ExpoShakespeare

As a High Gourmet, William Shakespeare is attentive to the themes of nutrition and ready to combine the ingredients of tears and laughter, comedy and tragedy with the hottest flavors of eros and its many laid tables. Just think of the cheerful crapules of Falstaff, the fat boar eaten by the triumvirs of Antony and Cleopatra, the rich but fleeting banquet that is just glimpsed in The Tempest, in addition to the numerous other scenes in which food is an important metaphor for the multiple senses of the text. In the bard’s kitchen, authors have also been formed who, in a cannibalistic way, have drawn on ingredients and flavors to cook unpublished, succulent or revolting texts. From the nineteenth century burlesque lollipops, through the wheat of the Coriolanus of Bertold Brecht and Günter Grass, the Shakespearean ingredients rise up mysteriously and in surprising ways in the Mediterranean diet of Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh as well as in the cheerful toasts of Verdi’s Falstaff.