Chapter 4 - Sexual Desire

Summary

Chapter 4 considers the intersection of appetite and desire in plays such as Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. It argues that the elision of these two drives lends a gustatory logic to the theatre’s depiction of excessive desire. The chapter explores the extent to which this serves to associate desire with the excessive appetites unleashed by material excess and tyranny. But it also emphasises the vulnerability which the culinary logic instils in representations of desire, emphasising the period’s profound ambiguity regarding who, precisely, is being consumed in the context of a sexual relationship. Finally, the chapter emphasises the extent to which the imagery of appetite foregrounds the potentially debilitating consequences of sexual desire, at a time in which humoral theory asserted a model of the body as porous, and potentially vulnerable.