restraints that would be put on them by society, perhaps especially by men. If they wear their clothing in a particularly loose manner, so too does the trade they offer in exchange for the ale require an undoing of sorts. The women barter for their ale items all used for cloth making, a traditional role of women. They trade a wimble (boring tool), a thimble, silk lace, a pin case, a man’s gown, a pillow of down, and napery (household line). In making such trades, the women reject their traditional role even as they embrace the grotesque festivity of the tavern. They are literally undoing and unmaking themselves. Such defiance can be seen as directed against the role their husbands would impose on them. The trade announces their choice to drink rather than labor, to consume rather than produce. Their trades suggest as well that they are embracing a very different aesthetic than that expected from them by society. That is, they are turning in the tools of the trade that will make the cloth necessary to cover them up for the grotesque world of the tavern, where all efforts to contain and control the body are unnecessary and superfluous. Skelton never allows the reader to forget that the world of the tavern defies the aesthetic of the court. He, therefore, allows the censorious voice of the courtier to intrude on the poem, even as he makes it clear that the women are oblivious to it. Skelton makes this point also by placing among the tavern women themselves an overly nice “lady,” who embraces a courtly aesthetic that conflicts with the tavern world. This “prycke-me-denty” (an overly fussy person) shows excessive respect for her person. In this, she asserts a type of autonomy, seeking especially, it would seem, to distinguish her own body from the bodies of those around her. In many ways, she represents an intrusion of a courtly aesthetic into the grotesque embodiment of the tavern. Skelton clearly


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aligns himself with the women against this intruder and therefore aligns himself with the grotesque against the civilized, courtly aesthetic. When she gets up from the table, thereby breaking communion with the other women, he comments, “We supposed, iwys, / That she rose to pys.”49 Skelton makes himself one of the “we” of the tavern world, who understands her behavior according to its grotesque world. They assume, then, that she rises to piss, a behavior that would in some senses align her with the grotesque world of the tavern. Of course, even if she were doing this, she would be distinguished from some of her most grotesque companions, who choose, instead, to piss where they sit.50 She presumably regulates such behavior by urinating in private, thereby embodying the new values of civilité. To the courtly reader, this prycke-me-denty might seem like a breath of fresh air. In defiance of such a reader, Skelton mocks her for her niceness evident in the way that she asserts her bodily autonomy: But, syr, amonge all That sate in that hall, There was a prycke-me-denty, Sat lyke a seynty, And began to paynty As though she would faynty. She made it as koye As a lege-de-moy; She was not halfe so wyse As she was pevysshe nyse. She sayde never a worde, But rose from the borde And called for our dame, Elynour by name. We supposed, iwys, That she rose to pys; But the very grounde Was for to compound With Elynour in the spence, To paye for her expence. “I have no penny nor grote To paye,” sayde she, “God wote, For wasshyng of my throte; But my bedes of amber. Bere them to your chamber.”51

Skelton offers at least two opposing perspectives on her actions. On the one hand we have the “Sir,” a courtly reader familiar with the “lege-de-moy”

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(a court dance); on the other hand we have the perspective of the tavern women, which includes Skelton himself. In juxtaposing the two, Skelton can criticize the aesthetic of the court, which has no place in the grotesque world of the tavern. The latter perspective dominates, as Skelton ridicules the intruder for acting the part of a “sainty.” From this perspective, it is surely important that he ridicules the lady for being “pevysshe nyse” (peevishly nice). In attempting to bring the courtly values of civilité to the tavern, she is patently absurd and even ridiculous. Skelton offers small details that undercut her pretense and insists that she is merely overly nice and hypocritical. She is in part a predecessor to the civilized elite in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, who want to consume the wares of the fair while always asserting their supposed autonomy from it. The prycke-me-denty will consume Eleanor’s drink even as she insists that she is distinct from the other customers. She drinks, the lady insists, merely because she wants to “wash” her throat, a nicety that would associate her with a cleanliness at odds with the messy world of the tavern. Of course, such words cannot erase the fact that she is a participant in the tavern world, even as she insists that she is somehow above it. Unlike the other women, she insists upon the types of individualized, bodily boundaries we have examined; thus, she must transact her business with Eleanor in private in a way that asserts her distinction from the other tavern women. She is, then, attempting to demarcate herself and trying to separate herself from others, even, perhaps, we might say, from communal embodiment altogether. Skelton ridicules such behavior even as he celebrates the very different, outrageous behavior of Eleanor, Maud, and the tavern community. Skelton writes at a time when the bodily aesthetic of civilité takes hold, and he attacks such an aesthetic by offering an alternative grotesque form of embodiment in the tavern world. He is important for the history of fat precisely because he offers us the first glimpse at the importance that fat will have with the coming of modernity. Fat will come to register as that which bulges forth beyond the confines of what the individualized body should be. In this sense, the characters in Elynour Rummynge are “protofat” selves. In many ways, they are, indeed, defiant in their bulging and even in their fat bodies, but such bodies are not read only, or even exclusively, in relation to an individualized, bounded body. The fat body of Eleanor does not register as a form of individualized excess, and she is not seen as revolting insofar as she consumes more than her fair share. For such developments to occur, we will need a further development of the ideal of civilité. Certainly, by the time that Shakespeare writes the Henry IV plays, he sees how a character such as Hal, a type of the new courtier


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that emerged under the Tudors, can assert his own bodily integrity to the degree to which he makes the fat body of Falstaff embody all that is excessive and sinful. In a similar way, a later play—Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess—gives us the type of the excessive fat person, in the figure of the Fat Bishop. Such a body, as we will see, is even seen as treasonous and thus as dangerous to the emerging Protestant state. For now, we need to ask how we late moderns should respond to a poem such as Elynour Rummynge. The poem has been read in a way that naturalizes the modern construction, “man,” and it has been read in a way that naturalizes an aesthetic in which the fat body is understood as essentially unlovely and ugly. Such readings depend on aligning ourselves with the “Sir” in the poem and making his censorious judgments implicitly universal ones. My reading of the poem suggests, in contrast, that Skelton critiques such judgments as he makes it clear that they are the unique product of the emerging elite culture. In a related way, he exposes this aesthetic as a petty and sterile one. The poem usefully serves to remind us late moderns that the emerging modern representational regime is a recent construction, even as it also reminds us that people were aware of its dehumanizing consequences early on. Skelton sees the consequences of this emerging aesthetic evident in the practices of Henry VIII’s court, and he rejects it in favor of the grotesque embodiment of the lowly tavern world. Precisely because fat bodies have come to seem so naturally excessive and sinful by our late modern constructions, perhaps we should align ourselves with the bodies of the tavern women. We do so, not because we wish to return to any pre- or early modern understanding of the body, but because such bodies are usefully revolting. They help us disrupt and denaturalize constructions that with late modernity have come to seem too natural to us. And, besides, might we not align ourselves with the aesthetic of the tavern against the petty aesthetic of the courtier simply because the former is perhaps more fun? Our attachments and alignments can and should give us pleasure in the present, no matter what practical purpose we believe they may have in the future. Ultimately, Elynour Rummynge challenges us to consider our pleasures. Does it give us more pleasure to align ourselves with those who have privilege, whether it be with the thin Hal or Skelton as courtier or “man,” or does it give us more pleasure to align ourselves with those considered so essentially revolting by just such privileged persons?


Chapter 4

Lean and Mean: Shakespeare’s Criticism of Thin Privilege Fat figures prominently in a number of William Shakespeare’s plays, but most notably in the Henry IV plays I will consider here. That fat is not a self-evident natural bodily category for Shakespeare is apparent in the multiple and even conflicting ways he represents it. Characters see the same fat body of Falstaff in strikingly different and even opposing ways. For the lower-class figures of the tavern world, Falstaff ’s fat body is, for the most part, a sign of his greatness and his great generosity and wit. For Hal, who creates a new bodily style to secure his newly achieved authority, the same fat body is a sign of Falstaff ’s essential lowliness, excessive appetite, and innate selfishness. In short, fatness represents everything that Hal must suppress if he is to assert his own privilege as a virtuous king. Importantly, Shakespeare pays equal attention to the ways in which thin bodies are constructed or, to put it another way, the ways the two body types are constructed in relationship to each other. It should not be surprising, then, that the lower-class figures in the Henry IV plays see the lean bodies of the lawmen as a sign of their meanness. They know by looking at them that they will get no mercy from the law. In contrast, Hal sees the lean male body that he cultivates as the unmarked sign of his newly achieved authority. It guarantees his privilege by demonstrating the extent to which he, unlike the older aristocratic type, contains and controls his appetites. He proves that he has the supposedly virtuous selfdiscipline that legitimizes his family’s usurpation of the crown. Exactly because Falstaff ’s fat body can come to represent the excess of society that

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threatens to destroy it from within, Hal’s own thin body can be seen as innately virtuous. By offering these opposing constructions of fat and thin bodies, Shakespeare makes it clear that their meanings are not the result of nature but rather of culture. Shakespeare writes during a period when the aesthetic first critiqued by Skelton has taken hold, and he is much more self-consciously critical of it. His criticism is apparent if we consider the very different perspective on this emerging aesthetic offered in 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV. In essence, Shakespeare goes over the same ground in both plays so that we see the very different ways in which the fat and thin bodies can be constructed and thus responded to. In what follows, I first consider modern criticism of the Henry IV plays. By focusing on the topic of fat, we see that such criticism has, for the most part, simply imposed modern and late modern constructions onto the play in a way that does not allow us to appreciate the way that fat and thin are socially constructed. Falstaff with his fat body is frequently taken to be something essentially, whether that be the Lord of Misrule, the medieval Vice figure, the body of the Lacanian Mother, or the body of woman generally.1 Falstaff is made to play the “before” that legitimizes the regime of the “after,” to use terms that pervade our late modern diet culture. Such a “before” is also seen as our “after” insofar as Falstaff is made into an emblem of the excesses of a decayed civilization that must be overcome if progress is to be achieved. Such essentialist readings of Falstaff make it virtually impossible for us to consider the ways in which Shakespeare is simultaneously criticizing Hal and the lean, civilized bodily style he promotes to legitimize his power. In the sections that follow, I focus on Part 1 and Part 2, respectively, to consider the two very different ways the fat and the thin body are there constructed and understood. In the first section, I consider how Hal in 1 Henry IV asserts his privilege as a presumptively thin, civilized elite by making Falstaff in his fatness an emblem of vicious excess. In particular, Falstaff is made to embody all that Hal must overcome or supersede if he is to succeed in his monarchical and imperialistic goals. In the next section, I consider the way that 2 Henry IV goes over the same ground in order to underscore the predatory nature of Hal’s trim regime. As Hal comes closer and closer to instituting his reign, the lean bodies of the lawmen proliferate and begin to prevail. Shakespeare now allows us to view these very same lean bodies through the perspective of the lower classes. To figures such as the Hostess and Doll Tearsheet, such bodies in their leanness are not characterized by virtuous self-restraint but rather by an insatiable hunger directed at the bodies of the lower classes. In giving this perspective, Shakespeare underscores the predatory aspect of the new bodily aesthetic, which consumes certain bodies even as it shores up the

Shakespeare’s Criticism

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power of the new civilized elite. In offering us multiple and contrasting constructions of the fat and the thin body, Shakespeare urges us to be conscious of the political significance of the aesthetic choices we make. We have a choice as to whether we are going to align ourselves with the aesthetic of the civilized Hal, which is in many ways our own modern aesthetic, or whether we are going to align ourselves with the very different aesthetic of Falstaff and the tavern women. In either case, we become aware that bodies take on different meanings depending on where one is positioned. There is no such thing as an objective or singular meaning found in the fat or the lean body. Thus, Shakespeare offers a lesson relevant to us in late modernity where the fat and thin bodies are often taken to have essential meanings in and of themselves. Why must we see the fat body as excessive and morally decadent and the thin body as presumptively virtuous? I. Modern Constructions Of Falstaff Perhaps, we should begin by reminding ourselves that Shakespeare was in a better position than we are to understand the significance of the construction of body size in the early modern period. In particular, he is in a better historical position to understand the way that the new bodily aesthetic, promoted by Hal, is used to secure the power of a few over the many. Relatedly, he is in a better historical position to appreciate alternative, earlier constructions of the fat and the thin body. He and his audience could still appreciate very different constructions of the fat and the thin body. Even as they might see the lean body as the body of a mean and exacting character, they could also see the fat body as the body of generosity. The latter construction comes from feudal understandings of status that differ greatly from those that emerged with the civilized elite that came to power with the Tudors. Unlike the contemporary, Western reader, Shakespeare and his audience were more aware of multiple constructions of the fat and the thin body. Shakespeare could use these in turn to encourage the audience to take responsibility for the political and human consequences of their constructions. For the most part, criticism of the plays has not offered a complex view of body size, nor has it criticized the way that Hal’s bodily aesthetic serves to legitimize his power and propel his imperialistic aims. We are still laboring under the modern assumption that we must not sentimentalize Falstaff. Even as we have questioned modern criticism for the way it romanticized Hal and his imperialistic goals, we still assume that we must be more rational and detached, especially from Falstaff. While I would not want to sentimentalize Falstaff, if sentimentalizing him means

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establishing him as the essential embodiment of Shakespeare’s genius, I would want to use him as a figure that exposes some of Hal’s more meanspirited, lean-witted machinations. It is important for us to do so, I believe, because Hal’s machinations are, by and large, our own. That is, both Hal, as a cunning early modern arriviste, and we, as late moderns, operate by a regime where lean bodies are privileged to the extent to which fat bodies are made into emblems of excess. Such machinations can only be thoroughly deconstructed and undermined if we cultivate very different aesthetics that encourage different relations to the fat and the thin body. We must ignore those who warn us against “sentimentalizing” Falstaff insofar as such warnings are used to discourage us from using him to expose Hal’s oppressive, predatory, and yes, modern representational regime. Modern readings could leverage this understanding of the fat body in order to legitimize the imperialistic projects of Hal and the modern state. To see how such an implicit argument works, we must understand how high modernism draws on and reinforces late modern constructions of the fat body, which see it as essentially dangerous (and even treasonous) in its excess.2 Leslie Heywood argues that modernism has at its base what she calls an “anorexic logic” in which the soft body is fundamentally discounted in favor of the hard mind. Such a logic seeks to contain and control the body thereby establishing the unmarked, thin male body as the presumptive ideal. Modernists often speak in a way that suggests that they want to “trim the fat” where the “fat” is the soft, indulgent poetry of either the Romantics or their more immediate successors, the PreRaphaelites.3 Perhaps nothing more vividly shows the interdependence of the aesthetics of modernism and the antifat discourse of the period than Ezra Pound’s intensely visceral, lifelong rejection of the imagist poet Amy Lowell.4 To Pound, Lowell’s fat body embodied everything he found corrupt, excessive, and luxurious. She became for Pound an emblem of a bloated, luxurious, and decadent American culture, including, of course, American literary culture. Clearly, she needed some of the trimming that he had so successfully done for other poets, especially in Pound’s editorial intervention in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Pound would need to renounce his allegiance to this decadent style, imagism, and this decadent American literary tradition. High modernism is part and parcel of the broader, modern representational regime that I described in my introduction. During the First World War, the fat body excited considerable anxiety as it was understood increasingly as even the treasonous body, much as it is today. According to Hillel Schwartz, under the pressure of the world wars, the fat body is seen as essentially treasonous, the thin as patriotic.5 The fat


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body was beginning to be conceptualized as that which literally takes nutrition from others, including, especially, “our boys” fighting overseas. With these world wars, a stereotype solidified in which “fatness was careless, selfish, wasteful, treacherous, and un-American.”6 For both the elite culture of high modernism and the popular culture of the United States, the fat body is seen as something that must be trimmed, if not obliterated outright, if we are to be all that we can be. A new lean ideal—what I would call a “trim reckoning”—needed to be maintained if we were to fulfill our supposedly worthy imperialist goals. That certain bodies such as Lowell’s were seen as embodying (American) luxury allowed the new trim, militarism to assume a virtuousness that justified imperial expansionism. Because the fat body is made into an emblem of a decadent excess, it is our obligation to contain and control it before it consumes us all. Of course, the cruelty of such logic is that the bodies that are made to embody the decadent luxury of us all are frequently the bodies of the poor and underclass, whose “choice” to become and remain fat is a dubious one at best. Hal becomes for many the perfect modern prince and king because he banishes the bloated, antiquated aristocracy, embodied by the fat Falstaff. This is precisely the reading that J. Dover Wilson promoted with his editions of 1 Henry IV (1952), 2 Henry IV (1946), and especially with his influential 1944 work The Fortunes of Falstaff..7 Wilson initially used his modernist reading of these plays to support the war effort, but he also used them more generally to support an expansion of the British militaristic, imperialist regime. England had become soft and overindulgent and was in need of a popular military leader such as Hal. Wilson thought that just as England was threatened by the decadent royalty represented by Edward VIII, who, by preferring the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, indulged his private desires at the expense of his public duty, so too English scholarship was threatened by an excessive, overindulgent Romanticism.8 Wilson seeks, then, in the boldest terms, to purify Shakespearean criticism of its Romantic, self-indulgent past, typified by the fat and bloated body of Falstaff. Previous scholarship erred because it idolized or sentimentalized Falstaff. We moderns, he preaches, can afford no such illusions because we have seen the costs of war.9 Throughout, Wilson positions himself as the one who is taking the type of toughminded, pragmatic approach needed in this particular critical time in England’s history. Every aspect of the play, including especially the character of Falstaff, must be evaluated according to what he insists is its (and our own) primary teleological aim. As he asserts, “The main theme, therefore, of Shakespeare’s morality play is the growing-up of a madcap prince into the ideal king, who was Henry V.”10 Wilson uses his moralistic

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reading to support England’s current war effort, which requires a new kind of populist leader such as his King Henry V. Overall, The Fortunes of Falstaff teaches the reader that “there can be no question of the rightness of Shakespeare’s finale [Falstaff ’s banishment].”11 Wilson’s argument depends heavily on a specifically modern construction of the fat and the thin body, where the latter is granted the privilege of being presumptively virtuous to the extent to which the former is made to embody the vice of us all. We all know, Wilson suggests, that what is needed in these days of war are the lean, muscular bodies of a Hal and not the fat, soft bodies of a Falstaff (and, in a different way, the lean, effeminate body of the effete literary scholar A. C. Bradley). From this perspective, Wilson’s allegiance is clear. Those who feel any sympathy for Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV are overly sentimental and soft, and hence dangerously indulgent. Wilson’s argument works in no small measure because it draws upon constructions of the fat person that have come to seem natural in modernity: namely that the fat person is excessive, luxurious, and hence dangerous to society. Wilson bolsters his own argument by harnessing this set of associations; thus, he continually refers to Falstaff with epithets such as “the fat man,” “the prodigiously incarnate Riot,” or the “colossal old man,” which continue to associate Falstaff first and foremost with his fat body.12 In contrast, Wilson never refers to Hal’s thinness. Wilson gives the thin body the privilege of being presumptively disembodied, and in so doing, he privileges both himself and Hal. As Wilson’s epithets suggest, he employs many of the same strategies used by Hal himself. As such, Wilson sets himself up as a new toughminded Hal, who, we are told at the end of the book, is “Shakespeare’s Balance”—a lean, militaristic ideal to replace the old, fat, flabby one of the Romantic past.13 If we need new leaders, we also need new modern critics who break with the Romantic past, characterized primarily for Bradley by his overattachment and overidentification with Falstaff. Wilson uses Bradley as an example of soft, indulgent criticism. Indeed, equally importantly, Wilson uses Bradley’s body to establish him as a soft, effete Romantic with no practical knowledge of the cold, hard realities of the modern world. We are to learn from the following that we must not make the same mistake of adopting an overly sentimental attachment to Falstaff. Wilson offers us an alternative, where the modern critic acts as rational, detached judge in uncovering the truth about the two embarrassingly embodied bodies of Falstaff and Bradley. As Wilson asserts, [T]he subject that engages Bradley, it will be observed, is not Falstaff at all, but the effect of Falstaff upon himself; upon that shy, gentle, refined, subtle, hypersensitive, entirely moral, almost other-worldly personality, at


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once donnish, a little old-maidish, and extraordinarily winning, that I can even now see in my mind’s eye standing before me, with his frail figure and tender smile.14

As the parenthetical, “it will be observed,” indicates, Wilson positions himself as the objective observer who establishes his authority to the extent to which he looks with cold calculation at his subject. Even as he gazes upon Bradley, significantly through his “mind’s eye,” he is not to be swayed by his “frail figure and tender smile.” Wilson positions himself over and against the bodies of others in a way that makes him presumptively disembodied. Falstaff and Bradley are, in turn, stigmatized to the extent that he marks them as having uncontrolled, overindulgent, and soft bodies. If Wilson uses antifat discourse, he also uses homophobia to convince us that we need to develop more detachment from our subjects. The “old-maidish” and effete man committed the sin of being overly concerned with Falstaff and especially with the “effect” he had on himself. We need to learn to become more detached, tough-minded critics interested primarily in defining what the characters be. Wilson draws on the fat body itself to make his broader point when he turns to Samuel Johnson’s criticism of the plays. The fat Johnson reveals the innate truth of the fat body because, “[t]o Johnson, on the other hand, the contemplation of Falstaff afforded no dream-compensations: the character was far too much like his own!”15 Such emphatic statements establish a universal truth about the fat body, one that transcends those historical differences that Wilson elsewhere foregrounds. Because all fat bodies are taken to have an essential meaning across time and space, we simply accept that Johnson knows something important and essential about the fat body generally and thus about Falstaff ’s fat body specifically. We all know, after all, that the fat body is an emblem of excess and, as such, we all know that Hal can do nothing else but banish Falstaff. Johnson tells us as much: “For he had only to look into his own conscience to realize (as he did, how often!) that if that belt broke, his very guts would fall about his knees.”16 Wilson knows this truth about Johnson because he views him through an essentialist understanding of the fat body pervasive in modernity. What he knows is what we all know: namely, that the fat body is essentially revolting. We must contain and control it before it gets out of hand. Certainly, Wilson argues throughout The Fortunes of Falstaff that Falstaff must finally be banished by Hal so that he can work for the welfare of the nation, especially where such welfare requires him to expand his empire. Subsequent scholarship may not be quite so bold as to dismiss their critics as mere fatties, but its arguments are often bolstered by modern

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constructions of fat and thin. Overall, scholarship tends to mark the fat body even as it leaves the thin body unmarked and thus unexamined. In marking the fat body, furthermore, it brings to bear broad cultural assumptions about what the fat body be. Scholarship has, for example, focused intensely on the fat body of Falstaff, asking in essence what he be. He is often made into the embodiment of one principle or another that in turn is understood as that entity which blocks progress, variously understood. Falstaff is made to embody festive culture, the Lacanian Mother, or the unchecked libido. In several of these cases, Falstaff is seen as the “before” that must be finally put down for the “after” to be achieved. C. L. Barber, for example, understood Falstaff as an embodiment of a rebellious, primitive festivity that must finally give way for order to be established. Other scholars see Falstaff as a “before” that is understood in more expressly individualistic and psychoanalytical terms. Falstaff is seen as that which obstructs Hal’s development from youth to man or from prince to king. Falstaff embodies a lost Lacanian Mother, a form of infantile desire, or a “utopian self ” that is a “pampered, self-indulgent recipient of bodily pleasures.”17 In all these cases, Falstaff is made into an embodiment of a “before” or past that must be mastered for the “after” to come into being. Frequently, Falstaff is made into an embodiment of some sort of infantile stage that must be mastered and overcome for proper maturation to occur. Coppélia Kahn argues, for example, that Falstaff is someone who is trapped in an infantile stage of development, desirous of food but lacking sufficient adult sexual desire.18 Falstaff is seen as that which embodies for Hal (and for us) “his rebellion against growing up into a problematic adult identity.”19 Such teleological arguments are bolstered by a representational regime that simply takes it for granted that the fat body is a form of atavism that must be overcome. They also implicitly privilege the unmarked thin body as the body that epitomizes adult self-control. That “before” comes to embody everything that is opposed to what we should want to be. Thus, although it is imagined as an atavism, a throwback to the past, it is also understood as embodying old age, decrepitude, and degeneration. Such a paradoxical view of fat lies at the heart of the modern representational regime. In late modernity, diet advertising promises almost eternal youth and longevity to those who master themselves properly. The fat body is made to embody all that threatens that impossible ideal; thus, it is made to occupy the position of death in our society. Such a paradoxical understanding of the fat body also influences the way that scholarship has often understood the fat figure of Falstaff. Falstaff is made to represent, on the one hand, infantilism and, on the


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other, decay, decrepitude, disease, and death. Sander Gilman, in Fat Boys: A Slim Book, describes Falstaff as a representation of the dangers of “old fat.”20 If Falstaff is made to represent, as Gilman argues, “pathological decay—more specifically, the decay of age,” that decay is a threat explicitly to what he calls the “new state.”21 The fat body is used to represent the corruptions of an overdeveloped society that must be brought under control if the state is to be lean and mean. It comes to represent, at least for the early modern character of Hal, the excesses of old civilization. With Hal, criticism will often assume that Falstaff has an immense appetite. Thus, it is operating through a set of assumptions that have come to seem natural. We all know the fat body “overeats” because we all know that it is characterized by its overindulgence and gluttony. With Kahn, we are likely to assume that Falstaff, because he is fat, is therefore intensely “overly-desirous of food.” As Gilman explains, “For Hal bread is the food of the masses, while sack and capons are the indulgences of those who would disrupt the health of the body politic with their sybaritic and useless lives.”22 Gilman puts his finger here on the way in which the fat body comes to represent in the new modern state the excess of us all that will, if unchecked, devour the very state from within. Criticism that is so focused on diagnosing Falstaff ’s character often ends by legitimizing a progressivist narrative in which we must all want to grow up, mature, or develop. All who impede this progress are, thus, implicitly unworthy, useless, unlovely, and even treasonous. Such arguments should give us pause. We can see the implications of much of this criticism if we turn to one more example. Hugh Grady argues that Falstaff and Hal embody two parts of the modern self. Whereas Hal embodies the Machiavellian subjectivity, Falstaff embodies a new consumer subjectivity. Grady’s argument depends heavily on antifat prejudice in which the fat body is assumed to be the body of excess, overindulgence, and, indeed, overconsumption. Grady initially tells us that Falstaff embodies a form of infantilism, associated with the Lacanian Imaginary; thus, Falstaff is a “fictional, utopian projection.”23 Here, Grady associates him with a “before” that, we might suspect, will also be conceptualized as an “after.” This primal subjectivity is also associated with the decay of modern civilization, especially our own late capitalistic society. Falstaff is made to embody modern “desire” itself, and thus, ultimately, what Grady sees as the cultural underside of all that we be. In language that mirrors the way our culture constructs the fat body as the essential pathological one, Grady explains, “Desire is that blind striving that enthralls humans to addictions and irrational cravings destructive of dignity and accomplishment.”24 Of course, Falstaff has been associated with these things before—addictions, cravings, and

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appetite, most famously in W. H. Auden’s description of him. Grady draws on such associations to make Falstaff into an emblem of the exploitative aspects of capitalism itself.25 We need to remember, of course, that this is precisely what the fat body has become in late modernity: the scapegoat that is made to embody our collective overconsumption. As Grady insists, “He is an emblem of the community-destroying dynamics of an embryonic capitalist society.”26 Though I appreciate his implicit critique of Hal, Grady’s argument helps us see the extent to which our obsessive commitment to a supposedly unsentimental Falstaff makes it more difficult, if not impossible, for us to recognize and thus criticize Hal’s exploitation. Because we are so obsessed with the overconsumption of the fat, we do not pay attention to the predatory consumptions of the thin elite. To be more specific, because we are so obsessed with what we imagine to be the insatiable appetite of the fat, we do not notice that Hal has a very specific, insatiable appetite—for the bodies of the underclass that are required to carry out his imperialistic aims. The antifat bias in Grady’s argument prompts him to see Falstaff as alone responsible for the consumption of the conscripts in 1 Henry IV, act 4, scene 2. He conveniently ignores the fact that these men are only conscripted because Hal needs them to secure his power.27 Thus, Hal’s appetite for consuming the men is at least the same, if not greater than, Falstaff ’s. Grady also, I would say, misreads the exchange: “PRINCE I did never see such pitiful rascals. / FALSTAFF Tut, tut, good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder.”28 Because Falstaff is read as the “compensatory modern subjectivity” and because this subjectivity is seen as that which primarily threatens our late modern society, Grady focuses on Falstaff ’s appetite alone. As he writes, “Thus the exploitative side of Falstaff can be seen as enacting one of the dangerous aspects of unfixed subjectivity in the service of unchecked appetite.”29 Grady blames Falstaff ’s pleasure seeking and ambition for the consumption of the conscripts, even as he ignores the extent to which Falstaff is acting as Hal’s agent. Falstaff is a willing agent in this exploitation, to be sure, and thus worthy of our censure, but it is clear that it is Hal’s appetite that is being fed by the conscripts. Falstaff is serving up what Hal needs in order to gain favor with the young prince; Hal’s only complaint is that he does not like the fare, and thus thinks Falstaff to be a rascal. Ultimately, Grady uses Falstaff as a lesson of the dangers this “appetite” poses for our “modern consumer society.”30 But the question remains: who is ultimately the consumer of the poor? To make Falstaff the sole scapegoat seems to turn a late-capitalist critique on its head: the exploitation by the capitalist remains invisible exactly because the sole blame is placed on the fat body of his agent.


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Grady’s arguments implicitly foreground the fundamental problem of any reading that draws on and reinforces the modern representational regime. Certain bodies are given privilege to the extent to which others are marked and stigmatized. More specifically, the body of Hal remains unmarked, invisible, and presumptively virtuous exactly because Falstaff is made to embody an overwhelming and dangerous appetite. One should observe that it is Falstaff who addresses Hal in this scene in order to underscore the way that his will to acquire power requires the exploitation of the conscripts’ bodies. Falstaff ’s remarks bring to the fore the way that Hal in his wars makes the bodies of the underclass “food for powder.” In the exchange, Falstaff, far from exonerating himself from responsibility, calls attention to the way in which he must inevitably make these men “food for powder” because he carries out Hal’s will in order, admittedly, to gain his favor. Falstaff uses himself to foreground Hal’s ravenous consumption of people, but because we are so obsessed with the supposed overconsumption of the fat person, we cannot see it. Thus, even though Grady rightly understands that Hal’s designs are Machiavellian, he does not fully associate Hal with the overconsumption of late capitalism because of his primary focus on Falstaff ’s fat body as the emblem of exploitation. Hal points the finger at Falstaff ’s conspicuous consumption, and the fat body that evinces it, to detract attention from his own ravenous appetites. Grady’s argument adopts Hal’s (and early and late modernity’s) moralist body aesthetic. In doing so, Grady allows certain elites, with their tendency to scapegoat the fat for their own excesses, escape the full scrutiny they deserve. Thus, it is too often the “fat cats” who bear the harshest criticism in Marxist critiques, such as Grady’s. All of these scholars in some way align themselves with Hal’s singular perspective insofar as they scrutinize and thus implicitly stigmatize the fat body of Falstaff. To counter this perspective in criticism, we need to consider, instead, how Shakespeare foregrounds the multiple constructions of the fat and the thin body. Hal attempts to make Falstaff embody all that is soft about civilization because it helps him secure his own authority. In exposing this, Shakespeare asks that we think in very different ways. Certainly, for the audience member who enters imaginatively and intellectually into the plays, it is difficult, if not impossible, to embrace the bodily style that Hal promotes, precisely because she sees how Hal uses it to shore up his power. Thus, Shakespeare makes it possible for us to begin to imagine alternative forms of alliances and attachments. We need not be aligned with a modern regime of trim reckoning that consumes certain bodies for the greater good of the state. We can align ourselves, instead, with those who, like Falstaff, are willing to use their bodies to open themselves up to others. As I will argue, Falstaff, for all of his selfish

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ambition, actually offers the audience a more humanistic relationship with the underclass. Falstaff ’s relationship to them, while hardly unproblematic, is certainly more complex and human. To contemporary readers, the questions posed by the Henry IV plays strike at the heart of what we want to be and what types of communities we want to foster. Do we want to align ourselves in power or do we want to align ourselves with those who are preyed upon by the powers that be? Alternately, do we want to create a community that is dependent on essentialist notions that make some bodies privileged to the extent to which they mark and stigmatize others? Falstaff in his interactions with others offers an alternative way to relate to people. Rather than relating to others by seeking to impose on them our singular way of being, as Hal does, we can relate to others by opening up ourselves to them and their experiences. To do the latter, furthermore, is to foster a world that is fat witted in contrast to the leanwitted world fostered by the modern representational regime. That is, it is fat insofar as it allows for multiple imaginative and interpretative engagements. At this historical moment, such a choice has the implicit virtue of countering a regime that in contemporary culture is dangerously trim, and far less human, indeed. II. Hal's Construction Of Falstaff In 1 Henry IV 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV challenge our own modern constructions of fat by offering us very different constructions of the fat and the thin body. The second goes over the same ground as the first and, in so doing, revisits the bodily aesthetic which, for the most part, dominates in 1 Henry IV. Even in Part 1, Shakespeare undermines Hal’s bodily aesthetic by showing us that it is a recent invention used to consolidate the power of the new civilized elite. In order to shore up their authority, the civilized elite developed a bodily aesthetic that departed from that which was used to establish the status of the feudal lord. The latter did so by establishing his greatness through his great body, great appetite, and largesse. The feudal lord, while no leader of an egalitarian utopia, has a more intimate relationship with those he uses to sustain his power. A new arriviste prince, such as Hal, remains more aloof from those he exploits, and thus has an investment in appearing moral, and above the petty sins and concerns of his subjects. Hal’s machinations underscore the extent to which the new civilized elite established their authority by making a show of their virtuous selfrestraint. They did so, Shakespeare demonstrates, by marking and stigmatizing the bodies of the fat as innately excessive and vicious. In what


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follows, I first sketch out the ways in which Hal attempts to characterize Falstaff as an emblem of excess that must be trimmed for the new regime of civilité to emerge. After this section, I focus on the way in which Falstaff speaks back in order to expose Hal’s constructions as lean and mean. In this way, Shakespeare encourages the audience member to see the regime Hal seeks to impose as highly problematic in nature. It is important to realize that in these plays, from the outset, Hal is attempting to create a myth about himself, one in which he can simultaneously be seen as a man of the people who matures into a heroic leader even as he casts aside the vices (and the companions) of his youth. Thus, Hal attempts to manipulate events in order to make Falstaff play the part of Vice in his morality tale. He uses the highly charged moralistic language we will consider in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, where the fat body is seen as a threat to the state. Hal can only insist that he has a perfect, self-contained identity if he can make Falstaff into the very emblem of excess. In order to establish himself as innately invulnerable, whole, light, and virtuously penitential, he needs to make Falstaff imperfect, foggy, heavy, and viciously festive. He does so by focusing on Falstaff ’s body in a way that makes Hal in his thinness presumptively virtuous and disembodied. In his purposeful jesting, Hal calls Falstaff names that attempt to make him mere dead matter or, to quote one critic, something that is simply “thingy” in nature.31 Hal calls Falstaff “fatkidneyed rascal,” “damned brawn,” “bull-calf,” and “my sweet beef.”32 With such epithets, Hal makes an effort to transform his supremely witty and thus mercurial companion into a mere thing or dumb creature, which can then, he hopes, be bent to his will. Such epithets tell us more about Hal’s construction of himself than they tell us about Falstaff. In making his friend into mere dead matter, he seeks to establish himself as the one with superior knowledge and intellect. Hal would become the civilized counterpart to his uncivilized friend. Indeed, he would even have the moral imperative to civilize Falstaff by containing and controlling his outrageous body. By the time that Shakespeare wrote 1 Henry IV, the aesthetic of civilité had, indeed, come to find the grotesque body fundamentally revolting. Thus, it should be no surprise that Falstaff ’s fatness is imagined as that which bulges forth beyond the boundaries of what the individualized body should be. Falstaff ’s paunch is the site of the offense because it bulges forth in a way that is taken to violate the boundaries of the civilized body. It is also the site, as we have seen, where the body touches other bodies and the world. Hal makes Falstaff all paunch when he calls him “whoreson round man” or, more significantly, “Sir John Paunch.”33 Elsewhere, Hal associates Falstaff with his guts, as when he calls him a

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“fat-kidneyed rascal,” “fat-guts,” or falling guts.34 For Hal, Falstaff ’s guts are characterized by a force that pushes beyond the limits of what the civilized body should be. Significantly, as Hal specifies that Falstaff ’s guts are “falling,” he imagines Falstaff as having a gravity that propels him downward. The moral associations of his words are hard to miss because Falstaff is seen in his fatness as that which tends toward death and even damnation. This is most dramatically apparent in his final words to Falstaff in the banishment scene in 2 Henry IV. There, Hal warns, “Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; /Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men.”35 As he understands Falstaff ’s body, its sheer mass rushes it onward to its death; thus, “the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men.” Already in Part 1, Hal calls attention to this same downward force when he characterizes Falstaff by his “falling” guts and thus by the way that it drags him downward—presumably, to death and damnation. Relatedly, Hal imagines Falstaff ’s fatness as a force which destroys the wholeness and integrity of the individualized body; it becomes all the more horrific, then, precisely because the individualized body is meant to be closed and impermeable with the coming of the bodily aesthetic of civilité. Hal does not simply characterize Falstaff as meat and guts, nor as falling guts that tend toward disease, death, and damnation. He imagines Falstaff ’s fatness as fundamentally and threateningly amorphous in nature. That is, Falstaff ’s fat is fundamentally foggy in Hal’s mind because it violates the proper boundaries of the individualized, civilized body. Hal calls Falstaff “tallow” and “thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch,” even as he likens him to a “dish of butter . . . that melted at the sweet tale of the sun.”36 Hal characterizes Falstaff by a dangerous formlessness that can be seen even as the power to liquefy and defy containment. In his liquid condition, Hal’s Falstaff, like Middleton’s Fat Bishop, is characterized by the way he refuses to conform to a singular, solid form. In characterizing Falstaff in this way, Hal is primarily interested in characterizing himself by his superior bodily integrity and singularity. That is, he can be seen as perfect, whole, and bright insofar as Falstaff is seen as his imperfect, amorphous, and dark counterpart. Shakespeare critiques Hal’s own bodily aesthetic in a number of ways. For one, he makes it clear that such constructions are unique to Hal. Indeed, Hal is shown to be wholly obsessed with imposing on his friend these morally charged cluster of images. With the exception of Poins, no one else in the play does so, and Poins is clearly also a thin, civilized elite. Thus, in making the two use similar constructions, Shakespeare makes it clear that these are the operations of power used by the civilized elite. Poins, after all, is trying to ingratiate himself with the heir apparent and


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thus to rise in social status. If Falstaff ’s age and girth contrast with those of Poins, so is Falstaff ’s relationship with Hal much different and much more complex. Falstaff, while clearly seeking to ingratiate himself with Hal, is no sycophant. Falstaff, as we shall see, is able to turn a joke into a lesson for Hal about his own less-than-savory role in the morality play he is seeking to create. These lessons do not serve Hal’s ultimate goals. This makes Falstaff a force to be reckoned with. Hal can merely dispense with Poins easily at the end of 2 Henry IV, but he has to use all of his political and rhetorical force to banish Falstaff. As Falstaff elsewhere recognizes, Poins uses his own thin, youthful, and fashionable body in no small measure to solidify his bond with Hal. Besides Poins, only the Sheriff and Carrier apply such epithets to Falstaff, but they do so only briefly in discussion with Hal to identify Falstaff to him.37 Throughout the play, Shakespeare makes it clear that it is Hal himself who is obsessed with this singular and essentialist view of Falstaff ’s body. In this way, Shakespeare highlights the central role that Hal’s own bodily aesthetic plays in securing his power. Shakespeare also foregrounds the trimness of Hal’s terms in the repartee between Hal and Falstaff. Hal’s terms are never allowed to stand as true or objective ones; indeed, Falstaff powerfully counters them, even as he offers alternative and multiple ways to understand his body. Equally importantly, Falstaff calls attention to the fact that Hal descends from a “Gaunt” line. Although Falstaff dismisses this line as “too Gaunt” for the throne, he, nonetheless, seems to understand that there is something important about Hal’s body. At the same time, his remarks call attention to the way that this gauntness is a sign of the fact that they are a usurped line. When Hal gibes, “What, a coward, Sir John Paunch?” Falstaff responds knowingly, “Indeed I am not John of Gaunt, your grandfather.”38 According to a feudal understanding, Hal is not sufficiently “great” or “fat” to justify his “great” status. Falstaff, then, retorts by calling attention to the trimness of his line. At the same time, Falstaff calls attention to the new bodily aesthetic that Hal uses to define himself. Falstaff implies that Hal’s values can be traced more specifically to his grandfather, who cleverly used his own aged and emaciated body to establish the superior virtue of his line against the decadent, soft Richard II. By mentioning John of Gaunt, Falstaff reveals how the Lancastrian line established its legitimacy in no small measure through this new bodily style. Their gaunt bodies suggest to at least some of their subjects that they are virtuous. Hal’s regime is “trim” in a number of respects. Even as Hal values a thin body as the one that is presumptively virtuous, he also values a reductive, literal sense of reality. Indeed, in Hal’s very first words, we

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come to see that he is instituting a novel, lean regime that will dominate in Part 2 as he comes closer to ascending the throne. Hal’s power is consolidated to the extent to which he cuts everything and everyone around him down to size. Hal does this, in particular, by measuring everything according to his new trim terms. Everything must be made to serve his utilitarian goal, and some, like Falstaff, serve it precisely by playing the part of the obstacle that must be overcome. From Hal’s very first soliloquy, we learn that he sees his tavern companions as a means to his end. Only by associating with them, at first, will he be able, at last, to establish his own glorious “reformation.”39 Importantly, Hal, like his grandfather, John of Gaunt, employs moral and religious language to establish himself as having an especially virtuous identity. It is no accident that Hal’s “reformation” resembles the “reformation” effected by dieters in late modernity. Hal himself establishes a new modern trim regime—albeit in an early modern form—which will later influence the moralistic understanding of the fat, or “obese,” body. The dieter, like Hal, comes to see her true self as emerging from a fat “before” that threatened to swallow and consume her true identity. Of course, the saying that inside each fat person is a thin person crying to get out suggests that the thin person is being consumed and buried by fat. I have already suggested in my introduction that such a narrative can only come into being with a singular, modern, and teleological sense of time. According to the logic of modern time, events are charted along a line, where they are conceptualized as more or less discrete in nature. Each event can, at most, be seen as causing the next, where the whole is seen as governed by a teleological thrust. Hal thinks in just such reductive, linear terms; he is mercilessly teleological because everyone and every event must fit within the myth of his progress toward becoming the heroic king. Hal’s “reformation” takes place on just such a modern, linear sense of time; as such, he needs certain bodies to embody his “before” so that he can show forth as the glorious and perfect “after.” In this sense, scholarship that makes Falstaff into an atavistic before is partially correct in its assessment. For Hal, Falstaff is an obstruction that is, nonetheless, necessary to help establish his glorious “reformation” that will legitimize his rise to power. Falstaff is a target for Hal precisely because he refuses to be governed by Hal’s reductive, utilitarian logic. Throughout, Hal seeks to assert his superiority over Falstaff by defining him according to his rigid, trim standard. Shakespeare always offers an alternative to such a standard in the words and actions of Falstaff and his tavern companions. Falstaff offers a more capacious, multitudinous way of being, a fat way of being, so to speak. In response to Hal’s trim body and trim time, Falstaff offers a fat body and fat time, where that fatness is characterized by a more


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capacious embrace of a multitudinous reality. Falstaff seems to open up possibilities that Hal attempts to and wants to close off. Where Hal would have us all believe that there is a singular reality to which we must bow down, Falstaff insists that there are multiple realities that we, like poets, create. Their repartee exposes the trimness of the modern representational regime. Hal’s first soliloquy in Part 1 already indicates how he would make Falstaff into an obstruction. His true identity will show forth once he follows a linear progress that requires him to reject the more capacious, multitudinous understanding of reality promoted by Falstaff. He wants to become the “after” to the “before”; he wants to move beyond or rise above the fat self. In this first soliloquy, Hal comes across as a coldhearted Machiavel, as critics from Bradley to William Empson to Stephen Greenblatt have noted (even if they have also often argued that it is a coldheartedness embraced, in part, by Shakespeare).40 Empson particularly considers this soliloquy as one that “cannot have been written without bitterness against the prince.”41 These scholars see the same speech as revealing that Hal is a social climber—indeed, much like one of the new civilized elite that came to power with the Tudors. Not surprisingly, the soliloquy gives rise to the values of the new civilized elite; more particularly, it underscores the development of the bodily aesthetic that we discussed in our last chapter. The thin body now can itself be used to guarantee the superior virtue and self-restraint of the new elite. Hal can assert his privilege as unmarked by making Falstaff play the part of the obstruction. Hal must rise above that which weighs him down and shine forth through that which temporarily sullies him. As this suggests, Falstaff ’s fat body plays a central role in defining what Hal wants to be. Without Falstaff to weigh him down or to darken him, Hal could not appear to be light. For Hal to make his point, he focuses on the fat body as that which obstructs progress; thus, it must be overcome for the triumphal destiny of Hal and England to be achieved. Progress moves toward a condition characterized by lightness, if not disembodiment. This final state of disembodiment, one in which the individual proves to have superior and virtuous control over his body, is only achieved as Hal moves beyond, rises above, or breaks free from Falstaff. Hal manipulates the type of moralistic attitude toward grotesque bodily phenomenon apparent in the premodern Piers Plowman, but now the individual fat body itself is seen as that which has the power to pollute all it touches. It is no accident that the language in Part 1 anticipates the language in Part 2: Hal similarly sees himself as morally compelled to cast off a fat Falstaff, who is conveniently characterized as “[t]he tutor and the feeder of my riots.”42 By banishing Falstaff,

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Hal sees himself as progressing because he casts off his “former self ” or the “thing I was.”43 In both cases, the true self shows forth as Hal performs his maturation or “reformation” in which he rises above a Falstaff that is associated with baseness, impure materiality, and overindulgence. This morally charged language, of course, remains potent in current diet discourse. Indeed, Hal even becomes a diet counselor of sorts in Part 2 when he asks Falstaff to reform himself where such reform requires him to “[m]ake less thy self.”44 The similarity is no accident since Hal already participates in an antifat discourse in which he is seen as the glorious “after” to the extent to which the fat Falstaff is seen as the “before.” His trim body establishes him as light, virtuous, and almost presumptively disembodied as long as Falstaff is forced to embody the opposite. Importantly, Hal also characterizes Falstaff as matter that is especially weighed down and inert when he calls Falstaff “gross as a mountain,” “clay-brained guts,” or a “huge hill of flesh,” to offer three examples.45 In all these cases, Falstaff is imagined as that which weighs him down and thus implicitly as that from which Hal will have to extricate himself if he wants his true civilized self to appear. In his soliloquy, Hal uses a similar cluster of associations to describe his glorious “reformation.” To take the central image, Hal promises, Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.46

Once again, we see how Hal associates himself with movement, here with the movement of the sun up and out of the clouds. He conceptualizes himself as obstructed or rather “smothered” and “strangled” by that which is “base.” Such imagery recalls the moralistic imagery used to characterize fat bodies by those committed to a civilized bodily aesthetic. The fat body is seen as that which refuses to adhere to the sharply demarcated, individualized body. Thus, characters from Eleanor to Falstaff to the Fat Bishop are associated with grease. In a related cluster of images, these bodies are associated with grotesque bodily phenomena characterized by an active amorphousness. They are associated with piss as well as vapors or farts. The fat body is repeatedly described as that which is enormously foggy in that it resists demarcated bodily boundaries. In the next chapter, we will see how Spalato, the historical figure represented by the Fat


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Bishop in Middleton’s A Game at Chess, is characterized as an ignis fatuus that threatens to smother and contaminate the true light of the Church of England. Hal draws on such moralistic associations in his characterization of Falstaff because he wants to establish himself as the one with superior virtue. Associated with the sun, with divinity, and with lightness, Hal sees himself as threatened with the darkness, the sinfulness, and the weight of Falstaff and his brood. Hal is threatened with pollution from an amorphous entity that resembles in every way the fat body as it is beginning to be understood in the period.47 The soliloquy as a whole tells us that Hal needs Falstaff if he is to assert his own virtuous bodily self-restraint. Elsewhere it becomes even more clear that Hal wants to make Falstaff embody all that obstructs his “reformation.” He does so by making Falstaff all that obstructs the forward progress, where that progress is understood according to a literal sense of reality and a modern sense of time. Hal attempts to do exactly this in the very first lines of 1 Henry IV. Hal attempts to make Falstaff into a figure who opposes or, even Saturnlike, consumes modern “time.” Shakespeare makes it clear that Hal is unable to force Falstaff to play this part in his morality tale because the fat-witted Falstaff confounds attempts to impose on him a singular, leanwitted reality. If Hal thinks of a singular time that is linear and teleological, Falstaff speaks and acts in ways that resist any such trim reckoning. Unlike his literal-minded friend, Falstaff embraces paradox, employs polyvalent tropes, and spins out hypotactic subjunctive constructions in a way that inevitably defies and, yes, outwits his friend. At the same time, Falstaff masterfully employs language in a way that exposes to view Hal’s operations of power; that is, he uses language that shows that Hal needs to insist on this trim view of reality if he is to consolidate his power. Hal cannot “win” in give-and-take conversation with Falstaff. He can only ultimately “win,” we find, when he uses violence in an institutional form as he will at the end of 2 Henry IV. Hal will need the lawmen to silence Falstaff and finally to banish him if he is to establish his reformation publicly. The precocious Hal refuses to embrace Falstaff ’s fat-wit, not because he cannot, but because he understands all too well that his power is secured through the literal-minded, linear sense of time he promotes throughout. In the very first speech in the play, Hal seeks to construct Falstaff as that which obstructs the forward thrust of a reductive, modern sense of time. Falstaff counters Hal’s trim reckoning with his very different fatwitted aesthetic, one that proves, ultimately, more agile and more responsively humane. Hal is lean witted insofar as he requires everything and everyone to bend to his reductively literal, linear sense of time, whereas

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Falstaff is fat witted insofar as he embraces multiple times and multiple realities. Notably, only Hal seeks to impose on others’ bodies a singular essentialist meaning. Hal is desperate to do so because he needs the bodies of others, especially the body of Falstaff, to play their part in securing his own privilege. The scene begins: FALSTAFF Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad? PRINCE Though art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. FALSTAFF Indeed you come near me now, Hal, for we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not by Phoebus, he, “that wand’ring knight so fair”. . . .48

From the beginning, Shakespeare makes it clear that the concept of “fat” is of central importance to Hal. We look on as Hal constructs his version of the term and, as such, we are always aware of alternative constructions, especially those offered by Falstaff himself. To Hal, his fat friend is an obstacle to the forward thrust of a linear sense of time. He seizes upon Falstaff ’s simple question, what time is it?, to make this rather dogmatic and singular point. Falstaff has nothing to do with the “time of the day,” Hal essentially insists, because Falstaff embodies all that resists, opposes, and even undoes a linear sense of time. Hal thinks here in the same linear terms that are evident in the reformation soliloquy considered above. He understands all too well that he needs the fat body of Falstaff to play the “before” so that he can establish himself as the superior and virtuous “after.” From the beginning, Shakespeare exposes Hal’s constructions as trim, and thus he suggests through Falstaff an alternative “fat” way of being. Shakespeare does this as he draws on the multiple and complex ways “fat” was understood in this period. Writing in the early modern period, Shakespeare is still aware of the positive way in which fat could be understood. The civilized elite established their self-discipline and self-control in part because they were reacting against a body aesthetic pervasive under feudalism. Even though this feudal aesthetic existed in the distant past, it was still, 1 Henry IV demonstrates, alive in the minds of many, and certainly to those who recognize in Falstaff the historical John Oldcastle. At the very least, it remained alive and well in biblical representations of God,


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who acted with a feudal largesse toward his people. In fact, precisely because this model remained so potent, the civilized elite such as Hal had to make every effort to discredit it. Hal does precisely this throughout Part 1 and 2 of the Henry IV plays. The positive significance of “fat,” particularly in its religious connotations, undoubtedly resonated much more with Shakespeare’s early modern audience than they do for us late moderns. Because of this, Shakespeare could draw on such significance to critique Hal’s new bodily aesthetic. Shakespeare insists on the multiplicity of meanings that can attach to “fat” and “lean” in the very first dialogue. The term “fat-witted” especially calls attention to the very new ways in which the civilized elite in the form of Hal are trying to understand “fat.” Those who understand that fat can be a sign of largesse would be more aware of how Hal seeks to usurp that term in order to establish his own virtuous superiority. Hal uses “fat-witted” to suggest that Falstaff is especially dim witted because he cannot comprehend the more sophisticated, new modern sense of time. Indeed, Falstaff is fat witted to the extent to which he refuses to be governed by such a narrow and singular sense of time. Because the term continues to have positive significance, many in the audience could respond to the epithet as suggesting that Falstaff generously bestows his rhetorical largesse on others. To such people, the tropical use of the term “fat-witted” would come to represent a certain rhetorical and poetic largesse on Falstaff ’s part, manifest in the multiple, and even conflicting, ways he can employ language. His mind is characterized by largesse, beneficence, and, I would add, agility. In using the term “fat-witted” here, Shakespeare encourages the audience to understand the term in multiple ways. Thus, he encourages us to think in a more fat-witted way where words, objects, and characters do not have a singular, reductive meaning. Shakespeare makes much this same point when he insists that “lean” and “lean-witted” have a singular, literal, and reductive meaning that is far from positive. From the perspective of the older feudal model of status, the lean body is often the mean body and thus one unlikely to bestow benevolence on the underclass. Shakespeare can focus on the lean bodies of the Gaunt line in Parts 1 and 2 in order to comment on their relationship to the underclasses. All who surround the crown and, more importantly, all who execute the authority of the king seem especially lean. They are also notably interchangeable and impersonal, as late modern bureaucrats have come to be. Surrounding Hal is his lean brother John and his lean friend Poins. In 2 Henry IV, as Hal takes power, he is surrounded by lean lawmen who solidify his authority in no small measure by containing and controlling the fat-witted Falstaff and

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his unruly companions. Their leanness is a sign that they will not bestow on their subjects beneficence. More insidiously, it is a sign that they will systematically prey upon their subjects so that they become mere “food for powder.” The terms “fat-witted” and “lean-witted” also remind the audience that Hal is haunted by a history of usurpation evident in their lean bodies. In particular, their leanness is, in part, a reflection of their usurped status. When Shakespeare shows Hal calling Falstaff “fat-witted” in his very first speech, he recalls this history that haunts the play. In particular, it recalls a strategy of the Gaunt line to establish their legitimacy by promoting a new civilized bodily aesthetic. More specifically, Hal’s words recall the moment in Richard II when the soon-to-be-usurped king, Richard II, passes judgment on John of Gaunt. John of Gaunt has just delivered his deathbed prophecy of the fall of Richard II. The authority of his words comes in no small measure from his own aged, dying, and lean body. John of Gaunt refers first to the “tedious fast” that made him gaunt, only later to describe the “strict fast” he suffered when Richard II exiled Gaunt’s son, Bolingbroke, from court.49 His words recall the importance that fasting had in this period for establishing the individual or religious group, whether conforming or nonconforming (puritans), as the truly virtuous one. Gaunt gives voice to the way in the period that the lean body was seen as the implicitly virtuous one; thus, he insists, “Within me Grief hath kept a tedious fast, / And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt?”50 He gives himself moral authority in no small measure by focusing on his gauntness; as such, the bodily style which privileges the thin body is shown by Shakespeare to be related to the group of arrivistes that usurp authority from others. Indeed, this bodily style serves to consolidate their newly achieved power. Hal is playing on the same bodily style when he dismisses his friend with the word “fat-witted.” The term recalls a very different aesthetic that haunts the play. The audience member, then, is made to see the multiple ways in which fat and thin can be understood, even as she is made to see how the new aesthetic serves the important purpose of attempting to secure the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line. After hearing John of Gaunt’s prophecy, Richard II exclaims, “A lunatic lean-witted fool, / Presuming on an ague’s privilege!”51 Richard gives voice to a feudal aesthetic in which the “lean-witted” is the one who does not have resources to bestow on others. From his perspective, it is presumably better to be “fat-witted.” At the same time, Richard’s words call attention to the way that such a regime of civilité serves the purpose of consolidating the power of a small group of arrivistes. John of Gaunt, after all, is asserting “ague’s privilege” in which his body in part is seen as showing forth his superior penitential discipline.


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In playing with these two opposing meanings, Shakespeare works against those who want to naturalize a single way of understanding the fat or thin body as having any essential meaning in and of itself. This, in turn, undermines the way in which Hal wants to use the thinness of his body and the fatness of Falstaff ’s body to assert his own innate superiority. In his heavy-handed “play,” Hal attempts to define Falstaff as the one who has nothing to do with “time of the day,” and, in so doing, he arrogates to himself the power to act as arbiter of such things. Throughout, Hal also insists that he is exempt from the same sins. That is, he is presumably not idle like his fat comrade, perhaps to the degree to which he asserts his right to judge Falstaff. No matter how much Hal dallies in the tavern and spends his time in their murky, nighttime activities, Hal claims to be immune to the extent to which he presumably understands and operates according to the “time of the day.” Indeed, he uses the “time of the day” to measure, interrogate, and condemn Falstaff ’s actions. As such, Falstaff is made into an obstruction of progress, even as Hal is associated with just such progress. Hal, after all, is the one who takes pains to chart Falstaff ’s tasks along a simple chronology of the day and thus to measure his actions according to a strict account of chronological time. Falstaff, Hal tells us, unbuttons himself “after supper” and, even more precisely, sleeps on benches “after noon.” Already, the thrust of his speech suggests that Falstaff will have to be contained, controlled, and finally banished if the much-hoped-for progress is to occur. Indeed, Hal employs metaphors that suggest that Falstaff ’s actions are insidiously destructive of progress. Falstaff threatens to devour this narrowly conceived, linear time itself. The cluster of associations Hal employs are recognizable today in the way that the fat body is imagined as an obstruction. This similarity is no accident, however, since Hal is giving voice to what is a modern representational regime in its earliest manifestations. The body of the fat person is associated with a voracious appetite that is conceptualized as essentially dangerous in and of itself. Hal describes Falstaff as devouring time itself as if “hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons.” This early image encapsulates the role that Hal consistently assigns Falstaff. Falstaff becomes for Hal an emblem of overconsumption and, as the use of “capons” suggests, the food associated with indulgent prelates, one particularly associated with the overindulgence of luxury.52 Falstaff, much like the Fat Bishop, threatens to devour everything he approaches, including Hal himself. Falstaff is compared to Saturn, famous, of course, for devouring his sons, and thus Hal suggests that Falstaff may even devour his “son,” Hal. From the perspective of a teleological sense of time used to promote Hal’s utilitarian goals, Falstaff embodies all that obstructs the much-desired progress.

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Shakespeare underscores the meanness in Hal’s new regime by drawing attention to how Hal marks and stigmatizes Falstaff. Shakespeare calls Hal’s regime into question by making it clear that it depends on an antifat discourse that is new with modernity. The audience, furthermore, is always aware that his regime is a new one because Shakespeare plays with the multiple meanings that “fat” and “lean” have in the period. The fat-witted Falstaff in his response refuses to accept the trim terms that Hal would impose on him. In the opening scene, he responds to the literalness of his friend with a more playful, fat-witted use of language that encourages us to embrace multiple senses of time. He resists Hal’s obsession with “time of the day” by redefining its meaning. Falstaff focuses on night rather than day, even as he offers a very different way of telling time generally. That is, they can “go by” or “tell time by” the “moon and the seven stars.”53 Falstaff counters Hal’s own literal sense of time by focusing on the multiple, poetic ways in which the sun can be understood and experienced. The sun need not merely be experienced as a sign of divinity or as a sign of a singular, literal sense of time; it can also be experienced as being the meandering, knightly, mythological figure of Phoebus. Falstaff ’s Phoebus is a knight from chivalric romance, the “wand’ring knight so fair,” who refuses to follow a single, linear path. Falstaff draws on the genre of romance, itself associated with the medieval and feudal, to offer an alternative to Hal’s new regime. The knight of such genre takes an erratic path, often finding his most important adventures when he has lost his way. Falstaff expressly rejects any sense of reality or time as consisting of a singular, linear path that can be easily charted and known. He, instead, embraces a sense of reality that is more capacious because it requires us to think in multiple ways. Falstaff, unlike Hal, seems to embrace paradox as well; thus, for him, the sun can simultaneously run its straight course and “meander.” Even as Hal attempts to assert his distinction from Falstaff, Falstaff insists that they are two of the same kind. He tells Hal, then, “[Y]ou come near me now,” in a way that brings them together, even as he reminds Hal that he too has participated in their nighttime activities. As Falstaff explains, “[W]e that take purses go by the moon and seven stars.” All of this is designed to work against Hal’s effort to assert his superiority to and distinctiveness from Falstaff. We are both sinners, Falstaff, in essence, says. Hal can only temporarily succeed in making Falstaff play the part he wants him to when he uses force of some type. Of course, he will do exactly this at the end of 2 Henry IV, but already, in Part 1, Hal manipulates situations so that Falstaff becomes an almost literal obstacle that must be overcome. In the madcap adventure at Gadshill, the robbery


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seems designed by Hal and Poins to make Falstaff the type of obstruction Hal needs him to be. Hal would be associated with forward movement to the extent to which Falstaff is associated with sloth and inertia. What they enact with their bodies is paralleled in what they try to do with their words: that is, they try to “put [him] down” by catching him in a lie. In both cases, Hal attempts to make Falstaff conform to a singular, reductively literal view of reality. When Poins takes Falstaff ’s horse away, Falstaff is rendered more or less inert.54 As Falstaff huffs and puffs, he calls attention to his inability to move and certainly to progress: “Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me, and the stony-hearted villains know it well enough.”55 Falstaff understands that Poins and Hal want to render him more completely inert. Hal clearly enjoys watching Falstaff in physical distress. When Falstaff demands of him, “Give me my horse, you rogues!”56 Hal responds by urging him to become even more inert: “Peace, ye fat-guts. Lie down, lay thine ear close to the ground and list if thou canst hear the tread of travellers.”57 Hal here devises a whole morality tale of sorts that depends on the visual and spatial relations of his own body in relationship to Falstaff ’s. Hal’s body will be characterized by its lightness, agility, and motion to the extent to which the fat body of Falstaff is characterized by its weight, ponderousness, and inertia. Indeed, throughout 1 Henry IV, Hal repeatedly calls attention to the difficulty his friend has in walking. Later, he will attempt to extend his morality tale when he assigns Falstaff to a charge of foot. As he explains, “I’ll procure this fat rogue a charge of foot, and I know his death will be a march of twelvescore.”58 All of his joking has the serious effect of making Falstaff quite literally into an obstruction to Hal’s progress. Perhaps, Hal needs to rely on such socially engineered moments because he cannot in conversation prove equally light and deft. Hal’s literal way of thinking is expressly related to his bodily style throughout. Thus, Shakespeare shows him employing the same antifat discourse we have already examined at exactly the moment he is about to catch Falstaff in a lie about the Gadshill robbery. Hal focuses especially on Falstaff ’s “gross” body.59 Indeed, as Hal is certain he has caught him, he announces, “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”60 All of this focuses on the inert nature of his body, even as it focuses on the way in which his fat body refuses containment. He employs, then, the language surrounding the foggy fat body that, in its refusal to contain itself, is seen as “open.” Your lies, Hal says, are as easy to read as your body is. Both betray you. Hal announces triumphantly, “Mark now how a plain tale shall put you down,” even as he characterizes himself throughout as morally compelled to expose the

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truth about Falstaff.61 Shakespeare makes Hal seem throughout like a literal-minded realist obsessed to tell the (supposedly singular) truth and to expose all else as mere “lies.” By the logic of his soliloquy, Hal’s integrity is established to the extent to which he insists that his fat comrade is characterized by a lack of integrity. Again, such characterizations tell us more about Hal than they tell us about Falstaff. Hal is obsessed with drawing sharp distinctions between himself and his friend by making his friend conform to his singular reality. Thus, he professes, “I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin. This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh.”62 Hal would assert his distinction from and superiority to Falstaff. Using the third person, Hal applies to Falstaff a series of images that all expose his immobility. In the case of “horse-back-breaker,” for example, Hal focuses on how Falstaff ’s bulk makes it impossible for him even to use the assistance of a horse to move forward. In calling him a “huge hill of flesh,” Hal focuses on the way that Falstaff ’s flesh, like the earth itself, cannot be moved. Hal uses such imagery to suggest that he has uncovered a truth about Falstaff: namely, that he is a lump of flesh— weak, inert, and heavy. Falstaff is not so easily trapped, so easily dwindled, the scene suggests, because he is exceptionally fat witted. A master in employing multiple tropes and styles, Falstaff proves to understand Hal quite well. That is, he understands that Hal wants to trap him by making him into an emblem of excess and sinfulness. He also understands that Hal does so because he wants to secure his own privilege as the one who is presumptively exempt from sin, as he is presumptively exempt from embodiment. The aesthetic Hal would impose on Falstaff, he understands, serves to legitimize his authority, at Falstaff ’s expense. Falstaff wins in this instance by telling a “lie” that he knows Hal must corroborate. In telling this lie, nonetheless, he forces Hal to admit that he is not so pure and virtuous as he claims to be. In this, he attempts to make Hal think in other than his lean-witted way. Thus, Falstaff argues that he ran away from the disguised Prince because “instinct” told him that Hal was a “true prince.”63 As he repeats the words “true prince” three times, Falstaff in essence challenges Hal to live up to his strict literal way of thinking.64 You, who are obsessed with truth, can easily expose me as a liar, but you have to be willing to expose yourself as a liar too, Falstaff seems to tell Hal. He must admit to himself and to others in a public declaration that he is descended from a line that usurped the throne; thus, he is not the “true prince” he wants to be. Where Hal attempts to pin Falstaff down to his own literal truth, Falstaff offers Hal a useful “lie.” In so doing, Falstaff also urges Hal to see the way that he is implicated in sin, and selective in his truth telling. No matter


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how much he pretends to be exempt from sin, to be truthful and whole, Hal is as “gross,” “open,” and “palpable” as the fat Falstaff. If there is a “singular” truth, then there are points where it is useful to depart from such “plain tale[s],” particularly when they “put down” people and ideas that are most dear to the speaker. Such exchanges serve to teach the audience as well an alternative to the trim regime promoted by Hal. According to a fat-witted view, no body, whether fat or thin, has a singular essential meaning. Each body, instead, can be constructed in different ways depending on the language employed. In making this point, the audience is asked to take responsibility for particular constructions. More particularly, the audience, at least the audience not entirely committed to the new trim regime of civilité, is encouraged to think in ways that are less predatory, less exploitative than those encouraged by Hal. III. Trim Reckoning In 2 Henry IV As mentioned earlier, the bodily aesthetic promoted by the thin Hal is already criticized in 1 Henry IV. 2 Henry IV strengthens this critique as it reconsiders, revises, and finally criticizes the bodily aesthetic promoted by Hal in 1 Henry IV. In making this point, I am foregrounding the structural problem of the Henry IV plays and insisting that they do not form an unproblematic sequence, as had once been argued. Part 2, instead, goes over the same ground as Part 1 and, in so doing, calls attention to the meanness of the bodily style that Hal attempts to impose on other bodies, especially Falstaff ’s fat body. Paul Yachnin describes the relationship between the plays aptly as “revisionist in that the second play constitutes a critique— even an undoing—of the first.”65 The mood darkens in Part 2: the emaciated bodies of the lawmen dominate and proliferate, as if to make the point that Hal’s trim regime now reigns. Shakespeare intensifies his criticism of this regime by making us consider the effect it has on the weakest members of society. To the poor and the underclasses, this regime, which sees itself as objectively just and routinely fair, proves to be very trim, indeed. In Part 2, the aesthetic of the civilized elite is viewed through the perspective of the underclass and poor. In offering this perspective, Shakespeare makes us understand how the ideal of civilité masks a predatory hunger directed at the bodies of the weakest in society. This new class preys upon the bodies of the poor and underclass, who are needed to carry out their grand military plans. In a similar way, their new bodily aesthetic compels them to seek to contain and control the bodies of the poor and underclass, who are imagined to be innately unruly. As the Hostess and Doll Tearsheet are carried away by the emaciated beadles to

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“justice,” they pass judgment on this new regime by focusing on its new lean aesthetic. They call one of its henchmen, appropriately enough, a “starved bloodhound.”66 With the new penitential regime of King Henry V, such people can expect a rigid and unyielding execution of justice that promises to sniff out their every supposed transgression. At such moments, we are made to see how this new regime is unrelenting and merciless, especially to the lower classes that it needs to execute its will. From the new perspective of civilité, those who are undisciplined or uncivilized will henceforth have to be contained and controlled by the mean force of the law. Shakespeare exposes Hal’s new regime as lean and mean by focusing our attention on the conspicuously emaciated bodies of those who implement its policy. Shakespeare uses the older, feudal regime to critique the new values of civilité. He does so, not so much to recommend a return to an idealized past or to feudal power relations, but to expose the predatory nature of the new regime. Who will find this new regime more civilized, more just, and more measured? Who will find it unrelenting and fierce in its exactness? This early modern aesthetic appeals, Shakespeare suggests, primarily to members of the civilized elite. The lower classes will find it much less appealing, precisely because they (often) understand the way that their bodies are dependent on others. Feudal terms seem more appealing to them simply because they suggest that their supposed superiors might treat them with leniency or perhaps even largesse. To return to 2 Henry IV, the lower classes find little in Hal’s early modern regime of trim reckoning that appeals to them and much that frightens them. They respond to the lean bodies of the lawmen with special suspicion; figures such as the beadles and Justice Shallow will only, they fear, prey upon them. These henchmen are particularly frightening because they make themselves into mere instruments of power and thus quite literally into “lean, mean, fighting machines,” to borrow a colloquial phrase from today. To the lower classes, the lean body is the mean body, the one that in its leanness promises to devour them. The emaciated figures of the lawmen that proliferate and dominate in 2 Henry IV promise that they will impose upon them a trim and exacting form of justice. Justice Shallow, a self-serving, crude, and corrupt lawman, exposes the way that the law often serves simply as an inhuman instrument to cudgel the poor and underprivileged. Because he only cares about profits, losses, and his own political advancement, Shallow has made himself into a mere instrument of power. Falstaff makes precisely this point when he calls him simply, “Vice’s dagger.”67 Falstaff aptly chooses a term from morality plays in which the Vice character carried around a “dagger” or club used to beat other characters to the amusement


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of the crowd. Shallow is just such a dehumanized instrument of power, Falstaff understands, who beats those unfortunate enough to be underneath him. This exacting regime has little to offer the likes of the Hostess except reduced profits if she is, for example, to be made to obey the strict letter of the law and not sell meat during Lent.68 From the first scene in which Falstaff appears, Shakespeare begins to expose the predatory nature of this regime of trim reckoning. It will impose its rigid and impersonal sense of justice on everything and everyone under its power. No longer will transactions be allowed to follow the messier, give-and-take characteristic of the tavern world; instead, they will have to operate by a strict and exacting standard. Loans will require strict security, as a pledge is considered of no consequence. Overall, then, “quick wit [is] wasted in giving reckonings.”69 Such a regime is obsessed with balancing its books, and no obligation supposedly remains between humans once the debt is paid. The tavern world works on a less strict accounting; its debts and obligations are never fully accounted for or paid in full. Falstaff represents this older model of relationships that is at odds with the new regime. We listen with some sense of irony when Falstaff asks the thin Lord Chief Justice: “I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing.”70 Falstaff appeals to a very different way of measuring and assessing bodies, where they are not to be called to an exacting, trim standard imposed externally. From act 1, scene 2 of 2 Henry IV, we sense that Falstaff will have to be reduced and trimmed if he is to conform to this new lean regime. Shakespeare draws upon these two very different bodily aesthetics— the older feudal one embodied in part by Falstaff and the new civilized one embodied by the trim Hal. 2 Henry IV uses the former to comment upon and critique the latter. Shakespeare does not mean us to return to the bygone feudal times, but he does mean us to feel the way that the former can promote certain intimate relationships precluded by the new ideal of civilité. Part 2 makes us understand that the virtuous regime that Hal wants to install is to many predatory, cruel, and heartless. Shakespeare underscores the cruelty of Hal’s emerging regime by showing how it only establishes itself by suppressing the type of beneficence that was the ideal under the older feudal model of elite status. Only one scholar has focused on body size at all in the plays, and he has focused particularly on the way that Shakespeare foregrounds this historical shift. As Jonathan Goldberg explains, “Hal’s new regime of trim reckonings (the predations of the engrossing arriviste that write themselves as civilized restraint) would cut the body down to size; it is mobilized against decaying aristocratic corpulence— the fat body that will come to be the body of the malnourished poor—and

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the woman’s body.”71 At the center of this new representational regime lies a negotiation of power in which the bodies of the uncivilized, itself an amorphous group, are used to further the aims of the thin, civilized elite, even as the thin establish themselves as virtuous, detached, and supremely self-disciplined. In the older, feudal representational regime, the fat body of the older feudal lord especially can be a mark of his fat, or great, status. Such positive significance remains alive and well into the early modern period. Words such as “portly,” “great,” or “fat” retain this significance so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether they refer to corpulence, status, or both. In addition, insofar as the words continue to refer to a great status, they can have a positive valence; they suggest that the feudal lord will render his largesse on others. Shakespeare, therefore, can play with the multiple and sometimes ambiguous way that these terms can be understood. Indeed, he could only play with the multiple meanings of the words “lean-witted” and “fat-witted,” because they continue to have a variety of meanings, including the older feudal one of status shown forth in body size. Even when we see “fat” redefined from its feudal meaning, as we do when Hal uses “fat-witted” as a supposed criticism of Falstaff, the word continues to carry, for many in the audience, a positive valence from this earlier feudal context of fatness. Many in the audience, then, would respond by both understanding the way in which Hal wants to use the word and understanding Falstaff as fat witted in a very different, feudal sense. To turn to another example, the competing royal families criticize Hal’s father, Henry Bolingbroke, for being inappropriately “portly”, where “portly” suggests multiple meanings. In Part 1, the Earl of Worcester describes Bolingbroke as having grown “portly” at the expense of others in his family who had equal claim to the throne. He likens him more specifically to a cuckoo bird that “[g]rew by our feeding so great a bulk.”72 In some senses, the word retains its older, feudal sense. It certainly associates Bolingbroke’s status as king with his corpulence. In another sense, the word begins to reverberate in a modern sense precisely because Bolingbroke is seen as usurping his status from others. In this sense, he is inappropriately “portly” because he has grown so at the expense of others. They liken themselves to the small sparrows that helped hatch the “ungentle gull,” the cuckoo, even as Bolingbroke is the gull who grows so big that no one can approach for fear of “swallowing.” The construct “portly” takes on a very different sense when used in this context. Bolingbroke is now seen as inappropriately “portly,” where “portly” means both “great” in status and inappropriately “great” (or fat) in size. Wilson correctly glosses the term “portly” as “stately” and, thus,


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as a word that refers to his status.73 David Scott Kastan offers a gloss, which suggests the way in which the word begins to take on the moralized overtones that we as late modern readers recognize in the way that the obese body is understood. As Kastan explains, “portly” means “majestic, imposing (though with sense of overweight, cf. 5.1.62, linking the King to Falstaff, who calls himself portly at 2.4.410).”74 Though I am not sure how useful it is to use a term such as “overweight” here because it is, after all, a uniquely late modern word, Kastan correctly suggests the extent to which the term “portly” adopts a moral valence, one much more in keeping with the premodern concept of gluttony discussed in chapter 2. Bolingbroke’s fat here is used to suggest that he is an emblem of excess that threatens the established hierarchy. His great body is a sign that he has consumed others. That the Earl of Worcester levels such criticism at Bolingbroke helps us see why it is advantageous to the newly emerging civilized elite to promote a very different bodily aesthetic in which their lean bodies will assure us that they deserve their newly won authority. It will, at the same time, mask their predation, or the way they gain their status at the expense of others. The lower classes, when faced with the new regime of trim reckoning, respond to bodies according to their older feudal meanings. The older regime offers, in particular, a more intimate sort of engagement that is at odds with the more rigid and impersonal forms of trim reckoning that the thin lawmen promise to implement under the soon-to-be-established reign of Henry V. We might remember here how Norbert Elias contrasts the earlier feudal table with the newer, civilized one that emerges in the Renaissance courts. At the feudal dinner table, the lord would serve a large, whole animal, and he would carve the meal and distribute its meat to his guests, including those under his authority.75 By this gesture, a relationship of obligation was created between lord and dependent, in which the dependents received nourishment and largesse through him. His fat body, like the hunk of meat itself, symbolized his beneficence, and his beneficence was (ideally) imparted to the lower classes as well as the nobility. Such a relationship is virtually nullified with the new regime, as feasts are served, instead, to reinforce the relationship between one ruling elite and another. Their feasts were conducted in a more highly orchestrated, disciplined manner. For one, all that is messy and distasteful is removed from the table and placed in the backroom. Rather than displaying a huge chunk of meat, carved for the guests by the lord, smaller, more elaborate fare was distributed among the guests. More than the huge chunk of meat is removed to the backrooms; now, the dependents, conceptualized as uncivilized, are removed from the table in all but the serving function.76 Such changes in behavior suggest that the introduction

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of the new bodily aesthetic might be undesirable to the lower classes. After all, this new regime of trim reckoning no longer extends to them even the most minimal largesse. They are, instead, conceptualized as the uncivilized that need to be contained and controlled. I do not want to be mistaken here as idealizing the older feudal system, nor am I suggesting that lower-class characters want to enter into a relationship of dependence with an aristocratic overlord. Shakespeare can draw on the older meaning ascribed to the fat body to critique the lean regime of his time, represented by Hal, the arriviste. We come to see why parts of the early modern audience, particularly the lower classes, may prefer Falstaff ’s fat body to the lean body of Hal and his law-men. We look on, for example, as Doll Tearsheet and the Hostess are certain that they will receive mercy from the Justice, but we understand that they are unlikely to receive any from him. Certainly, we have already heard the overly exacting Lord Chief Justice, who values “cold consideration,” promise that he will impose a rigid and supposedly impartial law.77 If such a regime promises to impose its rigid standards, however temporarily, on even the sons of the king, little mercy will be forthcoming, surely, to either the tavern women or Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff offers a temporary reprieve to the tavern women when he responds to them through older feudal ways. Lest my reader think that I am sentimentalizing Falstaff, I need to say that I am quite aware, for example, of how he insults Doll in Hal’s presence.78 I realize also that, to our eyes, Falstaff is entering into a relationship of exploitation with the Hostess insofar as his words cancel the debt he owes her. Falstaff is distinguished from Hal even in such manipulations, however, exactly because he involves himself in the lives of these women. Hal prefers either to ignore the women altogether or to treat them with civilized detachment as when he addresses them as “gentlewomen.” Relatedly, Hal pays his bill in full so that he, unlike Falstaff, is never in debt to the Hostess. He has no debt to quit because he refuses ever to have a debt of obligation to anyone, especially to the lower classes. Falstaff operates by a very different, quasifeudal sense of debt and obligation. At the conclusion of 2 Henry IV, even as the new regime of trim reckoning dominates, Falstaff promises, “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,” and later, “Sir, I will be as good as my word.”79 In his transactions with the Hostess, Falstaff similarly focuses on his debt to her but in a way that extends to her much-needed mercy and largesse. We moderns are often too keenly aware of the exploitation of such interchanges because we think that the Hostess needs and values money more than other things, such as divine mercy. When Hal comes on the scene, Falstaff discusses the sins of the two women—Doll Tearsheet


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and the Hostess. He initially criticizes the Hostess for her sin of usury: “For th’other, I owe her money, and whether she be damned for that I know not.”80 When she responds, “No, I warrant you,” Falstaff extends her mercy, “No, I think thou art not, I think thou art quit for that.”81 His response is typically fat witted in that it embraces multiple meanings; thus, he can be taken to say that she is “quit” of her sins and/or that she has quit him of his debt because he will never repay her. Many of us moderns, focused on a rigid sense of monetary profits and losses, are keenly sensitive to the exploitation of the scene. We think that what matters most is that Falstaff cheats her of money. We forget, however, that the Hostess too, perhaps like Falstaff himself, wants to be free from a trim and exacting form of reckoning. In her case, she wants to know that mercy and forgiveness will be extended her. If it is manipulation, it is also manipulation that responds to her own concerns that she not be forced into a strict, inhuman accounting of her every sin. In part, Falstaff can foster very different relationships with the tavern women because he is willing to respond to them through the older feudal expectations. He offers them an alternative to the rigid system of justice that is hardening around them. Later, when Pistol delivers the news in a mock-chivalric language that Doll “[i]s in base durance and contagious prison, / Hal’d thither / By the most mechanical and dirty hand,” Falstaff promises simply, “I will deliver her.”82 In all these ways, Falstaff is set up as the alternative to the new regime, one that offers to the lowerclass figures a form of mercy that they so desperately need, given the way that the new regime promises to prey upon them. Exactly because he operates through an older representational regime, Falstaff can enter into a more responsive and intimate relationship with lower-class figures such as Doll and the Hostess. Symbolically, Falstaff allows himself to be presented as a hefty animal, fit to be served to and to serve himself to others. Where Falstaff is to Doll a “Bartholomew pig,” and thus a feast, the thin men that dominate Part 2 are, instead, thinly embossed figures, often those found on coins.83 Shakespeare calls attention to the conflict between an older form of debt and obligation, represented by the largesse of a Bartholomew pig, and the new form of exacting measurement. Falstaff, in conversation with the Lord Chief Justice, makes a similar point as he insists that he cannot be the Prince’s “ill angel” because “your ill angel [coin] is light.”84 In what follows, he calls attention to his big body, which is seen as explicitly opposed to such a system of currency. If he asks, “I hope that he that looks upon me will take me without weighing,” he also admits that he “cannot go,” or measure up, to his assigned value.85 From the new trim regime, where everything

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must be evaluated according to a single standard, Falstaff is a mere obstruction—the thing that cannot go. Elsewhere, the lean are likened to either embossed figures generally—as when the tavern women call a beadle, “[Y]ou thin man in a censer”—or, more specifically, to the embossed face on a coin.86 Holofernes in Love’s Labor’s Lost is mocked as “[t]he face of a Roman coin, scarce seen.”87 In particular, thin men are repeatedly associated with the embossed face of a coin in a way that associates them with the new regime of trim reckoning. Falstaff mocks Hal’s beardless face by calling it a “face-royal,” or the royal face on a coin.88 The thin figures are associated with a rigid centralized system of weights and measures, itself of a fairly recent introduction. In conversation with Doll, Falstaff describes the relationship between Hal and Poins through a similar set of associations. Notably, their bond, as Falstaff sees it, is characterized by their identical (light) weight. As such, Falstaff calls attention to the courtly fashion for thin bodies and for the way that such an aesthetic bonds the courtly elite together. Doll asks Falstaff to explain what bonds the two, offering the suggestion that “[t]hey say Poins has a good wit.”89 When Falstaff dismisses this statement by explaining that “there’s no more conceit in him than is in a mallet,” Doll asks directly, “Why does the Prince love him so, then?”90 Significantly, Doll understands the value of a fat-witted fellow, but not of a thin-witted or for that matter thin-bodied one. In response, Falstaff describes for Doll the very foreign values of the court that operate by a civilized aesthetic. He explains their relationship as one that consists largely of a shared bodily fashion. Falstaff explains that Poins and Hal are brought together “[b]ecause their legs are both of a bigness,” a point Falstaff returns to later when he describes Poins as wearing “his boots very smooth like unto the sign of the Leg.”91 In his remarks, he suggests that the court has a certain fashion for the lean body, displayed especially in the leg. Falstaff describes this bond in a way that underscores its exacting, trim standard. Thus, he describes them as characterized by the same avoirdupois—the system of weights and measures used in trade. Such a system had been only recently standardized by order of Henry VIII, and thus, it is a fairly recent, modern invention to an Elizabethan audience, much like the thin body style Hal and Poins use to assert their power and status. In his specification that the two share a “weak mind and an able body,” Falstaff insists that the new regime of trim reckoning is antagonistic to the type of fat-wit that Falstaff employs throughout the Henry IV plays. Such a regime, Falstaff explains, cannot have the type of fat-wit that Falstaff employs, because it wants only bodies that conform themselves to a strict, singular, and exacting standard. As Falstaff explains, they have affection for each other because they both show forth their attachment


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to the new bodily aesthetics in their similarly lean bodies: “for the Prince himself is such another, the weight of a hair will turn the scales between their avoirdupois.”92 The use of “avoirdupois” here, from a character who elsewhere exclaims, “I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing,” is telling.93 Falstaff understands that the new regime is one that will require overly strict weighing, accounting, and reckoning, and he associates all of these qualities with the new bodily fashion that privileges the thin body. Such a system offers little for the likes of the Falstaffs, Dolls, and Hostesses of the world. Falstaff can use his fat body to appeal to the lower classes. Within the world of the tavern, he can even act according to a chivalric ideal. Indeed, Falstaff takes out his sword and fights off Pistol when he threatens to punish Doll by tearing her ruff, an act of humiliation usually performed on prostitutes. Doll responds by calling Falstaff affectionately, her “little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig.”94 The term recalls the many derogatory terms that Hal tried to impose on Falstaff in 1 Henry IV; certainly, Doll, like Hal, likens Falstaff to a huge chunk of meat. That Doll responds to the image in a much different way suggests the degree to which the tavern world operates by very different values. Doll understands Falstaff ’s fat body through an older feudal sense in which its fatness is a sign of his beneficence toward her, and Falstaff for his part responds in just this way when he offers to bestow on her a kirtle of any fabric she likes.95 Although Doll and Falstaff initially respond to each other through feudal patterns, they ultimately cultivate a more reciprocal, give-and-take relationship. In what follows, they speak more frankly and openly to each other than do any two other people in the play. She feels comfortable enough with Falstaff to urge him to attend to his final reckoning by asking, “[W]hen wilt thou leave fighting a-days, and foining a-nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?”96 Falstaff responds in kind, initially urging her to stop speaking like a “death’s-head” but then subsequently worrying that “[t]hou’t forget me when I am gone.”97 Both characters are profoundly concerned about each other, perhaps precisely because they do not ascribe to the ideal of bodily autonomy that lies at the heart of the new ideal of civilité. Falstaff ’s treatment of Doll differs greatly from Hal’s. Hal treats her with a hypocritical ideal of civilité by addressing her as “gentlewoman” or even “honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman.”98 Such courtesies are condescension on the part of Hal that really insist on the essential difference between them. Certainly, for all his supposedly gentle treatment, Hal will never allow himself to become involved in her lowly life as Falstaff does. Falstaff draws on an older set of values when he mocks and even ridicules lean figures such as Justice Shallow and even Sir John of

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Lancaster for their underlying meanness. Clearly, such thin figures are weak, at best, and, at worst, mean. Thinness in general, including the love of “thin drink” and the prevalence of “thin” blood, is characteristic of the new regime, Falstaff implies. Of course, Falstaff holds out the belief to the bitter end that Hal is different from these other lean fellows—that he will prove to be fat or benevolent in the end. Sir John of Lancaster, a “sober-blooded boy,” comes to represent the thinness and meanness of the new Gaunt regime.99 He is especially trim in the way that he follows an exact and literal reckoning. Nothing better exemplifies this than Sir John’s cold, calculated negotiations with the rebels. He can only be said to follow the letter of the law, certainly not the spirit, when he promises to redress all their grievances but subsequently arrests them and finally executes them for treason.100 To their complaints, “Will you break your faith,” Lancaster answers tellingly, “I pawn’d thee none.”101 Lancaster uses language that focuses attention on a strict, exact accounting: because he has given them no security, they can make no claim on the debt. In this, John calls attention to the type of trim reckoning that will characterize the new Lancastrian regime. Falstaff ’s critique of Sir John really is a critique of the entire regime, and thus, even though he is not yet aware of it, a critique of the future regime of Henry V. The two Sir Johns represent too very different regimes with very different bodily aesthetics. Where Sir John of Lancaster is characterized by his love of “thin drink” as he is, I would add, by his thin body, Falstaff is characterized by his love of fat drink and his fat body.102 Falstaff interprets John through an older set of values where thinness and a small appetite are signs of inherent meanness. A great man, Falstaff assumes, should have a great appetite. As Falstaff explains, “There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish meals, that they fall to a kind of male green-sickness; and then when they marry they get wenches.”103 Falstaff insists that Sir John of Lancaster is characterized by an exceptionally cool and, we could add, sterile constitution. He suffers under “green sickness,” which was commonly associated with unmarried women who fasted too much.104 Shakespeare uses Falstaff to give voice to an alternative aesthetic in which thinness is a sign of a weak constitution and even weak character. We are less likely to see this in late modernity precisely because we assume that Falstaff is himself the very emblem of excess. Because of this assumption, we do not appreciate the extent to which the new aesthetic that values thinness is itself critiqued by Shakespeare as problematic. In the world of Part 2, Falstaff comes to embody a very different aesthetic and thus set of values. In a scene in which Falstaff describes his


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ideal Hal, he calls attention to the importance of excess of all kind, especially excessive appetite. By drinking and eating, Falstaff hopes, Hal fertilizes the bare land he inherits through the Gaunt line: Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father he hath like lean, sterile, and bare land manured, husbanded, and tilled, with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant.105

Falstaff distinguishes Hal from his brother John—and, for that matter, from their progenitor, John of Gaunt—precisely because he is characterized by a great appetite and thirst. In a way that recalls the fertilizing property of drink in the tavern of Elynour Rummynge, drink here serves to fatten a “lean, sterile, and bare land.” Falstaff ’s gives voice to an older model of power in which the best monarch is the great man endowed with greatness of appetite and body, who is a life force that spreads abundance to all he touches. Long before Falstaff recites this speech and long before he attacks the “starved justice,” Justice Shallow, we know that Hal is establishing a very different trim regime.106 In the very first scene of Part 2, Hal makes a show of his now-diminished appetite in what seems like an orchestrated conversation with Poins. Poins, despite the thin aesthetic he has cultivated in himself to please Hal, still expects Hal to follow a very different, older model of greatness. Against his expectations, Hal shows himself to be characterized by his penitential self-control that was embodied by his grandfather, John of Gaunt. Falstaff is right that this newly usurping regime depends on their thinness, both in their thin appetite and in their thin bodies, but he does not yet understand that his Hal is invested in gaining legitimacy by appealing to such an aesthetic. We realize far before Falstaff does that Hal is invested in asserting his own virtuous, even penitential, weariness, mourning, and small appetite. Hal asks Poins rhetorically, “Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer?”107 Poins playfully responds, as Falstaff might, by insisting that such sober taste is inappropriate to one so great. Yes, Poins suggests, a great prince must have a great appetite. The whole scene seems designed by Hal so that he can establish a very different model of greatness, one in which status is secured by making a show of a penitential restraint in appetite and an equal restraint in girth. To Poins’s playful admonitions, Hal responds purposefully, “Belike then my appetite was no princely got, for, by my troth, I do now remember the poor creature small beer. But indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness.”108 Hal makes a show of his civilized restraint, insisting that

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he is not princely according to the older model of greatness; he is, therefore, “out of love with my greatness.” That is, he is out of love with the feudal sense of greatness in which the great appetite or the great body shows forth the status of the feudal, aristocratic lord. Hal makes a show of being “humble,” but such humility really masks the extent to which his new authority is legitimized by an aesthetic that insists that he demonstrate virtuous self-restraint. The lower-class people know, finally, that they will be preyed upon by this new lean and mean regime. The ruling elite may pretend to a virtuous self-restraint, but beneath this donned aesthetic lies an ominous and insatiable hunger that they know to be directed at them. Justice Shallow, more than any figure, typifies the meanness of such a regime. Falstaff calls him appropriately a “starved justice,” even as he explains that as a young man Shallow was “the very genius of famine.”109 We can glimpse in Justice Shallow the ugliest aspects of this soon-to-be-established trim regime, precisely because he is not yet so skilled in the civilized ways of the court as others. Unlike Hal, Justice Shallow does not hide his operations of power beneath supposedly civilized language; he tells us plainly that he will use anyone or anything for his own advantage, whether they be the conscripts, his cousin Silence, or his servant Davy. That he is a man of the new regime is perhaps most startlingly apparent in his first encounter with his cousin, Justice Silence. Upon first seeing Silence, he questions him with equal interest about two subjects: the deaths of his companions from youth and the price of livestock on the London marketplace. He is shown preoccupied with trim reckoning in that he cares only for knowledge of profits and losses, where there is little difference between people and livestock. Falstaff proves well aware of the way in which Shallow in his youth entered into the most base predatory transactions with others: I do remember him at Clement’s Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. A was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible; a was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake. A came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched housewives.110

Falstaff understands Shallow in his excessive leanness to be the “very genius of famine,” almost an iconographic figure of Death. Because he has none of the veneer of civilité donned by Hal, Shallow exposes to view the fullest implications of the leanness of the new regime. That is, it will


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devour the weakest and most vulnerable people for its projects and pleasures, just as Shallow in his youth preyed upon the weakest and most vulnerable whores, the “overscutched housewives.” These overly scutched or overly whipped whores are the most common and thus cheapest, probably a concern for the penny-pinching Shallow, and, as the term suggests, the group that is most vulnerable to the predatory impulses of such a man. Shallow seems to understand the motivations of the new regime, and thus he also offers himself up for their use. A forked radish, Justice Shallow is a thing fantastically carved by others. Thus, Falstaff calls attention to the way that Hal makes himself a mere instrument of power, “Vice’s dagger,” which executes their will.111 He does the beatings, quite literally, that others need him to do, so long as he gets paid. Shakespeare passes judgment on this trim regime by employing images that would have iconic forcefulness for the audience. In particular, the emaciated bodies of the likes of Shallow and the beadles, who lead the Hostess and Doll Tearsheet away, resemble the iconographic figure of Death itself. In a telling comment, Harry Berger describes the way that “the thinness Falstaff harps on (‘This same starved justice’ [3.2.303], ‘the very genius of famine’ [ll. 312–13]) is a kind of memento mori calling the fat man to account.”112 Such images are not only Falstaff ’s but Shakespeare’s; thus, the audience was likely to see the women being led away by the starved beadles as an iconographic representation of Death. In the period, the emaciated and even skeletal figure of Death is often depicted pushing lush, if not large, women toward the gaping grave.113 Given this, the audience might well respond, as the tavern women do, by seeing them as the predatory, merciless figure of Death. The beadles’ bodies show that these poor women will receive no mercy from them. The names the women call them underscore their inhuman nature. Doll begins by calling the beadle, “[Y]ou thin man in a censer,” you “filthy famished correctioner,” but ends by calling him “you thin thing.”114 Doll. Come, you rogue, come, bring me to a justice. Host. Ay, come, you starved bloodhound. Doll. Goodman death, goodman bones! Host. Thou atomy, thou! Doll. Come, you thin thing, come, you rascal! First Bead. Very well.115

They expect deliverance finally, not from such lean figures but from the fat figure of Falstaff. The Hostess exclaims, “O the Lord, that Sir John were come! He would make this a bloody day to somebody.”116 Both still hold out that someone in power outside of these captors will extend

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mercy to them, even as they come to understand that their captors are dehumanizing in the efficiency to which they carry out their orders. They characterize each of their immediate captors in far more ominous ways as a “starved bloodhound,” “goodman death,” and an “atomy” or “anatomy” (as the Folio reads). Their captors make no pretense to hide their insatiable hunger, a hunger that is made manifest in their starved bodies. As the women come to realize that their captors are relentlessly merciless, they use epithets that make it clear just how dehumanized they are. Finally, Doll calls her captor “you thin thing,” inanimate and unfeeling in its meanness. Taken as a whole, such epithets expose to view the way in which the justice given to them is inhumanly impersonal in nature. Indeed, the beadle becomes as a result a figure that exacts the impersonal form of reckoning commonly associated with the figure of Death. As Part 2 comes to a close, the women look expectantly for a reprieve, but none comes. Such an argument appeals powerfully to many audience members. Indeed, all but those absolutely committed to the new civilized bodily aesthetic would be likely to find this new regime lean and mean. Perhaps, the most powerful aspect of this perspective would come from those who look on God as the feudal lord, who bestows his largesse on his chosen people. Indeed, Falstaff can draw on such an association himself in order to counter the emerging thin regime. God as lord bestows his beneficence on his people frequently by fattening them and their land. In the Bible, God’s chosen people are often promised to be rewarded with peace, prosperity, and genuine fecundity. Such a promise, furthermore, is frequently described in terms of fatness: God rewards his chosen people by giving them the fat of the land, which in turn promises to “fatten” both them and their cattle. Such imagery likely appealed to many in Shakespeare’s audience, even those who were beginning to see the fat body as the emblem of excess. To offer an example, the prophet Isaiah promises that Israel will, after a period of dearth, experience a blessed period of fatness. As the prophecy ends, Isaiah promises, “And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones.”117 God’s beneficence is manifested in fatness, itself understood as a divine gift of fecundity. The fatness of God’s chosen people, furthermore, is a sign of their special relationship to God. Psalm 92:14 promises similarly that “[t]hey shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.” Such language continues to provide a counterpoint to the developing civilized bodily aesthetic. The fat body remains the body associated with divine blessedness, even as the civilized elite might want to insist that it is only an emblem of dangerous excess.


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In the concluding banishment scene, Falstaff is silenced. Insofar as I have commented on the reasons for, and the impact of, Hal’s silencing of Falstaff at some length, I want to conclude this section on Part 2 by returning to the mock-banishment scene in Part 1, because it foreshadows the final banishment scene. Certainly, Part 1 offers us the only opportunity to consider how Falstaff might have defended himself since he is silenced in his actual banishment. Falstaff there responds directly to Hal’s efforts to mark, stigmatize, and finally cast him aside. Importantly, he responds in a way that draws on the biblical understanding of fat shared by the tavern world, and, in so doing, he suggests a very different understanding of the fat and the thin body. Hal, after “deposing” Falstaff, plays the role of his father only to dismiss Falstaff as “that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness” and even “Satan.”118 Such images are typical of the way the fat body is conceptualized according to the modern representational regime that will be constructed out of the new courtly bodily aesthetic and the puritan one. Falstaff, like the Fat Bishop, is equated with all that is uncivilized, where the “trunk of humors” underscores the extent to which he fails to contain and control his body. In response, Falstaff offers a powerful defense of himself by evoking a very different biblical understanding of the fat and the lean body. Such a language, he knows, will resonate strongly with his tavern audience. As he argues, “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved.”119 Against those who want to see the fat body as an emblem of excess, selfishness, and reckless abandon, Falstaff imagines it to be the body of divine beneficence. The biblical language Falstaff employs undercuts Hal’s pretensions, exposing to view the predatory nature of the new trim regime. In Part 2, the thin characters are seen by the lower classes as “starved bloodhounds” that prey upon the defenseless poor. Falstaff makes the same forceful critique as he defends himself in the mock-banishment scene of Part 1. There, he recalls the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh. Joseph rises to power when he interprets the Pharaoh’s dream in which, among other things, seven “well favoured kine and fatfleshed” kines that are devoured by seven “ill favoured and leanfleshed” ones.120 As the Authorized Version recounts, “And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine.”121 Importantly, the Bible sees the lean cattle as having an insatiable and dangerous hunger. As Pharaoh later discovers to his misfortune, the lean cattle are furthermore an image for famine, which threatens to devour everyone, but perhaps especially the lower

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classes and poor. As the Bible recounts, “And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favoured, as at the beginning.”122 The horror comes, I believe, from the way that the lean kine can continually eat, and still remain lean and hungry. Iconographically, they recall the haunting figure of Hunger in passus 6 of Piers Plowman, which refuses to be satisfied no matter how much he eats. In 2 Henry IV, the lean kine recall the “very genius of famine,” the two beadles who threaten to devour the tavern women. When Hal attempts to impose on him a bodily aesthetic, which insists that his big body makes him an emblem of excess, Falstaff has recourse to this powerful counterdiscourse in which the big body is equated with beneficence, the thin with meanness and predation. Shakespeare employs these multiple constructions in ways that call into question the modern representational regime that promotes a lean bodily style, even as it marks and stigmatizes the fat body. Falstaff powerfully voices an opposition to a regime that is seen as lean and mean. Such a critique will not be visible to those who want to promote their own privilege; thus, to both the courtly elite of Shakespeare’s day and to the professional elite today, it will seem obvious that Falstaff simply is an emblem of excess. Other more imaginative and capacious readers can come to see that Shakespeare directs us to multiple constructions of the fat and the thin body. In this, we are asked to make aesthetic choices that have political consequences as well. What is the implication of simply reinforcing the dominant modern representational regime? How might alternative aesthetics help us develop very different types of communities? Once we begin to ask such questions, it becomes much harder, if not impossible to return to any essentialist understanding of bodies as having meanings in and of themselves. We begin, instead, to see how our constructions necessarily affect the way that certain bodies are understood and thus treated. Because modernity sees certain bodies as innately vicious, we are too apt to see them as needing external controls. Their bodies cost us too much, we insist, and thus we have the moral duty to contain and control them—for their own happiness (and our security), to be sure. Shakespeare offers us another solution exactly because he turns his attention to the lean bodily style promoted by Hal. As such, he lays open the operations of power by which the thin body is privileged to the extent to which it goes unmarked and thus unnoticed. In this, he reminds us of our own tendency to focus exclusively on the fat or obese body (or the “obesity epidemic”), even as we ignore the thin body. Shakespeare allows the thin body and the aesthetic that privileges it to be interrogated and, as such, he exposes its predation. He shows us how this bodily style allows


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the thin elite to assert his virtue in a way that masks his predatory designs. Such bodies consume the underclasses as they force them to bend to their grand projects. Today, when “fat” is still an underexamined category, and “thin” even less so, we can learn from Falstaff that we need to expose the operations of power that make certain bodies presumptively virtuous, and thus render their consumption and exploitation invisible. If we do not do this, we will continue to make the fat body, frequently the bodies of the poor, the one that embodies for us all our cumulative excess. Thus, we regrettably further justify their stigmatization and exploitation.


Chapter 5

Boundless Fat in Middleton’s A Game at Chess Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, performed in the Globe in 1624, is important to the history of fat because it promotes a puritan bodily style that contributes to the emerging modern bodily aesthetic I have been describing. Drawing on the moralistic horror evident in Piers Plowman, A Game at Chess promotes a bodily style that values the closed, bounded body. To bulge forth beyond the boundaries of the individualized body is to elicit the horror felt at the grotesque behavior Gluttony exhibits in Piers Plowman. Any violation of these boundaries, whether by rape, sodomy, or fat, is an abomination that reinforces the sense that individual bodily boundaries must be policed and protected. Middleton recommends such a bodily aesthetic by focusing on the abominations of the Black House (Catholic Spain). More particularly, he uses the grotesque bodies of the Black House as a warning to the White House (Protestant England). The bodies of the Black House threaten to invade or to penetrate the White House, thereby despoiling the Black House’s claims to bodily purity and inviolability. At the same time, the Black bodies themselves become an emblem of a bodily excess, disruption, and decay that the White House (Protestant England) must avoid at all costs. The leaky body of the Black Knight, with his leaking bottom (anal fistula), and the foggy fat body of the Fat Bishop both offer lessons to the English “puritan” reader of the need to police the boundaries of his body.1 To see how much has changed between the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Elynour Rummynge was written, to the beginning of the seventeenth, when A Game at Chess was, we can usefully contrast the tavern scene in the one with the final bagging scene in the other. In both cases,

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bodies mingle with bodies. Those bodies, furthermore, are grotesque ones that spill forth beyond any individualized bodily boundary. Even as the tavern women piss where they sit and consume the shit-laden brew that Eleanor offers, the Black pieces in the bagging scene are shown as mingling their “verjuice” among each other. Unlike the uproariously revolting scene in Elynour Rummynge, the bodily mingling in A Game at Chess suggests not merely defiance, but a form of pollution that becomes a punishment in itself. In the bagging scene, the Black pieces are placed in the bag of Hell. The Fat Bishop significantly plays a central role as the one who violates the boundaries of the others. Just as his fat violates the boundaries of his own individualized body, so too does he violate the boundaries of the bodies of the other Black pieces. As he is squeezed into the bag, he first luxuriates over the way in which he will be forced to lie upon, or rape, the Black Queen. Next, as he is squeezed in, Middleton makes it clear that he squeezes the other bodies so much that they dissolve into “verjuice.”2 The grotesque mingling in A Game at Chess is a form of punishment with no festive redemption. In this play, the grotesque mingling is supposed to serve the purpose of instilling in the audience a respect for a bodily aesthetic that values the closed, contained body, sharply differentiated from the bodies of others. The audience is supposed to feel simultaneously horrified at the way that the Black pieces violate the new aesthetic, even as they feel pleasure at seeing the Black House justly punished. Where the Black House would have invaded and violated the White House and raped its Queen, they are forced finally to invade and violate each other. The punishment fits the crime. Irrevocably reprobate, they are punished by becoming more and more themselves—that is, more and more unsound and grotesque. Middleton uses the grotesque image to convince the audience that they must police the boundaries of their own individualized bodies. The set of associations he uses, furthermore, suggests that such an action will protect the integrity of the collectivity as well. The aesthetic rejection of the foggy fat body by English elites in John Skelton’s day now is so pervasive that it allows Middleton to elevate it to be the very mark of the reprobate and profane status he perceived to be at the core of England’s Catholic enemies. To fail to observe one’s proper bodily boundaries has now become damnable treason against Protestant England. The fat body of the Fat Bishop plays a central role in articulating what the individualized body should be. A Game at Chess is important for a fat history because it helps us consider another discursive strain that helped create the modern representational regime I examine. So far we have focused on the way that a new civilized aesthetic places a high value on the contained, controlled, and individualized body. The more broadly Protestant, and more specifically “puritan,” bodily aesthetic contributes to

Middleton’s A Game at Chess

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a similar historical transformation in the understanding of the body. A Game at Chess plays off a puritan bodily aesthetic that is clearly already quite developed when it was written; indeed, the same aesthetic is evident in the moralistic language employed by Hal in the Henry IV plays. The fat body is so feared in A Game at Chess because it becomes the very emblem of excess and sin; it is taken to have immense power to pollute society from within. For this reason, the Fat Bishop must be expelled and damned to the bag of Hell if the White House is to remain intact and pure. As my introductory remarks suggest, I take Middleton in A Game at Chess to be addressing an English audience that is sympathetic with a “puritan” cause. There is much scholarly debate as to whether Middleton should be considered a “puritan,” but much of it centers on the definition of “puritan.” Middleton is not “puritan” if by “puritan” we mean that he belongs to a strictly sectarian group that looks with suspicion on the Church of England. Middleton is “puritan” if we take the term to refer to a sensibility in which the individual is suspicious of Catholicism (both at home and abroad), supportive of Protestant causes abroad, and desirous of defending a Calvinistic doctrine within the Church of England. Perhaps it will seem less unusual to call Middleton “puritan” if we remember that we can speak of a “conforming puritan.” Several scholars take Middleton to be a “puritan” in this sense.3 Herbert Heller seems to assume as much when he argues that Middleton embraced a “political Calvinism,” evident in his persistent attack against the dual excesses of Catholicism and the Jacobean court.4 Taking my cue from T. H. Howard-Hill, who argues that A Game at Chess is more moral-religious allegory than political allegory, I see Middleton as embracing a puritan bodily aesthetic that is designed to appeal to a broad range of conforming members of the Church of England.5 A Game at Chess certainly assumes an audience that is fearful of the way that the then recent policies of James I seemed to move the church and state away from its Protestant identity. Middleton plays on such fears when he focuses on the threat that the Black House poses to the White House’s integrity. Much in the play is also designed to please such an audience; thus, they would look on with pleasure in seeing the Catholic side completely annihilated in the final bagging scene. Those attached to a Calvinist church settlement and to a pro-Protestant state agenda fearfully watched the events of the late 1610s and early 1620s. James, many worried, was promoting too many Catholics and cryptoCatholics in his court; they also felt his policies were too influenced by Catholic Spain. Such fears only intensified when James entered into protracted negotiations with Spain to marry his son and heir to the throne, Prince Charles,

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to the Infanta Maria. In the early 1620s, the negotiations over the marriage centered heavily on the religious question. In particular, Spain was demanding that the recusant population be granted more leniency. These political events were seen by many faithful Protestants as a test of the integrity, virtue, and religious commitment of the king, the prince, and also of the Church of England. Would they barter away their religion? How far would the concessions go? Would the prince finally, and even the nation, be forced to convert to Catholicism to secure the much-desired marriage? Such questions were on many people’s minds when Prince Charles and George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, stole away to Spain on February 18, 1623, in order to expedite the faltering negotiations. The populace waited and wondered, many anxious about the fate of the Church of England and the English state. No wonder, then, that there were massive, widespread celebrations when they returned to England on October 5, 1623, safe and sound, without the Infanta. Middleton plays upon this Protestant fear in the multiple plots that comprise A Game at Chess. All of them focus in one way or another on the threat that the Black House poses to the White. In one plot, the White Queen’s Pawn is threatened with rape by the Jesuit figure, the Black Bishop’s Pawn. The White King, King James I, here as elsewhere, is seen as oblivious to the very real threat that the White pieces face. In another plot, Middleton describes the recent marriage negotiations. The White Knight, Prince Charles, and the White Duke, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, visit the Black House. There they are courted to convert to the Black side by the flamboyant Black Knight, Don Sarmiento de Acuña, the Conde of Gondomar, ambassador to England from 1613 to 1622. Although the White Duke and Knight are, ultimately, shown to be dissimulating in order to achieve their triumphant “checkmate by discovery,” the scene as a whole plays to those who were worried that that Protestant England was, indeed, vulnerable to Spanish seductions. In a similar way, the plot around the Fat Bishop speaks to the vulnerability and threat that he poses to the White Queen, most likely a representation of the Church of England since Queen Anna had been dead for several years when A Game at Chess was written. The Fat Bishop is modeled on the fat Marco Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spalato and famous “convert” to the Church of England. Just as the body of the Black Knight (Gondomar) tells us he is a threat because he has a leaky bottom, so too the body of the Fat Bishop (Spalato) tells us he is a threat because his “foggy fat” defies all efforts to contain it. Middleton singles him out; after all, by this description: notably, he is the only character in the play that is neither Black nor White. His fatness suggests that he was never really


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perfectly “white”; certainly, he had never really adopted the more abstemious behavior associated with the bodily aesthetic of the White House. His fatness, Middleton seems to suggest, should have told us that Archbishop Spalato never really sincerely converted to Protestantism but was only using the Church of England to feed his worldly ambition. Early on, the Fat Bishop is shown as readily taking the Black Knight’s bait and reconverting to the Black side when he is promised greater preferment there. In reality, Archbishop Spalato, facing difficulties in the struggle in Venice for independence from Rome, had been convinced to come to England in 1616. Having “converted” to its religion, Spalato rose quickly to power, as James gave him the deanship of Windsor and the prestigious mastership of Savoy. Spalato had acquired significant power in the Church of England, having been granted ecclesiastical precedence inferior only to that of the archbishops of Canterbury and York. In 1622, shortly after his extraordinary rise to power, Spalato revealed that he would return to Rome. He settled in Rome in 1623, where he lived on a pension from the pope, but not before he recanted in publication all his previous statements in support of the legitimacy of the Church of England. The White House, Middleton suggests, should have known that the Fat Bishop was a danger by simply looking at his body. In particular, his own unbounded, foggy fat suggests that he lacks integrity because he does not strictly contain his body. Indeed, the White Queen gives voice to just such a suspicion; thus, just before the Fat Bishop attempts to assault her, she announces that his body poses a particular threat to hers: “I never felt extremity like this; / Thick darkness dwells upon this hour, integrity / . . . / . . . / Suffers a black eclipse.”6 Such language recalls the way that the fat body in this period is repeatedly associated with a fogginess that smothers and pollutes all it touches. His body, having already swallowed up himself in its fog, threatens to swallow the Queen, or the Church of England. As he made his revision of A Game at Chess, Middleton seems only to augment elements that recommend this puritan bodily style. In revision, he makes more of a show of the bodily permeability of the Black House and the vulnerability of the White one. That the Fat Bishop was added in revision suggests that Middleton may have added him to further this theme. His grotesque bodily presence certainly offers a powerful lesson of the need to police individualized bodily boundaries. Middleton also revised the plot around the Black Knight in a way that further emphasized his own leaking bottom. In revision, he wrote scenes that incorporated more of the props that were associated with Gondomar. Middleton wrote scenes that put Gondomar’s litter on stage; most famously, for example, he included Gondomar’s sedan chair, designed with a hole in

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the seat to accommodate his anal fistula.7 In a similar way, Middleton expanded the bagging scene to include more ostentatious presentation of the squeezed, violated bodies of the Black House. All in all, such scenes would serve to make it clear that the Black House is characterized by a permeable, unbounded body. All the bodies of the Black House are made into a source of intense fear and revulsion for the English puritan audience, precisely because they refuse to contain and control themselves. The type of bodily aesthetic we have examined before was promoted as well by a puritan bodily style that emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fat body now is considered horrific insofar as its bodily morphology flouts this developing bodily aesthetic. With the sodomitical body, it is the very antithesis of what the English Protestant masculine body should be. To be strong, impregnable, and virtuous, as many Protestants wanted to be, bodily boundaries must be sharply demarcated and protected. A Game at Chess seeks to tap into the considerable fear that the puritan audience would feel in order to encourage them to police their own individualized bodily boundaries. In doing this, Middleton takes his cue from existing anti-Catholic polemic. Many of the texts I now discuss directly influenced A Game at Chess.8 Middleton also more generally engages with these polemical texts in that he develops the logic that is only implicit in many of them. The polemical texts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries implicitly promoted a puritan bodily style by using the Catholics to represent their grotesque opposites. Even as the Catholic body is associated with an insatiable appetite, much as Gluttony was in Piers Plowman, so too is it associated with a grotesque body. Such a Catholic body is seen as grotesque to the extent to which it refuses all efforts to contain and control the self. The Catholic gives way to his appetites, even as his body grows beyond the boundaries of the civilized body. The grotesque Catholic body has the power, such antiCatholic discourse suggests, to pollute and ruin the English Protestant state. Middleton draws out the logic of such polemics in A Game at Chess, especially in his representation of the Fat Bishop. His foggy fat body tells the puritan audience that the Fat Bishop is essentially dangerous and even treasonous. I. Protestant Bodily Styles In the following two sections, I consider how late Reformation developments contribute to the emergence of this new puritan bodily style. By the late sixteenth century, the thin body is associated with virtue, the fat with vice. Kristen Poole argues that, during the Marprelate controversy of the


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1590s, each side began to slur their enemies as “fat.” Both puritans and conforming Protestants would attack their opponents as “fat,” where fat was taken as a de facto sign that the person is “drunken, gluttonous, and lascivious.”9 Such a set of associations can only emerge when a number of broader cultural changes have occurred. In particular, the fat body must be viewed as violating what is assumed to be a natural, individualized bodily boundary. Often, such a new bodily aesthetic is associated with the Reformation itself, but I would suggest that it comes from a variety of changes, including those changes in the courtly style I examined in chapters 3 and 4. Significantly, the early Reformation did not generally concern itself with the individualized body at all. As John King writes, “The general impulse of the sixteenth century was toward public reformation of church and state rather than private sanctification.”10 It is only late in the sixteenth century that the Reformation begins to turn increasingly to the issue of private sanctification, especially among those we know as “puritans.” Much that later scholars have seen as “Protestant” is, in fact, a later development of the Reformation. Those poets who Barbara Lewalski considered to have developed a “Protestant poetics”—that is, John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, to name three—all wrote most of their poetry in the seventeenth century. This suggests that the puritan bodily style I am describing is influenced by broader cultural changes such as the change in the courtly bodily aesthetic. The early Reformation, like the premodern period, can be considered a time before fat precisely because fat does not uniformly register as it will in early (and late) modernity. That is, the early Reformation was a period before fat fully registers as a mark of a type of individualized excess that violates the boundaries of what the individualized body should be. Briefly, I would like to consider here one of the important reasons that fat does not register as it would later during the Reformation: namely, because the early Reformation was more interested in issues of public and social reform. John Bale’s influential Image of Both Churches, the first commentary in English on the Book of Revelation, does not, for example, represent the body of the Whore of Babylon as fat. Her body—that is the body of the false church—is characterized as a profanation in grotesque imagery similar to that found in Piers Plowman. Her body is characterized by the inappropriate mingling of bodies with bodies, as in the representation of her holding a cup that contains a mixture of menstrual blood and semen. Such grotesque details must be read in relation to the social body; thus, the mixture suggests the degree to which the false church as a collectivity has become foul and sterile. Just as Gluttony must be expelled for the good of society, so too must the Whore of Babylon, or the false church, be expelled in order to avoid the eternal death and damnation it represents. Grotesque bodily imagery here does not serve the

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function of instilling in the reader the need to protect the boundaries of what is understood as an individualized body. The reader learns, instead, to extricate himself from the false church before he too is profaned by it. In a similar way, the representations of martyrs that are the subject of much of this early Reformation writing do not focus on an individualized understanding of the body. The martyrs are rather types of the collective struggle between the true and the false church. Those martyrs described in Bale’s works and John Foxe’s massively influential Acts and Monuments offer, instead, a body that is dissolved and disintegrated where that process itself is imagined as one that brings the individual in contact with the divine. These martyrologies focus heavily on that moment of bodily dissolution which is understood in part as the moment of salvation. The Catholic martyrs left behind relics or material evidence, if we want to call it that, of their salvation, but the Protestant martyr is shown as leaving behind all materiality in martyrly dissolution. Janel Mueller observes that such martyrologies are not operating by modern and individualized understandings of the body or self. As she writes, “The figuration of their bodies as flesh, fluid, and fat in the material process of dissolution by fire operates as a metonymy for a larger sense of human identity being worked through to transformative completion.”11 These early Protestants would be the last people who would care about fat in the modern sense of the word, even as they might feel with their entire being horror and joy as the fat of the body liquefies, burns, and dissolves before them. Such moments of martyrdom suggest the degree to which the martyr becomes a part of a larger heavenly body. Only in the late sixteenth century does the Reformation begin to turn to issues of private sanctification evident in the literature of the period. Writers begin to focus on private election, even as others write the first devotional poetry. Relatedly, there begins to be more emphasis placed on bodily discipline, as scholars such as Michael Schoenfeldt argue. It should not be surprising that there is an increased interest in the practice of fasting in this period. As we will see, different religious groups, but especially puritans and conforming members of the Church of England, compete to establish themselves as the group that practices exemplary forms of bodily self-discipline. We are the ones who contain and control ourselves, and you, whether that “you” be Catholic or Protestant, are the ones who indulge yourselves, writers in the period suggest. As people struggle to establish themselves as virtuous and others as vicious, it becomes convenient to focus on body size as a type suggesting essential moral character. The thin body is presumed to be virtuous to the extent to which the fat body is presumed to be essentially vicious.


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Significantly, the emphasis on bodily self-discipline and fasting comes fairly late in the Reformation. The early Reformation placed less emphasis on such bodily self-control. As a convenient shorthand for this cultural change, we can contrast the earlier 1547 Book of Homilies with the Elizabethan one published in 1562 and 1563. Whereas the earlier one includes homilies focused on basic Reformation doctrine, the latter one includes homilies focused on behavior, including forms of ecclesiastically sanctioned fasting. Early Reformers such as Bale and Foxe did not recommend fasting; indeed, they were largely suspicious of the practice because it was closely associated with the Catholic tradition of selfmortification and penitence. One of Bale’s plays written to educate the populace on the essentials of the Reformed religion expressly shuns the practice of fasting. A Briefe Comedy or Enterlude Concernynge the Temptacyon of Our Lorde and Saver Jesus Christ by Sathan in the Desart (1538), sponsored by Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, for the education of the populace, has no less of a figure than Christ warn the audience not to imitate him in fasting. Before engaging in his fortyday fast, Christ warns the audience, “Thynke not me to fast bycause I wolde yow to fast.”12 Bale does not recommend fasting because he is concerned that it will encourage the populace to preserve uniquely Catholic forms of penitential self-mortification. By the end of the sixteenth century, such practices of bodily selfmortification become increasingly more important in defining and demarcating the faithful, variously defined. In the same period, conforming and nonconforming groups argue over who has the authority to command fasts and, relatedly, who will be associated with the practice. The Church of England can be seen as reacting to puritan developments, as puritans began to create communities around public ceremonies that included public fasting. In response, the Church of England began to arrogate to itself the exclusive power to command such days. Two Elizabethan homilies, the Homily against Gluttony and Drunkenness and the Homily of Good Works and Fasting, recommend fasting as a practice that is, indeed, consistent with the Reformed religion, but they also insist that the practice must be performed with the guidance of the established church and state. The Homily of Good Works and Fasting insists that public fasts must accord with “publicke order and Laws made by Princes, and by the authority of the Magistrates.”13 In a similar way, the 1604 canons ensure that fasting will be done in accordance with the church when it specifies that the parish minister must remind his parishioners of any upcoming holy day or “fasting day” as appointed by the Communion book.14 Such specifications seem designed to counteract those nonconforming puritans who regularly called their own fast days. Later, George Herbert, in

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his poem “Lent,” recommends a fasting that is sanctioned by the Church of England. To fast in this way is to accept “authority”: “Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee, / He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie, / But is compos’d of passion.”15 Herbert recommends a form of bodily discipline that must, however, be practiced under the supervision of the church. All who refuse to conform themselves in this way, Herbert insists, are “composed of passion.” The Church of England is likely reacting to the fact that, by the late sixteenth century, fasting was a demonstrably puritan practice.16 In semiseparatist and separatist communities, fasting was used to assert the autonomy and integrity of the community (and of the individual) against the established church and state. Unlike Herbert, such puritans would insist that they are the ones who embrace temperance and bodily selfrestraint, while other groups, including those in the Church of Rome and Church of England, are “composed of passion.” The historian Patrick Collinson traces the practice of collective fasting to the early prophesying famously forbidden late in Elizabeth’s reign. The puritans gathered to hear sermons even as they practiced various forms of abstinence, including communal fasts.17 Similar gatherings continued even after they were officially prohibited, and, as Collinson notes, “Invariably they are indicative of advanced, radical puritanism.”18 A related polemical discourse shows us just how concerned puritans were with establishing themselves as exemplary in their holiness to the extent to which they embraced a new bodily aesthetic. In particular, they sought to establish themselves as the ones with superior selfcontrol, often represented by their fasting, to the extent to which the papist or crypto-papist was characterized by bodily lack of control. Such polemical works draw on a long-standing tradition of antifraternal and antimonastic satire that we considered in relation to the premodern Piers Plowman. The friar, the monk, or the religious was seen as a hypocrite who threatens the community because he follows his “gut” or appetites. This discourse was used by various sects to characterize their opponents as mere hypocrites who follow their appetites even as they hypocritically assert their virtue. The type of the fat hypocrite emerges first as the fat friar and then eventually as the type of the fat puritan or even fat-conforming Protestant. Body size begins to play a central role in discrediting the individual. We know by looking at his fat body that he could not possibly practice the forms of bodily self-mortification and pious discipline that he claims to practice. As Poole explains, the fat puritan is a type that emerges in the 1590s to discredit the puritan’s claim that he is uniquely holy. His fatness now tells us that he could not possibly be fasting. The same could be said


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of the fat religious generally, whether that be the fat pope, fat monk, or fat-conforming member of the Church of England. All the anti-Catholic tracts I now consider are addressed to the same sort of broadly understood puritan audience that A Game at Chess addresses. Written for the most part in the latter part of James’s reign from the middle to late 1610s to the 1620s, such pamphlets clearly appeal to a readership with puritan sensibilities. That is, they assume a readership that is anti-Catholic and thus deeply suspicious of Catholic populations both at home and abroad. These polemical texts, then, give the reader what they want by exposing the sinfulness of the Catholic. In James Wadsworth’s The English Spanish Pilgrim or Thomas Robinson’s 1622 The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, to name just two, the reader is taken into the foreign (and especially Spanish) Catholic institutions only to see just how sinful and overindulgent they are. These texts focus on a bodily aesthetic in which the Catholic body is seen as the undisciplined, unbounded body that threatens the English state, church, and people. As such, they suggest by implication that the devout puritan reader is characterized by virtuous control over his body, especially his appetites. It is this set of associations that Middleton will use and even expand upon in his A Game at Chess. He will take this bodily aesthetic and essentialize it so that the fat body in its flabbiness becomes an emblem of all excess and moral decay. Pamphlet after pamphlet focuses on the overconsumption of the Catholic religious in a way that suggests that, if unchecked, they will devour everything in their midst. Such behavior, these pamphlets imply, will affect the fate of the English state. A number of these texts focus on the foreign schools for English Catholics because, they suggest, these schools pose a threat to the English state to the degree to which they threaten to corrupt the English youth with their indulgent, Catholic religion. Others focus on the pre-Reformation history of England in a way that suggests that the Catholic presence nearly destroyed the English state by corrupting its otherwise hard-working peasant population. Overall, they teach the puritan reader that he must practice intensive bodily self-restraint for the good of himself and the state. The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon exposes the seemingly pious practices of the Catholic religious as essentially vicious, thereby suggesting that Catholic identity is both corrupt and corrupting. In taking their vow of poverty, for example, the Catholic religious only become further and further governed by the sins of the flesh, especially gluttony. As such, the nuns ravage their neighbors, consuming more and more of what they produce. As Robinson explains, “For their fulnesse of bread who knoweth not that they (like the Caterpillers of Egypt) doe eate up the

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fat and best fruits of the Land.”19 Catholics are a plague on the English state because they have allowed their appetites to grow beyond control. As Robinson continues, “I have knowne the Cator of this House to buy at unreasonable rates for their ghostly fathers table . . . whose greatest (and indeed only) care is, to prove skillfull in the confection and dressing of such daintie cates as may best please their wanton palates.”20 The exposé takes us into the lavish world of these rich and idle nuns to show the way that their whole life is organized primarily to please and arouse “wanton palates.” They offer to the puritan reader a negative lesson. The puritan needs to contain and control his appetites even as he contains and controls the appetites of the dependents in his household. Such bodily self-discipline, furthermore, is seen as of central importance to the strength and welfare of the English state. In a similar way, The English Spanish Pilgrim (1630) exposes the English Protestant audience to the depraved practices of the boys’ school at St. Omers, one famous for educating English Catholic elites. Once again, the seemingly august and religious superiors are exposed as merely “impious epicures,” to quote from A Game at Chess.21 In so doing, the pamphlet attempts to discredit the Catholic schools and Catholic education, which had a reputation of being more learned and rigorous than their English counterparts.22 Here again, Wadsworth critiques Catholicism by insisting that their claims to superior bodily self-mortification only conceal their overindulgence. In this case, the school only seems scholarly and virtuous, but the reader who looks beneath the veneer sees that its Byzantine practices are actually organized to feed the insatiable appetites of the presiding Catholic schoolmasters. The boys’ studies have no other purpose than to aid in digestion, Wadsworth implies, in making the point that the boys study only “till the clocke and our stomackes strike supper time.”23 In a similar way, the academic debates are selected, organized, and conducted only to aid the digestion of the presiding priests. The boys debate “of such things which may rather helpe digestion to the Fathers, then benefit their owne understandings, as whether their paternities had better eate flesh or fish, drinke wine or beere; and this dispute begins and ends with their dinner.”24 All of this is typical anti-Catholic polemic, which owes its lineage to the antifraternal polemic of the premodern period. The religious person is exposed as a hypocrite, who only seems to be practicing bodily self-control and mortification. Typically, such texts focus on how the overly arcane rules of the Catholic church (or Catholic order) allow its occupants to live a gluttonous life. In this case, they can eat overly rich and delicate foods and still assert their virtue as long as they follow the letter of the laws regarding what food is prohibited during Lent. Middleton


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makes much this same point when we first encounter the Fat Bishop. We learn, then, that he has eaten, “Of six and thirty dishes at a meal, / But most on’t out of cullis of cock-sparrows.”25 As long as he eats “fowl,” he can consume “six and thirty dishes” because none of it is “flesh” according to the overly nice specifications of the Church of Rome. These tracts urge the puritan reader to discipline his body with more determination. They do so in part because they suggest that Catholic ecclesiastical practices are, in fact, weakening England. The proud English reader is supposed to see in these schools how the Catholic church is corrupting its otherwise virtuous, restrained youths by teaching them to indulge their appetites. All of this is seen as having dire consequences for the Protestant English state. Even as they learn to indulge their appetites, they also learn to disobey and disrespect their superiors. Their religious leaders teach them, after all, to master their “paternities.” They are being encouraged to debate questions that touch on how their parents should behave. They presumably decide which of their parents’ behaviors should be seen as truly religious. Such details are designed to excite contempt in the proud English puritan reader. Our state will only be strong, he can be made to feel, if we free the children from such decadent, luxurious masters. The foreign, Catholic religious offer a counterpoint to what the puritan male reader should be. In this case, it encourages the puritan reader to promote bodily self-restraint in himself and in his dependents for the welfare of the English state generally. Thomas Goad recommends such a practice of bodily self-restraint directed at the appetites in his Friers Chronicle (1623). He likens his text to a moderate “diet” that consists of a selection of dainties or stories of the friar’s corruption. Goad promises to lay these stories out for the reader so that he can “taste of every one of the divisions.”26 As he continues, “For if I should set a Banquet before you, or a Feast to feed you, you would rather surfet, then be satisfied; the dishes are so many wherewith I could furnish the Table, and of that varietie, that you might rather glut and gorge yourselves, then content nature with a temperate dyet.”27 Given the way in which the Friers Chronicle characterizes Catholics by their excessive eating, this trope used throughout is more than a mere flourish. It offers a lesson to the puritan reader of the importance of bodily self-regulation, especially when it comes to the appetite. Puritans learn that they should eat moderately when they come to know that Catholics “feed their sensuall carkases with the banquet and acates of their owne desires, and devising.”28 The puritan must contain and control himself by in part limiting his appetites, but this is no easy task, such texts suggest. In texts such as the Friers Chronicle, we have the outlines of the sort of puritan bodily style recommended by Middleton. The Protestant must

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contain and control his individualized body lest he become the defiling creature that the Catholic is taken to be. Thus far, we have only focused on how the Catholic is associated with an unbounded appetite that threatens the English Protestant state. Such texts also suggest that the Protestant, unlike the Catholic, must work to govern his appetites by governing his body. Now, I want to consider the way that the overindulgent Catholic and the self-governed Protestant are increasingly associated with the fat and thin body types, respectively. As I have said before, such associations are generally only implicit in these texts: Middleton will make these associations more explicit in A Game at Chess. The Merry Jests Concerning Popes, Monkes, and Friers (1617) still associates the Catholics with overindulgence, but it also begins to associate this same overindulgence with the fat body. Thus, it assumes that the English puritan reader will inevitably cultivate a thin and strong body that is seen as more militaristic in nature. One of the jests revolves around the fat and medieval Pope Leo, whose fat body is seen as emasculating him by rendering him weak and passive. The overindulgence characteristic of Catholics is here associated with the fat body; thus, presumably, the Protestant reader learns that his own bodily self-discipline will result in a lean, militaristic body needed to protect the state. Pope Leo has all the vices of a cock and none of the virtues. Like a cock, he is continually copulating and refusing to work. Unlike a cock, he is fat, flabby, weak, and useless. The jest concludes, “[A]s touching fighting you are not a good Cocke, for you are so fat and grosse that you can hardly goe, much lesse fight well.”29 Pope Leo’s “fat and gross body” serves as a counterpoint to an implicitly virile, militant Protestant body type. His fat renders him unable to move and, more importantly, from the perspective of the writer, unable to fight. In the case of this jest, the fat body is significantly seen as passive, slothful, gluttonous, and weak (or effeminate) in a way that recommends that the Protestant cultivate an appropriately opposite bodily style. Presumably, his lean body would suggest that he is virile and militaristic. The latter bodily style, furthermore, is seen as the type of body that will better protect the English Protestant state from foreign invasion. If left unchecked, Merry Jests suggests, such Catholic figures will inevitably corrupt all who come in contact with them. It makes this point because it implies that all humans are characterized by a boundless appetite that can easily grow out of control. For this reason, the puritan reader needs to be constantly vigilant to regulate and manage his appetite and body. Merry Jests makes it clear that such boundless appetites, if unchecked, threaten the very welfare of the English state itself. If we look at the past, Merry Jests tells us, we can see how the Catholic monasteries nearly destroyed the English state by weakening and effeminizing its peasantry.


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It tells the tale of a peasant’s son, who is offered employment at a monastery. The father argues passionately with the religious superior that his son will be debilitated by all contact with their luxurious brood. The father tells him, “[Y]ou would make him a sluggish and sloathfull fellow, yea and a glutton too.”30 Contact with the Catholic religious will inevitably debilitate the simple English peasant. In his effort to get him to work there, the superior even offers a compromise in which he will “make him labour hard and give him but moderate dyet.”31 The father rejoins, however, that “a man cannot frequent the company of gluttonous, sloathfull and Idle persons, but hee shall be infected with their gurmundizeing, and sluggish kind of life.”32 All of this focuses on indulgent practice in which the Catholic is seen as refusing to contain and control the body. The Protestant must avoid the Catholic because he will “infect” him with his indolence. Inevitably, the father argues that such contact will so radically alter his son that he will be rendered absolutely unfit to work.33 Such a story indicates to its reader that England remained strong because it refused to succumb to the Catholic presence in the countryside. Such stories encourage the English Protestant and, more specifically, the contemporary English puritan reader to follow a regime very different from the Catholic. In particular, he is encouraged throughout such works to assert control over his body by adopting abstemious practices. The puritan is the one who will work hard and eat a moderate diet. He also implicitly follows a more rigorous form of fasting. Certainly, he does not merely follow the letter of the law when it comes to ecclesiastical fasting, but instead, works to contain and control his appetites by rigorous labor and temperate eating. Such restrained, temperate behavior is seen as playing a central role in preserving the Protestant state. Certainly, such texts offer a history of the Reformation and, more specifically, of the dissolution of the monasteries by suggesting that they would inevitably fall because of the sinful overindulgence of their occupants. In part, they know this because they can see this sin revealed in the body of certain key religious figures. Certainly, the fat body of Pope Leo, like the fat body of the Catholic religious, is seen as essentially corrupt and corrupting. No longer is the fat body a sign of strength or beneficence; instead, it is a sign of a self-induced weakness that is seen as coming from a refusal to govern the appetites. For our purposes, it is important that even as the fatness of Pope Leo is marked, the thinness of other bodies remains unmarked. The puritan bodily style needs its Catholic counterpart to define what it means to be virtuous. As the last chapter demonstrated, iconographically, the lean body could be represented in a negative light. In William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, the leanness of people in power is a sign of their meanness and

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even cruelty. Such traditions could have been used to represent the Catholics in the anti-Catholic pamphlets we have considered. Their leanness could have suggested that they direct an endless hunger at the bodies of others, including the bodies of the English youths. Importantly, such a tradition is not used in either the polemic texts I have been considering or A Game at Chess. Fatness registers even as thinness does not. The fat body is beginning to be associated with the voracious, parasitical body that is in its essence seen as a threat to the state. Middleton draws out these associations even more in A Game at Chess where the amorphous body of the Fat Bishop will come to be seen as essentially dangerous, disruptive, morally corrupt, and even treasonous. To understand this development, we need to consider further some of the ways in which Archbishop Spalato was understood in the period. His belly, particularly, becomes a sign of his excess that in its fogginess threatens to obliterate all efforts to contain and control it. II. Spalato's Belly Excess of all types registers in anti-Catholic pamphlets that tell the Protestant reader that he must assert control over his body. Such bodily self-discipline is seen as absolutely necessary for the well-being of the English Protestant state. Now, I want to consider how the fat body of Archbishop Spalato serves to define the antithesis of what the puritan body should be. Marco Antonio de Dominis, the archbishop of Spalato and prominent convertito, is characterized by his fat body where that body becomes an emblem of his limitless, unbounded appetite. The representation of Spalato is important for a history of fat precisely because his fatness is made to represent moral depravity. His body, like his appetites and ambition, grows beyond all bounds. Pamphlets focus frequently on that bodily site which is taken to grow beyond the bounds of the individualized body: that is, the swollen paunch. Insofar as it is taken to grow beyond all bounds, the swollen paunch of Spalato embodies his unnatural, unbounded appetites and ambitions. He is represented as being “puffed up” or blown up beyond what he should be, as when we are told he is “puft more with ambition than corpulency.”34 Similarly, we learn, “this Monster of men did swell, and was puffed up no lesse in heart and minde, than he was in bodie.”35 In his swollen paunch, Spalato represents the excesses that all bodies should avoid. Thus, he helps to inculcate in the contemporary reader a need to adopt a puritan bodily style that values the controlled, contained, individualized body. The Newes from Rome, Spalato’s Doome (1624), published shortly after A Game at Chess, gives us a glimpse of some of the ways in which Spalato’s


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body was conceptualized in the period. It clearly demonstrates that the fat body is increasingly marked and stigmatized. The pamphlet portrays his distended belly as the site that embodies his excessive ambition. The paunch, an embodied symbol of his refusal to contain or control himself, then, becomes a sign of his excessive appetites both for food and for power. Notably, many of the nastiest descriptions of Spalato come in the period after he received preferment in the Church of England. Before that period, Spalato seems to have been either liked or disregarded; certainly, he was not perceived as the threat he would later become to those who wanted to preserve the integrity of a Protestant, or Calvinist, church settlement. Some at court noticed that he was fat, but it seemed to excite little censure. As the historian James Doelman observes, “The worst that was said of him was the Roman Catholic Tobie Matthew’s comment that ‘he is very fatt, but otherwise I have not in my life seene a more gallante presence of a man.’”36 Matthew’s remarks remind us that fatness was not always in the period taken as an emblem of excess, even by those in court. Indeed, Matthew’s remarks suggest that an older model of greatness coexisted with the new one I examined in the previous two chapters; thus, Spalato was considered in some senses a great man, whose fatness might even contribute to his “gallante presence.” Spalato too seems to have seen his fat very differently. In some senses, he seems frequently to ignore his corpulence. More than this, however, Spalato sometimes seems to suggest that his fatness might be a sign of his status as a scholar. The title page of the work he considered his magnum opus, De Republica Ecclesiastica (1617), represents the archbishop in his study, fat and surrounded by books. This representation may seem to suggest that corpulence may even be a sign of excessive monastic-style learning and piety. That is, he is not a man of the world, but a man who has embraced an inactive life more typical of learning and contemplation. Spalato implicitly offers such defense of himself in a letter he wrote that was included in the 1624 pamphlet M. Ant. de D[omi]nis Arch-bishop of Spalato, his shiftings in religion, published just after Spalato left England for Rome. Spalato calls attention to his fat body in order to defend himself against those who argue that he has been acting as a covert spy on behalf of the Catholic Church or Spain. His fatness suggests that he is more given to study, contemplation, and prayer rather than such devious activity: I have in a sort drowned my selfe in my Bookes, and macerated my selfe, as buried in my Study, daily spending there ten houres in reading, meditation and writing. How fit a man then am I to bee thought a spie? how nimble or able in body am I to survey the secret parts of this Kingdome.37

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That he is not nimble and able of body is a sign for Spalato of his exemplary piety. Spalato calls attention to the way that he is weakened to the point of decrepitude, but he seems to have none of the sense that this is a sign of his impiety or hypocrisy. His defense of himself directly counters the sorts of judgments placed on him by a puritan bodily aesthetic. Where it assumes that his fat body is a sign of his innate treachery, he argues that it is a sign rather of his exemplary piety. The fact that he has “macerated” and “drowned” himself suggests that he values learning above all things, even above the maintenance of his body. Such details will be used by others to suggest that Spalato is, instead, a fat hypocrite whose overindulgence is obvious in his distended, flabby paunch. M. Ant. de Dominis also offers us a useful contrast of this very different way that Spalato’s body was understood. Archbishop Richard Neile reads the same body through the puritan bodily aesthetic. In words recalling Spalato’s own descriptions of his fat body, Neile discredits him with the remark that “[t]here belike he eateth his word, and swalloweth his conscience that he may throw us into the gulphe of Schisme.’38 His characterization of Spalato draws on the types of associations that predominated the anti-Catholic pamphlets. Spalato in his fatness comes to embody the open, vulnerable, and grotesque body. We know by looking at it that it is characterized by a formlessness, evident in the use of the term “gulf ” here. His body, insofar as it bulges forth, tells us that he is characterized by a limitless appetite. Neile draws on a series of associations that would appeal viscerally to the puritans in his readership. In what follows, Neile follows this set of associations to their logical conclusion, as he imagines Spalato finally swallowing everything he touches. Thus, the Catholics “have bayted an hooke for him” of, among other things, a promise of “rich preferment of eight times as much yearely revenues, as he had here in England,) which hee hath swallowed.”39 All of this depends on seeing in his fat body a limitless appetite that places material comfort over principle. More specifically, it depends on understanding his distended paunch as the site of limitless appetite for power and wealth. From Neile’s perspective, we therefore know, by looking at Spalato’s paunch, that Spalato cannot rule his appetites. We Protestants know by looking at Spalato’s big fat gut that his conversion was never sincere. Spalato’s appearance says everything the Protestant, and especially puritan, audience needs to know about him. His fat belly becomes a convenient shorthand for his depravity and a convenient target for derision. The representation of Spalato in A Game at Chess or in Newes from Rome, Spalato’s Doome gives voice in part to this “common knowledge and gossip” of this era.40 Certainly, they operate by a series of associations


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that are already apparent in the anti-Catholic pamphlets we have considered.41 Indeed, the line I quoted above suggests that such a characterization is likely common knowledge: “Now it was observed by divers, that this Monster of men did swell, and was puffed up no lesse in heart and minde, then he was in bodie.”42 Spalato is repeatedly likened to large, amorphous entities that, in their formlessness, threaten to devour everyone in their midst; thus, he is likened to a quagmire, a gulf, a Scylla, and a Charybdis. All of this is designed to instill in the reader a puritan bodily aesthetic, along with a “healthy” dose of fear and revulsion. The figure of Spalato warns against the dangers of the flabby, fat body, even as it suggests that the reader should cultivate a more clearly demarcated, thin body. Spalato’s flabby body represents a considerable threat to the reader, the writer insists. He promises to offer only the most brief temperate “diet” of stories about Spalato: “As for some turpitude of his (when he lived here, which was kept a while very covert) I had rather it should be buried still, than defile my pen, my selfe, and the world with the discoverie of it, except I should be inforced to it.”43 The reader is warned to remain detached from his subject because Spalato is characterized as a force that has the power to pollute everything it touches. Spalato’s grotesque formlessness also assures the puritan audience that he is essentially irreligious. As the writer remarks, “As for Religion, I thinke hee had never any in him.”44 Puritan pamphlets offer a very different reading of Spalato’s body than the one offered in his defense. Where Spalato claimed that his fat was a sign of his own superior religion, committed to a life of scholarship, contemplation, and prayer, the puritans used his same fat body to emblematize how Spalato was fundamentally irreligious. His body tells us, after all, that he was governed by his appetites and not by his pious conscience. In what follows, the writer appears quite palpably disturbed by the way in which Spalato had previously haughtily dismissed the learning of the English divines. He takes pains, then, to undercut his learning and judgment by describing him to be like one of those depraved schoolmasters of St. Omers, more concerned with indulging himself and his appetites than with engaging in academic debates. The writer makes this point especially when he describes one of Spalato’s visits to the University at Oxford. There, “his conversion [was] gratulated with the tongues and phrases of the most elegant perpolite Orators of that famous Academie, saluted with the Stentorian voice and noise of Doctors.”45 The writer is clearly piqued because Spalato not only refuses to praise the learning of the Protestant divines but also insists that they are unlearned. The easiest way to undercut him, by this period, is to focus on his fatness and especially the

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bulging fatness of his paunch. The following passage is every bit as vitriolic as much antifat discourse today: his great, greazie, filthie, foggie paunch cheered with the daintiest cates the time could afford: yet after this nastie lubber his departure, he shamed not to report, that the Universitie knew not (forsooth) how to entertain such a worthy Gentleman as he was: hee spake disgracefully of their Act, unworthily of those reverend Doctors, who as farre exceeded him for learning, as a burning Torch outshineth a little candle, or the light of true fire, excelleth any false, foggie, vaporous Ignis fatuus whatsoever.46

Significantly, Spalato’s fat paunch is used here to represent the excess that is the obverse of the assumed puritan bodily style. Spalato is characterized by falsehood, the puritans by truth. He is characterized by multiplicity and mutability, they by singleness and immutability. Their respective identities are taken to be suggested by their respective body types. Spalato is characterized by a foggy paunch that refuses containment, they implicitly by a thin body that makes a show of its virtuous containment. Spalato’s paunch is characterized by the grotesque embodiment that in the early Reformation was used to characterize the Church of Rome as a collective body. If the Protestant faith is assumed to have a singular, immutable identity, evident here in the way that the learning of the Protestant divines is characterized as “true fire,” then Catholicism is associated with all that is multiple and changing. The site where Spalato defies firm bodily boundaries becomes an emblem not only of boundless appetite but also of his formlessness and, hence, of a multiple, changing quality. The proliferation of adjectives used to describe Spalato’s paunch, indeed, calls attention to the way that it resists all efforts to contain or define it. No single word can encompass it because it is essentially defined by its multiplicity and mutability. His paunch is finally largely defined by its inability to be controlled or contained; it registers, therefore, primarily as a disruption that defies stasis. This uncontainable, amorphous quality of Spalato’s paunch leads the puritan polemicists to arrive at the logical conclusion that Spalato’s foggy fat, all-consuming ambition presents an omnipresent threat of pollution. Terms such as “greasy” or “filthy” are used throughout these polemical works to characterize the polluting quality that is essential to Spalato’s body (and the fat body in general); such pollution comes from that bodily site where the body flaunts containment. The paunch finally is characterized more by a verb than a noun. That is, it is characterized more by a power to resist containment and from that power comes its immense threat to all that it touches. Spalato’s


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fatness symbolizes a threat that is dynamic in its mutability. Just as his flesh oozes forth, so his guile, hypocrisy, and ambition threaten the boundaries that the puritans cherish, particularly if they are not careful to contain such a threat. Spalato’s paunch is defined as that which flouts the emerging bodily style puritans see as a sign of their moral superiority. Such texts use the moralized language of pollution to suggest that the paunch is a force that threatens to violate all that it touches. His paunch, after all, is described as “filthy,” even as he is described as that fogginess which obscures the true light. The puritan reader could not read such characterizations without knowing that in Spalato’s paunch lies a force that must be avoided— indeed, a force that must be constantly contained and controlled within the puritan himself. Spalato’s fat body is characterized by its power to violate what are assumed to be clear-cut distinctions. His bulging body is neither solid nor liquid, but a messy mixture of both. Spalato will often be described in just such anomalous terms in a way that is supposed to excite revulsion in an audience that values a closed bodily style as a sign of purity and abstemiousness. Spalato’s paunch will come to be seen as a “quagmire,” as A Game at Chess has it, or a “Gulfe, Charybdis,” as the Newes from Rome has it.47 In its oozing materiality, it threatens to engulf anyone or anything it touches. The term “foggy,” used twice here, is important because it focuses on how his fatness refuses containment. It might be useful here to recall that the one fat character in Elynour Rummynge is described as “[a]ll foggy fat,” where grotesque embodiment is seen as that which violates the newly developing civilized bodily aesthetic. Appropriately enough for a word that focuses on anomalousness, “foggy” has an uncertain etymology, although the Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it has its origin in a word meaning “coarse grass” or “moss.”48 The word comes to represent that which violates all expected and seemingly fixed categories; thus, it can describe a liquid that is “[f ]ull of floating particles, thick” or, more commonly today, air that is “thick, murky.”49 Such meanings, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, come from the way that the word comes to signify “boggy, marshy.”50 As the civilized bodily aesthetic takes hold, the word can be used to suggest a fat that is “unwholesomely bloated, swollen with flabby and unhealthy corpulence, puffy.”51 Foggy fat is precisely that fat which refuses containment; it is more suggestive of liquid or fog to the extent to which it flouts all clear-cut bodily boundaries. When it is used to characterize Spalato, the word emphasizes his “puffed up” quality described elsewhere. Thus, his paunch is powerful insofar as it is the site in which Spalato grows beyond the proper limits of what the individualized body should be according to this new aesthetic.

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Later, in calling him a “luxurious Glutton,” the writer observes that “[h]is Gut I must needs say was a Gulfe, Charybdis.”52 Such imagery underscores the degree to which his paunch, in its fogginess, threatens to engulf all in its midst. Now I want to consider one more image because insofar as it recalls older iconographic representations of the Church of Rome, it allows us to see how the grotesque is understood in a very different way when the civilized bodily aesthetic begins to emerge. Grotesque imagery often suggests the way that a collectivity becomes polluted, but with the emergence of the civilized aesthetic, the same grotesque imagery points to the power of the individualized body to pollute all it touches. In Reformation iconography, the Church of Rome was commonly associated with the grotesque belly, even as it was associated with the grotesque mingling of body with body, the latter typically understood as a form of sodomy in its disruption of traditional social categories. In one seventeenth-century image described by John King, the Church of Rome is depicted as a huge beast whose belly is a cask of wine.53 From the anus of the beast spews Eucharistic hosts that are distributed by priests to the obedient, kneeling people. This iconography draws on passages in the Bible to characterize the Church of Rome with the belly and belly-god. In its association with the belly, the Church of Rome is seen as that which promotes the material and worldly at the expense of the spiritual. Newes from Rome draws on such grotesque iconographic imagery, only now the imagery focuses on the very specific “belly” of Spalato himself. The horror that attaches to the collective body is directed at the body of Spalato, specifically as that site in his body that refuses to contain itself and thus remains amorphous (and hence dangerous). Spalato becomes an example of all that the individual can degenerate into if he refuses to contain and control his body. The set of associations, furthermore, is designed to both excite the visceral revulsion of the reader and instruct his behavior at the same time: The Babylonians used daily to sacrifice to their Bell, he to his Belly, making it his god, Philip. 3.19. and his lungs the Temple, his paunch the Altar. Oh brutish Sacrificer. I could here speake much of this Belly-god; that he would often drinke usque ad ebrietatem, till hee were drunken. So that I cannot better compare him than unto a furnace, whose mouth is Gluttony, whose flame Pride, whose steame Luxurie, the sparkles filthy words, the smoake an evill name, the ashes have beene Povertie, and the end of all, Shame.54

The grotesque imagery often applied to the Church of Rome as a collective entity is applied to the swollen belly of Spalato. In the process, he


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comes to embody all that is excessive and corrupt. Notably, the term “belly-god” is used to characterize Spalato’s own individualized belly with a suggestion that any fat person growing beyond the bounds of what he should be becomes a similarly profane and profaning object. Spalato acquires the power to pollute all he touches. Such power comes from the way in which his body is characterized as that which rejects solidity. The belly-god is literalized into the site in which the body bulges forth beyond the distinct boundaries that demarcate the individualized body. In this sense, the reader is warned that anyone can become a belly-god if he does not take efforts to contain and control himself to these individualized bodily boundaries. Newes from Rome extends those associations that were only implicitly developed in the anti-Catholic tracts we considered. His foggy fat paunch tells us that he is the very essence of sin. As such, every Protestant reader is urged to embrace a virtuous life in which he regulates what goes in and what comes out. In doing so, he will assume the more sharply bounded, individualized body that can be derived from such practices. III. The Vulnerable English Body in A Game at Chess Middleton’s A Game at Chess similarly plays on the fears of the audience to encourage them to cultivate a puritan bodily aesthetic. The body must be sharply demarcated and bounded, and what goes in and comes out must be constantly monitored. Only such a body, furthermore, is assumed to be the holy one. A Game at Chess encourages this new bodily style by playing on the fears of its audience. These fears are intensified when they realize that no body can ever achieve such a perfect, closed condition. As such, they realize that the closed, impermeable body is an ideal that they always strive for but never achieve. To make this predicament worse, they also realize that they are constantly threatened by the grotesque body of the Catholic. The oozing, unbounded, permeable bodies of the Black House remain a constant threat to the integrity of the White House. Such a dynamic plays a central role in encouraging people to adopt behavior they see as fostering the individualized, demarcated body of the civilized aesthetic. The fear that the fat body has the power to pollute all it touches remains alive and well, I would argue, in contemporary antiobesity rhetoric. Thus, we respond to such bodily phenomena with viscerally felt revulsion and fear. As we gaze on those fat, flabby bottoms or bellies that accompany such news stories, some of us, at least, are likely to feel that those bodies in their amorphousness have the power to infect us and pollute us both as individuals and as a nation. Recent media stories that

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discuss the contagious nature of obesity draw on and augment just such a fear. We can better understand the fear in A Game at Chess if we consider the historical moment in which it was written. As I have stated above, it was written when many Protestants, especially puritans, feared for the future of the English Protestant church and state. Many feared that they had already been infiltrated by Catholics and crypto-Catholics, and many feared that they were about to be invaded and taken over by a foreign, Catholic power. Middleton draws on these fears and describes them in terms of a threat of violation (bodily penetration) in his work; he does so in order to inculcate his devout reader with the puritan bodily aesthetic. Thus, Middleton suggests to the puritan reader that the best way to protect the church and state is to adopt a puritan bodily aesthetic. In other words, the borders of the state will be preserved if the borders of the individualized body are sealed off and protected. Representations of the Black House focus on their permeable bodies in a way that is designed to excite revulsion and fear in a puritan audience. In a similar way, their threat to the English church and state is described as a form of penetration that threatens to pollute and weaken the entire state. In this portrayal, Middleton expects his audience to feel intense revulsion at the fact that they (puritan England) had already been penetrated and defiled by foreign figures such as Gondomar and by crypto-Catholics at home. Consider how, in the play, Gondomar boasts of his own intrusion upon and penetration of the White House. His imagery suggests the degree to which he has effectively infiltrated what should have been her hard, protective boundaries. Gondomar boasts, “No fortification, / Haven, creek, landingplace ‘bout the White coast / But I got draught and platform, learned the depth / Of all their channels, knowledge of all sands / Shelves, rocks, and rivers for invasion properest.”55 Because Gondomar has already penetrated into the most secret inlets of England’s borders, they are rendered weak and vulnerable to future invasion. The state will be protected if the audience members redouble their efforts to police the boundaries, both of the state and of their own bodies. Such bodily self-discipline is seen as the key to the security of the English state as a whole. Middleton then maneuvers the Black Knight to make much the same point when he boasts of his success in convincing King James I to free Jesuit priests from English prisons. He has, then, released a plague of “locusts” on England that threatens to destroy her from within. As the Black Knight boasts, the Jesuits “have their dens / In ladies’ couches, there’s safe groves and fens.”56 Presumably, the Jesuits must be kept in prison lest they penetrate into the heart of the English households. More particularly, they seduce the wives of prominent Catholic families, and in so doing,


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undermine the proper order that should prevail in the household because, through their actions, the women become masters over their husbands. All of this is fairly typical anti-Catholic rhetoric. Middleton draws on such conventions to instill fear, especially in the male puritan audience member, that England will be polluted and corrupted from within. In this case, the boundaries of the English household and the boundaries of the ladies’ bodies must be vigilantly guarded from Catholic attacks and invasions. Middleton addresses a godly Protestant audience, who had feared that they might be invaded (or infiltrated) by Catholic Spain. Such an audience is likely to be sympathetic to the bodily aesthetic, which values the closed and contained body, and thus they are likely to find bodily permeability particularly revolting. Boasts such as the one above are meant to excite revulsion and contempt from just such an audience. Elsewhere, Gondomar boasts that “[t]he court has held the city by the horns / Whilst I have milked her.”57 Middleton describes the threat to England as coming both from its own corrupt court that was seen as too lax toward Catholicism, foreign and domestic, and from the foreign Catholic threat. Many puritans were, indeed, upset at the way that the city was itself rendered weak and vulnerable as James defended his Catholic favorites at court, including the foreign ambassador, Gondomar. The city’s symbolic bodily boundaries are violated as she is “milked” by Gondomar himself. Such an image is designed to horrify and anger those who value a puritan bodily aesthetic. England has been weakened and effeminized, such language suggests, because she cannot preserve her bodily borders. Through Gondomar’s violence and their own failure to look to their bodily boundaries, the puritan city is transformed into the sort of leaking, oozing, unholy body, a veritable Sodom, which is a site most frequently associated in A Game at Chess with the Catholic, or Black, side. The fat body plays a central role in A Game at Chess because it becomes an emblem of bodily excess that must be avoided if England is to remain safe and inviolable. Middleton seems sure that many in his audience will have the same visceral disgust for the fat body that was evident in the anti-Spalato pamphlets and gossip. Such a visceral disgust and even horror for the fat body can in turn encourage his audience to contain and control themselves by practicing those forms of self-discipline for which the puritan was known. Shortly, I will consider the way in which Middleton depicts the fat body, where Spalato’s fatness is a sign of his treason, but for now, I want to begin my consideration of the “checkmate by discovery” scene. Placed after the Fat Bishop is bagged but before the extensive bagging scene, the “checkmate by discovery” scene offers a topical representation of the marriage

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negotiations between Spain and Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham after they had stolen off to Spain in 1623. Many in the audience would approach this scene with the expectation that they will finally see the truth of the Black House exposed. Some might expect to see Prince Charles and the Duke himself also exposed. Many puritans certainly considered them to be threats to Protestantism because they seemed (at this point in history at least) to be bartering away their faith. Middleton urges such audience members to look to themselves instead, because he chooses this key moment to focus on the White plebeian population. In doing so, he insists that they, rather than the prince and duke, have made themselves vulnerable to attacks on their faith. Relatedly, he offers them a solution to their existing predicament. If they care about the future of their faith, they should redirect attention to containing and controlling their bodies by avoiding the type of excesses typical of the Black House. After a whole play full of scenes that mocked Archbishop Spalato for his fatness, the London puritan audience might be surprised to find that they are likened to Spalato themselves at this key point in the play. In their affluence, they too have indulged their belly and become, as a result, fat and lazy. In Gondomar’s lengthy speech, Middleton directs his attention to the way in which the “the wealthy, plump plebeians” of the White House have made themselves vulnerable to assault.58 Their moral laxity is apparent in their fat bodies, Middleton suggests. Gondomar focuses on the way in which their fat bodies make them too permeable and thus too vulnerable to invasion. His description of the “wealthy, plump plebeians” focuses heavily on the way that their massive body “swallows” them from within. Gondomar offers an extensive history of famous fat men, who all, in one way or another, are emasculated and weakened. One ruler was virtually “choked with his own paunch.”59 The king of Castille killed himself by a “pernicious herb / Taken to make him lean” because he so fears being killed by his “infinite mass of belly.”60 In all these cases, the individual is “swallowed,” “choked” by the “belly,” or “paunch.” All these figures, like the Fat Bishop himself, are threatened by that bodily site in which the body is seen as oozing beyond what it should be. Taken as a whole, this speech would teach the audience that they need to cultivate a thin body with clearly demarcated boundaries between itself and others. The emphasis on foggy fatness here tells them that the holy body is thin, the unholy one fat. As the Gondomar figure of the Black Knight continues, he dismisses the White citizens in terms that recall the morally charged language used to depict the Fat Bishop. Those audience members, then, who have spent the entire play so sure that they


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were superior to the Fat Bishop would be forced suddenly to see themselves as characterized by a similar bodily excess: The old bewailers of excess in those days Complained there was more coin bid for a cook Than for a warhorse, but now cooks are purchased After the rate of triumphs, and some dishes After the rate of cooks; which must needs make Some of th’White House gourmandisers, especially Your wealthy, plump plebeians, like the hogs Which Scaliger cites, that could not move for fat, So insensible of either prick or goad, That mice made holes to needle in their buttocks And they ne’er felt’em.61

The puritan audience member might at first assume that this applies to the Jacobean court, famous for its lavish feasts. Suddenly, the same criticism they regularly level at the overindulgent Catholic or Jacobean courtier is, they would see, leveled at them. Gondomar, furthermore, uses the language previously used for the Fat Bishop when he imagines them as “wealthy, plump plebeians.” In this, the puritan audience is made to see how their excesses, including their excess consumption, render them vulnerable to foreign invasion. They are described as hogs with an infinite mass of flesh that overflows the boundaries of their individualized bodies. The bulk, furthermore, renders them susceptible to foreign invasion; thus, they are sodomized by mice, who make “holes to needles in their buttocks,” without even being aware of any bodily penetration. The passage would excite special horror, and perhaps some anger and fear, in the audience member who has spent the whole play laughing at the leaking and overflowing bodies of Gondomar and the Fat Bishop. Now, they are made to realize that they too can say with Gondomar, “There’s a foul flaw in the bottom of my drum, Pawn.”62 Indeed, it might be a shock to just such a plebeian audience member to realize that his behavior is so excessive and overindulgent that it horrifies both the Spanish and the Jacobean court. The White Knight responds in horror by saying that “I shall be half afraid to feed hereafter.”63 He gives voice to a puritan bodily aesthetic by recommending implicitly to the puritan audience that they need to embrace a more systematic and intentional form of bodily self-mortification, such as fasting. The White Duke responds with similar disgust, but his remarks are especially important to our history of fat because they indicate that Middleton was well aware of the emerging courtly aesthetic we examined previously. Through the White Duke’s words, Middleton associates the

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Jacobean court with a civilized courtly aesthetic that privileges the thin male body. Middleton uses his remarks to make a distinction between a puritan bodily aesthetic and the civilized courtly one; whereas the former recommends a thin body for its virtuousness and integrity, the latter recommends a thin body for its comeliness. Not all thin bodies presumably are equal; some, like the thin body of Gondomar or the thin body of the Duke of Buckingham, suggest the vanity and excesses of the individual. The White Duke agrees with the White Knight that he will not eat, not so much because he is repulsed by the excesses of the wealthy, plump plebeians, but because he wishes a “comely” body. The White Duke adds, “Or I, beshrew my heart, for I fear fatness, / The fog of fatness, as I fear a dragon; / The comeliness I wish for, that’s as glorious.”64 Middleton uses these remarks to distinguish between the two bodily aesthetics and thus between the thin body favored at court and the thin body that should ideally be cultivated by the puritan reader. The White Duke fears the fog of fat because he wants a thin body that establishes his status. Thus, he focuses on the way it makes him “glorious,” perhaps because it renders him attractive to those at court, especially to James. Buckingham is a type of the arriviste who was disliked by many precisely because he used his thin body to rise to power. Middleton plays up such associations in this section when, as Heinemann comments, he “makes Buckingham accuse himself of faults well known to be his in reality—gluttony, fatness and lechery, with a more than a hint of homosexual lechery at that.”65 Importantly, Buckingham’s thin body is not a sign of his virtue, nor is it a sign of his impermeability. Buckingham’s thin body, instead, is a result of his personal vanity, especially his intense fear of fatness, the “fog of fatness” that would swallow up the thin body for which he was known and by which he at least partially achieved his preferment. All of this comments on the way that the Duke of Buckingham rose to power because he was favored by King James, where his appeal came in no small measure because his body, his carriage, and his dancing pleased the king. Such a bodily aesthetic, while consistent with the form puritans favor, differs in its motivation and is thus seen as weakening the state. We should notice, then, that Buckingham shows himself more preoccupied with fighting fat than with fighting dragons, and this in a play that is obsessively concerned with the security of the state. Those who cultivate a thin body to be pleasing and comely according to court style are implicitly seen as weak and effeminate. Like Gondomar, their thin bodies are no guarantee that they are pure and inviolable. Such a counterpoint serves to instill further fear in the puritan audience member, who will adopt behavior designed to assert and preserve the borders of his individualized body. The puritan will, instead, cultivate a thin body that is strong, virtuous,


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and militaristic; even as the puritan secures the boundaries of his own sharply demarcated body, he will help to secure the boundaries of the church and state. Middleton is clearly aware that the same intense fear of fat can be used to privilege the elite body of the likes of Buckingham, and he takes steps to distance his own aesthetic from this courtly one. Middleton uses the “checkmate by discovery” scene to redirect his puritan audience to their own bodies. They would understand the need to police the borders of their bodies because the Fat Bishop offers the horrific counterpoint of what they should be. He is defined not simply by his fat but also by his grotesqueness. His fat expands like liquid or fog until it fills whatever space it occupies. All of this is taken to be a sign of his dangerous, limitless appetite and ambition. The Fat Bishop expresses his dissatisfaction with the preferment he has received in England by focusing on his expanding flesh: “I am persuaded that this flesh would fill / The biggest chair ecclesiastical / If it were put to trial.”66 The final bagging scene offers us a visual representation of this as the Fat Bishop expands to fit his new preferment, hell. The fat of the Fat Bishop is seen as that which resists all firm bodily boundaries; indeed, it seems infinitely expandable and malleable. It should be no surprise, given the representations of Spalato we have considered, that this grotesque aspect of fat is located in the site of the paunch. It is in this site that he is seen as growing beyond the boundaries of the individualized body. The Black Knight, after he has connived to trap the Fat Bishop, comments, “Here’s a sweet paunch to propagate belief on, / Like the foundation of a chapel laid / Upon a quagmire.”67 Middleton uses the anti-Spalato imagery we already considered in Newes from Rome. His paunch is that site which is a quagmire insofar as it is the site that refuses all containment. The Black Knight’s words make it clear that the Fat Bishop is essentially a figure of irreligion; thus, no church should lay its foundations upon such a “quagmire.” The cluster of images indicates that Spalato is a threat not just to himself but to all he touches. They are likely to be swallowed up by his ever-expanding, grotesque body. Elsewhere, the Fat Bishop is described as a mere aggregate of garbage or a bag of liquid in a way that suggests that he is only barely solid and whole. In his first appearance, the Fat Bishop compares himself to “Fat cathedral bodies / [that] Have very often but lean little souls / Much like the lady in the lobster’s head, / A great deal of shell and garbage of all colours.”68 Thus, he is described as a thing that is garbage and thus potentially polluting, but also as a thing defined by its multiplicity and formlessness. That is, he would easily disintegrate into mere parts that have no cohesion or integrity. In a related image, the Fat Bishop is elsewhere described as liquid ready to burst forth from its distended container. Upon learning that the Fat Bishop has betrayed him by attempting to seize or

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rape the White Queen, the White King calls him simply a “lump of rank ingratitude / Swelled with the poison of hypocrisy.”69 The Black Knight employs similar language to describe him when he speaks of his intention to woo him back to their side: “I’ll make him the balloon-ball of the churches / And both the sides shall toss him; he looks like one, / A thing swelled up with mingled drink and urine, / And will bound well from one side to another!”70 Both descriptions focus on his fat body as that which swells into a threatening formlessness. The site of this active formlessness is his paunch. It both attacks his own form even as in its grotesque nature threatens to attack all it touches. This explains why he can simultaneously be described as something with no solidity, even as he elsewhere is seen as solid enough to push, squeeze, and even penetrate the bodies of others. Notably, his liquid nature is associated as well with his hypocrisy or treachery; both Black Knight and White King recognize that he will bounce from one side to the other by looking at the grotesqueness of his body. That he has no firm bodily boundaries indicates that he has no integrity. Such an audience might get pleasure from the way that the Fat Bishop comes to violate the Black House by pushing them aside with his everexpanding paunch. They deserve each other, such an audience might insist, because where the one continually oozes beyond all efforts at containment, the others are dangerously leaking. As Catholic bodies, all of them are inappropriately unbounded, albeit in different ways. As the Fat Bishop grows beyond the boundaries of what his body should be, he threatens to penetrate and violate the bodies of others. Early on, the Fat Bishop revels in the way that his pamphlets penetrate deeply into the vulnerable body of the Catholic enemy. The Fat Bishop boasts to the White King that “[t]he stronger sting it shoots into the blood / Of the Black adversary.”71 The Black Knight similarly observes that “Look, more books yet. / Yonder greasy gormandising prelate / Has wrought our House more mischief by his scripts, / His fat and fulsome volumes, / Than the whole body of the adverse party.”72 Spalato is characterized by the way in which he violates the boundaries of all bodies, his own and others. Such imagery teaches the puritan reader to mistrust the fat body generally. Certainly, they are made to know that, in his swelling fatness, the Fat Bishop could never really be either Black or White, Catholic or Protestant. He is characterized, instead, by his changeability, evident in his “greasy” and “foggy” nature. As such, he threatens to besmear anyone he touches. The Fat Bishop boasts openly of the way in which his writing draws blood from the Black House. Much of the humor of the final scene comes from the fact that the various liquid bodies will now mingle inappropriately in the swollen bag of hell. Such grotesque imagery is supposed to suggest something essential about the Church of Rome; thus,


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Middleton uses imagery that refers to devotional practices commonly associated with the Catholic church. The following recalls the way Catholics meditated upon the crucifixion, but it takes a perverse form as the Fat Bishop is seen as crucifying his “mother” church. As he boasts, I know my pen draws blood of the Black House; There’s never a book I write but their cause bleeds. It has lost many an ounce of reputation Since I came of this side, I strike deep in And leave the orifex gushing where I come; But where’s my advancement all this while I ha’ gaped for? I’d have some round preferment, corpulent dignity, That bears some breadth and compass in the gift on’t; I am persuaded that this flesh would fill The biggest chair ecclesiastical If it were put to trial.73

A premonition of the type of power the Fat Bishop is to exert at the end of A Game at Chess, he is here seen as penetrating and drawing blood from the Church of Rome. Middleton dwells in detail on this image, perhaps in a way designed to elicit horror from the audience who is committed to a puritan bodily style. Here is a bishop, after all, who has no respect for the integrity of his mother church. The whole suggests that the Fat Bishop gets sadistic, perhaps even erotic, pleasure from penetrating the bodies of others, including the body of his “mother” church. He lacks all integrity, his fat body tells us, because he has no respect for the borders of the individualized body. The threat he poses to her is manifested in the way that his fat body grows so big that it can fill “the biggest chair ecclesiastical.” Middleton uses all of these images to suggest that the Fat Bishop in his grotesque fatness is a source of contamination and pollution. Even the Black Knight finds him morally wanting—his fatness tells the knight that he has no integrity. When the Fat Bishop falls for his trap and determines to reconvert to Rome, the Black Knight chastises him for the pain he has inflicted on his mother church. For the Protestant audience member, such a description would undoubtedly underscore the leaking and permeable nature of the Black House and its church, but it would also convince them that the Fat Bishop was a particularly lethal threat precisely because he has no respect for the integrity of any institution, whether it be for the Church of Rome or the Church of England. In making this point, Middleton is also inculcating his audience with a very different sense of what religion (and piety) must be. The truly religious person, unlike the fat hypocrite, will practice bodily self-control. After the Fat

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Bishop tells the Black Knight of his intention to change allegiance once again, the Black Knight declares, Your holiness is merry with the messenger, Too happy to be true; you speak what should be, If natural compunction touched you truly. O you’ve drawn blood, life-blood, the blood of honour, From your most dear, your primitive mother’s heart. Your sharp invectives have been points of spears In her sweet tender sides; the unkind wounds Which a son gives, a son of reverence specially, They rankle ten times more than the adversary’s.74

The language recalls the devotional traditions of the Catholic church, especially those in which the devotee meditates on the Crucifixion. In particular, it recalls the devotional practice by which the devotee meditates on Jesus’s sacred heart or wounded side in order to feel in part the pain Christ suffers. Perhaps recognizing that the Fat Bishop is insensible to the pain he has inflicted on his primitive mother, the Black Knight directs him to meditate in detail on this pain until he understands how his polemic has been like the “point of spears / In her tender sides.” Interestingly, the Fat Bishop’s response only further suggests his own permeable and liquid nature; thus, he implores, “Forbear, or I shall melt in the place I stand / And let forth a fat bishop in sad syrup.”75 The representation of his fat body as liquid, syrup, and poison indicates that he is essentially changeable in nature and thus untrustworthy. If he has wounded his mother church, he will, the audience is made to know, soon wound the English church and state. The Fat Bishop is even more permeable and unbounded than other members of the Black House. An essentially liquid entity, he will grow to fill whatever “chair ecclesiastical” he acquires. Indeed, at the end of A Game of Chess, the Fat Bishop promises to grow big enough to fill his new preferment of Hell. The bag of Hell is itself much like the Fat Bishop. Just as he is described as a ball of liquid, so too the bag of Hell swells as it swallows the characters of the Black House. His paunch, in fact, the site of his seemingly limitless swelling, is in many ways like the bag of hell itself. The association between the two is more than mere accident, I would insist; thus, we might remember that, as T.H. Howard-Hill reminds us, both the Fat Bishop and the bagging scene were added in revision. The scene is played in a way that associates the two. When the bag appears on stage—probably from the trapdoor where the hellmouth traditionally emerges, the Fat Bishop is already inside it. In some ways, he is the genius of the place, as he represents the immense


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appetite associated as well with the ever-increasing, gluttonous maw of hell. Both have a belly that is insatiable, and both destroy the firm boundaries of the individualized bodies. The bag becomes a “balloon ball” swollen finally with the bodily juices of the characters of the Black House; the “verjuice” that issues from one piece mingles with the leakage from the Black Knight when both are consumed by the hell-bag. At the same time, the Fat Bishop plays the central role in squeezing into and penetrating the bodies in ways that make them mingle improperly with each other. This final moment draws on premodern iconography of Hell with its grotesque descriptions of hellish punishment. Body mingles improperly with body, even as their bodies are perpetually pierced, pricked, and penetrated by the devils that punish them. Importantly, the figure of the Fat Bishop is associated, finally, even with death, damnation, and hell itself. After the White side has won, the bag appears on stage with the pieces already bagged in it. The White King announces, “And there behold: the bag, like hell-mouth, opens / To take her due, and the lost sons appear / Greedily gaping for increase of fellowship.”76 Indeed, the syntax makes it unclear whether he is referring to the “greedily gaping” hell-mouth or lost sons. I would insist that the cluster of associations links the “greedily gaping” appetite of the hell-mouth with the appetite of the Fat Bishop. The Fat Bishop clearly plays a central role in the scene. Once more he seeks to gain primacy as he views the bag as one more world to conquer. He announces, “The White House has given us the bag, I thank’em.”77 Perhaps the title page to the published text gives us some sense as to how this would be played. It certainly shows that there is a close identification between the Fat Bishop and the bag itself: the bishop’s swollen paunch mirrors the swollen paunch of the hell-bag. In the engraving on the titlepage, three pieces are pushed into the bag even as the mitered figure of the Fat Bishop takes precedent in placement as he is pushed slightly above them and to the front.78 The audience, then, was made to focus on the Fat Bishop, and especially his fat paunch, as that which represents hell itself. Notice how the following lines focus especially on “Spalato’s paunch” and how it aggressively squeezes, and even seemingly violates, the bodies of those around him: Fat Bishop. [In the bag] The White House has given us the bag, I thank’em. Jesting Pawn. [In the bag] They had need have given you a whole bag by yourself. ’Slid, this Fat Bishop has so overlaid me, So squelched and squeezed me, I have no verjuice left in me;

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You shall find all my goodness, if you look for’t, In the bottom of the bag. Fat Bishop. Thou malapert pawn! The Bishop must have room, he will have room, And room to lie at pleasure. Jesting Pawn. All the bag, I think, Is room scant for your Spalato paunch.79

The exchange focuses especially on Spalato’s ever-expanding paunch, which, indeed, threatens to crush them all. These lines suggest something of what must have been acted on stage; that is, the actor who played the Fat Bishop must have bumped up, squeezed against, and even tried to lay on top of the other pieces as he struggled for primacy of place. He would undoubtedly play up the aggressive assault on the bodies of others, and the language is suggestive of the sort of threat of bodily penetration found elsewhere in A Game at Chess. Such action is even sexualized, as it recalls similar moments earlier in the play. In particular, it recalls the earlier threatened rape of the White Queen’s Pawn and the White Queen. With his ever-growing flesh, the Fat Bishop promises to penetrate and pollute the Black Queen and the Jesting Pawn, even as he once threatened to penetrate, pollute, and rape the White Queen. The audience might very well recall that the Jesting Pawn was the same character who threatened to bugger the White Pawn as when he promised he would make him his “under-drudgery” or, more sensationally, his “white jennet.”80 In hell, the Fat Bishop carries out the type of grotesque, improper penetration that is characteristic of the Black House itself. Middleton even implies that the Fat Bishop might swell beyond the confines of hell. His insatiable appetite is associated with his swelling belly, as he urges his fellow victims to “[c]rowd in all you can, / The bishop will be still uppermost man, / Maugre king, queen, or politician.”81 He might even break Hell itself. When he was bagged at the end of act 4, the Fat Bishop explains, “The bag had need be sound, or it goes to wrack; / Sin and my weight will make a strong one crack.”82 In fact, Hell itself may not be able to contain the permeable and changeable bodies of either the Black Knight or the Fat Bishop. The Fat Bishop assures us of his companion: He’ll peck a hole i’th’bag and get out shortly But I shall be the last man that creeps out, And that’s the misery of greatness ever. Foh, the politician is not sound i’th’vent; I smell him hither.83


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The Fat Bishop is, of course, making fun of the Black Knight’s bleeding fistula, but in a way that forces the audience to focus on how their bodies leak forth. The bag is filled with the bodily fluids and smells from the all-too-permeable bodies of the Black House. Middleton implies that the Black House will find its way out, the bottom of the bag proving finally as unsound as the bottoms of the bodies of the fat plebeian Londoners or of the Black Knight himself. Such a cluster of images around the swollen body of the Fat Bishop, the swollen bodies of the wealthy Londoners, and the swollen body of the bag that is the hell-mouth tells us much about the puritan bodily style promoted in A Game at Chess. The puritan, in policing what goes in and what comes out will, cultivate an implicitly thin, taut body. Middleton uses this cluster of images to encourage his audience to rededicate themselves to such puritan forms of bodily self-discipline. Importantly, the bodies of the White House remain vulnerable throughout A Game at Chess, as they are at once threatened by their lack of discipline, their recusant population, and the foreign-born Catholics. No one in A Game at Chess is allowed to embody the perfectly thin, controlled body because the puritan readers have yet to live up to their ideal. Certainly, Middleton criticizes the “wealthy, plump plebeians” for adopting a lax, immoral lifestyle. Yes, our state and church have been threatened, A Game at Chess tells us, by the unwise actions of the king, prince, and the king’s favorite, but it has also been threatened because those who claim to be the most virtuous have been morally lax and self-indulgent. The Fat Bishop reminds the puritan audience of what they might become if they do not begin to be more vigilant in guarding their bodily boundaries. Middleton’s A Game at Chess helps demonstrate how religion, and more specifically the godly religion, plays an important role in making the fat body into the very emblem of excess. Indeed, the fat body is seen as innately sinful and even damnable in A Game at Chess. By the time Middleton wrote, the fat body was something to be feared. Just by looking at the “infinite mass of belly,” the puritan especially knew that an individual was overly excessive, indulgent, and lazy. Here was a body, after all, that had grown beyond its proper, individualized bounds. As such, no one could trust it. If it could engulf the self, it could also engulf everything and everyone it touches. The moralistic language once applied to the figure of Gluttony in premodern times is now applied to those individualized characters who fail to police the boundaries of their individualized bodies. In this sense, the horror that once attached to Gluttony is transferred onto the bodies of the fat. A Game at Chess explains in part why we should feel such visceral horror and disgust at the fat body even in late modernity. To the early moderns as well as to the

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late moderns, the fat body is an emblem of excess, associated with disease, death, and even damnation. The fat body, we might notice, with the sodomitical body, excites a similar fear that it destroys the boundaries of the individual body. Such permeable bodies serve to define the outer limits of what the body should be. Of course, we need not identify with the thin, bounded body over presumptively unbounded ones, and this visceral horror need not consume us when we are presented with bodies that are, from this emerging modern aesthetic, grotesque. That it is not inevitable that we identify with or align ourselves with the thin and virtuous body or that we promote a (Protestant) masculinist militarism becomes apparent when we consider Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Middleton’s near contemporaries. Both of them critique a dynamic by which the fat body is made the emblem of excess. Both show how the certain privileged people get their privilege insofar as they mark and stigmatize the fat body. Both Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s works show how this moralism that sees the fat body as essentially sinful can be used to secure the privilege of a few, including the few privileged courtly elites criticized by Middleton in A Game at Chess. They remain, however, far more suspicious of such a dynamic relationship, showing how it is used for dehumanizing ends. For this reason, they offer us a model of how we can make allegiances with bodies that are still very keenly stigmatized in late modernity.

Chapter

6

Weigh Me as a Friend: Jonson’s Multiple Constructions of the Fat Body Ben Jonson’s body is often palpably present in his poetry. In his late poetry, especially, Jonson repeatedly offers what appears to be vivid descriptions of his body that are to many people’s minds simply grotesque.1 We are told, then, that he has a “rocky face,” a “mountain belly,” and even such details as he “doth hardly approach / His friends, but to break chairs, or crack a coach.”2 Jonson gives us his age to the very year or his weight to what appears to be the nearest pound. In such moments, Jonson provides for early modern and late modern readers what Sara van den Berg has called “damning enumeration.”3 He tells us that “[h]is weight is twenty stone, within two pound” and that he is a “[f ]ull twenty stone, of which I lack two pound.”4 Such enumerations are likely to be especially damning for the late modern reader given the extent to which we are asked in our daily lives to identify ourselves by such vital statistics. We think we know something important and essential about Jonson when we know that he weighed 278 pounds, significantly a number that only seems precise. (In reality, he may weigh sometimes more, sometimes less, or he may be using the figure symbolically, as one scholar reasons Jonson does with his age when he specifies in the same collection that it is fifty.5) Such a figure can be damning when it is taken to be a simple objective statement of fact that is, nonetheless, taken to say something of central importance about the

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character of the person. We know, or think we know, that Jonson was excessive and immoderate, given that number on the scale. Such assumptions are evident in statements by several critics. Bruce Boehrer, in his criticism, uses this approximate reckoning to damn Jonson. Having just discussed the excesses of the Jacobean court, he uses this number to prove that Jonson is the perfect emblem of this courtly excess. As Boehrer concludes, “Hence the sad case of Ben Jonson: he cannot successfully assert his notion of moral value without transgressing it in the same gesture; he cannot become the monarch of literary moderation without weighing 280 pounds.”6 It is tempting, of course, given the way that Boehrer confidently announces this figure, to correct him by citing the lines above and announcing that, in fact, Jonson clearly weighed only 278 pounds. Obviously, it would be absurd for me to do so since I would, in doing this, be participating in the very cultural discourse that I am here decrying. I would be giving such enumerations too much power, and I would be falling victim to the terms that Jonson all too knowingly mocks in his poetry. The figure that Jonson dances around and plays with in ways designed to mock certain readers becomes much too concrete and telling for Boehrer as when he cites it to communicate something essential about Jonson. This number supposedly tells us beyond doubt that Jonson was excessive, immoderate, and a fat hypocrite if he audaciously dared to recommend moderation. Jonson, well aware of the tendency to read bodies, including his fat body, in this way, mocks those that do in his poetry. Such conclusions, Jonson’s poetry insists, tell us more about the reader than they can ever tell us about the poet. In late modernity, our own damning enumerations tell us more about ourselves: numbers that can be quantified, charted, and assessed demographically have come to say it all. Indeed, certain numbers have come to acquire magical connotations, such as 200 or 300 pounds. We feel we know something important about the person who weighs one of these numbers. Jonson makes himself palpably present in his poetry in a way that challenges the reader to weigh his fat body in other than objectivist ways. Many will see his fat body as an obstruction that conveys something fundamentally important and essential about him. Such a reader cannot go beyond those vital statistics, whether they be Jonson’s age, the size of his waist, the number of his gray hairs, or his weight. Jonson gives such a judgmental reader the statistics they need, even as he urges others to understand him differently. As we will see, the word “weight” is important to Jonson. He urges the reader to weigh him, yet he understands weight in a very different, humanistic sense. He encourages the reader to “weigh” him in the sense

Jonson’s Multiple Constructions

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of using her sound judgment, but he suggests that wise judgment is more of a qualitative, discerning process, rather than a quantitative one that can be reduced to a mere number. Whereas some will weigh him by the number on the scale, others, he hopes, will weigh him quite differently, more as a friend than a merchant. He asks that his friends and his more humanistic readers weigh him according to the learning, honesty, and love he extends in his poems. In choosing how you will weigh, how you will measure, how you will judge, you show what type of world you want to live in, Jonson says. Do you want to live in a world of dead objects, weighed and measured by an objective system of measurement, or do you want to live in a world where objects, things, and even bodies are animated by a lively human judgment? Are you going to be, he might ask, a merchant, a superficial courtier, or a friend? To put this question in late modern terms, are you going to be a physician or a police officer who requires that I identify myself by my vital statistics? Only the friend understands that Jonson is, indeed, weighty, where that weight comes from his substantial love and judgment and, yes, from his animated body rather than from his mere mass. I. Fat Ben As a famous fat man, Jonson is often an apparent victim of the modern representational regime, where his fat is taken to make him the very emblem of excess. In his day, writers dismissed him as merely a “[b]ig fatt man, that spake in Ryme.”7 Drawing on the type of language we considered before, he is measured according to a bodily style in which the fat body is taken to be inherently base, uncivilized, and immoral. Such judgments are only reinforced through a strain of recent criticism that views Jonson through the lens of psychoanalysis. Jonson is, then, taken to be “obese” and even characterized as having an “obese personality.” Together, both of these traditions make it difficult to conceptualize Jonson in other ways. Indeed, it becomes difficult even to remember that Jonson was not always fat. A poem such as Epigram 101, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” is sometimes read through the lens of Jonson’s fatness even though he was not yet fat when he wrote it.8 To counteract such a tendency, we need to explore other ways in which fat is constructed in the early and late modern periods. Equally importantly, we need to explore the more complex ways in which Jonson understood the body, including the fat one. Jonson is, we will see, a protoconstructionist, who understood the multiple ways in which the fat and thin body could be understood. Jonson was himself aware of the way in which contemporary writers used his fat body against him, and he was well aware of the courtly bodily

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style, which privileged the thin body. In one of his begging poems to King Charles, Jonson acknowledges, and ridicules, the envious crowd.9 There he acknowledges that many write doggerel against him, which only serves to expose the shallowness of their judgment and wit. Writing of the pension promised to him by James but not always promptly paid to him by Charles, Jonson notes that it10 [h]ath drawn on me from the times All the envy of the rhymes And the rattling pit-pat noise Of the less-poetic boys; When their pot-guns aim to hit, With their pellets of small wit, Parts of me they judged decayed, But we last out, still unlaid.11

Jonson dismisses his detractors by pointing to the doggerel qualities of their verse; they are exposed as mere boys who cannot hope to approach his greatness. Although Jonson does not directly characterize the nature of their potshots, he does suggest that these potshots, such as they are, are directed at “[p]arts of me they judged decayed.” We have good reason to believe that these parts are more specifically those places he elsewhere marks as the signs of his physical decay—his gray hairs and, especially, his fat paunch. Certainly, the chapter on Middleton shows just how much the fat paunch was a body part associated with decay. The specification of “parts” reminds us that he is attacking such detractors for the superficiality of their judgment. Certainly, he focuses on their judgment when he adds, parenthetically, “ . . . they judged decayed.” Jonson here focuses on how a reductive and dehumanizing judgment, fixated as it is on a particular objective, material reality, reduces the world down to their own diminutive size. Contemporary doggerel during Jonson’s lifetime suggests that many focused on parts that were fat when they tried to make Jonson an emblem of corruption and decay. As the thin body of the elite was made presumptively beautiful and virtuous, the fat body of the commoner was made an emblem of excess, decay, and corruption. Jonson is well aware of this courtly bodily style and exposes it as petty and diminutive. An early piece of doggerel written by a Francis Andrewes dismisses Jonson as a “[b]ig fatt man, that spake in Ryme.”12 The fatness of his body is seen as innately disorderly; thus, reminding us of Thomas Middleton’s imagery, it becomes in its disorderliness associated with sodomy.13 Thus, we look on as the courtiers attempt to squeeze the fat Jonson through a


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small hole, which makes him fart: “Wee had much a-doo, to drawe him in, / ffor hee at first stuck by the chin. / But when the bulghe came to the straights / Hee farted as t’had beene the Waites.”14 Jonson himself draws on this typical comic description in his masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, where the figure of Venter is praised as the “father of farts.”15 Such descriptions focus on the failure of the fat body to contain and control itself. Just as he cannot control his farts, so too he cannot contain or control his body, which bulges forth in foggy fat. The sodomitical imagery here suggests the extent to which the fat body is imagined as fundamentally excessive and dangerous to the culture at large. Other contemporary gibes describe Jonson’s fat body as a formidable threat to society as a whole. In another piece, written, it seems, shortly after his death, Jonson is described as the self-appointed and pompous judge or jailer to poets, but he is deflated finally when the piece exposes him as a mere fat man. Such criticism works because the fat body is increasingly equated with the lower-class and commoner status. As such, the fat Jonson cannot make claims to superior judgment, certainly not to superior civilité. Consider the following: “For sterne aspect, with Mars hee might compare, / But by his belly, and his double chinne, / Hee look’d like the old Hoste of a New Inne.”16 His critics use his fatness to associate Jonson with the same lower-class figures satirized in his own work. Such imagery makes sense according to the logic of the emerging bodily style in which the fat body is a sign of uncivilized excess, the thin body of civilized restraint. In what anticipates the logic of contemporary psychobiographical criticism, the essentialized understanding of the fat body as that which is innately excessive undercuts any claims Jonson might make that he is virtuously moderate, learned, or civilized. One more early modern example will help us see just how disruptive this fat body becomes for some observers. The sodomitical associations are explicit in the following piece written by his one-time friend George Chapman after the public feud between Jonson and Inigo Jones, his onetime collaborator on royal masques. Chapman draws on a series of associations between the fat body, anality, and sodomy to excite in his reader intense visceral disgust and horror of the fat body. It must be contained in any way possible or it will endanger us all, such doggerel insists. Not only is Jonson made into a figure that no one could respect or love, he is finally made into a sodomite who deserves the harshest of punishments: Frugallitie is no philosophie that is not gelte of pride and miserie that hang hym like A nastie bore behynde And grunt hym out of all the human kynd

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That dares assume to free A man of god w[i]thout whome he,’s A rogue past periode A spawne of lust, In Sacke and Johnson sodd.17

This piece, “Epicure’s Frugality,” sees the fat body as something that fundamentally endangers society (and damns the fat person). This poem draws on the logic developed in Middleton’s A Game at Chess: the fat body, like the sodomitical body, is dangerous insofar as it refuses to maintain the sharp boundaries of the individualized body. It is also taken as an emblem of the fat person’s essential depravity. Here, as in A Game at Chess, the reader is supposed to feel intense pleasure as that excessive body is first exposed and finally punished. Just as the Fat Bishop is supposedly justly punished by penetrating into and violating the boundaries of his Black comrades, so here Jonson here is justly punished by having his body penetrated by a meat-hook. Exposed as nothing less or more than a “sod,” he should be hung “like a nastie bore behind,” much as one would hang a pig after slaughter. Such a justice is seen as appropriate because the punishment fits the crime. In his fatness, Jonson violates the boundary of the civilized body. It also seems an “appropriate punishment” for the fat person’s material excess and, hence, depravity, to be reduced ultimately to meat that is sodomized as it is readied for consumption. All of the sins of the flesh are answered in Chapman’s rather sadistic imagination. This logic indicates the degree to which the fat body in the modern representational regime comes to mark the outer-limits of the individualized body. Anyone who is seen as living beyond these limits can easily become the target for very inhuman treatment indeed. Contemporary criticism that is psychoanalytically inflected has considered Jonson to be innately excessive and vicious. Such criticism is quite likely influenced by a view of Jonson that solidified in the years shortly after he died. Culturally, there was a pressure to associate Jonson with his fat body, I suspect, because his literary reputation developed in relationship to William Shakespeare’s. Ian Donaldson makes this point, as he explains, “The shape of this story is in part chiasmic, with Jonson’s star sinking as Shakespeare’s climbs ever higher into the skies.”18 As their reputations developed, it became convenient to focus on their relative body size as suggesting their relative literary characters. In making Jonson fat, Shakespeare becomes thin, and as such, the latter is given the privilege that is granted to such an unmarked body. Jonson would not seem so fat, I suspect, nor would his fatness be taken as a central fact of his life, if it had not served as a convenient shorthand to characterize the respective literary characters of Ben and Will. The chiasmic relationship is conveniently


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underscored by their respective body size. Will’s body is given the privilege of the thin, unmarked body to the extent to which Ben’s body is marked and stigmatized as fat. The criticism today that insists on associating Jonson with the fat body of his middle and late years is influenced by this earlier tradition. Such a tradition begins in the late seventeenth century. As early as 1662, Thomas Fuller offers an influential, vivid description of the two that uses their respective bodies to establish their distinctive, opposing literary personalities. Jonson’s bulk helps establish Shakespeare as lean, and precisely because Shakespeare is “lesser in bulk,” he is taken to be the greater poet.19 Fuller establishes the two in the same chiasmic relationship described by Donaldson. The scene Fuller imagines requires that if one wins, the other will lose; thus, he imagines Shakespeare and Jonson engaged in “wit-combats” at the Mermaid Inn. Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War; master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing.”20

Jonson serves as a foil to establish the superior artistry and genius of Shakespeare. According to the analogy, Jonson is the obvious outsider and even a figure of some danger. His bulk associates him with the ominous power of Spain, which famously had almost invaded England in 1588 with its bulky ships of the Armada. Jonson, because he is bulky, is the invader that threatens the welfare of the state, but Shakespeare, fortunately, with his thin, light body, is able to rebuff his attempted invasion. As Fuller conceptualizes the battle for his own purposes, no longer is God’s providence important but rather the body type of the respective combatants.21 In Fuller’s version the essential qualities of those ships, now read as the bodies of Shakespeare and Jonson, are themselves made responsible for the outcome. The English are superior because they are “lesser in bulk,” where they are only established as such because their counterparts are menacing, bulky, and finally inferior. Given his analogy, Fuller builds on a set of associations that we examined in A Game at Chess and, more critically, in Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV. The thin, bounded body is seen as the body necessary for English military strength. The fat body is seen as a fifth column that threatens the security of England from within. Indeed, presumably, he must be expunged if the state is to achieve its militaristic and imperialistic destiny. Such

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moralistic understandings remain potent even in present-day discussions of the obesity epidemic. At this point, I could observe that Shakespeare himself was “fat” or, at the very least, not obviously thin. J. Dover Wilson is obviously disturbed by this fact when he observes that Shakespeare’s tomb at Stratford-upon-Avon makes him look like a “self-satisfied pork-butcher.”22 Rather than making such a point, I would prefer to examine how Shakespeare can be conceptualized as thin precisely because he becomes so when he is contrasted to Jonson’s fat body. Shakespeare becomes thin, I suspect, in the same way that he becomes aristocratic or “white” (to some, of course); he is made so, furthermore, as his opposite, Jonson, is made to embody the fat. We can only wonder what could have been different if Shakespeare had been flamboyantly fat and had called attention to his fat body in his poetry. Might an alternative tradition have arisen in which Jonson’s “thin” body was privileged over Shakespeare’s “fat” one? Perhaps it would be useful to imagine how such an alternative tradition might have emerged, because, in doing so, we call attention to the artificiality of the tradition of a fat Jonson and thin Shakespeare. What if Jonson had remained thin, as he apparently was as a younger man? What if Shakespeare had, instead, become markedly fat as he aged? Would this same shorthand formula remain so potent? Would we have, instead, developed an alternative formula that stigmatized and pathologized the figure of Shakespeare? One can easily see how a fat Shakespeare could have elicited the same types of moralistic readings now directed toward his fat character Falstaff.23 That is, Shakespeare would be seen as a figure obviously unable to control his bodily impulses, especially his appetite, and he would, therefore, become an emblem for overconsumption. Shakespeare, like Jonson or Falstaff, would be seen as the one trapped in an earlier stage of development, whether understood in psychological or social terms. Those qualities that have been traditionally extolled in Shakespeare could be seen precisely as those that should be stigmatized, especially if the fact of his fat body were to be taken as the central most important fact in his life. That is, his supposed speed of composition, his natural genius, and his prodigious output could all be read as an obvious sign that he was unable to restrain himself. Shakespeare should have learned to mold and shape his work, as the judicious Jonson did. Jonson knew how to use his learning to shape his corpus, bodily and literary. The point of this imaginative exercise is not to make us come to any of these conclusions, but to appreciate better the way that certain modern constructions of fat and thin help to secure the privilege of a single author, whether Shakespeare or Jonson. Because these associations have become potent ones, it becomes expedient to contrast the bodies of


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such literary figures to establish the implicit virtue of the one who is made thin. Given such modern associations, Jonson’s reputation suffered because he was taken first as a fat poet and finally as an “obese” one. Many scholars want to ignore that Jonson is fat, but in doing so, they cannot hope to see how the fact of his fatness has diminished his reputation. Other scholars, especially psychobiographical ones, focus on his fat body as suggesting an important flaw in his personality. Such a psychobiographical strain of criticism has its inception in the still very influential essay by Edmund Wilson “Morose Ben Jonson.”24 His understanding of Jonson importantly is influenced by the tradition considered above. Wilson implicitly diagnoses Jonson’s personality in terms that should be familiar by now. The fat character or poet is trapped in an immature stage of development, having never achieved the proper maturity of self-restraint and, hence, the virtue associated with the thin body. Wilson makes this argument in Freudian terms as he argues that Jonson is trapped in the more immature, analerotic stage, having failed to attain full sexual maturity. That this point is bolstered by the tradition discussed above is apparent in the final moments of the essay. There, he contrasts Shakespeare and Jonson in a way that leads to the conclusion that the latter is more heavy and ponderous. Jonson had an “aspiring nature” that desired the light genius and sharp wit of a Shakespeare, but he was dragged down by his ponderous body, Wilson suggests. Thus, Wilson tells us that Jonson had “to drag so much dead weight,” and similarly that he was characterized by a “cramped, but virile intellect.”25 Wilson draws on the types of modern, essentialist understanding of the fat and the thin body to characterize Jonson and Shakespeare, respectively. Shakespeare is granted the privilege of being quick-witted, light, and thin to the extent to which Jonson is slow-witted, heavy, and fat. I have begun with Wilson’s essay because it has influenced subsequent psychobiographical criticism. Critics Joseph Loewenstein and Boehrer expand upon some of the points made by Wilson implicitly as they ask us to focus on Jonson’s “essential” personality. Both assume that Jonson’s fat body reveals something fundamental and immutable about his personality. Both characterize Jonson as “obese,” where the term is understood according to the moralized and pathological dimensions evident in its modern understanding. Both are equally interested in knowing his vital statistics. Loewenstein assumes that the answer to the question, “How fat?” tells us something of central importance about Jonson.26 Loewenstein also looks for other ways to answer the question, as when he mourns the fact that he does not have access to the “genetic information” about Jonson

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that would presumably help us arrive at a full etiological diagnosis.27 Even as Loewenstein complains that we will never know the central truth about Jonson, he diagnoses Jonson as characterized by an “obese personality.” By looking to psychoanalysts such as Hilde Bruch and Roy Schafer, Loewenstein argues that Jonson uses eating as a “defense mechanism.”28 As Loewenstein explains, “It may be that for Jonson, as for many people, eating is a defense of the ego, an attempt to shore up a fugitive being within a bulwark of flesh.”29 Loewenstein gives us a Jonson who is an obese personality, but in so doing, he notably reads back into the early modern period late modern, pathologized constructions. We must always remind ourselves that the pathology of fat, what we have come to call “obesity,” is a particular construction of the nineteenth century, even though the early modern period began to see the fat body in moralized terms that inform our present treatment of the “obese.”30 Such a tradition of psychobiographical criticism does nothing to help us interrogate our own pathologized and moralized understanding of “obesity.” Relatedly, it does nothing to help us understand the very different, constructionist way in which Jonson understands body size. The next section will offer an alternative view of Jonson by examining the multiple ways in which he understood the fat and the thin body. He, like Shakespeare, resists the singular and reductive way that fat and thin bodies were coming to be understood with the coming of modernity. II. Jonson through Thick and Thin Given this strain of criticism, it might be tempting to insist on a thin Jonson. Jonson, I might say, only became fat in his middle and late years. For much of his life, he seems to have been regarded as a lean man, or at least not as a fat man.31 Obviously, even though this was the case, I do not want to reify modern constructions of fat and thin. In this section, I focus, instead, on the multiple constructions of the fat and the thin body that Jonson offers. He is not restricted by any single representational regime, and certainly not the courtly or puritan bodily aesthetic that will come to dominate with the coming of modernity. Jonson offers multiple ways in which the fat and the thin body can be understood in order to expose the limitations and pettiness of the emerging modern regime. In what follows, I consider his multiple constructions of the fat body and the thin body, focusing especially on how his constructions call attention to themselves as such. First, I consider how Jonson thought in other than the emerging representational regime; thus, he actually considered the thin body of his youth undesirable because it could be and,


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in fact, was read as a sign of envy. Subsequently, I consider how Jonson constructs the fat body in ways that are quite different from those pervasive in modernity. Indeed, he uses multiple constructions, I argue, to mock the assumptions of his courtly readers, attached as they are to a view of bodies in which the fat body is always uncivilized, and the thin, civilized. Conscious of the emerging modern representational regime and its darker implications, Jonson does much to denaturalize its terms. He works against the tendency to privilege the thin body by making it the presumptively virtuous, unmarked body. Jonson, notably, focuses on the thin body in a way that calls attention to its constructed nature. At the same time, he draws on existing constructions that make the thin body particularly infelicitous. It helps to counteract a bias in criticism if we reassess Jonson’s relationship to the thin body he had in his youth. Jonson understands that his thin body could be read through older, medieval iconography as suggesting that he was, indeed, vicious. To be more specific, the thin body was the body of the iconographic figure, Envy, Jonson knew. We have considered such constructions in part in chapter 4: the bodies of the lean lawmen were taken by some as a sign of their innate meanness. Such a construction was even used by Jonson’s rivals to suggest that Jonson himself was characterized by a base envy. In Satiromastix (1601), Thomas Dekker and John Marston use such medieval constructions to discredit Jonson. He could not be the judicious and wise figure of Horace that he wanted to be because he had the most un-Horatian of bodies. As the play insists, “Horace was a goodly Corpulent Gentleman, and not so leane a hollow-cheekt Scrag as thou art.”32 Such an attack should warn us against making the assumption that Jonson must have hated his fat body in later years, especially when we remember that he characterizes himself as a Horatian figure in his late poetry. The young Jonson understood that, if anything, he was closer to his bitter and lean character, Macilente, than he was to the fat figure of Horace. Donaldson even suggests that Jonson may have welcomed getting fat because the “symbolic properties [of the fat body] were at least more pleasing.”33 There are a number of reasons why Jonson may have even wanted to be fat. Certainly, we can see how he can think about the fat and the thin body in other than that conceptualized by the emerging modern regime. For one, he could see his fat body as making him conform more to a classical model of the poet; Horace was, after all, famously fat, ugly, and old. For another, his fat body could be used to defend himself against those who wanted to argue that he was characterized by envy, particularly given Jonson’s commoner status. Significantly, we even have an example of

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Jonson doing the latter in one of his later poems, “Expostulations with Inigo Jones.” Jonson defends himself in the public dispute between the powerful Jones and himself. He could not be acting through envy, Jonson insists, because his body does not fit the iconographic type. As he writes, “I am too fat to envy him; he too lean / To be worth envy.”34 While the line offers a defense that focuses on his own body, he also cleverly asks the readers to draw their own conclusions about their dispute by comparing his body with that of Jones. “Which of us would be more likely to be envious?” Jonson implicitly asks. We need to be more aware of the complex ways in which Jonson plays with the cultural constructions surrounding fat and thin. If we turn to an early play, Every Man Out of His Humor, we see how much, like his later poetry, it plays with multiple and shifting constructions of the body, whether fat or thin. Thus, he suggests that the body is (or can be) what it is taken to be by a sympathetic, capacious, and imaginative reader. Certainly, Macilente is criticized by the fat figure of Carlo Buffone precisely because he is lean and thus an “envious man.”35 Any reading of that body, however, must be understood in the overall context of the play, which, like all of Jonson’s work, is self-consciously focused on the ethics of receptivity. Jonson makes the point, here as elsewhere, that bodies become what the audience makes of them. The play is structured to make us attend to our own reception and thus to the way that we impose on certain characters certain constructions. The running commentary of the chorus or Grex asks us to reflect on the way we respond to specific characters. The lean character of Macilente is never allowed to have a stable and essential being apart from how the audience understands him. Jonson asks us to see him in multiple ways as he has him adopt various forms. Initially, the audience sees him as the character of Asper, whose name means bitterness; subsequently, he is transformed into the character Macilente. At the end of the play, Macilente appears in a new form. Thus, Jonson does not allow us to see him as having any singular, essential character, nor does he allow us to see him as having any essential being apart from how we understand him. In his last speech, present in the first published quarto of 1600 and in the 1616 folio, Asper, still costumed as his alter ego, Macilente, admits that “I should have gone in and returned to you as I was, Asper at first. But (by reason that the shift would have been somewhat long, and we are loath to draw your patience any farther) we’ll entreat you to imagine it.”36 Jonson, by leaving on stage a figure who is in some ways Macilente, in some ways Asper, and in some ways Jonson himself, works against any static essentialist understanding of the figure.37 The audience is asked to keep all these roles in mind in a


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way that undermines any singular, objective understanding of the self and the body. Ultimately, Jonson makes this same constructionist point more radically in what follows. There he imagines how the audience’s reception can effect a dramatic transformation that is, notably, a bodily metamorphosis as well: “But, if you, out of the bounty of your good liking, will bestow it, why, you may, in time, make lean Macilente as fat as Sir John Falstaff.”38 Drawing on the success and popularity of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Jonson urges the audience to make his lean character, Macilente, just such a successful figure. Notably, fatness here is a positive characteristic, but equally notably, it is not an objective bodily condition. Fatness is, instead, a sign of the audience’s approval; as God fattens those he loves, so too the audience, presumably, fatten the characters it loves. A body is not objectively fat or thin but is made such by the audience’s reaction to it. Macilente-Asper-Jonson can be made fat if you give him your applause and your approval. Such a constructionist conception of the body urges the audience to take more responsibility for the way they respond to people with varying bodily characteristics. Jonson also simultaneously works against those sorts of assumptions about bodies that are pervasive in the courtly aesthetic. He aligns himself with Falstaff against Hal and his lean lawmen, and “fat” retains a positive moral valence here. Certainly, the bodily transformation he urges is of a very different kind than the one urged by Hal at the end of 2 Henry IV.39 Where Henry V requires Falstaff to reduce his body quite literally by fasting (or what we might call dieting), Jonson looks for a transformation in the body of his character that is effected, in time, through the transformation of the audience’s attitudes. Jonson moves away from essentialist interpretations as he invites his audience to take responsibility for the way that they construct bodies through their judgment. He looks to multiple ways that such bodies can be read and uses these multiple perspectives to challenge the singular and essentialist understanding of the body promoted by the dominant forces I have been discussing. In that, Jonson offers an important lesson to late modern readers, who are perhaps more trapped than Jonson’s contemporaries in a singular way of conceptualizing bodies, especially fat ones. Jonson’s disgust for the courtly bodily aesthetic is evident in a number of his works, including his court masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, created in cooperation with Jones and produced at court in 1618. Fat bodies abound in this text in the newly fat figure of Comus himself, in the human bottles and casks that dance in the first antimasque, in the ever-present mountain-man, Atlas, and finally even in the figure of Hercules himself. In including so many “great” men, if not always fat ones,

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Jonson suggests the multiple ways in which the fat or bulky body can be understood. Importantly, only one of them accords with the narrow and stigmatized understanding of the fat body pervasive at court. How much, then, is that image of the fat Comus itself an ironic critique of the superficial court, which judges only the apparent size of the body? Once again, Jonson reminds the audience that they are what they judge. In Pleasure, as in Under-wood, Jonson plays into the superficial expectations of many in the courtly audience. As Stephen Orgel observes, Jonson offers his courtly audience a representation of vice that they would readily recognize. Contrasting Jonson’s Comus with Milton’s later more traditional, thin version, Orgel argues that Jonson makes his figure fat in order to play into the antifat biases of his courtly audience. As he notes, “In contrast, the spectators at Whitehall in 1618 had more faith that the aesthetic judgment was the right one. Merely by looking at Jonson’s Comus they knew who and what he was.”40 By the early seventeenth century, the courtly bodily aesthetic had become so pervasive that the fat male body was taken as a de facto sign of vice. Such an understanding of the body is evident in contemporary criticism when it takes the fat body of the older Jonson as a sign that he must be a glutton. It is precisely this sense that bodies mean something apart from human judgment that Jonson ridicules throughout. Jonson and Jones alter the traditional representation of Comus by making him fat. That the fat representation of Comus was something of a cultural shift can be traced in some audience members’ failure to recognize the figure in the play. The chaplain to the Venetian ambassador cannot even identify the figure as Comus but assumes that it is a “very chubby Bacchus.”41 Comus had been depicted as a thin, classically beautiful male figure through the sixteenth century.42 Comus becomes “fat” as he is translated into an English and Reformation context. In the influential Italian form, Comus had a thin, classically beautiful form, but when he is translated into English, the figure of Comus is transformed in large part, I believe, because he is viewed through the lens of the Reformation.43 Comus became a figure of “greate excesse, and too much superfluitie,” more on the model of the Fat Bishop.44 In a similar way, Comus became in this translation a god with a “corpulent and gross bodie” with a face “of high color and very big.”45 Orgel explains how the figure is transformed as it is viewed through a medieval and Christian perspective.46 He examines two iconographic representations of Comus that begin to represent him, not so much as the pagan god of dance, but rather as a Christian belly-god.


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With such changes, Comus becomes associated with Gluttony. He is not a figure of Gluttony in the model of Piers Plowman who offends through his excessive actions, but rather one in the model of Middleton’s Fat Bishop or Hal’s Falstaff, who become themselves the very embodiment of such excesses. That is, he is seen as growing beyond the boundaries of the civilized body. He is, as such, an affront, and even a threat, to all who come in contact with him. In making Comus a Christian bellygod of this sort, Jonson plays upon the two interrelated developing bodily aesthetics—the courtly one and the puritan one. In bringing the two together, he can be fairly certain that his courtly audience would not recognize themselves in this figure. Their thin bodies assured them, after all, that they were characterized by virtuous self-restraint. Jonson therefore has to create a fat Comus to serve this purpose. Jonson consciously plays on his audience’s predispositions to respond to the fat body as an emblem of excess. The audience’s reactions, therefore, to the fat figure would only condemn them as operating by a dehumanizing and superficial understanding. Jonson makes it unlikely that the courtly elite will recognize themselves in these figures. For one, they are fat; for another, they would be recognized by the court as any number of various comic types of the lowly fat men that performed in native English, festive performances such as the mummer play and the jig.47 Fashionable courtiers are anything but such figures, they might reason. Jonson expects a number of possible reactions, I suspect. Some in the audience may simply condemn themselves as they continue to measure the fat figures by narrow, essentialist terms, but some would certainly come to the sudden realization that they are, in fact, being mocked by the display. This more reflective audience member might come to this understanding when he realizes that the fat man is, in fact, Comus, the god of cheer.48 Jonson draws the parallels between the reveling Comus and the reveling aristocratic audience in ways that would encourage them to make such a connection, that is, if they are paying close attention to what is happening on stage. Throughout the play, Comus is associated with excessive feasting and drinking, both activities that were famously associated with the Jacobean court. King James’s exchequer was stretched because he had to pay for so many lavish feasts.49 According to Leah Marcus, Jonson can draw on more specific topical details to encourage his audience to see the parallels. That Comus was the cupbearer for Hercules may be meant to recall the fact that Buckingham had just been made cupbearer to James I.50 Similarly, the antimasque of the dancing bottles and casks may remind the audience that Buckingham had “just granted the infamous monopoly

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on alehouses to his relative Sir Giles Mompesson.”51 For the audience that is likely to see themselves as entirely distinct from the fat figures, such topical details encourage self-recognition among some at least. Even as some audience members, so utterly committed to a representational regime that grants their bodies privilege at the expense of fat ones, may never make the connection, some might come to the sudden recognition that they are the figures that they have found so execrable. It is interesting, but not necessary, to imagine that King James was beginning to come to such self-recognition when he interrupted the performance to exclaim, “Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance.”52 In a way that might restore his sense of order, George Villiers, James’s favorite, rose to perform a few impromptu dance steps, thereby banishing the fat figures in favor of his own agile and pleasingly thin self. The antimasque certainly encourages such self-recognition from the elite audience even as it critiques the courtly bodily aesthetic because it is dehumanizing. Bodies become mere things when their possessors refuse to exercise any humanizing judgment. Their constructions have the power to affect themselves and the world in this case in a way that makes everything into mere dead objects to be manipulated by the powers that be. Jonson’s antimasque focuses on the way that they become in the process dead matter, mere receptacles for what they drink and eat.53 They are transformed more specifically into objects that conform to an objective system of measurements; thus, we find that the gullet makes the “belly a sack” and later the paunch is called “half a tun of paunch.”54 Both are, of course, units of measurement used at the time, and both suggest the extent to which they make themselves into mere dead weight. Jonson must assault his audience into self-recognition because they are so sure that the fat body is innately excessive and vicious. After ordering the dance of tuns and bottles, Comus says, Ha! You look as if you would make a problem of this. Do you see? Do you see? a problem: why bottles? and why a tun? and why a tun? and why bottles to dance? I say that men that drink hard and serve the belly in any place of quality . . . are living measures of drink, and can transform themselves, and do every day, to bottles or tuns when they please; and when they ha’ done all they can, they are, as I say again (for I think I have said something like it afore) but moving measures of drink; and there is a piece i’ the cellar can hold more than they.55

In this lurching prose, Jonson accentuates the drunkenness of the speaker in a way that indicates that he, certainly, actively refuses to think


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in a self-conscious manner. Instead, the courtier simply wallows with satisfaction in a world of dead things, where he enjoys this mundane, purely material metamorphosis of men into tuns and sacks. All along, Jonson provokes his audience to think of the world in other than their dehumanizing essentialist ways. The problem is not that these people drink too much, but that they live as if the world were occupied by mere matter that exists independent of the human judgment that understands and comprehends it. In the process, they, in fact, remake that world into their image. Some might sit and remain trapped by their essentialist assumptions, and others might finally wake up and take responsibility for the way in which their judgment constructs and vivifies the world. Jonson is highly critical of the modern representational regime that insists that bodies have meanings in and of themselves. He presses his audience in a variety of ways to take responsibility for the way in which they construct bodies, even when they cede to the authority of the emerging representational regime. Jonson plays with the assumptions embraced by a courtly audience especially, even as he makes his satire more and more outrageous in a way designed to focus on the assumptions they make. For our purposes, it might be important to remember that Jonson was not easily embarrassed by his body and certainly not by his fat body because he understood that he could view that body through multiple constructions. Viewed through a classical lens, the fatness of his body becomes a sign that he is particularly Horatian. Jonson does not define himself by how people viewed him, and he could easily dismiss the courtly bodily aesthetic as inherently petty and dehumanizing. It is in this tradition of the weighty Ben that I offer a reading of him as a constructionist and as someone who would have (and did have) contempt for the modern representational regime, especially when it is accepted and used as constituting a reality that is fixed and inescapable. Jonson did repeatedly escape any singular reality, even though all but the most imaginative, capacious, and ethical reader (or audience member) may have not seen it. III. Weighty Ben in Under-wood Jonson distrusts all who insist on weighing him or his poetry by an objective system of weights and measurements, whether that might be the merchant’s wife who insists he pay what is owed to the very pound, or the lady who will require him to pay exactly the number of verses that is owed her.56 Jonson is scornful of such people because they would impose on the world a singular and trim way of being. In insisting that they follow an objective system of weights and measurements, they refuse to use

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their own humanizing judgment and imagination; thus, they remake the world into simply dead matter. On several occasions, Jonson asks the reader to accept his “weight and fashion,” where that weight has nothing to do with an objective system of measurement, and where fashion has nothing to do with the latest fashion at court. Jonson never asks us to overlook the realities of his corpulent and aged body, as some have argued;57 instead, he asks us to weigh him and thus his body in more humanistic ways. His friends know that he is fat, just as they know that he breaks the occasional chair. More than most, they understand that he is weighty because he exercises a weighty presence palpable in the judgment, honesty, and love he offers them. Only this ethical understanding of the self matters to Jonson. He wants the readers to come to see him as weighty in a similar way, something that we can only come to see if we weigh the man and his muse by our cultivated judgment rather than by the exacting scale. As one scholar rightly weighs in on the subject, “In one way or another, the ethics of receptivity forms a constant preoccupation in Jonson’s art,” to which I would add that this ethics of receptivity is one of the most persistent preoccupations of Jonson’s late poetry, especially.58 The word “weight” figures prominently, given the frequency in which he describes his own weighty body in his last poetic collection, Underwood. The collection as a whole pushes against any attempts to weigh the man or his muse by a singular and supposedly objective standard. Jonson does this by employing a breathtaking diversity of forms that demand that the reader experience things, including bodies, in strikingly different ways.59 Not only does Jonson adopt poetic forms, like the love (Petrarchan) poem, that he has not previously, but he also requires that we move quickly and suddenly from one to another. As we read the collection, we move from sacred to secular poetry, from Christian to classical, and within the body of the work addressed to would-be lovers, to those addressed to friends, and finally to those addressed to the king, his family, his household, and even the clerk of the exchequer. To the reader who wholeheartedly enters into these poems, the world cannot stand still, and objects within it cannot maintain anything like fixed and stable meanings. Jonson’s body, palpably present in a number of these poems, is weighed and experienced in very different ways depending on the responsiveness and imagination of the reader. We come to understand that such a supposedly objective physical fact as Jonson’s “mountain belly” or “rocky face” acquires very different meanings whether read by a court lady or a friend. Even the poem that offers this characterization, “My Picture Left in Scotland,” is self-conscious about the way it will elicit different responses from different readers. While the


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lady who rejects Jonson might find the “mountain belly” only an unpleasant reminder that he is unfashionably fat, a learned reader, including a potential lover, might take it to be an apt description of his very substantial witty presence.60 Because Jonson leaves open the question as to whether he is accepted by the lady, he urges the reader to consider her own constructions. The poem asks whether the reader can think beyond the petty terms that dominate at court. Any substantive, including his body, is dynamic in the self-consciously retrospective and revisionist poetry of Under-wood. As the title suggests, Under-wood is itself a self-conscious addendum to his earlier collection The Forest, which itself is self-conscious about its relationship to its Elizabethan poetic predecessors. As Annabel Patterson demonstrates so well, Jonson is reimagining and revivifying history in a way that calls attention to how history is continually being made (and, I would add, made in cooperation with the engaged reader).61 In that sense, there can be no such thing as a factual, singular, and objective Jonson—the fat man of fifty that we often take him to be—precisely because we are made to see how he is constructed and reconstructed in relation to an ever-changing past. With this realization, Jonson presses us to reimagine and revivify him in a more humanistic way so that we take responsibility for the role we have as cocreators of the poetry and the world. Under-wood turns its attention to the audience and how it constructs reality. Jonson is especially interested in getting the reader to take responsibility for the way that she cocreates reality, and thus he actively satirizes constructions that claim that there is an objective, material reality that exists apart from human judgment. In what follows, I will consider for the most part those poems in which Jonson is taken to be most obviously and materially present: “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces,” “My Picture Left in Scotland,” and “Epistle to My Lady Covell,” to name just three. These poems satirize those who read the (fat) body in essentialist ways, particularly as having a meaning in and of itself. At the same time, they also encourage the reader to think in ways other than those that are dehumanizing. Like Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, these poems lay a trap for the reader who insists that there is an objective, material existence that has meaning apart from human judgment. He traps the reader by feeding into her sense about meaning; thus, he offers all-important numerical figures that are taken to say something of central importance about the meaning of the individual. Scholars who place such importance on such numbers implicitly read them as suggesting something important and central about what is taken to be an objective reality. Jonson uses such details to lay a trap for the reader so that he can see how his own dehumanizing judgment

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transforms the world, including Jonson’s body, into mere dead weight. More importantly, Jonson does much more in these poems as he encourages the more capacious, imaginative, and ethical reader to take responsibility for exercising judgment. To such readers, he offers his fat body as something that can have weight in a very different, humanistic and participatory sense. In the first group of poems that are all Petrarchan or anti-Petrarchan in nature, Jonson seeks to exorcise a courtly bodily aesthetic, which privileges the young, thin, and gentle even as it marks and stigmatizes the old, fat, and common. The Petrarchan form is, Jonson understands, important to establishing this aesthetic, which will become more pervasive with modernity. Some readers may now object that Petrarchan poetry is noteworthy for including no body at all, or that it is, at the most, a blazon of the female body. Certainly, the body of the male lover seems absent from such poems. Jonson criticizes just this dynamic when he interjects his own fat body into the poems. The lover is always presumptively young, gentle, and lean, Jonson implies, when he puts his old, common, and fat body in the poems. Their privilege comes, furthermore, from the way they are positioned as the one with the right to mark, observe, and judge the bodies of others. Jonson wants to make the reader look beyond the essentialist assumptions of court, which assumes that fat, old commoners do not woo, and if they do, they certainly do not succeed in winning the lady. In Jonson’s world, fat, old commoners can and do woo, and can and do win the lady, not in spite of their weight but because of their weight, variously and multitudinously understood. “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces” and “My Picture Left in Scotland” seem designed, in part, to excite a certain very intense visceral disgust from a courtly reader. For this reason, John Lemly is partially correct when he observes that (to some) these poems present a “physical problem of visual disorder and gross imperfection.”62 In both poems, Jonson’s body intrudes into a genre that has no place for him precisely because he is fat, old, and common. His body is meant to excite in such courtly readers laughter, disdain, and even revulsion because he has none of the requisite parts required by them. “A Celebration of Charis” begins, “Let it not your wonder move, / Less your laughter, that I love” and continues by focusing on his body, which would have seemed quite out of fashion at court.63 Jonson reminds the reader throughout that he is in every way unfashionable by court standards. Later, we learn that “there I stood a stone, / Mocked of all.”64 From the beginning, however, he invites other readers to think beyond those petty terms. Even as Jonson writes of all the ways he does not conform to “civilized” courtly standards, he suggests that the more humanistic reader will understand him


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to have “weight and fashion” in a very different sense. The following is an exorcism of sorts: And it is not always face, Clothes, or fortune gives the grace, Or the feature, or the youth; But the language, and the truth, With the ardour and the passion, Gives the lover weight and fashion.65

These lines are typical of many that Jonson uses when discussing his “weight” or corpulence. He typically focuses on what others take him to be when they anatomize his person into specific corporeal “parts”: in this case, “face,” “clothes,” “fortune” (or wealth), “feature,” or “youth.” Such a reader views him according to the lens of the courtly values, including the courtly bodily aesthetic that values the youthful, thin body. In criticizing such a dehumanizing judgment, he asks some readers to see “weight and fashion” in a very different humanistic sense. Even as he reaches out to a more capacious humanistic reader that will understand “weight and fashion” in a very different sense, Jonson continues to give voice to the shallow values of a superficial courtly reader. The sequence ends by directing attention at the consequences of adopting a particular, dehumanizing view of the world in the final section of the poem,” “Another Lady’s Exception, Present at the Hearing.”66 By this point, Jonson can well believe that those who have weighed carefully will find her ideal utterly dehumanizing in that it insists on defining humans according to objective, essentialist standards. Her blazon exposes the dehumanizing nature of the courtly anatomizing judgment. As she looks for all her ideal “parts” in a man, she literally parcels out her would-be lover into pieces, transforming him into a heap of mere dead matter. She embodies the type of essentialist logic that Jonson detests: For his mind I do not care, That’s a toy that I could spare; Let his title be but great, His clothes rich, and band sit neat, Himself young, and face be good, All I wish is understood. What you please you parts may call, ’Tis one good part I’d lie withal.67

The lady speaks with the smug assurance of someone who is certain she knows how the world is. She lists all the things that must be for her lover

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to be acceptable, and notably, most of these are things—a title, clothes, and a face. Thus, she asks that he be “young,” his face be “good,” and, most importantly, his band or waistband sit neat. That is, he will not have the fat paunch that we have seen excite so much contempt as an emblem of bodily lack of control and baseness. Her ideal lover would be the perfect Petrarchan lover—young, gentle, and thin. That, ultimately, only things mean anything to her is revealed by how she responds to the terms set down by Charis in the preceding poem. Forced by Jonson to give voice to her ideal man, Charis more humanely and ironically concludes finally, after her exhaustive and conventional list, that she would have “[s]uch a man, with every part.”68 The generic lady of the last part responds by reducing her would-be lover to that single “good part” that matters. In this humorous and derisive turn, Jonson exposes the speaker’s dehumanizing judgment. Her description is meant to disgust the imaginative and ethical reader who realizes how dehumanizing her values are. By this point in the sequence, after all, the reader has been treated to a playful, witty giveand-take, where Jonson has shown off his weight in dialogue with others.69 In his pieces, he calls attention to the way in which reality, including his body, is continually constructed and reconstructed in active engagement with others. Jonson works against the traditional Petrarchan blazon in which the lady’s body would be anatomized for his (and our) pleasure in piece 5, “His Discourse with Cupid.” Jonson’s playful dialogue between Cupid and himself is offered to Charis with an equally playful remark, “Hear what last discourse of you / Love and I have had, and true.”70 Once again, Jonson plays with his understanding of truth, as he does elsewhere with his understanding of “grace” and “weight,” to insist that truth is what you make of it. Perhaps, I should say, instead, that Jonson self-consciously rejects a modern view of truth in which everything must measure up to what is assumed to be an objective, material standard. In his response to Cupid’s lengthy blazon of Charis, Jonson exposes conventional Petrarchan rhetoric as dehumanizing. Initially, he agrees simply by saying that “[a]ll is Venus, save unchaste” in a way that, of course, repudiates the Petrarchan ideal.71 In what follows, he offers his own more humanizing blazon: For this beauty yet doth hide, Something more than thou hast spied. Outward grace weak love beguiles; She is Venus, when she smiles, But she’s Juno, when she walks, And Minerva, when she talks.72


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Jonson does not respond by rejecting the corporeal, only the dehumanizing and essentializing view of the corporeal that informs the Petrarchan blazon. Thus, Jonson here teaches Cupid and, of course, the reader to see a different sort of beauty in Charis, one found in the animated body. The last three lines are typical Jonson in the way that they reject an essentialist view of the world. Charis is Venus, Juno, and Minerva, as revealed in her smiling, walking, and talking body. Where the court lady’s blazon anatomizes him so that he becomes simply a heap of things, Jonson’s lines ask us to weigh, consider, and appreciate her whole responsive, animated, and corporeal self. Charis can, in Jonson’s world, be simultaneously three goddesses. Jonson gestures toward an identity that is as multitudinous and paradoxical as that suggested by the Asper character at the conclusion of Every Man Out of His Humour. Just as he could be simultaneously Macilente, Asper, and even Jonson himself, she too can be simultaneously these three goddesses. In both cases, Jonson focuses his attention on the audience’s reception of the figure. She can be all these things insofar as we view her through multiple discourses and genres. How is the poem resolved? Does Charis accept Ben? Does the reader finally learn, as Jonson promises, that they “never knew till now / Either whom to love, or how”? Most criticism has, in fact, seen Jonson as rejected by Charis in section 9, “Her Man Described by Her Own Dictamen.”73 By what we have examined thus far, I would say that we should be suspicious that her dictamen, like any statement in the poem, should be taken at face value. For one, Charis has already given Ben a kiss, even if he has asked her to “mend” it with another, lengthier one. For another, Charis proves witty and responsive to her Ben, and thus, as Van den Berg suggests, she is in every way his match. If read in dialogue with Ben, her dictamen seems like a playful, spirited retort that responds in kind to the playfully disparaging words that Ben directed at her in piece 8. In front of all her suitors, Ben requires her to fulfill her supposed obligation to “tell / What a man she could love well.”74 Indeed, he nags her, Nay, I will not let you sit ’Fore your idol glass a whit, To say over every purl There or to reform a curl; Or with secretary Cis To consult, if fucus this Be as good as was the last: All your sweet of life is past, Make accompt, unless you can (And that quickly) speak your man.75

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As we can see, Jonson is, in essence, saying her life is over, and so she must “make accompt” or make her account. Even just the use of “account” here, given the way that Jonson repeatedly satirizes those who reckon numerically, should make us hesitate before we take what follows to be a simple statement. She responds in kind to his own remarks by offering a reckoning of her ideal man that she knows is everything Ben is not. The response, taken as a whole, mocks Ben the way that Ben mocked her. Indeed, she signals that the dictamen should be taken ironically when she begins, “Of your trouble, Ben, to ease me, / I will tell what man would please me.”76 The blazon that follows should not be read as a statement of her ideal man but rather as an answer designed to repudiate and to provoke, albeit playfully, her Ben. Not surprisingly, her ideal turns out to be everything Ben is not: that is, noble, young, and lean. As she concludes, “What we harmony do call / In a body should be there. / Well he should his clothes, too, wear, / Yet no tailor help to make him.”77 In this poem, as in others, Jonson leaves it uncertain as to whether the lady accepts him or not in a way that pushes readers to reflect on how they weigh him. In particular, we are encouraged to examine our own constructions. The more humanistic reader, Jonson knows, will appreciate his “weight and fashion” in a different way, and they will see his animated, fat body as full of weight and fashion insofar as it extends to his friends an imaginative engagement of the type evident in his give-andtake dialogue with Charis. In “My Picture,” to which I now turn, Jonson calls attention to the assumptions that lead the lady to reject him: “I now think Love is rather deaf than blind, / For else it could not be / That she / Whom I adore so much should so slight me.”78 Jonson teaches us to attend more closely to the way in which we understand bodies. Once again, Jonson calls attention to all he lacks in terms of the Petrarchan model, even as he exposes to view its own trim aesthetic. Consider the following: I’m sure my language to her was as sweet, And every close did meet In sentence of as subtle feet, As hath the youngest he That sits in shadow of Apollo’s tree.79

Jonson insists that his language gives him weight, where that weight comes from how he constructs reality. He is, of course, making a contrast between his own tropological world and the more reductively literal world of his competitors. Jonson plays on the multiple meanings of “subtle feet,”


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which first seems to refer only to Jonson’s own fine and delicate craftsmanship but comes to refer to the subtle or “thin” feet of the conventional Petrarchan lover, the “youngest he.”80 The term “subtle feet” has no singular or stable meaning. The whole works against those who accept the terms of a traditional Petrarchism, which does, indeed, tend to dehumanize insofar as it objectifies the beloved. Jonson, in contrast, offers his poetry and himself up to the creative and ethical reactions of his reader. In the second and final stanza, Jonson gives us an example of how language can, indeed, transform the world into dead matter. The lady reads him through a crude essentialist understanding of the body pervasive in the modern representational regime. The lady values and weighs Ben according to an objective standard, and in so doing, she transforms him into a mere thing: Oh, but my conscious fears That fly my thoughts between, Tell me that she hath seen My hundred of grey hairs, Told seven-and-forty years, Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace My mountain belly, and my rocky face; And all these through her eyes have stopped her ears.81

Jonson imagines the lady measuring him from the modern representational regime that equates the fat body with decrepitude and excess, as when he expresses fear that she will “read so much waste, as she cannot embrace.” Punning on “waste” and “waist,” Jonson calls attention to the way that his belly to such people comes to represent a very dangerous excess and decay. Such a conclusion only comes, however, when the lady reads in a particularly dehumanizing way. That is, she may have performed a reckoning in which his body is exactly enumerated. In counting his hundred gray hairs, his years, and the inches of his waist, she turns him only into dead matter. Such a process of weighing and measuring according to an objective system of measurement would make Jonson into the undesirable thing she takes him to be. The reader who understands language tropologically and sees, therefore, how Jonson can shift meaning quickly and suddenly will read him in other ways. Such a reader, for example, will come to see how his “waist” can take on different meanings depending on how it is understood. To understand Jonson’s conception of weight, we have to turn to another group of poems that also offer us what seem to us to be concrete descriptions of his weight. After all, one of the poems we will

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consider—Under-wood 54, “Epistle to Mr. Arthur Squib”—is frequently cited as conveying the fact that he weighed 280 pounds or twenty stone. Jonson discusses “weight” in these poems in terms of his friendship, or, more particularly, in terms of the debt of obligation he owes to his friends. Significantly, the poems we will now consider, the two to Squib, teller of the exchequer, are placed in a section of “begging poems.” He readily acknowledges his indebtedness to all sorts of people from the king to the clerk of the exchequer to friends and patrons.82 Throughout, Jonson establishes an ethics of reciprocity that is very different from that which dominates in both the mercantile and the court culture. As the reader will recall from chapter 4, this sort of exchange represents a more premodern view of debt of the sort Shakespeare portrays through Falstaff and his dealings with the tavern world. As Jonson says in one poem, “’Tis then a crime, when the usurer is judge, / And he is not in friendship.”83 He asks to be judged by the mutual obligation and unquantifiable debt of friendship and social obligation rather than by an objective system of laws, weights, and measurements. Such begging poems are invitations to the enlightened, humanistic reader to enter into a reciprocal relationship with Jonson. In all these cases, Jonson contrasts two types of debts: a dehumanizing one, which insists on an exacting repayment of an objectively understood and measured debt, and a humanizing one, which insists that all humans are forever indebted to others. Two poems addressed to the teller Mr. Squib urge the reader to consider the way that he helps construct Jonson. “An Epistle to Master Arthur Squib,” Under-wood 45, is fiercely antiessentialist throughout. Jonson uses the verb “to be” in a way that frustrates any attempts to see the body as a singular, essential, or stable thing. Jonson begins with what seems to be a simple, direct statement, but it is soon apparent that its truth depends on the imaginative participation of the sympathetic reader: “What I am not, and what I fain would be, / Whilst I inform myself, I would teach thee, / My gentle Arthur, that it might be said / One lesson we have both learned and well read.”84 Jonson carefully refuses to describe himself objectively; instead, he suggests what “I am not” and, more importantly, “what I fain would be.” The latter underscores the extent to which Jonson proposes that his essence is subjunctive in nature because it is created in cooperation with the actively engaged, imaginative, and humanistic reader. Jonson teaches this lesson in what follows by focusing on how coins acquire value. He describes Squib’s actions as teller of the exchequer in more humanistic terms. He does not merely uncover the intrinsic value of the coin, but rather he gives it value as he tests, tries, and weighs it. Jonson does not seek to give himself the privilege of being presumptively


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thin or disembodied; instead, he seeks to make his body “weighty” in a very different humanistic sense. In this case, his weight, like the value of the coin, comes from the way that his friend “touches” or “tries” him. Jonson asks Squib, “And as within your office you do take / No piece of money, but you know or make / Inquiry of the worth, so must we do: / First weigh a friend, then touch, and try him too; / For there are many slips and counterfeits.”85 Jonson is given weight and value, the analogy suggests, when the friend actively weighs, touches, and tries him. The analogy is antiessentialist because it insists that the coin has no intrinsic value but value only in the way it is assessed and even used. The use of “weight” throughout cannot help but remind the reader that Jonson is, indeed, fat, but in this analogy, it asks that weight be imagined in a very different, humanistic sense. The reader, thus, is urged to understand his fat body in other than the dehumanizing way that predominates among the courtly elite. Under-wood 54 plays with the multiple ways in which his weight can be understood. Thus, it already insists that there is no such thing as an objective and singular sense of weight. The poem is written on the occasion of a wager Jonson seems to have made that he weighs a full twenty stone. I say “seems to have made” simply because the poem implies that the interlocutor quickly accepts the bet and insists on it even when it may have been offered as a simple jest. (And, of course, Jonson may have invented the whole exchange for his literary purposes.) Certainly, the “merchant’s wife,” like other exacting characters in Under-wood, is overly concerned to turn a profit, and thus, in this case, to make sure that Jonson’s wager is paid if he does not weigh the full twenty stone he is said to have claimed. As Jonson writes, I am to dine, friend, where I must be weighed For a just wager, and that wager paid If I do lose it: and, without a tale, A merchant’s wife is regent of the scale. Who, when she heard the match, concluded straight, An ill commodity! It must make good weight. So that upon the point my corporal fear Is she will play Dame Justice too severe, And hold me to it close; to stand upright Within the balance, and not want a mite, But rather with advantage to be found Full twenty stone, of which I lack two pound.86

She plays “Dame Justice too severe,” in part because she will require an overexacting weighing of the “commodity.” Her weighing is strikingly

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different from the type of weighing that Jonson urges his friend, Arthur, to perform in Under-wood 45; where Arthur is invited to weigh him in a way that brings him closer to his friend, she insists on weighing him in a way that objectifies and dehumanizes him. Jonson fears the exactness with which she will weigh him. She will not allow him to misrepresent his weight or to pay his monetary debt with a “tale.” “Good weight” is a weight that is objective, exact, and numerical, and Jonson must be made to conform himself to this harsh “reality.” Jonson undercuts any claim that there be an objective, numerical meaning when he plays with polyvalence of language. As such, he indicates that “weight” could be constructed in any number of senses and certainly with more largesse. As Jonson lays out his calculations, he plays with the very different possible meanings of “pound.” While it can mean a unit of money, it can also be a unit of weight. The two, as Arthur understands, do not accord, and thus the wager can never be one based on a singular, objective reality. Jonson must even simply assert that six pounds as money equals two pounds in weight, even as he asks his friend Arthur to give him the one pound to make his five pounds good. All of this suggests that the hope that there be some sort of objective numerical standard is a futile one, which must rely on willfully misunderstanding the multiple values and meanings of words. There is no reason to prefer one form of compensation over another. We could just as easily let Jonson accept one “pound” for another, exempt him from the debt altogether, or use the debt to enter into a more reciprocal and playful relationship with him. This last alternative is exactly what Jonson does in the poem. He takes the occasion of this debt to place himself in a debt of obligation to his friend, Arthur: One piece I have in store; Lend me, dear Arthur, for a week five more And you shall make me good, in weight and fashion, And then to be returned; or protestation To go out after—till when, take this letter For your security. I can no better.87

The lines, of course, are playing with what it means to have “good weight.” Where the merchant’s wife will only take good weight to mean that which is apparently numerically exact and what brings her monetary profit, Jonson sees his good weight coming from his indebtedness to his friend. The latter insists on a reckoning that goes beyond any simple number. Ultimately, Jonson willingly puts himself in debt to his friend, even as he suggests that his friend can be paid in other more humanistic


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senses. “This letter,” after all, is offered as “security” for his debt in a way that suggests that Arthur, unlike the merchant’s wife, does understand the value of imagination. Jonson uses the poem to offer his friend a very different way to understand his weight. After all, we might remember that Arthur finally helps him make his weight by offering him the pound that will make up the difference. Thus, Jonson proves unconcerned about the corpulence that some courtly readers find so revolting; indeed, his friends give him more weight rather than less. Under-wood rejects any reading of Jonson’s body that would make his fat seemingly factual and objective because he wants his readers to reflect on how their construction make the man, including the fat one. In doing this, he resists the bodily aesthetic that privileged the thin body over the fat one. Such an aesthetic makes the latter one the very emblem of excess, one that excited a morally tinged revulsion in many, even in Jonson’s day. Jonson especially rejects those who read any bodily mark, including the bodily morphology of the distended paunch, as having any meaning in and of itself. Jonson is a useful figure for late modernity precisely because he criticizes a modern representational regime in its earliest manifestations. His contempt for a courtly definition of “weight and fashion” is evident in his poetry, even as he redefines “weight and fashion” as something he has when friends respond to him in a more capacious, appreciative way. He urges us to enter into a reciprocal relationship with him in which we test, try, and weigh him. In the way that he uses language to construct a reality that requires our active engagement to animate it, Jonson asks us to take responsibility for the way in which we construct the world. He allows us to make him into a “fat man that spake in rhyme,” if that is how we choose to view the world, or we can see him as a weighty man insofar as he sees the world including corporeality in a playful constructionist way. In his emphasis on debt in human relationships, he insists that we are all indebted to others; such relationships, like our bodies, are multifaceted and can be made and remade through our cooperation with others. Only the most mean, dehumanizing person would insist that the body has just one singular meaning. That person is even meaner if he insists that the fat body has a singular negative meaning. It is naturally, such a person assumes, the emblem of excess. To us in late modernity, Jonson’s poetry teaches us to take responsibility for our own constructions, including the moralized and pathologized one known as “obesity.” At the same time, it offers an alternative way to construct such a body as weighty insofar as we view it through a variety of constructions. We can just as easily see the fat body, like any body, as weighty to the extent to which it demands that we judge the world according to a more humanistic

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judgment that attaches us to other people, that is in ways other than those dehumanizing ones our modern representational regime fosters. IV. Baiting the Fat Girl in Bartholomew Fair Bartholomew Fair, first performed at the Hope Theater in 1614, is like Under-wood in that it criticizes the civilized elite for their dehumanizing constructions. Jonson exposes the way in which the privilege the civilized elite assert depends on the victimization of the “uncivilized,” lower-class fair folk. Fat has a central role in this play because, as I have explained, Jonson is well aware of how fat is coming to be seen in the modern representational regime. That is, the fat character of Ursula, who bulges with flesh, is seen by some as an emblem of excess and immorality. Jonson in two different characters demonstrates how the new modern preference for thin bodies emerges from both the puritan bodily aesthetic and courtly bodily aesthetic. Even as the puritan character Zeal-of-the-Land Busy finds Ursula the very “enormity of the fair,” the civilized elite, such as the gallants, Quarlous and Winwife, mock her as ugly and uncivilized. These last two poke, prod, and bait the uncivilized fat character, Ursula, the she-bear and pig-woman. Jonson’s play seeks to counteract such representations by breaking down the barriers that especially elite figures erect between themselves and others. In particular, he wants his audience no longer to feel the dehumanizing detachment from, and superiority to, lowly fat folk such as Ursula. He hopes, instead, that some might even feel charity toward them as they understand that they share a similar flawed humanity.88 Thus, Jonson both recognizes the implications of the emerging modern representational regime even as he seeks to criticize its dehumanizing consequences. Jonson is palpably disillusioned with society in Bartholomew Fair; indeed, he offers very little hope for social reform from the type of cruelty he foregrounds in the play. The play does not give us any character to believe in, even as it presents us with numerous characters who are excessively cruel and even predatory in their behavior. The bitterness that is palpable in the play can be explained if we remember that Jonson wrote it after the failure of his classical tragedy Cataline. In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson expresses contempt for an elite audience who would rather watch bearbaiting and other blood sports than classical tragedy.89 Jonson criticizes such an audience by giving them exactly what they want: a spectacle to amuse them. He does so in a way that is designed to criticize their own aesthetic that leads them to enjoy blood sports. In essence, the audience is judged by how they respond to the central figure of Ursula. Those who are so certain


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that they are innately superior to Ursula prove to be more base, sinful, and uncivilized than she. Such criticism works, in part, because the fair folk prove to be more civilized than their supposed betters. Both the fair folk and the civilized elite care about profit, but only the fair folk seem able to sometimes put profit aside to tend to the needs of their neighbors. When Ursula is baited by the two “dogs” Quarlous and Winwife, the fair folk abandon their booths to tend to their ailing comrade.90 The dynamic of Bartholomew Fair is one Jonson uses elsewhere. Once again, he criticizes the elite audience roundly by showing them that they are more lowly than their supposed inferiors. In this case, the thin elite prove to be much more vicious and inhumane than the fat Ursula. To understand this dynamic, we might look at his Commonplace Book: What petty things they are, wee wonder at? like children, that esteeme every trifle; and preferre a Fairing before their Fathers: what difference is betweene us, and them? but that we are dearer Fooles, Cockscombes, at a higher rate? They are pleas’d with Cockleshels, Whistles, Hobby-horses, and such like: wee with Statues, marble Pillars, Pictures, gilded Roofes, where under-neath is Lath, and Lyme; perhaps Lome. Yet, wee take pleasure in the lye, and are glad, wee can cousen our selves.91

Jonson appeals to what he knows to be a sense of superiority in his elite reader, only to insist finally with “what a different is between us and them” that there is, in fact, no real difference between the two. Both groups sell themselves, only the elite do so at a “higher rate.” Jonson plays on the reader’s sense that he is superior in order to prod him into seeing how despicable his sense of privilege is. All of us, Jonson says, are equally “loam,” but some of us assert our own innate superiority and privilege in a way that dehumanizes us. That Jonson is critiquing especially the civilized elite and their courtly aesthetic is apparent if we consider the extent to which Bartholomew Fair evokes the spectacle of bearbaiting. The “sport” was a particular favorite with the court as well as with those who, like Quarlous and Winwife, followed its fashions. Jonson chooses a sport too that encourages particular detachment from, and cruelty to, animals, especially the bear. As Jason Scott-Warner explains, the royal audience identified with the English dogs, although even there they remained rather detached from the creatures.92 Scott-Warner observes, “What stands out . . . is the spectator’s detached admiration for the quality and courage of the English dogs.”93 Such a dynamic is criticized by Jonson throughout the play. Characters such as Quarlous and Winwife especially are characterized by their civilized detachment from the spectacles of cruelty that they create. It is this

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detachment apparent in Quarlous, Winwife, and Justice Overdo that Jonson criticizes, precisely because they insist they are better in kind from others, even as they act in especially cruel and predatory ways. Jonson wants the audience of this play to be aware throughout that they are participants in a bearbaiting. Even his choice of having it performed at the Hope Theater would remind them continually of such spectacles. The Hope was known as much for its bearbaiting as it was for theater. The owner of the Hope, Philip Henslowe, was especially strongly associated with bearbaiting; in fact, it was his primary means of preferment at court. Henslowe proved expert in all aspects of bearbaiting from the keeping of the bears and dogs to executing the spectacles themselves. As Andrew Gurr explains, Equally, or perhaps more potently, his involvement in baiting seems to have promoted him even further at court. In 1603 he became Gentleman Sewer of the Chamber to King James, although it was not until 1604 that he gained official control of the royal bears. He had in fact been running the Beargarden near the Rose under license from Jacob Meade, Keeper of the royal bears, since 1594.94

Commenting on his career, Gurr concludes that “Henslowe’s interests always lay equally between playing and baiting” and that “he never saw any difficulty in mixing the two activities at the one venue.”95 The Hope was designed from its inception to be “convenient” for both playing and bear- and bullbaiting.96 In choosing to have his play performed at the Hope, Jonson could encourage the audience to reflect on their own role as spectators to such events. In particular, the audience is encouraged to reflect on how they should respond to and treat the suffering of Ursula herself. Ursula offers the greatest challenge to the elite spectator especially because she insists upon her embodiment. Thus, she challenges those who want to insist on their own civilized detachment from other bodies. From the beginning, the play assaults just such elite sensibilities in a way that is designed to break down the barriers of their civilized detachment. Jonson has, in choosing the Hope, chosen a venue ideal to remind such a spectator of the realities of a suffering body. The bodily presence of the bear is made apparent when the Induction reminds us that the Stagekeeper has the duty of “gathering up the broken apples for the bears within.”97 The audience is made aware of the bodily presence of the bear, even as it is reminded of her creaturely needs. In later remarks, the audience is made palpably aware of the bodily presence of dogs and bears. Their stench reminds them that they are immersed even in the various


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bodily remains of these creatures, which permeate the theater itself. The character of the Scriviner announces, “And though the Fair be not kept in the same region that some here, perhaps, would have it, yet think that therein the author hath observed a special decorum, the place being as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every wit.”98 As editors observe, such lines call attention to the stench that comes perhaps especially from the residue from bearbaiting.99 The audience would smell the remnants of the bears, including, I suspect, the excrement, blood, and spittle that undoubtedly sprayed throughout the theater during these ghastly events. Jonson works against those who want to remain detached from these events and from the creaturely reality of the (suffering) body itself. Jonson associates the elites with the dogs so that the audience will see just how implicated they are in these spectacles of cruelty. The totality of this setting works against those who want to remain smugly detached from the cruelty they witness frequently with apparent amusement.100 Thus, Jonson prepares the audience for the bodily reality of the central character of Ursula, who, much like the stench of the Hope, will assault the audience member with the reality of her suffering fat body. Ursula takes on the role of the bear in the bearbaiting, as she is the central figure of the play around which everything revolves. In performance, her person and her booth would, indeed, take center stage.101 For her fair-folk companions, she is a truth teller of sorts, modeled, I suspect, on Falstaff. They gravitate to her almost as if she were their queen; once she is wounded by the “dogs,” Quarlous and Winwife, they even elevate her to their “Ursa major.”102 The civilized fairgoers gravitate toward her in a more nefarious way; they are dogs, she is their prey, a she-bear to be baited. Virtually all the civilized characters are likened to dogs, whereas, significantly, none of the fair folk are. Even the figures of Zeal-of-theLand Busy and John Littlewit are likened to dogs who sniff out their prey. Their nose brings them to Ursula. Busy, warning his party against giving in to visual seductions, urges them instead to “follow the scent” to the pig they so desire.103 The stage directions explain further, “Busy scents after it like a hound.”104 Jonson associates their threat with the dehumanizing language they apply to Ursula. In particular, he focuses on the way that the civilized characters draw on an existing antifat discourse in a way that already does violence to her by making her into the very emblem of excess. Zeal-ofthe-Land Busy makes her the very “enormity of the fair” that comes to embody all of his sins. Even as his appetites bring him to her—he, after all, sniffs her out—yet she is presumably made responsible for that sinful pursuit. She becomes for him an emblem of all excess that must be avoided for the puritan to remain pure. As he preaches, “Urs’la, is above

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all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man: the world, as being in the Fair; the devil, as being in the fire; and the flesh, as being herself.”105 Such censorious statements, the bearbaiting theme makes us realize, are far from mere bombast. People such as Ursula get hurt, and even killed, when the likes of Busy and Overdo turn their attention toward them. Busy’s sermon exposes the problems inherent in the puritan bodily aesthetic, which grants the thin body privilege to the extent to which it makes the fat one the embodiment of sinful appetites and excess consumption. Notably, Busy does not see himself as implicated in these three sins, but instead sees Ursula as an essential embodiment of them all. For our purposes, it is perhaps most important that he makes her literally the embodiment of the “flesh.” Quarlous and Winwife are even more persistently and ominously described as dogs throughout Bartholomew Fair. Jonson develops this trope in a way that suggests that they make themselves dogs because all they care about is predatory profit. In their search for rich wives, both are described as dogs sniffing after prey. Quarlous uses just such language when he describes Winwife’s search for a rich widow to marry. He describes Winwife as “nosing” after “ancient tripe or trillibub.”106 Even more unpleasantly, he adds that Winwife is “perhaps, worse, currying a carcass that thou hast bound thyself to alive.”107 The woman is made into a “tripe or trillibub”—a stomach —or even a rotting carcass. Such language, ultimately, tells us that these gallants view everyone as a thing to be consumed for their pleasure and profit. They, rather than the fair folk, are seen as predatorial, where their predation is directed specifically at the fair folk themselves and especially Ursula. Such predation becomes all the more nefarious because it is disguised behind a veneer of civilité. Ursula in her embodiment offers a challenge to the audience member who is intensely invested in the regime of civilité. Not only is she enormous but she is unapologetically so. Thus, she offers a counterpoint to the other women in the play who are all ruled by a regime of civilité that makes them into objects of exchange. Where they are associated with their clothing, especially their velvet hoods, Ursula is associated with her sweating, fat, and outrageous body.108 Where they are intensely embarrassed every time their bodily needs make themselves felt, Ursula has no embarrassment over her body or its functions. Gail Kern Paster is correct to point out the importance of the two parallel scenes in which these civilized women, ashamed of their urge to piss, are assisted by “chivalrous” men to the booth of Ursula where they finally relieve themselves.109 Mistress Overdo, especially, employs the language of courtesy, as she makes Captain Whit, a bawd, her chivalrous hero. When he asks what she needs, she responds, “[I am] a little distempered


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with these enormities; shall I entreat a courtesy of you, Captain?”110 Both women refuse to name what their body needs: Overdo simply says, “I cannot with modesty speak it out, but—,”111 and Win responds to her husband with equal modesty that she has need “[f ]or a thing I am ashamed to tell you, i’faith, and ‘tis too far to go home.”112 They are so invested in the regime of civilité that they must not, whatever they do, call attention to their bodies. In this, they play into a culture that would make them into objects, valued and priced by their velvet hood, a sign of their price on the market. When Ursula bursts onto the scene from the back of her booth, she revolts against the civilized aesthetic that finds her revolting. Ursula unapologetically insists upon her own embodiment in a way that flamboyantly rejects the regime of civilité. She is not a body that is individualized or bounded. She sweats and leaks openly even as she insists that others acknowledge her bodily needs. Others, furthermore, will be required to accommodate her size, as she refuses to reduce herself to their trim, civilized aesthetic. Indeed, it is this refusal of hers that makes the logical target of civilized characters such as Justice Overdo, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and Quarlous and Winwife, who all see her as an embodiment of a dangerous excess that threatens their own aesthetic and moral values. Jonson does more than merely construct Ursula in this negative way as embodying all that is uncivilized. Ultimately, she hearkens back to figures such as Elynour Rummyng in the way that she, in her crude, embodied self, is a life force that cannot be comprehended by the civilized constructions of the elite. From the moment she enters the stage through the back of her booth, Ursula drips with bodily fluids of all types. The audience might very well feel that they smell her body when they smell the stench from the bodily remnants left behind from Hope’s actual bearbaiting. In her grotesque presence, she certainly suggests a connection to other beings. In this, she recalls earlier figures who, like Elynour Rummynge, similarly drip forth bodily vitality. Ursula even seems to be boasting when she announces, loudly and coarsely I imagine, “I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great garden-pot; you may follow me by the S’s I make.”113 Ursula’s remarks make no sense to those who, like Mistress Overdo and Win, will insist on hiding their bodies and their bodily processes, nor do they make any sense to their male counterparts who are invested in having women conform to their thin regime. Ursula treats her leakage as something other than mere excrement to be discretely secreted and removed politely from view; instead, she sees it as something to be flaunted, displayed, and even celebrated. Her excrement would seem to be fecund when she is described as a “great garden-pot” that fertilizes all she touches.

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Ursula cannot be properly responded to in her simple embodiment if we make her into a mere symbolic entity, as some critics do. It is often assumed that she must represent something; thus, her specification that she is in hell or her utterances such as “I am all fire and fat” are taken to tell us something fundamental about her essential self.114 Ursula’s overthe-top, greasy language forces such people to confront her embodied humanity. She wants, and demands, sympathy from Nightingale, Mooncalf, and even Mad Arthur, just as she wants, and demands, such sympathy from the audience. When in her first words, Ursula emerges from the back of the booth and roars, “Fie upon’t! Who would wear out their youth and prime thus in roasting of pigs, had they any cooler vocation?,” she demands empathy from the audience.115 She roars to Nightingale, “I am all fire and fat, Nightingale; I shall e’en melt away to the first woman, a rib again.”116 Although such statements can be taken to insist that Ursula is some symbolic entity, they can also be taken as simple expressions of embodied suffering. The fair folk even offer an alternative way of reading such statements when they respond with a simple expression of sympathy, as Nightingale does when he responds, “Alas, Good Urs.”117 In a similar way, her body grows beyond the confines of the civilized body. Her body is, then, in every way the type of disruptive body of the Fat Bishop in A Game at Chess. Both of their bodies, furthermore, are seen as growing so large that they strain against their chairs. Just as the Fat Bishop grows beyond his “chair ecclesiastical,” Ursula grows beyond her own chair, which itself is a chair of state. Jonson, who elsewhere calls attention to the way that his own fat body “breaks a chair, or cracks a coach,” is well aware of the way that such bodies offend, precisely because they are seen as refusing to contain and control themselves. Ursula is characterized as having a foggy fat that oozes beyond any confines. In this, it revolts against those who want the individualized body to be neatly contained and controlled to firm bodily boundaries. In the refusal of accepting any fixed and singular boundaries, Ursula offers a more playful alternative to the bodily aesthetic of the elite. Ursula asks simply, “Did not I bid you should get this chair let out o’ the sides for me, that my hips might play?”118 Not only does Ursula refuse to apologize for her size, she demands an accommodation that will allow her hips to “play.” Ursula performs her outrageous fatness for us in a way that challenges the unsympathetic and cruel responses of the civilized class, who only sees her outrageous embodiment as unlovely and even monstrous. I want to consider now the bearbaiting scene in which the civilized figures of Winwife and especially Quarlous bait Ursula. Their civilized treatment of her is contrasted with the more humane engagement of the fair


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folk; thus, the scene begins and ends by focusing on the more active, humane way that the fair folk respond to and treat Ursula. As the scene begins, Knockem, Edgworth, and Ursula are all drinking toasts to one another.119 Their solidarity and conviviality contrast sharply with the mercenary competitiveness of Quarlous, Winwife, and their likes. When Quarlous and Winwife enter the scene, they disrupt the camaraderie of the group because they insist that everyone acknowledge their innate superiority. They reserve the right to enjoy the fruits of the fairs, but always while insisting that they are distinct and superior from the fair folk themselves. For Jonson, it is no doubt important that they use what little learning they have to assert their distinction from their supposed inferiors. Quarlous responds to Leatherhead’s sales pitch with the supposedly learned pronouncement, “Orpheus among the beasts, with his fiddle and all!”120 To Trash’s, he responds with the contemptuous, “And Ceres selling her daughter’s picture in gingerwork!”121 Throughout, Quarlous remains smugly detached from the people around him, even as he asserts his right to name them. The humans are mere props in a performance designed to perform his innate superiority. Quarlous objectifies all around him by making them merely imperfect and profane parodies of the heroes and gods. Jonson writes the scene to focus on how Quarlous and Winwife assert their distinction from others. They readily consume goods produced by their supposed inferiors, even as they want to insist that they are superior to such lowly creatures. We look on as two different world views collide. The fair folk, while still wanting profit, also expect Quarlous and Winwife to incorporate themselves into the booth. They rebuff all efforts at such incorporation, even as they assert their distinction from the tavern folk. When Knockem, quite reasonably, invites them to take a “froth and smoke with us,” they respond with what seems like unreasonable disdain,122 as the following passage shows, Quarlous. Yes, sir, but you’ll pardon us if we knew not of so much familiarity between us afore. Knockem. As what, sir? Quarlous. To be so lightly invited to smoke and froth. Knockem. A good vapor. 123

Such “familiarity” might very well cause the beginning of the baiting that ensues. Certainly, Jonson calls attention to a fundamental difference between the expectations of the fair folk and the expectations of these two civilized gallants. The civilized expect to enjoy all that the fair has to

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offer while always maintaining their distinction from the fair folk. In contrast, the fair folk expect that their visitors will incorporate themselves into the fair, where their enjoyment of a “smoke and froth” represents their at least temporary incorporation into the community. Knockem readily recognizes that the visitors are snubbing them when they refuse to “talk” or “drink” with them.124 As Knockem says, “Master Winwife, you are proud, methinks; you do not talk nor drink; are you proud?” to which he adds, “You do not except at the company, do you?”125 Given the fair folk’s behavior, it is almost inevitable that Quarlous and Winwife will bait Ursula when she comes onto the scene. They, after all, insist on their detachment, distinction, and privilege, even as the grotesque figure of Ursula urges her visitors to incorporate themselves into the fair. Her very grotesque bodily existence challenges their civilized aesthetic. She, after all, does not allow them to ignore her body, even as she also does not allow them to debase her. They employ the type of antifat language we have examined before. Much like Hal, they attempt to mark and stigmatize her as embodying all that is excessive and dangerous. This attempt is, admittedly, more gender inflected because they attack Ursula in part for her refusal to make herself into an object available for their enjoyment. In their first attack, both make attempts to establish their own superior civilité by calling her names that embody all that is uncivilized. If Ursula offers a challenge for the audience to engage with her in a more humanistic way, these civilized men categorically refuse to rise to the challenge. In their joking, Quarlous and Winwife attempt to remain safely detached from Ursula, even as they arrogate to themselves the right to judge and name her: Quarlous. Body o’ the Fair! what’s this? Mother o’ the bawds? Knockem. No, she’s mother o’ the pigs, sir, mother o’the pigs! Winwife. Mother o’the Furies, I think, by her firebrand. Quarlous. Nay, she is too fat to be a Fury, sure some walking sow of tallow! Winwife. An inspired vessel of kitchen-stuff ! Quarlous. She’ll make excellent gear for the coach-makers here in Smithfield to anoint wheels and axle-trees with. Ursula. Aye, aye, gamesters, mock a plain plump soft wench o’ the suburbs, do, because she’s juicy and wholesome. You must ha’ your thin pinched ware, pent up i’the compass of a dog-collar (or ‘twill not do), that looks like a long laced conger, set upright, and a green feather, like fennel, i’the jowl on’t. Knockem. Well said, Urs, my good Urs; to’em, Urs.126

They use their learning in an effort to control and contain Ursula. As they did with the other fair folk, they attempt to define her, although,


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notably, her outrageous bodily presence generates from even them a “playful” array of conceits. Their play has a high seriousness, however, evident in how their language would make her less and less human. They first describe her in human terms, next in bestial ones, and finally in terms of mere materiality. Thus, she is first the “Body of the Fair,” next the “Mother,” and finally a vessel and even just oil used to “anoint wheels and axle-trees.” They would make her embody these things so that they can assert their own superiority over her. She would be the stuff of the fair, available for their use and enjoyment. Ursula talks back. Even in this, she in essence demands that they respond to her in a more egalitarian manner. They, after all, never address her directly, even as they reserve the right to define her to the men around her. Ursula says repeatedly, in essence, “Speak to me,” which is for her the same thing as saying, “You cannot define me.” In her response, she seems aware that they dehumanize her to the extent to which they attempt to measure her by their own ideal of civilité. Ursula responds by turning her attention to their aesthetic and moral judgment, exposing how thin it is. She does this by calling attention to how they see the world in terms merely of profit and thus to how they see everything in it, including women, as mere objects to be exchanged. Their bodily aesthetic is revealed, her retorts suggest, in the type of women they prey upon. She focuses on their taste for especially skinny women. Through her, Jonson gives us a glimpse of an alternative perspective that sees the aesthetic of the civilized elite as trim, indeed. The lower-class figures of the fair admire, want, and need fat, where fat represents their livelihood. Alice, the whore, decried the fact that “your caps and hoods of velvet call away our customers and lick the fat from us.”127 Ursula critiques Quarlous and Winwife for their civilized aesthetic when she describes them as seeking only after “pinched ware.” Such a remark is not really a critique of women, but a critique of men who only want women who are “pent up i’the compass of a dog-collar.” Ursula exposes what lays at the heart of their attack on her. Namely, they find her grotesque, excessive, and enormous because she refuses to be contained and controlled by them. The “ware” that they “must ha” are civilized creatures increasingly more controlled by their masters. If, at first, she describes them as wanting a woman like a dog “pent up,” she finally sees them as wanting a woman like a “conger” or sea-eel perfectly “dressed.” If we take into account all the meanings of “dressed,” of course, Ursula is calling attention to the way that Winwife and Quarlous would have their women eviscerated. Ursula exposes throughout the predatory instincts that their civilité is founded upon.

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Quarlous and Winwife respond, perhaps precisely because they recognize the strength of Ursula’s attack, with an even more vicious counterattack. Notably, they attempt to enlist Knockem to their cause. Disturbed by Ursula’s obvious independence, they attempt to characterize her as Knockem’s “bog,” or “quagmire.” Understood as essentially excessive, the fat person is characterized throughout as that which bulges beyond all individualized bodily boundaries. Quarlous asks pointedly, “Is she your quagmire, Dan Knockem? Is this your bog?”128 All of this language is quite familiar to us now: it is used to suggest that the fat body is dangerous to the extent to which it refuses to conform itself to fixed, stable, and thin bodily boundaries. In this case, the language takes on a decidedly antifeminist thrust. For Quarlous and Winwife, Ursula’s fatness makes her an undesirable object. Unlike the other women who can be commodities easily exchanged, Ursula’s fat makes her unavailable for “use.” According to such logic, the man who would “use” her would get lost in her seemingly endless and formless fat: Quarlous. Yes, he that would venture for’t, I assure him, might sink into her and be drowned a week ere any friend he had could find where he were. Winwife. And then he would be a fortnight weighing up again. Quarlous. ’Twere like falling into a whole shire of butter. They had need be a team of Dutchmen, should draw him out. Knockem. Answer ’em, Urs; where’s thy Barthol’mew-wit, now, Urs? thy Barthol’mew-wit? Ursula. Hang ’em, rotten, roguy cheaters, I hope to see ’em plagued one day (poxed they are already, I am sure) with lean playhouse poultry, that has the bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a partizan, that every rib of ’em is like the tooth of a saw; and will so grate ’em with their hips and shoulders, as (take ’em altogether) they were as good lie with a hurdle.129

Such descriptions insist that Ursula is dangerous because her flesh refuses to conform to the new bodily aesthetic. Just as she does not contain and control her body, so too does she not allow it to become the exclusive property of men. Her behavior contrasts with that of other women; thus, she contrasts to the lady, Dame Purecraft, precisely because the latter makes herself a commodity when she courts Quarlous by telling him, “I am worth six thousand pound.”130 In contrast, Ursula calls herself approvingly a “plump soft wench o’ the suburbs.”131 Quarlous and Winwife use conceits to make her into an object that could, then, be easily controlled. Relatedly, they never speak to her directly, preferring, instead, to speak of her to Knockem as a “this” and “it.”132


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Ursula counterattacks in part by critiquing their civilized desires and tastes. According to her, they must dismiss her because she does not conform to the type of women they like. Where they like women who are perfect commodities and thus either dead or inanimate, she is “juicy and wholesome”. As she explains, Hang’em, rotten, roguy cheaters, I hope to see ’em plagued one day (poxed they are already, I am sure) with lean playhouse poultry, that has the bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a partizan, that every rib of ’em is like the tooth of a saw; and will so grate ’em that their hips and shoulders, as (take ’em altogether) they were as good lie with a hurdle.133

Her language is crude, but appropriately so insofar as it exposes the nature of their desires. They only want women as “ware” or women as “lean playhouse poultry.” In intercourse, she insists, every bone of their lover will become the “tooth of a saw” to “grate ’em.” Her remarks expose the nature of their desires for women who only accord to their narrow conceptions of what women must be. That Jonson wants the reader to consider Ursula’s side is apparent if we remember that her words allude to lines from Martial, the classical poet Jonson admired and imitated in his earliest volume of poetry Epigrams, included in his 1616 Folio. Such an allusion would, to the learned in the audience, suggest a very different aesthetic from that articulated by Quarlous and Winwife. Significantly, too, it comes from a classical context that offers an alternative humanistic response to the emerging modern values. Martial writes that “I don’t wish to have, Flaccus, a mistress who is thin . . . who rasps me with her skinny haunch and pricks me with her knee, from whose spine protrudes a saw, from whose latter end a spear.”134 It cannot be a mere accident that Ursula’s words, rather than Quarlous’s, allude to Martial, nor can it be an accident that her words give voice to an aesthetic that contrasts with the civilized aesthetic. In effect, the allusion indicates that no matter how unlearned Ursula is, she offers a formidable critique of the two dogs, Quarlous and Winwife. A learned reader would understand her words to carry some weight and to articulate an aesthetic that is an alternative to the trim one embraced by the civilized Quarlous and Winwife. Certainly, the presence of her words requires the audience to consider the fat and the thin body in different ways. In this case, Jonson urges us to consider the way that the thin body can be considered undesirable from an urbane classical perspective. Jonson does so, not necessarily because he wants to recommend

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such a construction but because he wants to call into question the emerging modern aesthetic embraced by Quarlous and Winwife. Throughout, Ursula uses a number of canine metaphors that underscore the predatory nature of Winwife and Quarlous. All of this, notably, focuses on the way that they are sniffing after money and prestige. In one, for example, she tells them to “[g]o, snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity.”135 Obviously, the metaphors she uses associate their profiteering with their predatory nature. Everything and everyone around them becomes a mere thing to use for their profit because all they think about is money. Notably, Winwife and Quarlous are more concerned with profit than are their presumed social inferiors. In looking at their clothing, Ursula immediately understands this about them. In the passage I just quoted, Ursula continues by saying, “That the livery you wear; ’twill be out at the elbows shortly. It’s time you went to’t, for the tother remnant.”136 Earlier too, she described them as “patched,” where their skin is patched because they have the pox, their clothing patched because they have scant money. She sees through their finery: “I ha’ seen as fine outsides as either o’yours bring lousy linings to the brokers ere now, twice a week!”137 All of these statements show us an Ursula who is quite astute in seeing through their pretensions. More importantly, she sees through the aesthetic they offer and finds it to be wanting. In the bearbaiting, Ursula would seem to be winning at this point. Certainly, she calls attention to their grasping and mercenary nature. The dog, Quarlous, counterattacks notably in a way that underscores the very real, social threat he poses to Ursula. Like Hal, he can only silence his fat interlocutor by using his institutional authority against her. Quarlous reminds Ursula that he can take steps to have her punished for being an unruly woman. He asks Winwife, “Do you think there may be a fine new cucking-stool i’ the Fair to be purchased? One large enough, I mean. I know there is a pond of capacity for her.”138 In saying this, Quarlous breaks all faith with her. Certainly, Quarlous in essence destroys any possibility that Ursula and he can meet on common ground. He uses his social position here to remind her that he has the power in society to punish her if she gets out of line. Even as the two seek to use their social standing to silence her, Ursula directly counters this prospective attack with her own violent sally. Initially, she merely roars, “Out, you rogue, you hedge-bird, you pimp, you pannier-man’s bastard you!” but when they refuse, she finally uses the threat of violence to drive them out of her booth.139 As she grabs the scalding pan, Ursula threatens, “I’ll set you gone. Gi’ me my pig-pan hither a little. I’ll scald you hence, an’ you will not go.”140 She meets their threat with her own, still defiant to the end.


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The denouement is all very predictable. Quarlous and Winwife stand their ground, refusing to leave, and Ursula, in the tussle, ends up harming herself. Ultimately, Jonson comments on the scene as a whole in its conclusion. There, the fair folk respond to Ursula in a very different, more humane way than the two dogs. Throughout, the fair folk have shown her sympathy, as they recognized the real danger she faced. Knockem tries to prevent the fight entirely: “Peace, Urs, peace, Urs. [Aside] They’ll kill the poor whale and make oil of her.—Pray thee go in.”141 His own response contrasts sharply with the provocative, objectifying remarks of Quarlous and Winwife. Once Ursula is wounded, everyone present, with the exception of Quarlous and Winwife, expresses pity for her. Together, just as she falls, Edgworth and Nightingale exclaim simply, “God bless the woman.”142 Even Justice Overdo cries out, “Goodly woman!”143 All of them respond with concern for her ailing body in a way that is markedly different from the more civilized, detached predatorial actions of the civilized elite. That they utter simple exclamations underscore the degree to which they are reacting with spontaneous kindness. The movement of the characters on stage makes this point perhaps more poignantly. Just as Quarlous and Winwife exit, after having struck Knockem for no apparent reason, the fair folk run toward Ursula to assist and comfort her. Nothing better suggests this very human and charitable solidarity than the way that the characters set her in her chair and finally lift her up to a place of special standing. Leatherhead directs, “Best sit up i’your chair, Urs’la,” as the men together lift her into what seems like a chair of state.144 Knockem, Nightingale, and Edgworth all utter consoling words, as Knockem tends to her leg. The attention he gives her suffering body contrasts sharply with the cruel detachment of Quarlous and Winwife. In perhaps the most touching moment, Knockem consoles Ursula: Patience, Urs. Take a good heart; ’tis but a blister as big as a windgall. I’ll take it away with the white of an egg, a little honey, and hog’s grease; ha’ thy pasterns well rolled, and thou shalt pace again by tomorrow. I’ll tend thy booth and look to thy affairs the while; thou shalt sit i’thy chair and give directions, and shine Ursa major.145

After the baiting, there is quiet solidarity, as her neighbors stop to help Ursula. Thus, they prove to be relatively uninterested in profit and much more humane than their “betters”: Joan and Leatherhead leave their booths, Mooncalf watches over Joan’s basket in the interim, and Edgworth assures Ursula (and Nightingale) that there was no money to be had from these gallants anyhow because they “were too fine to carry

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money.”146 Similarly, Knockem puts his profit on hold as he pledges to tend to her and her booth while she recovers. They relate to Ursula’s body in this very different manner because they are not obsessed with a civilized bodily aesthetic. Bodies do not have to be distinct from bodies, nor do bodies have to be thin in a way that declares their superior self-control and virtue. When they look on Ursula’s fat body, they see a body that is suffering. They react directly and immediately with pity to her embodied condition. The bearbaiting scene, like Bartholomew Fair generally, provokes the audience to think about their response to the spectacle they watch. Even as it critiques the type of civilized detachment cultivated by a Quarlous and Winwife, it recommends a form of charity exemplified by the fair folk. Jonson urges them to position themselves with the bodies of those who are most baited, and especially with the body of the fat made by the powerful into the very emblem of cumulative excess and sin. Justice Overdo may represent the only elite character who is even temporarily redeemed when he acts with the same pity exhibited by the fair folk. Of course, he can only do so, the scene suggests, when he has incorporated himself, albeit temporarily, into the community of the fair. With his simple, “Goodly woman!” he expresses his concern for Ursula’s bodily suffering. In that moment, she is for him no longer an emblem of excess but rather a suffering human being. Jonson uses the Justice’s reaction here to urge the audience to reflect on their own responses. Will they be too concerned to assert their distinction and autonomy from the likes of Ursula? Are they so obsessed with reading her body as an emblem of excess that they cannot look on her with pity, even when baited? Can they see themselves as sharing with her a common humanity? Are we going to accept the boundaries of modern “reality,” or the grotesque realism of Bakhtin, who sees our physical reality as much more intermingled than our modern sensibility would allow? Such questions are directed at Jonson’s contemporary audience, but insofar as they critique a representational regime that has come to dominate with modernity, they should also be directed at us. We have a choice, when reading Bartholomew Fair, to decide where we want to position ourselves. The play offers a challenge for us that might be even greater than it was for the early modern audience: because our dominant culture has come to see “obesity” as so innately immoral and pathological, it may be difficult to respond to Ursula with anything approaching charity. Well, perhaps I should rephrase that and say that it is difficult for us to respond to Ursula with anything approaching “charity” as Jonson defines it. Many of us might see ourselves as acting “charitably” if we were to tell


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Ursula to face the facts and to diet in order to make her hips conform to the rigid chairs her servant brings her. Jonson offers us a stark choice that offers us an example of how to express our defiance with a modern representational regime that privileges certain bodies at the expense of others. That is, we can insist on our own embodiment in a way that works against the regime that would mark and stigmatize Ursula’s body as uniquely revolting. In that idea, however, is also the seed of change. That is, in positioning ourselves with the fat against the thin, with the fair folk against the civilized elite, we begin to revolt against the modern representational regime that would insist that such positioning is impossible. To oppose such a regime, Jonson writes in a way that asks us to consider our own reactions to the bodies of people around us. As such, he asks us to take responsibility for the way that we construct certain bodies; his multiple constructions that are self-consciously focused on receptivity work against any essentialist understanding of the body. No body, including the fat body, has for Jonson any meaning in and of itself. Its meaning comes from the way that we understand it and construct it. Because of this, fatness as a bodily characteristic is not for Jonson a negative quality in and of itself. For us in late modernity, Jonson offers a powerful lesson of the need to take responsibility for our aesthetic and political choices. Jonson gives the lie to our assertion that we are simply using language objectively or hygienically when we use terms such as “obese.” Such a construction has implications, Jonson tells us, just as the construction of fat was beginning to have in his day. Such terms suggest more about the type of world that we are constructing for ourselves. Perhaps, then, when we use such terms, we should ask ourselves, instead, what purpose do they serve, and more importantly, how do they position me in relation to other people around me? Our modern representational regime, insofar as it grants certain bodies privilege by allowing them to assert their detachment and presumptive disembodiment, is inherently dehumanizing. Realizing that we reinforce such a regime when we also act with detachment and supposed objectivity, we might want to align ourselves with the “obese” or the “unhealthy.” That is, we might follow the fair folk’s lead and respond in a more human way to the individual bodies before us. Perhaps then we can imagine body types in ways that will allow us to appreciate and imagine our multiple “weights.”


Notes Chapter 1 1. Several scholars identify the turn of the twentieth century as the time in which fat becomes a particular preoccupation in the society at large. See Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1986); Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, 2nd ed. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Culture of the Abdomen: Obesity and Reducing in Britain, circa 1900–1939,” Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005): 239–73. For an argument that the fear of fat is associated with modernity, see Christopher E. Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne, eds., Culture of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2. Richard Carmona, U.S. surgeon general, in an interview in Morning Edition (November 23, 2003). 3. “Surgeon General to Cops: Put Down the Donuts,” CNN.com, February 28, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/02/28/ obesity.police/index.html. 4. Maggie Fox, “Obesity Top Health Problem in U.S., Agency Head Says,” Reuters (October 28, 2003). 5. This remark was made in a story on the effects that the obesity epidemic was supposed to have on the longevity of the American population (based on a study subsequently questioned by the scientific community and finally significantly corrected by the CDC). See Rob Stein, “Obesity May Stall Trend of Increased Longevity,” The Washington Post, March 17, 2005, A2. See also Lisa Tartamella, Elaine Herscher, and Chris Woolston, Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from an Epidemic of Obesity (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 9–10, which uses such language as when remarking, “In that city’s school district, administrators say they feel as though they’re watching a tsunami headed their way.” 6. Kim Severson, “Obesity ‘A Threat’ to U.S. Security: Surgeon General Urges Shift,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 2003, A1.

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7. The Director of the CDC, Julie Gerberding, said in a speech: “If you looked at any epidemic—whether it’s influenza or plague from the Middle Ages—they are not as serious as the epidemic of obesity in terms of the health impact on our country and our society,” in Jim Kvicala, “Americans Experiencing ‘Pandemic of Obesity,’ Says Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta” (2003), http://www.terry.uga.edu/news/releases/2003/gerberding.html (accessed July 22, 2005). For a comparison between the “epidemic” of obesity and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, see the opening of Tartamella, Herscher, and Woolston, Generation Extra Large, 1–3. 8. For a discussion of this study and the responses to it, see J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24–6, 49–50. At a conference Oliver attended shortly after the correction was published, the CDC issued a set of “talking points” that insisted that “despite the recent controversy in the media about how many deaths are related to obesity in the United States, the simple fact remains: obesity can be deadly” (49). See also the CDC’s press release of June 14, 2005, which sought to help the American public “sort out the facts” raised by the controversy over the recent study (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC’s National Leadership Role in Addressing Obesity,” http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r050615.htm). For just one article that criticized the original study, see Eliot Marshall, “Public Enemy Number One: Tobacco or Obesity?” Science 304 (May 7, 2004): 804. He quotes an unnamed source from the CDC as saying “that the paper’s [original study’s] compatibility with the new antiobesity theme in government public health pronouncements—rather than sound analysis—propelled it into print.” 9. Michael Fumento, The Fat of the Land: The Obesity Epidemic and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves (New York: Viking, 1997), 263. 10. Fox, “Top Health Problem.” 11. S. Jay Olshansky, et al., “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century,” New England Journal of Medicine 352, no. 11 (March 17, 2005): 1138. 12. Olshansky, et al., “Potential Decline,” 1124. 13. Gary Heavin and Carol Colman, Curves: Permanent Results Without Permanent Dieting (New York: Putnam, 2003), 98. 14. Sander L. Gilman writes of the way that the fat boy in modernity is associated with death, disease, and degeneration: “Coded into this literature is an obsessive concern with the collapse and decay of the body that clearly parallels the medical and cultural discourse on obesity. Obesity is seen as antithetical to a long life, thus standing for moral as well as purely medical failures,” in Sander L. Gilman, Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), xi.

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15. Barry Sears and Bill Lawren, The Zone: A Dietary Road Map (New York: Regan Books, 1995), ix. 16. Greg Critser, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 53–7. 17. A different version of this argument is offered by the two diet books, Diet for a Small Planet and Diet for a New America, where a change in our diet away from meat and toward vegetarianism is seen as having the capacity to transform civilization (Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet [New York: Ballantine Books, 1975]; John Robbins, Diet for a New America [Walpole, NH: Stillpoint, 1987]). According to these books, it is more “natural” to eat lower on the food chain. Similarly, The Maker’s Diet suggests a return to a simpler time, albeit the time of the Hebraic patriarchs. All of these diets suggest that “history reveals that the healthiest people in the world were generally the most primitive people as well!” (Jordan Rubin, The Maker’s Diet [Lake Mary, FL: Siloam, 2004], 32), only they locate the primitive in different times and places. 18. Robert C. Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (New York: Quill, 2002), 22–6; Heavin and Colman, Curves, 20–1; Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (New York: J. Wiley, 2002). 19. Sears and Lawren, Zone, 101. 20. Ibid., Zone, 102. 21. Ibid., 103. Speaking of low-fat products on the supermarket shelves, Dr. Atkins announces similarly, “This is not real food; it’s invented fake food,” in Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ Diet, 25. 22. Rubin, Maker’s Diet, 32; Cordain, Paleo Diet, 5–7, 33–5. 23. Severson, “Obesity: ‘A Threat.’” For an article that discusses the threat that obesity poses for military preparedness, see Marilynn Marchione, “Out-of-Shape Youths Weigh on Military Recruitment,” The Associated Press, July 8, 2005. See also the discussion of a scientific study offered by Obesity Week, an online magazine that advertises prominently on its Web site the latest weight-loss drugs: “Study: Many Young Men and Women Too Obese for Military Service,” Obesity Week 2 (December 8, 2002), http://www.obesityweek.org/members/Vol2/News/024901.htm. 24. Severson, “Obesity: ‘A Threat.’” Col. Gaston Bathalon, an Army nutrition expert, remarks similarly that “this is quickly becoming a national security issue for us. The pool of recruits is becoming smaller,” in Marchione, “Out-of-Shape.” 25. Obesity Week, “Many Young Men and Women.” 26. CNN.com, “Surgeon General to Cops.” 27. Such a sensibility was evident during the First World War where fat was considered “treasonable,” in Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 140–5. “In such an atmosphere, reducing weight became civil defense” (Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 141).

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28. For a discussion of the role their struggle with fat had in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, see Paul F. Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Gotham Books, 2004), 184–98; Lauren Gail Berlant and Lisa Duggan, eds., Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 250–1. 29. Cordain, Paleo Diet, 7. 30. Public health experts and bureaucrats use such inflammatory language to justify their programs and recommendations. To cite one example, the American Dietetic Association, begins its position paper on “obesity” by quoting the surgeon general’s remarks that “the obesity epidemic” is the “terror within,” in American Dietetic Association, “Obesity Issues Brief ” (2004), 1, http://www.eatright. org/ada/files/ObesityBrief.pdf. It makes this commonplace point, then, that “we as a nation must address the causes of obesity and overweight as aggressively as we pursue national security threats” (American Dietetic Association, “Obesity Brief,” 1). After assessing possible government legislation, they acknowledge, “The obesity epidemic is a ‘crisis-opportunity’ for dieticians and the ADA, offering the profession the chance to gain new prominence, get the public’s attention and deliver a wider range of information” (American Dietetic Association, “Obesity Brief,” 3). 31. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Hers,” The New York Times, January 17, 1985, C2. 32. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 329. 33. Ibid. 34. National Institutes of Health (United States), Women of Color Health Data Book: Adolescents to Seniors, NIH Publication (Bethesda, MD: Office of Research on Women’s Health, Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health, 1998), 62, 63. 35. Critser, Fat Land, 120. The author is quoting B.A. Sisson, S.M. Franco, et al., “Bodyfat Analysis and Perception of Body Image,” Clinical Pediatrics 26 (1997): 415–8. 36. Ibid., 121. 37. Cathy Newman, “‘Why Are We So Fat?” National Geographic 206 (August 2004): 46–61. 38. Newman, “Why?” 46–7. Perhaps sensing that there is something beautiful about the image, the magazine takes steps to characterize it as ominous. Besides the byline, we find the following explanation next to the credits for the photograph: “Fat: For a vast growing number of Americans, it’s a potential killer,” in Newman, “Why?” 1. 39. Newman, “Why?” 46. 40. Ibid., 60, 61. 41. Ibid., 56, 60. 42. Ibid., 49.

Notes

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Ibid., 49. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 48. Karen Kasmauski, “Heavy Cost of Fat: Field Notes from Photographer Karen Kasmauski” (August 2004), http://magma.nationalgeographic. com/ngm/0408/feature3/assignment2.html. Newman, “Why?” 60–1. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 61. For a discussion of the history of the National Geographic Society and its magazine, see Jane Collins and Catherine Lutz, “Becoming America’s Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century,” in Eloquent Obsessions Writing Cultural Criticism, ed. Marianna Torgovnick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 128–56; Catherine Lutz and Jane Lou Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). In surveying the trends of National Geographic, Collins and Lutz explain that they have moved away from the “advocacy journalism” of the seventies even while they have continued to focus on environmental conservationism (Collins and Lutz, “Becoming America’s Lens,” 148–53). Michael J. Fay, “In the Land of the Surfing Hippos: Gabon’s Loango National Park,” National Geographic 206 (August 2004): 105. Fay, “In the Land,” 105. Ibid., 106–7. Ibid., 124–5. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 126–7. “What’s Your Diet IQ?” (2004). http://magma.nationalgeographic. com/ngm/0408/feature3/quiz/triva_prize.html. The word “fat” is preferred to “obesity” by many fat activists because the latter is associated with the medical, pathologized discourse. The term “obesity” is sometimes used in a more clinical way and thus assumed to be a universal, transhistorical descriptor; even when authors try to employ it in this way, it typically ends up by reinforcing a moralized and pathologized understanding of fat. In Jonson criticism, for example, the use of the term “obesity” is often taken to suggest that Jonson had an obese personality, a psychoanalytical term that suggests that his character is innately gluttonous and lazy. See my discussion of Jonson criticism in chapter 6. For a similar understanding of Falstaff, called by one scholar “triumphantly obese,” see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

198

Notes

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

1980), 105. Gilman and Stearns use the term but in a more complex way. Even as both authors acknowledge that the definition of the term is influenced by culture and changes over time, they also write in a way that tends to reinforce its medical and pathological associations. See Gilman, Fat Boys, especially 15–16; Stearns, Fat History. The call for papers for the 12th Annual Conference for the Group of Early Modern Cultural Studies, “Cultures of Consumption,” asked for papers and/or panels on the topic of “Food and Drink (Gluttony, drunkenness); Obesity and Eating disorders in the early modern period,” at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/2004-05/0153.html. The Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession similarly requested papers for a panel entitled, “Obesity as Disability,” in the MLA Newsletter 35, no. 4: 10. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 498. Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (May 2000): 323. Stearns, Fat History, x, xi, x. Ibid., xxv. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 247–60; Peter N. Stearns, “Fat in America,” in Cultures of the Abdomen, ed. Forth and Carden-Coyne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 239–58. Stearns, Fat History, 255–6. Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss (New York: Paddington Press, 1978); Marcia Millman, Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America (New York: Norton, 1980); Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). Schwartz, Never Satisfied; Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, eds., Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A LittleUnderstood Emotion,” in Tendencies, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 215–51. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 51. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” in Tendencies, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 111.

Notes

199

76. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 77. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 78. Edelman, No Future, 3. 79. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 10. 80. Halberstam, In a Queer Time, 10. 81. Sedgwick and Moon, “Divinity,” 218. 82. Ibid., 251. 83. Gilman, Fat Boys, xi. 84. A. M. Valdes, et al., “Obesity, Cigarette Smoking, and Telomere Length in Women,” Lancet 366 (August 20, 2005): 662. 85. Ibid., 664. 86. Ibid., 664. 87. Tartamella, Herscher, and Woolston, Generation Extra Large, title. 88. Susan Okie, Fed up!: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2005), 5. 89. Sonia Caprio and Myron Genel, “Confronting the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity,” Pediatrics 115 (February, 2005): 494. 90. Lynette R. Holloway, “The Battle Against Childhood Obesity,” Parenting, March 2005, 118. 91. Tartamella, Herscher, and Woolston, Generation Extra Large, 4. 92. E. J. Mundell, “Puberty Comes Sooner for Overweight Girls,” HealthDay, August 11, 2005, http://www.healthday.com/view.cfm?id⫽527380; Youfa Wang, “Is Obesity Associated with Early Sexual Maturation?: A Comparison of the Association in American Boys Versus Girls,” Pediatrics 110 (November, 2002): 903–10. 93. Mundell, “Puberty Comes.” 94. Tartamella, Herscher, and Woolston, Generation Extra Large, 5–6. 95. Ibid., 6. 96. Ibid., 5, 6. 97. Ibid., 4. 98. Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); LeBesco and Braziel, eds., Bodies Out of Bounds. 99. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (London: Pluto, 1990), 27. 100. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 28. 101. Ibid., 32. 102. Critser, Fat Land, 31. 103. Ibid., 31. 104. Ibid., 57.

200

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Chapter 2 1. Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1986), 28. 2. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 24, 53. 3. Michael Holquist, Introduction to Rabelais and His World, xiii–xxiii. 4. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 9–10; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 15–16. 5. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 83. 6. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 320. 7. Ibid., 321. 8. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 169. 9. Morton W. Bloomfield, “Piers Plowman” as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 142. 10. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, ed. E. Talbot Donaldson, George Kane, and G. H. Russell, vol. 2, Piers Plowman: The B Text (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 243, passus 1, 35–6. I have modernized the spelling convention by changing the “u” to “v,” the “i” to “j,” and the medieval letters to modern ones. Piers Plowman is one of the most complicated texts to edit; the secondary literature on it and the debates over various versions are extensive and too complicated for me to enter into here. W. W. Skeat identified three authorial texts—“A,” “B,” and “C”—that are traditionally identified as successive. For a discussion of the recent thoughts on these three versions and their dating, see Ralph Hanna, William Langland (Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1993), 11–17. Derek Pearsall observes that “even the usually accepted sequence of the “A,” “B,” and “C” versions has been challenged, though the sequence of “B” and “C,” most would agree, is unassailable” (Derek Pearsall, “Langland and Lollardy: From B to C,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 [2003]: 8). “B” is taken generally to have been written before the rebellion of 1381, in 1377 or 1378, whereas “C” is taken to have been written in the 1380s. Langland substantially rewrites “B,” some argue, in order to make it more overtly orthodox. Indeed, Pearsall sees “C” as in effect “toning down” “B” as Langland sought to “avoid occasions for being misunderstood” (Pearsall, “Langland and Lollardy,” 21). For my purposes, it is unimportant what Langland intended in his revisions; it is more important that the effect of such revisions is often to tone down statements on evangelical poverty (Pearsall, “Langland and Lollardy,” 22).

Notes

11. 12. 13.

14.

201

Given my emphasis here on the relationship between Langland’s conception of gluttony and his view of evangelical poverty, it made sense to choose “B.” Middle English Dictionary 1b [b]. Langland, Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, passus 5.381–4. Wendy Scase, “Piers Plowman” and the New Anticlericalism, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64–5, discusses the way that the poem promotes “the association central to the new polemic between voluntary renunciation of wealth (both by lay almsgivers and by clerics) and the alleviation of suffering of the involuntary poor.” Geoffrey Shepherd argues that Piers Plowman sees the deserving poor as having a “kind of contractual relationship with society as a whole,” in Geoffrey Shepherd, “Poverty in Piers Plowman,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R.H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Cross, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 174. Margaret Aston shows how Lollard writing uses such arguments over the proper treatment of the deserving poor to condemn the parasitical mendicancy of the friars and, ultimately, of all clergy. See Margaret Aston, “‘Caim’s Castles’: Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment,” in The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 45–81. Finally, in a close examination of the 1492 Lollard program in Coventry, P. J. P. Goldberg argues that attempts to control the vagrants and beggars who are “myghty in body” are designed to create a society for the common profit. See P. J. P. Goldberg, “Coventry’s ‘Lollard’ Programme of 1492 and the Making of Utopia,” in Pragmatic Utopias Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, ed. Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 109–10. Pearsall argues that Langland presents a more complex view of poverty. Unlike other writers of the time, Langland focuses on the “new poverty” that emerges in the fourteenth century. With the Black Death and periodic agricultural failures, the rural poor were driven to the cities; thus, we see a “new poverty” that consists of indigent women, who worked in the textile industry, and unemployed able-bodied men. See also Derek Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1988), 167–85. Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People,” discusses the multiple ways that poverty was understood in the period, explaining that many thought in terms of an abstract poverty (including an evangelical poverty), but few thought in terms of actual poor people. For a discussion of the antimendicant debate and the relationship of Piers Plowman to it, see Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature

202

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For the argument that Piers Plowman broadens such critique into a broader anticlericalism, see Scase, “Piers Plowman” and the New Anticlericalism. For a discussion of the poverty ethic as a response to societal changes in the fourteenth century, see Shepherd, “Poverty in Piers Plowman,” 169–89; David Aers, “Piers Plowman and Problems of Poverty: A Culture in Transition,” Leeds Studies in English 14, n.s. (1983): 5–25; Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People.” For a discussion of the way in which beggars are redefined in the period according to worthy and unworthy beggars, see Aston, “Caim’s Castles,” 45–81. See “Piers Plowman” and New Anticlericalism, 64–5; Shepherd, “Poverty in Piers Plowman,” 174; P. J. P. Goldberg, “Coventry’s ‘Lollard’ Programme of 1492 and the Making of Utopia,” in Pragmatic Utopias Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, ed. Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 109–10. See also Pearsall’s discussion of Langland’s sympathy, unique in his time, for the “new poor” in Pearsall, ‘Poverty and Poor People’, esp. 175–6. Langland, Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, 338–9. Ibid., 340–1. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The Prologue and Passus I-VII of the B Text as Found in Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 581, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 175n346. Langland, Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, 338–44. William Langland, Piers Plowman: Selections from the C-Text, ed. Derek Albert Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 90n186. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, 5.371–4. Ibid., 353–6. Aston, “Caim’s Castles,” 57–9; Goldberg, “Coventry’s ‘Lollard’ Programme of 1492,” 109–10; Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People.” Scase, Piers and New Anticlericalism, 74–5.

Chapter 3 1. John Skelton, John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood, The English Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 99, 483. 2. Arthur F. Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 3. A. W. Barnes, “Constructing the Sexual Subject of John Skelton,” ELH 71 (2005): 29–51. 4. W. H. Auden, “John Skelton,” in Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 91. Originally published in W. H. Auden, “John Skelton,” in

Notes

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

203

The Great Tudors, ed. Katharine Garvin (London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1935), 55–67. Stanley Eugene Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 258. H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London: Cape, 1949), 120. Maurice Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England (London: Dent, 1971), 109. Ian Alistair Gordon, John Skelton, Poet Laureate (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1970), 73–4. Arthur Ray Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 297–8; Pollet, John Skelton, 10. Peter Green, John Skelton (London: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green, 1960), 34. William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (1939; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 52. Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50. Walker, Skelton and Politics, 47. Skelton, Poems, 79–84. Ibid., 176–80. Ibid., 181. Walker, Skelton and Politics, 60, 61. Ibid., 60, 61. Skelton, Poems, 1–14. Herbert Norris, Tudor Costume and Fashion (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 199–200; Iris Brooke, A History of English Costume (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1972), 49–50; Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 6–7. Brooke, History of Costume, 43; Steele, Corset, 6–7; David Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing, and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture in the West (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 70–1. Norris, Tudor Costume, 59–60. Ibid., 209, plate xii. Brooke, History of Costume, 42–3. Norris, Tudor Costume, 104–5. Brooke, History of Costume, 42. Norris, Tudor Costume, 197, figure 239; 323. For a representation of the headdress with the slashed back flaps, see the 1527 Hans Holbein drawing in James Laver, Costume of the Western World (New York: Harper, 1950), 38, plate 26. Peter C. Herman, “Leaky Ladies and Droopy Dames: The Grotesque Realism of Skelton’s The Tunnynge of Elynour Rummynge,” in Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter C. Herman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 155.

204

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29. John C. Kelly, “A Perfect Feast of Fools and Plenty: Carnival in John Skelton’s Poem, ‘The Tunning of Elinour Rumming,’” English Studies in Canada 22, no. 2 (1996): 138. Kelly argues that even though it was “written prior to the publication of Erasmus’s treatise,” ‘“Elinour Rumming,’ as a frank description of a May Day celebration, reflects the changing notion of the subject in Renaissance Europe” (Kelly, “Perfect Feast,” 145). 30. Skelton, Poems, 507. 31. Herman, “Leaky Ladies,” 155. 32. Skelton, Poems, e.g., 156–9. 33. Nelson, Laureate, 51. 34. Kinney, Priest as Poet, 171; Green, John Skelton, 33; Pollet, John Skelton, 108; Deborah Wyrick, “‘Withine That Develes Temple’: An Examination of Skelton’s The Tunnyng of Eleanour Rummyng,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980–81): 247n24; Nelson, Laureate, 50–1. 35. Skelton, Poems, 51–79. 36. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 138. 37. Norris, Tudor Costume, 308. 38. Ibid., 84. 39. Skelton, Poems, 74, 78. 40. Ibid., 84. 41. Ibid., 88–90. 42. Ibid., 39–41, 478–9. 43. Ibid., 260. 44. Ibid., 482–91. 45. Ibid., 133–8. 46. Ibid., 419–21. 47. Ibid., 373. 48. Ibid., 507, 505. 49. Ibid., 594–5. 50. Ibid., 373. 51. Ibid., 579–604.

Chapter 4 1. For the argument that Falstaff is the Lord of Misrule, see especially the influential C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 195–205. For the argument that he is a Vice figure, see Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 203–4. Scholarship that argues that Falstaff is a woman is frequently influenced by Auden’s reading of his paunch as being a sign of both infancy and pregnancy.

Notes

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

205

His belly tells us that he combines “mother and child in his own person” (W. H. Auden, “The Prince’s Dog,” in The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays [New York: Random House, 1962], 196). Scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives argue that Falstaff is a woman. For an argument that he represents a dilation of the “literary fat lady,” see Patricia A. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 21–2; for a psychoanalytical argument that sees him as occupying the place of the Mother, see Valerie Traub, “Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 456–74; Gayle Whittier, “Falstaff as Welshwoman: Uncomic Adrogyny,” Ball State University Forum 20, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 25–35. See also Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 72, where she asserts that Falstaff is a “man with a curiously feminine sensual abundance” and that “a fat man can look like a pregnant woman.” Others argue that Falstaff in his physicality is essentially “thingy.” See Barbara Everett, “The Fatness of Falstaff: Shakespeare and Character,” Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1991): esp. 114. For an argument that he has an unchecked libido, see Hugh Grady, “Falstaff: Subjectivity Between the Carnival and the Aesthetic,” Modern Language Review 96, no. 3 (2001): 609–23. The psychoanalyst Franz Alexander characterizes Falstaff as the primitive, “pregenital forms of instinctual life,” and finally as someone with the “mentality of a three or four year old child in the body of the fat old man,” in Franz Alexander, “A Note on Falstaff,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 599, 602. Leslie Heywood, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1996); Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 8; Melissa Bradshaw, “Remembering Amy Lowell: Embodiment, Obesity, and the Construction of a Persona,” in Amy Lowell, American Modern, ed. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 170. Heywood, Dedication to Hunger, 89; Ellmann, Hunger Artists, 26–7. See also Mark Anderson, “Anorexia and Modernism, or How I Learned to Diet in All Directions,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (1988–89): 28–41. Bradshaw, “Remembering Amy.” Ellmann, Hunger Artists, 8–9; Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1986), 140–5. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 143. John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943); William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University

206

Notes

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

Press, 1952); William Shakespeare, The Second Part of the History of Henry IV, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946). “As for ourselves, how characteristically muddle-headed it is that a generation which has almost universally condemned a prince of its own for putting private inclinations before his public obligations, should condemn Hal as a cad and a prig for doing just the opposite” (Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 123). Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 1. He ends his introduction to his edition of 1 Henry IV by describing how the play helped boost the morale of the troops during the war (Wilson, Introduction to The First Part of King Henry IV, xxvii–xxviii). Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 22. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 31, 45, 97. Ibid., 126–8. Contemporary society inappropriately indulges itself when it, like Bradley, seeks to escape all “conventions, codes and moral ties that control us as members of human society” (Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 128). Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 13. Ibid. Ibid., 13–14. Grady, “Falstaff ,” 614; Traub, “Hal’s Falstaff ”; Kahn, Man’s Estate, 70–3. Kahn, Man’s Estate, 72. Ibid., 73. Sander L. Gilman, Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 119. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 115, my emphasis. Grady, “Falstaff ,” 614. Ibid., 616. See Auden’s statement, “Once upon a time we were all Falstaffs: then we became social beings with super-egos. Most of us learn to accept this, but there are some in whom the nostalgia for the state of innocent self-importance is so strong that they refuse to accept adult life and responsibilities and seek some means to become again the Falstaffs they once were. The commonest technique adopted is the bottle, and, curiously enough, the male drinker reveals his intention by developing a drinker’s belly” (Auden, “Prince’s Dog,” 195). For Auden, the male belly and male fat are signs of an immature character (Auden, “Prince’s Dog,” 196–7). Grady, “Falstaff ,” 619. Ibid., esp. 618. William Shakespeare, King Henry IV. Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 4.2.63–5.

Notes

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

207

Grady, “Falstaff ,” 619. Ibid., 620. Everett, “Fatness of Falstaff,” 114. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 2.2.5, 2.4.107, 253, 3.3.176. Ibid., 2.4.134, 2.2.64. Ibid., 2.2.5, 2.2.31, 3.3.151–2. William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 5.5.52–4. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 2.4.108, 220–1, 115–17. Ibid., 2.4.497–8. Ibid., 2.2.64, 65–6. Ibid., 1.2.203. A. C. Bradley, “The Rejection of Falstaff ” in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 247–78; Stephen Jay Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65; William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), 102–4. Empson, Some Versions, 103. Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 5.5.62. Ibid., 58, 56. Shakespeare, Ibid., 5.5.52–3. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 2.4.219, 219–20, 237. Ibid., 1.2.187–93. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 152. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 1.2.1–14. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 2.1.73–83, esp. 75, 80. Ibid., 2.1.75–6. Ibid., 115–16. In antimonastic and later anti-Catholic tracts, capons were one meal typically consumed by the vicious monks. This meal of the monks was a sign of their excess and hypocrisy, because capons were seen as a rare foul that could be eaten even when they were maintaining in only letter the Lenten fast restrictions. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 1.2.13n13. Ibid., 2.2.23–6. Ibid. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 31–3. Ibid., 2.4.531–2. Ibid., 218–9. Ibid. Ibid., 247–8.

208

Notes

62. 63. 64. 65.

Ibid., 235–7. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 261, 263, 266. Paul Yachnin, “History, Theatricality, and the ‘Structural Problem’ in the Henry IV Plays,” Philological Quarterly 70, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 169. “Structural problem” is the term used for a consideration of the relationship between 1 and 2 Henry IV. Are they a unified sequence, two distinct parts, or some combination of these two? Such questions are related to Shakespeare’s view of history, and thus, discussions of his view of history inevitably touch on the same subject. Two introductory sources discuss the problem: Humphrey’s “The Relationship to ‘1 Henry IV,”’ in A. R. Humphreys, Introduction to The Second Part, xxi–xxviii; Kastan, “1 Henry IV: One Part or One Play?” in Kastan, Introduction to King Henry IV, 17–23. In recent years, there is less desire to make the plays into an unproblematic sequence that is, in effect, one play (which may include Richard II and Henry V ). Perhaps this comes from an acknowledgment that the issues raised by the structural problem are themselves a reflection, as Yachnin argues, “of the desire to render Shakespeare’s meaning, full, stable, and permanent” (Yachnin, “History, Theatricality,” 164). From the 1950s, Harold Jenkins argued that “Henry IV is both one play and two . . . the two parts are complementary, they are also independent and even incompatible,” in Harold Jenkins, The Structural Problem in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth (London: Methuen, 1956), 26. G. K. Hunter considers the two plays in relationship to the Elizabethan two-part plays, and although he sees them as forming a “unity,” he characterized this unity as a “diptych” in which there is a “parallel setting-out of incidents rather than on any picking-up of threads of Part One,” in G. K. Hunter, “Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play,” Review of English Studies n.s. 5 (1954): 237, 243. Indeed, when we come to Part 2, “we have a change of direction and a different atmosphere,” one in which “the temper of the world he [Falstaff ] lives in has become less amenable to his methods” (Hunter, “Henry IV,” 245, 247). Other arguments seem to suggest that Shakespeare is more explicitly creating a play that is self-consciously metahistorical. Paul Dean examines the Elizabethan two-part play to argue that 1 and 2 Henry IV are strikingly different from their predecessors. They cultivate an “almost philosophical explicitness with which they meditate on Time” (Paul Dean, “Forms of Time: Some Elizabethan Two-Part History Plays,” Renaissance Studies 4 [1987]: 428). Both plays, he argues, offer us characters who “make history in their imagination” (Dean, “Forms of Time,” 429). Yachnin and Kastan see the second play as engaging in a critique of the first. As Kastan writes, “The second play revisits and revises the first, exposing the conclusion of 1 Henry IV as history gilded in the happiest terms Shakespeare was able to imagine” (Kastan, Introduction to King Henry IV, 23). Yachnin sees this relationship as

Notes

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

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one of undoing designed in part as “Shakespeare’s critique of Renaissance historiography” that reminds the reader of the “revisionist, open-ended nature of historical change” (Yachnin, “History, Theatricality,” 163). This revisionist relationship between the plays encourages the audience to consider the nature of their own constructions, including those related to body size. In a different context, Jonathan Goldberg makes much the same argument; thus, he argues, “History enters the text, the writer is in history, but not as some stable ground of singular meaning and determination” ( Jonathan Goldberg, “The Commodity of Names: ‘Falstaff ’ and ‘Oldcastle’ in 1 Henry IV, ” Bucknell Review 35, no. 2 [1992]: 83). Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 5.4.27. Ibid., 3.2.313. Ibid., 2.4.340–3. Ibid., 1.2.169–70. Ibid., 164–5. Goldberg, Sodometries, 172. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 1.3.10–4, 5.1.59–64a. Shakespeare, First Part, 206, glossary. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 1.3.13 n. David M. Bevington glosses “portly” as “majestic, stately (with suggestion of ‘over prosperous’)” (William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, ed. David M. Bevington, Oxford Shakespeare [Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 1.3.13 n). Norbert. Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 119. Elias, History of Manners, 121. Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 5.2.98. Ibid., 2.4.335–7. Ibid., 5.5.73, 85. Ibid., 2.4.336–7. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 2.4.338, 339–40. Ibid., 5.5.34–6, 39. Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 5.4.19n. Ibid., 1.2.164. Ibid., 164–6. Ibid., 5.4.19–21. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.2.613. See also King John, where the Bastard jokes about his leanness, observing, “That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose / Lest men should say, ‘Look where three-farthings goes!’” (Riverside Shakespeare, 1.1.142–3). Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 1.2.21–2. Ibid., 2.4.236. Ibid., 238–9, 240. Ibid., 241, 245–6.

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

Notes

Ibid., 250–2. Ibid., 1.2.164–5. Ibid., 2.4.227. Ibid., 271–2. Ibid., 228–30. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 231, 274. Ibid., 346; 298–9. Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 4.3.85–6. Ibid., 4.2. Ibid., 4.2.112. Ibid., 4.3.89. Ibid., 88–92. Nancy A. Gutierrez, ‘Shall She Famish Then?’: Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 2, 17. Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 4.3.115–20. Ibid., 3.2.298. Ibid., 2.2.5–6, 6n. Ibid., 9–12. Ibid., 3.2.298, 307–8. Ibid., 302–11. Ibid., 313. Harry Berger, Jr., “The Prince’s Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of SpeechPrefixity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 73. See Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, California Studies in the History of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Jean Wirth, La Jeune Fille et la Mort: Recherches sur les Thèmes Macabres dans l’Art Germanique de la Renaissance, Hautes Études Medievales et Modernes (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Karl Siegfried Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV, 19, 21, 30. Ibid., 26–31. Ibid., 12–13. Isaiah, 58:11 (all biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version). Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 2.4.437–8, 451. Shakespeare, Ibid., 458–61. Genesis 41:2–3. Ibid., 41:3. Ibid., 41:21.

Chapter 5 1. John Jowett, “Thomas Middleton,” in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, Blackwell Companions to Literature and

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Culture (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 507–23. Olga L. Valbuena argues that the later Reformation particularly begins to demonstrate the “consanguinity among religious, political, and carnal infidelity,” in Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), xxiii. Drawing on an example taken from the early poem by Middleton, Valbuena explains that “much of the rhetoric inside and outside of imaginative literature of the period, I believe, returns to the fundamental concern in England with the integrity and progress of the Reformation,” in Valbuena, Subjects, xxiv. 2. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, The Revels Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, distributed exclusively in the United States and Canada by St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 5.3.188–91. 3. My use of the term “puritan” is informed by recent historical studies that argue that there is such a phenomenon as a “conforming puritan.” I do not use “puritan” to suggest that there is anything approaching a single, cohesive party defined by its political and religious opposition to the socalled establishment. Margot Heinemann, in a book that, nonetheless, offers interesting readings of the plays, argued that Middleton belonged to just such a party that she called “Parliamentary Puritan Opposition.” See her Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). More recently, scholars are nearly unanimous that Middleton is “Calvinist” in theology, and several argue that he is a “puritan,” albeit a conforming one. Gary Taylor describes him as a “moderate Puritan” in “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 289. A Game at Chess criticizes policies and policy makers from a “distinctly Puritan perspective, sometimes drawing verbatim upon explicitly Puritan (and outlawed) sources” (Taylor, “Forms of Opposition,” 290). Other scholars have preferred to call Middleton a “Calvinist” as they focus on the way that theology affects character development. John Stachniewski argues that a “Calvinist psychology” undergirds his tragedies, in “Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies,” in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling: A Casebook, ed. R. V. Holdsworth, Casebook Series (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990), 226–47. See also Alizon Brunning, “‘O, How My Offences Wrestle with My Repentance!’: The Protestant Poetics of Redemption in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature 8, no. 3 (January 2003): 51 paragraphs. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/08–3/ brunchas.html. Anyone interested in this debate should look at Herbert Jack Heller’s extensive discussion of the terms, in Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press;

212

4. 5.

6. 7.

Notes

London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 27–34. For him, one “is a Puritan if the definition is a person who wants to purify . . . the established Church from the taint of Popery’’ (Heller, Penitent Brothellers, 32). He insists that in plays such as A Game Middleton is a “militant Protestant,” defined as “a person politically committed to the Reformation and whose theology, like John Foxe’s, was apocalyptic” (Heller, Penitent Brothellers, 32). For an argument that the term “puritan” is altogether inappropriate for Middleton, because Middleton used it in a derogatory sense in several of his plays, see N.W. Bawcutt, “Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?,” Modern Language Review 94, no. 4 (1999): 925–39. Interestingly, a consideration of these moments might even imply that Middleton is more of a “puritan” in the sense that he embraces a puritan bodily style. Thus, he uses the term in a derogatory sense when characters refuse to live up to the ideal of living a “pure” or abstemious life. In A Chaste Maid at Cheapside, the “puritan” gossips, after eating too many sweets, lose bodily control as they fart and even, it is suggested, piss in public. Heller, Penitent Brothellers, 15–34. A number of scholars insist that A Game at Chess is a largely topical political play: John Robert Moore, “The Contemporary Significance of Middleton’s A Game at Chess,” PMLA 50, no. 3 (September 1935): 761–8; Thomas Cogswell, “Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 273–88; Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Others see it as a largely moralistic-religious play: Paul Yachnin, “A Game at Chess and Chess Allegory,” SEL 22, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 317–30; T. H. Howard-Hill, Introduction to A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, 1–60; T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin”: Essays on “A Game at Chess” (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995). HowardHill’s argument that the play is not mainly political, as Heinemann sees it as being, rests in part on a consideration of the revisions, including the addition of the Fat Bishop. As he notes, “De Dominis had no significance for English politics in the middle of 1624 and his addition weakens the political force of the play,” in T. H. Howard-Hill, “Political Interpretations of Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624),” Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 285. The addition of the Fat Bishop in revision made it less rather than more topical; nonetheless, he served the important role of reinforcing those themes that recommend a puritan bodily style. As such, I take issue with Howard-Hill’s insistence that the addition is “owed to no more serious desire than the players’ need for a fat part for their clown that would enhance the play’s comic value” (Howard-Hill, “Political Interpretations,” 285). Middleton, A Game at Chess, 4.5.3–4, 7. Howard-Hill, Introduction to A Game at Chess, 24.

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8. Howard-Hill, Introduction to A Game. 9. Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12. 10. John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 7. 11. Janel N. Mueller, “Pain, Persecution, and the Construction of Selfhood in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire Elizabeth McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174. 12. The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happé, Tudor Interludes (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, and Dover, NH: Boydell & Brewer, 1985), 54, 151nT43. 13. Church of England, Certaine Sermons or Homilies, Appointed to be Read in Churches, in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I, 1547–1571 (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), 88. 14. Church of England, Synodalia: A Collection of Articles of Religion, Canons, and Proceedings of Convocations in the Province of Canterbury, from the Year 1547 to the Year 1717, ed. Edward Cardwell, 2 vols. (Oxford: University Press, 1842), 1: 283. 15. George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. Francis Ernest Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 1–3. 16. Poole, Radical Religion; Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Nancy A. Gutierrez, ‘Shall She Famish Then? ’: Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 36. 17. Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 8. 18. Collinson, Godly People, 475. 19. Thomas Robinson, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugall (London, 1622), 13. In quoting from these pamphlets, I have kept the original spelling although I have changed the “i” to “j” and the “u” to “v.” 20. Robinson, Anatomy of the English Nunnery, 13. 21. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 5.3.28. 22. Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 23. James Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime, or, A New Discovery of Spanish Popery and Jesuiticall Stratagems (London, 1630), 18. 24. Wadsworth, English Spanish Pilgrime, 15–6. 25. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 2.2.22–3. 26. T. G. [Thomas Goad], The Friers Chronicle, or, The True Legend of Priests and Monkes Lives (London, 1623), C2.

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Notes

27. Ibid., C2–C2v. 28. Ibid., B1. 29. Rowland Willet, Merry Jests, Concerning Popes, Monkes, and Friers (London, 1617), 111. 30. Willet, Merry Jests, 103. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 104. 34. James Wadsworth, Further Observations of the English Spanish Pilgrime (London, 1630), 26. 35. Newes from Rome, Spalato’s Doome. Or An Epitome of the Life and Behaviour of M. Antonius de Dominis (London, 1624), 12. 36. James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 129. 37. M. Ant. de Dominis and Richard Neile, M. Ant. de D[omi]nis ArchBishop of Spalato, His Shiftings in Religion: A Man for Many Masters (London, 1624), 42. 38. De Dominis and Neile, M. Ant. de Dominis, 72. 39. Ibid., 91. 40. Howard-Hill, Introduction to A Game of Chess, 33. 41. According to Heinemann, Spalato is represented through the traditions of anticlerical satire (Puritanism and Theatre, 161–2). 42. Newes from Rome, my emphasis, 12. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Ibid., 13. 47. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 3.1.78; Newes from Rome, 14. 48. Oxford English Dictionary, “foggy” etymology and 1a. 49. OED, “foggy,” 3d, 4a. 50. Ibid., 2. 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Newes from Rome, 14. 53. John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79, figure 16. 54. Newes from Rome, 14–5. 55. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 4.2.60b–4. 56. Ibid., 3.1.89–97, 96b–7. 57. Ibid., 108–9a. 58. Ibid., 5.3.40. 59. Ibid., 45. 60. Ibid., 46–52. 61. Ibid., 5.3.34–44a. 62. Ibid., 4.2.7. 63. Ibid., 5.3.57.

Notes

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Ibid., 58–60. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater, 164. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 3.1.9–11. Ibid., 76–8. Ibid., 2.2.4b–7. Ibid., 4.5.34b–5. Ibid., 2.2.73–6. Ibid., 88–9a. Ibid., 53b–7. Ibid., 3.1.1–11. Ibid., 57–65. Ibid., 70-1. Ibid., 5.3.179–81. Ibid., 186. Howard-Hill, Introduction to A Game at Chess, 7. Middleton, A Game at Chess, 186–94. Ibid., 3.2.1–6. Ibid., 213b–5. Ibid., 4.5.61–2. Ibid., 5.3.206–10.

Chapter 6 1. John Lemly, “Masks and Self-Portraits in Jonson’s Late Poetry,” ELH 44, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 248–66. 2. Ben Jonson, Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson, Oxford Standard Authors (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), Under-wood 9.17, 56.9–10. 3. Sara J. van den Berg, The Action of Ben Jonson’s Poetry (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1987), 31. 4. Jonson, Poems, Under-wood 56.11, 54.12. 5. Wesley Trimpi explains, “Except for purposes of dating, it makes little difference whether he was actually fifty when he wrote the poem or whether he adopted that particular age to represent a man old enough to be at a disadvantage in a love affair, on the suggestion perhaps of Horace’s Ode IV.i, of which he made one of the best translations,” in Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 213. 6. Bruce Boehrer, “Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson,” PMLA 105, no. 5 (October 1990): 1078. 7. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 11: 288, l. 20. 8. See, for example, Joseph Loewenstein, “The Jonsonian Corpulence: Or, The Poet as Mouthpiece,” ELH 53, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 491–518. Perhaps Robert Cumming offers the best example of the way that this moralized portrait of a fat Jonson has infiltrated scholarship. He refers

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

without irony to Jonson in his article as “[b]ig fatt man, that spake in Ryme” (Robert Cummings, “Liberty and History in Jonson’s Invitation to Supper,” Studies in English Literature 40, no. 1 [Winter 2000]: 104). Jonson, Poems, Under-wood 76. Ibid., 221n 57. Ibid., Under-wood 76.15–22. Herford, Simpson, and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11: 388, l. 20. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 152. Herford, Simpson, and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11: 388, ll. 21–4. Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 55. Herford, Simpson, and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11: 498, ll. 4–6. Ibid., 11: 411–12. I have altered the passage slightly by removing superscript. Ian Donaldson, “‘Not of an Age’: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of Posterity,” in New Perspectives on Ben Jonson, ed. James E. Hirsh (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 198. It falls outside of this study to explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s body has been represented. I can observe, however, that the Stratford bust has excited particular hostility from scholars because as a more authentic portrait of Shakespeare, they worry that it shows him as what most scholars see as “fat.” Certainly, the bust offends many modern commentators because it does not conform to the Romantic ideal of the artist as having a consumptive body. C. C. Stopes, for example, sets about to prove that the Stratford bust, as it stood in her day, was a late reconstruction; thus, she argued the “emaciated” likeness of it, found in William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, offered a more accurate representation of the original and thus presumably of the authentic Shakespeare. She writes, “Yet everyone who approaches the Stratford bust is more disappointed in it, as a revelation of the poet, than even the crude lines of the Droeshout. There is an entire lack of the faintest suggestion of poetic or spiritual inspiration in its plump earthiness’’ (C. C. Stopes, “The True Story of the Stratford Bust,” in Shakespeare’s Environment [London: G. Bell, 1914], 108). She prefers to imagine an original bust, which is thin, simply because it is “emaciated”: “Far from resembling the self-contented fleshy man of today, the large and full dark eyes look out of the cheeks hollow to emaciation” (Stopes, “True Story,” 109). Not surprisingly, given his investment in the thin Hal and revulsion with the fat Falstaff, Dover Wilson belongs to this same tradition; thus, he desires Shakespeare to conform to the Romantic ideal of a consumptive poet. His biography begins by exorcising a particular view of Shakespeare as an old, fat, sullen businessman (“pork-butcher”), which he sees as promulgated by the Stratford memorial bust and the Droeshout portrait. “I make bold to say that

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this bust is one of the greatest obstacles to the true understanding of Shakespeare” (John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933], 5). The terms he uses to dismiss the bust all focus on its fatness; thus, it represents Shakespeare with a “self-complacent prosperity” of a “butcher-boy,” an “affluent and retired butcher,” or a “self-satisfied pork-butcher” (Wilson, Essential Shakespeare, 4, 5, 6). Shakespeare’s body size is the single greatest obstacle to his reputation among the “unlearned world”: “All this might suit well enough with an affluent and retired butcher, but does gross wrong to a dead poet. ‘Some men there are love not a gaping pig,’ and for half the unlearned world this Shakespeare simply will not do” (Wilson, Essential Shakespeare, 6, also 7). I suppose to assist the “unlearned world,” Wilson begins his book with a portrait he feels will exorcise such an erroneous view by presenting a young, thin, and aristocratic Shakespeare: “It will at any rate help him [the reader] to forget the Stratford bust. Let him take it, if he will, as a painted cloth or arras, drawn in front of that monstrosity [of the Stratford monument], and symbolizing the Essential Poet” (Wilson, Essential Shakespeare, 6–8). More recently, scholars seem to accept that Shakespeare is not thin, even as they have not been sufficiently critical of the role body size has played in our constructions of Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum responds to Wilson’s remarks that the Stratford monument makes Shakespeare look like a “self-satisfied pork-butcher” as follows: “Maybe so; but not all middle-aged successful writers look delicately consumptive” (William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life [New York: Oxford University Press in association with Scolar Press, 1975], 254). Katherine Duncan-Jones agrees, “It can be surmised that Shakespeare was distinctly corpulent, since both the Stratford bust and the Martin Droeshout engraving show him as plump-faced. Given that most portraits aim to flatter, he was probably in truth plumper still,” in Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 267. In a few offhand remarks, Duncan-Jones does seem to imply a new relationship between Jonson and Shakespeare: “His ‘mountain belly’ may by now have rivaled Ben Jonson’s, making the three-day ride from Stratford to London increasingly uncomfortable” (Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 258). Stephen Orgel may not explicitly deal with the role that body size plays in our construction of Shakespeare, but he shows how visual representations of Shakespeare have “sentimentalized” and “miniaturized” him (Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions [Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003], 75). His examples indicate that Shakespeare is made increasingly thinner so that he better exemplifies the Romantic ideal of the consumptive poet. Discussing one such representation, Orgel observes, “What is more to the point, nothing in it suggests the jowliness . . . of the Stratford monument” (Imagining Shakespeare, 81 and figure 3.13).

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20. Herford, Simpson, and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11.510. 21. Such an explanation revises an earlier one, which considered the defeat of the Armada as an act of providential deliverance. See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 245–66. 22. Wilson, Essential Shakespeare, 6. 23. W. H. Auden’s essay on Falstaff influenced a number of psychoanalytically inflected readings of him. Its assumptions seem also to inform Edmund Wilson, “Morose Ben Jonson,” in Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jonas Barish (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 60–74. 24. On this point, see Ian Donaldson, “Gathering and Losing the Self,” in Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 31–3. What E. Pearlman observed in 1979 about Wilson’s article remains true today: “While it is not universally accepted and is often scorned, it has been neither refuted nor superseded, and remains the last word on Jonson from a psychological perspective” (E. Pearlman, “Ben Jonson: An Anatomy,” English Literary Renaissance 9 [1979]: 364). See also Judith K. Gardiner, “Adult Critics and Bartholomew Fair,” Literature and Psychology 24 [November 1974]: 124, which argues that “Wilson’s authoritative essay has provided easy labels for discounting Jonson’s work and denigrating his personality.” If this view of Jonson had not remained influential, Donaldson would feel no need to offer a different portrait of him in his “Gathering and Losing.” More recently Loewenstein, David Riggs, and Boehrer are all in one way or another influenced by Wilson’s essay. See Loewenstein, “Jonsonian Corpulence,” which argues that Wilson’s essay is “one of the finest biographical, specifically psycho-biographical, readings of Jonson,” in Loewenstein, “Jonsonian Corpulence,” 508. Loewenstein, like Wilson, is influenced by the tradition that establishes their literary characters by contrasting their fat/thin bodies. See Loewenstein, “Jonsonian Corpulence,” 516n26. 25. Wilson, “Morose Ben Jonson,” 74. 26. Loewenstein, “Jonsonian Corpulence,” 516n27. Even as he senses there are problems with using the poetry to diagnose Jonson, he inevitably does so. He writes, “This is hyperbole, no doubt . . . but it suggests that either [his] body, or body-image, were remarkable” (516n27). Such an argument underscores how the modern representational regime finds the fat body, and not the thin one, “remarkable”. 27. Loewenstein wistfully remarks, “An adequate etiological account would obviously require unavailable genetic information” (Loewenstein, “Jonsonian Corpulence,” 517n31). 28. Ibid., 517n31. 29. Ibid., 510.

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30. Hillel Schwartz, “The Three-Body Problem and the End of the World,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York and Cambridge: Zone, distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), 406–65. 31. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 206–7; Ian Donaldson, “Looking Sideways: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Myths of Envy,” Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 4. 32. Thomas Dekker, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 1: 5.2.63. 33. Donaldson, “Looking Sideways,” 5. 34. Jonson, Poems, Ungathered Verse, 34.69–70; Donaldson, “Looking Sideways,” 5. 35. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich, The Revels Plays (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, distributed exclusively in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), Induction, 364, 5.3.133–45. “Macilente” significantly means “lean, meagre, gaunt, barren, thin,” in Jonson, Every Man, 102n6. He identifies himself with the figure of Envy throughout, but perhaps most notably when, in the revised catastrophe to the quarto, he announces, “I am as empty of all envy now / As they of merit to be envied at” ( Jonson, Every Man, Appendix A 375.2–3). 36. Jonson, Every Man, 55. 37. Asper, as an “authorial character,” looks “suspiciously like Jonson himself,” in Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 62. For a discussion of the way that the final scene plays with various public personae, see George A. E. Parfitt, Ben Jonson, Public Poet and Private Man (London: Dent, 1976), 46–7. 38. Jonson, Every Man, 5.4.61–3. Although Jonson omitted these lines in the revised quarto, he added them again in the Folio. See Jonson, Every Man, Appendix A 379. 39. For a discussion of the relationship between Every Man and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, see the brief discussion by Barton, Jonson, Dramatist, 71–2. I disagree with Barton that Jonson is only offering at best lukewarm respect for Shakespeare (Barton, Jonson, Dramatist, 73). 40. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 153. 41. Jesse Franklin Bradley and Joseph Quincy Adams, eds., The Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700, Cornell Studies in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 104. He continues by referring to a “stout” individual, identified because of his drunkenness and stoutness as “Bacchus’s cupbearer” (104).

220

Notes

42. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 152–9; Richard Peterson, “The Iconography of Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1975): 140–51. 43. Peterson, “Iconography,” 142. 44. Richard Linche, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (London, 1599), as quoted in Peterson, “Iconography,” 142. 45. Linche, as quoted in Peterson, “Iconography,” 143. 46. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 159. 47. Ibid., 158. 48. Of course, only the reader of the published text would know immediately that the character is “Comus, the god of cheer, or the belly” ( Jonson, Complete Masques, 263). 49. Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 122. 50. Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 123. 51. Ibid., 124. 52. Bradley and Adams, Jonson Allusion-Book, 106. We can never know for sure what caused James’s dissatisfaction. One contemporary notes simply that the whole performance was “dull,” whereas another writes that Inigo Jones’s main device was not extraordinary enough for Prince Charles’s first masque (Bradley and Adams, Jonson Allusion-Book, 108). That the court found Comus and the dance of fat men as casks and tuns particularly tedious, if not offensive, can be partially demonstrated if we remember that when it was later performed in front of the Queen, Jonson excised this antimasque for one with Welsh folk. 53. Jonson, Complete Masques, 160–1. 54. Ibid., 25, 86. 55. Ibid., 66–73. 56. Jonson, Poems, Under-wood 54, 56. 57. Lemly, “Masks”; Robert Martin Adams, “On the Bulk of Ben,” in Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques: Texts of the Plays and Masques, Jonson on His Work, Contemporary Readers on Jonson, Criticism, ed. Robert Martin Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), 482–92; Peterson, “Iconography,” 151. 58. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, Elizabethan Club Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 283. 59. See Lemly’s description of how Jonson in his poetry often seeks to overcome in his lightness of verse the grotesque self-presence that haunts the poem. For a discussion of the revisionist politics of the volume, see Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 134–51. Finally, for a discussion of how Jonson uses the volume to affirm the past even while accepting a diminished present, see van den Berg, Action, 171, 170–81.

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221

60. The specification that he has a “rocky face” and a “mountain belly” associates Jonson with the mountain-man character of Atlas, who presides over the actions of his masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. 61. Patterson, Censorship, 134–52, esp. 135. 62. Lemly, “Masks,” 251. 63. Jonson, Poems, Under-wood 2.1.1–2. 64. Ibid., 2.2.27b–28a. 65. Ibid., 2.1.7–11. 66. Ibid., 2.10. 67. Ibid., 2.10.1–8. 68. Ibid., 2.9.53. 69. Trimpi argues that this sequence is really a Renaissance discorso or questione d’amore, a poetic form that gives voice to multiple perspectives on love in the voices of different characters (Ben Jonson’s Poems, 211). 70. Jonson, Poems, 2.5.5–6. 71. Ibid., 42. 72. Ibid., 49–54. 73. Readings of the poems may differ on how they take the lady, Charis, but they almost unilaterally agree that Jonson fails to woo her successfully. For a reading that sees Jonson as failing and then getting his revenge on the lady, see Arthur F. Marotti, “All About Jonson’s Poetry,” ELH 39, no. 2 (1972): 232–7. For a reading that sees Jonson as failing, but, nonetheless, appreciating the wit and grace of Charis, see Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems, 209–27. For a reading that sees Jonson as attaining the lady but keeping their love secret from the corrupt court society, see Richard S. Peterson, “Virtue Reconciled to Pleasure: Jonson’s ‘A Celebration of Charis,’” Studies in the Literary Imagination 6, no. 1 (1973): 219–68. For a reading that leaves the question open and, in fact, sees Charis as responding in kind with grace and wit to Jonson, see van den Berg, Action, 41–50. Where Marotti sees Jonson as exposing Charis as a “shallow-brained, and aging coquette” (Marotti, “Jonson’s Poetry,” 234), van den Berg sees the character as using her dictamen to expose the “reductive terms” Ben uses in wooing her (van den Berg, Action, 48). According to her reading, Charis would not only be entering into the type of reciprocal ethical relationship often seen as at the center of Jonson’s poetic ethics, but she would also be critiquing with Jonson the facile, essentialist constructions of the court. 74. Jonson, Poems, 2.8.3b–4. 75. Ibid., 21–30. 76. Ibid., 2.9.1–2. 77. Ibid., 34–8. 78. Ibid., 9.1–4. 79. Ibid., 6–10. 80. OED, “subtle” 3. 81. Jonson, Poems, 11–18. 82. Ibid., Under-wood 54, 55, 57, 68, 76.

222

Notes

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Ibid., Under-wood 17.4–5. Ibid., Under-wood 45.1–4. Ibid., 13–16. Ibid., 1–12. Ibid., 15b–20. Kristen McDermott is correct that “studies of Bartholomew Fair tend to focus on Ursula as the embodiment of the fair” (Kristen McDermott, “Versions of Femininity in Bartholomew Fair,” Renaissance Papers [1993]: 92). Scholarship has traditionally taken the position of a Zealof-the-Land Busy or of a Justice Overdo in seeing Ursula as a symbol of the fair. Jackson I. Cope sees her as the iconographic representation of Discordia (Jackson I. Cope, “Bartholomew Fair as Blasphemy,” Renaissance Drama 8 [1965]: 143–5). Joel H. Kaplan agrees with such a reading, even insisting that she is a “mad devil” styled after similar figures in medieval drama (Joel H. Kaplan, “Dramatic and Moral Energy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 3 [1970]: 143–5). Kaplan adds that she offers “another and more pleasant side” in that “Ursula creates her own holiday dispensation” (Kaplan, “Dramatic and Moral Energy,” 145). Mirroring such criticism, R. B. Parker speculates that the pig booth must have been located “stage-left” because this is the “traditional ‘sinister’ location of hell-mouth” (R. B. Parker, “The Themes and Staging of Bartholomew Fair,” University of Toronto Quarterly 39 [1970]: 294). Ursula is, for him, as such remarks suggest, a vice figure, a “traditional mothers-of-misrule” figure in “European folk festivals” (Parker, “Themes and Staging,” 296–7). Clifford Davidson (Clifford Davidson, “Judgment, Iconoclasm, and Anti-Theatricalism in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” Papers on Language and Literature 25, no. 4 [Fall 1989]: 350) sees Ursula as Ate, the goddess of folly, the “presiding deity of the fair.” For discussions that see her as a “material bodily principle” that is associated with the Bakhtinian grotesque, see Jonathan Haynes, “Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” ELH 51 (1984): 647; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen,1986), 64–6. Such readings also see Jonson as distancing himself from such older festive traditions. Ursula is, then, precisely that principle that must be surpassed when society moves into the more civilized forms of festivity, represented by Jonson’s Epigram 101 (Haynes, “Festivity,” 663). A number of feminist arguments also make Ursula into the embodiment of the fair. See note 108. For readings that see Jonson as encouraging his audience to distance themselves from the figure of Ursula, see especially Guy Hamel, “Order and Judgment in Bartholomew Fair,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1973): 57, 58–9. His discussion of the “brawl” between Ursula and Quarlous is particularly interesting since he complains, “One may feel that in his willingness to join Ursula at her level and to brawl (for Quarlous by striking Knockem gives the first blow of the play) he debases himself ” (Hamel, “Order and Judgment,” 58).

Notes

223

89. Thomas L. Martin, “Enormity and Aurea Mediocritas in Bartholomew Fayre,” Ben Jonson Journal 2 (1995): 150. 90. Although Hamel comes to a very different conclusion that privileges the civilized characters, especially the character of Quarlous, because they epitomize the detachment the audience should feel toward the fair folk, he does make the following observation: “The folk of the Fair show, especially by contrast with the disintegration of the groups of visitors, considerable solidarity. At times this fellow concern extends to charity” (Hamel, “Order and Judgment,” 55). 91. Herford, Simpson, and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 8:607. 92. Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2003): 71–4. 93. Scott-Warren, “When Theaters,” 71. See also Stephen Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 255–63. 94. Andrew Gurr, “Bears and Players: Philip Henslowe’s Double Acts,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 35. 95. Gurr, “Bears and Players,” 40. For a discussion of the audience’s taste for stage and stake, see Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff,” 263. 96. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 2: 466–8. 97. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), Induction 46. 98. Ibid., Induction 138–42. 99. Ibid., 29n46; Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. A. Horsman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 13n161 and 162; Ben Jonson, The Selected Plays of Ben Jonson, vol. 1, ed. Johanna Procter, vol. 2, ed. Martin Butler, Plays by Renaissance and Restoration Dramatists (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 161n184. 100. Scott-Warren argues that Jonson uses Epicoene to express his “severe reservations about the pretensions to civility of the newly emergent ‘town,’ which is shown to be every bit as feral as the city” (“When Theaters,” 82). 101. Shannon Miller, “Consuming Mothers/Consuming Merchants: The Carnivalesque Economy of Jacobean City Comedy,” Modern Language Studies 26, no. 2/3 (Spring-Summer 1996): 87; Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 212, Appendix 2. 102. Ibid., 2.5.177. 103. Ibid., 3.2.78. 104. Ibid., 74–5. 105. Ibid., 3.6.33–5. 106. Ibid., 1.3.61, 60. 107. Ibid., 64–5. 108. Feminist criticism of the play generally follows traditional scholarship

224

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

Notes

in seeing Ursula as the embodiment of the “enormity of the fair.” Gail Kern Paster’s offers an especially influential reading of the play; Ursula, she argues, epitomizes the misogynistic understanding of women as “leaky vessels,” or vessels unable to contain or control their bodily excrement. “As we shall find confirmed by sweating Ursula, Jonson’s pig-woman, the liquid letters of this humiliation belong to Olivia and to all women alike,” in Gail Kern Paster, Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 34. Erin Roland-Leone is even more emphatic when she writes, “Ursula is a woman overflowing, and, thus, deceitful, unchaste, and loud” (Erin Roland-Leone, “Jonson’s Vessels Runneth Over: A Look at the Ladies of Bartholomew Fair,” English Language Notes 33, no. 1 [September 1995]: 13). See also Miller, “Consuming Mothers,” 87: “Everything about Ursula—her size and appearance, her role as procurer of both pork and punks—makes her an emblem of carnival excess.” Still following in this tradition of seeing Ursula as the type of a “female grotesque,” Lori Schroeder Haslem holds out the possibility that she might triumph in the end (see Lori Schroeder Haslem, “‘Troubled with the Mother’: Longings, Purgings, and the Maternal Body in Bartholomew Fair and The Duchess of Malfi,” Modern Philology 92, no. 4 (May 1995): 449. For McDermott, Ursula is an image of the “swallowing womb”; despite this reading, she does see the baiting scene as functioning to expose the dehumanization caused by “Renaissance antifeminism” (McDermott, “Versions of Femininity,” 105–6). Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 4.4., 3.6. Ibid., 4.4.182–3. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 3.6.112–13. Ibid., 2.2.49–51. Ibid., 48, 41. Ibid., 40–1. Ibid., 48–9. Ibid., 2.2.52. Ibid., 61–3. Ibid., 2.4.75–6. Ibid., 2.5.7–8. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34–8. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 48–9, 52. Ibid., 2.5.69–82. Ibid., 4.5.65–6. Ibid., 2.5.83. Ibid., 86–100. Ibid., 5.2.47.

Notes

131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

225

Ibid., 2.5.77–8. Ibid., 2.5.83, 86. Ibid., 94–100. As quoted in Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 60. See Martial, Epigrams with an English Translation, ed. and trans. Walter C. A. Ker, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2:309. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 2.5.115–16. Ibid., 116–18. Ibid., 104–6. Ibid., 107–9. Ibid., 110–11. Ibid., 130–1. Ibid., 119–20. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 172–7. Ibid., 164–5.


INDEX Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, The 121–2 Anderson, Benedict 22 anti-Catholic pamphlets 121–6 bodily discipline promoted by 121–6 Catholic learning as threat to English virility 123–6 Catholic religious as threats to English productivity 121–2 Catholic religious as threat to patriarchy 123 foreign Catholic institutions, criticism of 122, 124 militarism, role in 124–6 puritan bodily aesthetic promoted by 121–6 See also Catholic type antifraternal satire 7, 43–4, 123–5 Auden, W.H. 46, 76 Auerbach, Erich 22–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail 36–7, 50, 54–5, 62 Bale, John 117–19 Barnes, A.W. 46 Bartholomew Fair 69, 176–91 bearbaiting and 177–80 bearbaiting scene in 183–9 civilized elite, criticism of 64, 177, 183–9 civilized elite, detachment of 64, 179–80, 183–5 civilized elite, predatory nature of 177, 179–80, 186–9

civilized elite likened to dogs in 177, 179–81, 184–6 elite women, shame of bodily functions 180–1 elite women equated with clothing 180, 185 fair folk, comradeship of 177–81, 189–91 fair folk, extension of charity to Ursula 189–91 Hope Theater 178–9 Induction 178–9 Jonson’s bitterness evident in 176–7 Martial, allusion to 187 receptivity, ethics of 176–9, 190–1 See also individual characters Baudrillard, Jean 29 bearbaiting 177–80, 183–6 civilized elite and 177–9, 183–6 detachment from cruelty 177–9 dogs in 177–8, 180 Hope Theater and 178–9 Jacobean court and 177–8 belly. See paunch biohealth regime 2–7, 11–17, 23 Black House bodily permeability of 111–12, 133–4 English state, threat to 111–12, 133–46 essentialism of 111–12, 145–6 excess, emblem of 111, 135–46 grotesque mingling in 112, 141–6

228

Index

Black House (contd.) puritan audience revulsion toward 111–12, 115–16, 135–8 puritan bodily aesthetic, counterpoint to 111, 115–16, 135–8 sodomitical associations of 112, 142–6 unbounded nature of 115–16, 135–6 Black Knight 114, 134–8 as spy 134–5 threat to English state 114, 134–8 See also Gondomar, Conde de Boehrer, Bruce 148 Bradley, A.C. See Wilson, J. Dover Buckingham, Duke of, George Villiers 114, 138–9, 161–2 as cupbearer to James I 161 thinness of 138–9, 161–2 See also White Duke Catholic type in anti-Catholic pamphlets 121–6 corrupting nature of 121–5 enervation by 124–5 false penance 122–3 fatness, associated with 124–6 as gluttons 121–2, 125 as hypocrites 122–3 as slothful 124–5 as threat to England 121–5 voracious appetite, associated with 121–2 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (United States) 2–5 childhood obesity. See obese child civilité. See civilized bodily aesthetic; civilized elite civilized bodily aesthetic bodily boundaries fostered by 51, 55, 79–80 bodily demarcation and 51–5, 57, 69–70, 77–8 bodily discipline and 51, 54, 57, 83–4, 88–9, 103–4

cleanliness and 51, 59 consumption and 61–2, 64, 75–7, 103–4 court, association with 46, 51–4, 57. See also civilized elite elites, legitimization of 77, 81, 84–5, 88–9 emergence of 31, 50–4 fat, aversion to 51–2, 55, 80, 83–5, 89–93 feudal aesthetic and 57–9, 69, 78, 81, 86–8, 90, 94–9, 101, 103–4, 106 grotesque, aversion to 54–65 penitential associations with 78, 81, 84, 87–88 predation masked by 75–8, 90–7, 95–6, 106–9 privacy promoted by 63–4, 180–1 self-restraint, assertion of 77, 88–9, 103–4 subjugation of lower classes by 77, 93–8 virtue, assertion of 68, 78–9, 81–4, 95–6, 103–4 civilized elite 77–109 predatory nature of 77–8, 177–81, 184–6 coins. See currency Comus 159–63 courtly aesthetic. See civilized bodily aesthetic currency 98–101, 147–9, 171–4 emergence of standard weights and measures 100, 147–9, 171–4 strict accounting and 98–101, 172–4 as symbol of self-restraint 99–100 thin body, association with 171 weight and 99–100 diet (reducing) discourse 6–11, 13–18 apocalypticism central to 7 before and after 6–11

Index

diet (reducing) discourse (contd.) biohealth regime, relationship to 5–8 biomedical intervention and 7, 11–12 civilization, degenerative influence of 10–11, 14 consumer culture and 11–18 death defeated through 7 Dr. Atkins’ Diet 8, 11 Edenic past, idealization of 17 fat prejudice hidden by 6, 10–19 gastric bypass surgery and 15–16 historiography of 5, 10–11 Maker’s Diet, The 10 modern temporality and 9–16, 82 moralism of 7–10 natural, idealization of 10–11 nostalgia of 10 Paleo Diet, The 8–11 success precarious in 16 temporal contradictions in 10–11, 14, 16 Warrior Diet, The 8–11 Zone, The 7–8, 10–11 dieting. See diet (reducing) discourse Doll Tearsheet 98–101, 105–6 Donaldson, Ian 152–3 Edelman, Lee 23–5 Edwards, H.L.R. 46–7 Ehrenreich, Barbara 11 Eleanor 56–65 bigness of 57–8 clothing and 56–8 civilized bodily aesthetic, defiance of 62–5 civilized elite, rejection by 62–5 fecund nature of 58–9, 103 feudal aesthetic and 57–9 grotesque nature of 56 See also Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, The Elias, Norbert 97–8 Elynour Rummynge. See Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, The

229

English Spanish Pilgrim, The 121–3 Every Man Out of His Humor 158–9 Falstaff chivalric associations with 90, 99 civilized aesthetic, criticism of 88–93, 100–5 Doll Tearsheet and 98–101 fat, positive associations with 97–101 fat-witted, positive associations with 85–7 fat-witted rhetoric, use of 85–93 feudal aesthetic, appeal to 86, 87, 97–101 Hal, criticism of 90, 91–93, 100–1 Hal, repartee with 85–93 Hostess and 98–99 Justice Shallow, criticism of 94–5, 98, 104–5 Lancaster, John of 100–2 largesse, embodiment of 97–100, 106–8 lower classes, relationship to 77–8, 98–101, 106–9 as meat for feast 97–99 modern temporality, defiance of 85–7 strict accounting, rejection of 97–9 tavern women, relationship to 98–101, 105–6 temporality, capacious sense of 85–86, 89–90 Falstaff, Hal’s construction of 78–93 amorphousness of 79–80, 84–5 before, constructed as 82–4, 86 butter and 80 consumption, associated with 86–7, 89–90 darkness, associated with 80, 84 essentialism 86–8. See also Falstaff, modern critical constructions of excess, emblem of 85, 89. See also Falstaff, modern critical constructions of

230

Index

Falstaff, Hal’s construction of (contd.) fat, negative associations with 78–93 fat-witted, negative associations with 85–6 grease and 84 immobility, emphasized by 84–5, 91–2 luxury, associated with 89 meat as dead matter 79–80. See also Falstaff, as meat for feast modern temporality, dependence on 85–7 as obstruction 85, 89–90 paunch, association with 81, 84–5, 92 pollution and 83–5 tallow and 80 Falstaff, modern critical constructions of 69–78 antifat construction of 70 before, constructed as 74–5 consumer capitalism, representation of 75–7 essentialism of 73–4 excess, emblem of 75–6 Hal, identification with 70–3 indulgence, associated with 72–3, 74–5 infantilism and 74 fasting body size, association with 120–2 Church of England and 119 early Reformation suspicion of 119 ecclesiastical supervision of 38–9 and Gaunt, John of 88, 102–3 and greensickness 102 gut restricted by 38–42 puritan associations with 120 regulatory capacity of 39–42 fat biblical associations of 86–7, 106–8, feudal associations with 86–7, 97–8, 107–8. See also feudal bodily aesthetic

God’s blessing, sign of 106–7 prosperity and 107 See also diet (reducing) discourse; fat body; obesity; obesity epidemic Fat Bishop added in revision 115 ambition of 115, 126 Black Knight and 136–7, 139–42 Black Queen, threatened rape of 144 Catholic devotional language used by 142 Church of England, threat to 115, 141, 144 darkness, association with 114–15 excess, emblem of 9, 111, 121, 126, 132–3, 135, 145–6 excremental association with 140, 144–5 fogginess of 129–33, 136–7 gaseous nature of 115, 126 grotesque nature of 115–18, 139–46 as hell-mouth 139, 142–4 heterogeneous nature of 115–16 hypocrisy of 115–16, 139–41 liquid associations with 139–40 mutability of 139–41 paunch, association with 139–46 pollution of 115, 139–41 quagmire 139 rape and 112, 115, 144 sodomitical associations with 112, 116, 144 treasonous nature of 65, 114–15, 139–46 voracious appetite of 115–16 fat body amorphous nature of 79–80, 84–5, 127–8, 181–2, 186 appetite and 86–7, 89–90, 115–6, 132–3, 160–1 before, association with 6, 7, 15–16, 74–5, 82–4, 86

Index

fat body (contd.) butter and 80, 186 civilization, association with 5, 8–11, 14–18, 74–7 constructionist views of 68–9, 85–7, 107, 159–63, 163–76 darkness, associations with 80, 84, 114–15 death, emblem of 23–5, 74–5, 80, 142–3 decay, bodily 25–6, 72, 74–6, 84–5, 91–2, 127–8 essentialist construction of 1–3, 5, 18–30, 73–4, 86–8, 115–16, 139–46, 147–8, 152, 154–6, 161–3, 163–76, 179–80, 182, 186, 191 excess, emblem of 2–3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13–14, 16, 30–1, 75–7, 85–9, 111, 121, 126, 132–3, 135, 145–6, 148–52, 160–2, 171, 175, 176, 179–81, 182, 186, 190 excremental associations of. See Fat Bishop, excremental associations of feminist criticism and 12–14, 21–2, 180–2 flatulence, associations with 84, 150–1 fogginess of 45, 51–2, 54–5, 60–1, 79–82, 84–5, 91–2, 111–12, 114–16, 129–33, 136–7, 150–1, 182 gluttony, relationship to 1, 8–10, 37, 42–4, 72–5, 85–90, 111, 114–17, 131–2, 142–3, 145–6, 147–52 grease and 84, 130, 181–2, 185 lower classes, associations with 4, 12–14, 77–8, 80–1, 86–7, 95–101, 106–9, 151, 157, 182–3, 185, 189–90 as meat 79–80, 97–9, 152, 184 nonwhite, association with 4, 12–14

231

as obstruction to progress 5–9, 85, 89–90 pig and 99, 152, 176, 182 pollution of 83–5, 115, 130–1, 139–41 as quagmire 139, 186 queer potential of 19, 23–5 sodomitical nature of 112, 116, 132, 137, 144–6, 150–2 sweat and 182 tallow 80, 184 treasonous nature of 2–7, 9–10, 12, 65, 70–5, 114–15, 139–46, 153 voracious appetite of 16–19, 75–7, 86–7, 115–16 fat history before, attachment to 22–3 empiricism, resistance to 23–7 fat, constructed nature of 19–20, 22, 31–3 futurism, rejection of 23–7 modern temporality interrogation of 21–31 obesity, history of 19–20 obesity, rejection of 19–20 queer history, relationship to 21–4 queer potential in 21–2 queer theory, relationship to 21–2 thin privilege, interrogation of 27–33 fat panic children and. See obese child emergence of 1–8 global implications of 14 media use of 2, 5–7, 13–18 medical researchers, usefulness to 3–6 moralism central to 7–19 nationalism, relationship to 9–11 terrorism and 2, 10 world wars and 9

232

Index

feudal bodily aesthetic appetite and 51 greatness valued in 51, 57–9, 86–7, 97–101 lower classes’ receptivity to 87, 95, 97–8 Friers Chronicle 123–4 Game at Chess, A 111–46 addressed to puritan audience 113–14. See also Puritanism, definition of anti-Catholicism of 112–14 audience and 113–14 bagging scene 142–5 bodily discipline recommended in 116, 133–46 bodily vulnerability in 116, 133–46 checkmate by discovery scene 114, 139–41 contemporary political circumstances 112–16 Fat Bishop’s central role in 114–15 fat body, aversion to 65, 115–16, 126, 135–8, 139–46 grotesque bodies feared in 114–15, 132–46 London’s wealthy citizenry, representation of 136–7 as moral-religious allegory 113–16 puritan bodily aesthetic promoted in 112–13, 133–6 revision of 115–16 See also individual characters gastric bypass surgery. See diet (reducing) discourse, gastric bypass surgery Gaunt, John of 81, 88, 102–3 fasting and 88, 102–3 penitential language and 88 thinness, legitimization of royal claim by 81, 88, 102–3

Gilman, Sander 25, 74–5 Gluttony (character) 35–6, 37–44 grotesque imagery and 40–1 poverty ethic and 41–2 See also Piers Plowman gluttony (sin) fat, modern associations with 37, 42–4 grotesque imagery and 36–8, 40–2 gut as seat of 40 mendicant orders and 38–9 obesity, modern associations with 1, 8–10 premodern moralism and 37–44 profanation and 41–3 sloth and 42–3 superfluity and 40 gluttony satire 38 Goldberg, Jonathan 95–6 Gondomar, Conde of, Sarmiento de Acuña bodily permeability of 115–16, 144–5 Catholicism, promoter of 113–14, 134–5 James I, influence on 114 See also Black Knight Grady, Hugh 75–7 grotesque realism 36–7, 50, 54–5, 62 gut 38–42 Hal as arriviste 64–5, 95–6 civilized bodily aesthetic and 78–82, 103–4 civilized elite and 78–82 diet discourse, anticipation of 82–3 Falstaff. See Falstaff, Hal’s construction of Falstaff, rejection of 80, 85–93, 107 fat body marked by 80, 83–5, 89–93 feudal aesthetic, rejection of 86–8 Gaunt lineage of 81, 88, 102–3

Index

Hal (contd.) lawmen, reliance on 87–8, 104–6 lean-witted 87–90 literalness of 85–8 Machiavellianism of 83–5 militarism 70–2 modern temporality, use of 85–7, 89 moral language, use of 89–93 Poins and 81, 103–4 strict accounting of 95, 97 tavern women, detachment from 98, 101 thinness used to legitimize royal claims 84–5, 88, 102–3 Halberstam, Judith 2 Hal’s thin body after, constructed as 74, 84–6, 88–91 claims to throne legitimized by 84–5 Gaunt lineage embodied by 88, 102–3 light, associated with 84–5 virtue, assertion of 84–5, 88, 102–3 health. See biohealth regime Henry IV, Part 1 civilized elite audience 78–80, 106 fat and thin, biblical constructions of 106–9 fat and thin, multiple constructions of 87–8, 90–3 fat- and thin-witted, multiple understandings of 86–8 Gadshill scene 90–3 lower-class audience 81–5, 95–8, 106 mock-banishment scene 107 See characters Henry IV, Part 2 banishment scene 72, 73, 80 civilized bodily aesthetic in 101–2, 103–4, 106

233

feudal aesthetic as critique of civilized bodily aesthetic in 97–101 lawmen in 94–5, 98, 103–6 lower classes in 93–109 Part I, revision of 93–4 strict accounting in 98–100 tavern women, punishment of 101–6 thin bodies, proliferation of 101–6 See characters Henry IV plays audience, reception of 78–80, 81–5, 95–8, 106 feudal bodily aesthetic in 86–7, 97–101 literary criticism of 69–78. See also Falstaff, modern critical constructions of structural problem of 93–4 Henry VIII 45, 48–9 court of 45–54 fashions at court of. See Tudor ladies’ fashions See also Skelton, John; Skelton biography Heywood, Leslie 70 history. See fat history, modern temporality interrogation of Hope Theater 177–80 Bartholomew Fair, staging of 177–9 bearbaiting and 177–89 stench of 178–9 Hostess (Henry IV plays) 98–9, 105–6 Jacobean court 161–3 Jesuits 134–8 Jonson, Ben body size, changes in 156–8 civilized bodily aesthetic, criticism of 148–9 as constructionist 149–51, 159–60 enumerative body, critique of 147–8

234

Index

Jonson, Ben (contd.) Envy, iconography of 158 fat body. See Jonson’s fat body Jacobean court, criticism of 159–63 libels on 150–2 literary reputation, development of 152–6 literary reputation association with Shakespeare 152–5 literary reputation and body size 152–6 modern bodily aesthetic, rejection of 159–63, 164–76, 177–91 psychoanalytically inflected readings of 155–6 receptivity, ethics of 152–6, 159–60, 163–76, 189–91 thin body of 157–8 weight, constructionism of 164–76 Jonson’s fat body 148–60, 163 anality of 150–2 commoner status, sign of 151, 157 English state, threat to 153–4 essentialist understandings of 148–9 excess, emblem of 148–52 flatulence of 150–1 Horatian associations with 157–60, 163 hypocrisy exposed by 148 immaturity and 155 libels on 150–2 as meat 152 paunch, associations with 164–5, 171 psychoanalytical readings of 152, 155–6 sodomitical associations with 150–2 Spanish empire, association with 153 uncivilized nature revealed through 151

Justice Shallow 94–8, 98, 104–5 death, association with 104–5 and Falstaff 94–5, 98, 104–5 as henchman 94, 105 new regime, association with 104 predatory nature of 94–5, 98, 104–5 Kermode, Frank 22–3 King, John N. 117, 132 Lancaster, John of 101–3 Langland, William. See Piers Plowman LeBesco, Kathleen 21 Lewis, C.S. 19, 58 Loewenstein, Joseph 155–6 Lowell, Amy 70 Macilente 158–60 Mann, Jill 38 martyrologies, Protestant 118–19 Merry Jests Concerning Popes, Monkes, and Friers 124–5 Middleton, Thomas. See A Game at Chess and characters modernism 70–1 modernity enumerated body 147–9, 152 fat first stigmatized in 35, 42–4, 64–5, 70–1 observer’s detachment in 46, 60–2 temporality, alternatives to 27–9 temporality, apocalypticism of 22–3 temporality, fat’s disruption of 74–5, 84–93 temporality, linear sense of 6–8, 20, 81–5 temporality, regulatory capacity of 20, 85 temporality, telos emphasis of 6–8, 81–5 thin privilege and 20–9, 43–4, 64–5 Moon, Michael 21, 24–5 Mueller, Janel 118

Index

Newes from Rome, Spalato’s Doome 126–8, 131, 133 obese child 25–6 obesity essentialism and 1, 5–9, 18–30 gluttony, association with 8 humiliations of 15–16 longevity, decline of 5–6 masculinity, threat to 9–11 moralism implicit in 2, 147–9 national defense, threat to 2 national reform necessitated by 2 in nineteenth century 8, 28 objectivity and 1–5, 20–1 as obstruction to progress 7–9 pathologization of 9, 28–9, 155–6 as polite term 18 temporality, relationship to 5–7, 27–9 as transhistorical concept 18–19 United States, association with 2–6, 14–18 See also obesity epidemic obesity epidemic American exceptionalism, threat to 2–5, 7 biomedical intervention in 3–6, 11 civilization, decline of 10–11, 14, 25–7 demography, importance to 2–6, 25–7 gluttony, association with 8 governmental use of 2, 7 imperialism, threat to 2, 9 longevity, decline of 5–9 media’s depiction of 3–6, 13–18 middle-class values and 12–16 national reform necessitated by 3–5 race and 12, 15–16 statistics and 3–4 stigma and 12–16, 25–6 terrorism, likened to 2, 10 tsunami, likened to 2

235

United States, decline of 2–6, 9 See also fat panic; obesity obesity experts bias of 1–9 fear-mongering of 1–9 longevity studies of 3–7 objective rhetoric and 1–6, 18–21, 27–9 stigma and 12–16, 25–6 Orgel, Stephen 160 overweight. See fat body; obesity Paster, Gail Kern 180 Patterson, Annabel 165 paunch 79–81, 84–5, 92, 129–33, 136, 139–46, 144–6, 147, 164–5, 170–1 Piers Plowman 35–44, 46, 56 fasting and 38–42 fat, inconsequential in 42–4 grotesque imagery in 39–41 modern bodily aesthetic, challenge to 35–7, 43–4 poverty ethic and 41–2 sacred and profane in 41–3 See also Gluttony (character) Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue 159–63, 165. See also Comus Poins 70, 100, 103–4 Poole, Kristen 116–17 portly 96–7 Pound, Ezra 70 poverty ethic 38–40 premodern temporality creativity encouraged by 22–3 figurative thinking in 22 multitudinous nature of 24–5 queerness of 23–5 Puritan bodily aesthetic bodily violation feared 137–46 civilized bodily aesthetic distinguished from 112–13, 137–9 closed bodily boundaries 134–46 constant vigilance necessitated by 133–46

236

Index

Puritan bodily aesthetic (contd.) historical development of 116–21 militarism, association with 122–5 modern bodily aesthetic and 133–4 self-control, association with 137–146, 179–80 Puritanism, definition of 113 Quarlous and Winwife 176–90 civilized bodily aesthetic, example of 176–7, 185–6 commodification of women by 180–1, 185–6 as dogs 177, 179–81, 184–6 fair folk, detachment from 177, 183–6 objectification of women 180 predatory nature of 177–80 superiority, assertion of 177–8, 183–6 Ursula, violence against 179–80, 188–9 Reformation, English 116–21 individualized discourse, later appearance of 119–21 private sanctification, later development of 119–21 public nature of early Reformation 117–19 reproductive futurism 23–30 See also Edelman, Lee Richard II 88 Schwartz, Hillel 2, 12, 21, 35, 70–1 Sedgwick, Eve 21, 23, 24–5 Shakespeare, William 152–6 body size and reputation 152–5 See individual titles and characters Skelton, John civilized bodily aesthetic, defiance of 50–65 fat used by 50–1

Garnesche, Christopher, poetic contest with 48–9 Henry VIII, relationship to 48–50 Henrician court, bitterness toward 48–50 women, identification with 48–50 See also Skelton biography; individual titles and characters Skelton biography 45–50 detachment of 46–7 disembodiment of 47 heterosexualization of 46 modern identities, imposed on 46–8 modern male critic, identification with 46–8 women, disassociated with 46–7 See also Skelton, John Smith, Bruce 20 Spalato, Archbishop of, Marco Antonio de Dominis 114–15, 126–33 Church of England, preferment in 127 conversion to Protestantism 126–7 popular suspicions of 129–33 reconversion to Catholicism 127–8 See also Fat Bishop; Spalato’s fat body Spalato’s fat body 126–33 amorphousness of 128–30, 132–3 as “belly-god” 132–3 fogginess of 129–33, 136–7 gaseous nature of 126–7, 131–2 grease and 130 grotesque nature of 128–33 heterogeneity of 129–30 moral depravity of 128–32 mutability of 128–33 negative example for puritans of 130 paunch and 130 pollution of 130–1

Index

Spalato’s fat body (contd.) puritan aversion to 129–31 as quagmire 131 voracious appetite of 128 Spanish Match 113–14 Speke Parott 49–50 Stearns, Peter 2, 20–1 Surgeon General (United States) national reform, call for 3, 9–10 thin body after, association with 6–7, 83–4 coins, likened to 99–101 courtly associations with 51–4, 67–8, 81–3, 100–1, 150–1, 160–2, 166–7 Death, iconographic associations with 104–6 elite, mark of 9–15, 80–1, 100–1, 137–9, 159–63, 165–70 Envy, associations with 155–8 health, association with 1–7 longevity, association with 5–6 lower classes’ aversion to 93–5, 97–8, 105–8 masculinity typified by 9–11 meanness of 157–9, 185, 187–8 militarism, association with 9–11, 70–2, 153–4, 159 overconsumption of 11–15, 77–8, 93 Romantic poet, association with 154–5, 166 self-restraint, association with 78–9, 81–5, 88, 95–6, 102–4 starvation and 107–8 strict accounting, association with 100–2 success, association with 6–9 whiteness, association with 13, 15 youth, association with 15, 158–9, 161–2, 166–8 thin privilege civilized elite 67–9, 78–85, 97–8, 100

237

disembodiment presumed in 9–10, 51–2, 83–4 fat stigmatization necessitated by 51–2, 68, 80–5 Shakespeare and 152–5 thin professional elite consumption masked in 11–15 metabolic efficiency of 11 overconsumption of 11–15 privilege of 11–15 virtue, assertion of 12–17 Tudor ladies’ fashions 52–4 bodily containment and 52–3 headdresses and 53–4. See also Eleanor, clothing and Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, The 45–65 bodily display in 55–8 civilized bodily aesthetic, defiance of 54–65 clothing and 52–4, 55–8 consumption in 62–4 courtly male audience of 55 criticism and 46–8 excretory imagery in 60–1 fogginess and 45, 51–2, 54–5, 60–1 gendered roles rejected in 56, 58–64 grotesque imagery, Skelton’s revelry in 56 protofat nature of 56–8 reader’s choices posed by 64–5 tavern women in 55, 60–3 See also Eleanor Under-wood 163–76 “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces” 165–70 civilized bodily aesthetic, criticism of 166–8 constructionism of 163–76 debt and obligation 170, 172–5 “Epistle to My Lady Covell” 165 essentialism, association with court culture 166–7

238

Index

Under-wood (contd.) essentialism, criticism of 163–76 friendship in 174–5 materiality in 165–8, 172–6 “My Picture Left in Scotland” 165–6, 170–2 organization of 166 paunch in 164–5, 171 Petrarchism, criticism of 166 receptivity, ethics of 165–76 Squib, Arthur, epistles to 172–5 strict accounting in 170, 173–4 weight central to 163–76 weight, constructionist understandings of 163–76 weight, humanistic sense of 163–76 Ursula 176–91 amorphousness of 182, 186 audience’s response challenged by 179–80, 190–1 butter and 186 central location of 179 civilized bodily aesthetic, challenge to 181–2, 186–7, 190–1 civilized elite, defiance of 185–91 elite women, counterpoint to 181–2 embodiment insistence on 181–2 as enormity of the fair 180–1, 185 excess, emblem of 179–82, 186, 190 feminist view of 180 flesh, association with 180 gender roles, rejection of traditional 180–2 grease and 181–2, 185 Knockem and 184, 186, 189 as pig-woman 176, 182 as quagmire 186

Quarlous and Winwife, criticism of 185–9 as sexual object 186 as she-bear 176–91 sweat and 182 as Ursa Major 184 van den Berg, Sara

147

weight essentialist constructions of 163–76 humanistic sense of 163–76 multiple constructions of 163–76 pound, multiple significance of 173–6 standardization of 147–9, 163–5, 173–5 standardization, critique of 173–5 White Duke 114, 137–9 White House 111–16, 132–46 Black House relationship to 111–12, 115–16, 133–46 bodily vulnerability 111–12, 115–16, 133–46 English state, representation of 111–16, 133–46 Wilson, Edmund 155 Wilson, J. Dover 71–4, 155 British imperialism, supported by 71–3 Shakespeare thinned by 154 Winwife. See Quarlous and Winwife Yachnin, Paul

93

Zeal-of-the-Land Busy 179–80

176,

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