Cannibalism and the act of Revenge in Jacobean Drama

Raymond J. Rice

In Shakespeare, as in the works of his contemporaries, people often talk of eating one another. Hamlet complains of "monster custom, who all sense doth eat"; in Twelfth Night, Duke Orsino condemns the inconstant nature of woman’s "appetite"; Othello "bewitches" Desdemona with tales of cannibals and "Anthropophagi"; a friend warns Timon that "a number of men eats him" and that "ladies eat lords"; Ulysses that one man eats away another’s pride; Coriolanus worries that the masses wish to eat him; and although Shylock never actually promises to eat Antonio’s pound of flesh, the play’s "good" Christians ridicule his demanded "interest" as an unholy, egregiously consumptive act, quite opposed to their own "pious" speculations and appetites.

Of course, in Shakespeare’s works no one ever literally eats anyone else. The consumption of human flesh represents the symbolic order’s limit point, a threshold that must not be crossed. "Abjection this way lies" might be an appropriate subtext for these speech acts and their service as metaphors for the tainting of the sacred—or at least the licit and sanctioned—by the profane, sullied, and illicit. In almost every invocation of the eating of human flesh (metaphoric, to be sure) Shakespeare invokes a circumscription of the (fallen) body from the utopian ideal of a pure, symbolic, and transcendent order; or, rather, he documents the loss of such a distinction, both potential and actual. And yet, these speech acts serve simultaneously as the constitutive ground of that symbolic order, for the repeated exorcising of the actual consumption of human flesh, replaced with a fetishistic discursive re-enactment of this consumption, engenders the space for community, the necessary basis of the social order itself.

One of the more complex invocations of community and cannibalism (itself a recently coined term in Shakespeare’s lexicon) occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, often celebrated as one of the "sunniest" of Shakespeare’s comedies. The first scene of act four concludes with Beatrice and Benedick alone, hesitantly swearing their love for one another. Beatrice has just witnessed the humiliation of her cousin Hero at the hands of Benedick’s companions; Shakespeare has, in fact, loosed the full complement of patriarchal authority against Beatrice and Hero, threatening both with the indelible "stain" of unchastely behavior. Beatrice’s first reaction to Benedick’s avowal of love is that he must "not swear and eat it"—that he not subsequently recant his pledge. This leads to an exchange of puns, in which Benedick swears he will "make him eat it that says I love not you" (IV.i.280). Initially, this traditional conceit of love as a consumable part of the self, a transcendent synecdoche of the material body, indicates the pair’s self-positioning as legitimate lovers within the symbolic order. But Beatrice puts Benedick’s "word" immediately to the test with her demand that he "kill Claudio." Benedick’s denial—"not for the wide world" (IV.i.288)—elicits her anger at and sense of helplessness within the play’s gender hierarchy, for would that she "were a man" she could then "eat his [Claudio’s] heart in the market place" (IV.i.303-04). This is a potentially transgressive moment, one that encapsulates the symbolic role of cannibalism within the play’s theatrical/ideological economy, as well as hints at the excessive presence of the Lacanian "Real" which the remainder of the play, and so many of its authority figures, labors mightily to repress.

The complexity of what might best be termed the scene’s cannibalistic "conceit" depends upon several interlocking cultural-discursive traditions. First and foremost, Beatrice invokes the rhetoric of vengeance by employing language of the "typical" tragic revenger whose actions, motivated by a growing recognition of the lack of innate social justice, traditionally move the revenger away from the culturally acceptable to its unsanctioned margins. This process of alienation has long been recognized as integral to the revenge process. As Robert Ornstein explains in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy: "the revenging hero has no way of bringing his criminal opponent to justice, either because no proof of the crime exists, or because the criminal is placed beyond the reach of justice, or because justice itself is a mockery in the hero’s society." Thus, the basic question faced by the revenger is not what form retribution should take, but whether one is indeed capable of taking action in the first place. As Charles and Elaine Hallett have more recently noted, the alienation resulting from this dilemma pushes the revenger to the limits of social rationality: "the revenge tragedy form, with its obligatory madness of the revenger, presupposes that a commitment to the irrational limits the amount of truth which the psyche can attain to through the descent into the self, for the very reason that the irrational keeps one preoccupied with the self."

Beatrice’s frustration with her inability to act, however, is not merely a by-product of a generalized "descent into the self," but rather her recognition of the limit of her subjectivity as a woman constituted as such by her culture. This is the second cultural-discursive tradition engaged by Beatrice in the scene. For Beatrice realizes that she cannot enact revenge because she is a woman and thus locked into specific gender roles: "I cannot be a man with wishing, / therefore I will die a woman with grieving" (IV.i.317-18). The authority of multiple discourses forbids Beatrice to assume the role of revenger, constructing for her a "natural" feminine position of passive objectification and acceptance of the Law, rather than its questioning. Simply to invoke such active, violent, and transgressive language destabilizes Beatrice’s gender position—hence her frustrated recognition that her action is already circumscribed, limited to grieving for injustice rather than acting upon such grief.

Beatrice’s desire to "eat" Claudio’s heart in the "market place" (a decidedly public locus!) is thus frustrated not simply because she lacks the "stomach" to become a revenger, but because her gender will not allow for a matter-ization of her desire; she can speak of her desires all she wants (as long as they are directed to the sympathetic ears of Benedick and not, for instance, to the insuperable patriarchal assumptions manifested by the play’s authority figures), but she cannot enact them. And this is how the third cultural-discursive tradition circumscribes her subjectivity, for the cultural limits that Beatrice has recognized she cannot cross—enacting revenge by acting as a man—are in turn defined by community, a community which marks the limits of its constitution by the possibility of cannibalism, by the potential for consuming human flesh, but by the simultaneous "rational" decision to deny or cross out that possibility, replacing it with the safety of discourse’s endlessly deferred satisfaction. If revenge is an inherently masculine activity, the constantly erased "absent presence" of cannibalism marks the ground upon which that activity is rendered possible. Proper speech acts—rational public discourse—is therefore authorized as a production of a specifically male community, a dictate that, as Carolyn Dinshaw has shown, can be traced back to the medieval scholastic and patristic traditions. Whereas acts of "writing and related acts of signifying—allegorizing, interpreting, glossing, translating" are allied with masculine qualities of inscription and control, the "surfaces on which these acts are performed, or from which these acts depart, or which these acts reveal—the page, the text, the literal sense, or even the hidden meaning" are aligned with the feminine. The community of revengers is thus a quintessentially active and masculine one from which women are excluded, with any attempt by women to join such a community constructed as an inherently transgressive act. Furthermore, the gender-specific language employed by this community gives cultural definition to the bodies of those employing the language. As Judith Butler explains: "Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible." The act of addressing a subject as a revenger therefore "constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and, accordingly, outside of it, in abjection." Subjects recognize each other as potential revengers, as potential members of a specific community, because the Other, the symbolic order, renders them recognizable as bodies, and more importantly, as gendered bodies.

Beatrice’s desire is thus inherently transgressive in that it conflicts with yet another cultural-discursive tradition, for the male community produces the subjectivity of its members as a by-product of the speech acts that it either licenses or forbids. As Catherine Belsey has noted, "subjectivity is discursively produced and is constrained by the range of subject-positions defined by the discourses in which the concrete individual participates." Moreover, "proper" male subjects are produced only in relation to the "improper" subjectivity of women such as Beatrice, subjects who question their own constrained positions and whom, simultaneously, cannot be recognized as legitimate potential members of the revenger’s community. Thus, the ultimate legitimacy of the (male) revenger’s position is rendered possible through the concurrent existence of the excessive illegitimacy of the woman, whose "literal" appetites are always in danger of escaping male definition and interpretation, in turn disrupting carefully constructed and maintained gendered positions.

Beatrice’s complaints are thus doubly important to the continual establishment of community and its concurrent performance of subjectivity. For her desire to usurp "man’s estate"—the privilege of revenge—reinforces the distinction between "innate" masculine and feminine subjectivity. In Much Ado About Nothing, such a threat remains linguistic and potential, but as Orsino in Twelfth Night reminds us, this condition persists because of hegemonic notions of the Renaissance "nature" of women: "their love may be called appetite, / No motion of the liver, but the palate, / That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt"( II.iv.94-97). An unchecked "appetite" is indeed a primary component of a feminine gender identity; situated beyond the bounds of rational control and seated within the passions rather than the "higher" organs (such as the liver), feminine desire simultaneously lacks more and devours more, but is inherently inconstant in its hunger. As Orsino opines, a woman’s heart simply cannot hold enough to remain sated; always in need of "controllment" through (masculine) interpretation, it concurrently persists beyond interpretation. Thus, by constructing a woman’s desire as simultaneously devouring—cannibalistic—and incomplete and inferior, the patriarchal order can effectively locate potentially transgressive behavior as originating outside the male community.

John Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (1611) provides a paradigmatic example of this acculturated need to displace the anxiety of cannibalism onto the body of the woman in Jacobean drama. Marston reworks a story originally told in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567) in which Isabella, an Italian countess, plots the murders of her husband and a succession of subsequent lovers. Many of the period’s most intense apprehensions of the unlicensed sexual monstrosities of widowed, hence "unmastered," women are embodied in the portrayal, which establishes an absolute distinction between male and female wantonness in which the latter is always a "default" condition from which the woman must be trained to avoid and that in turn threatens to "infect" the male’s behavior. Isabella’s insatiability quickly assumes overtly cannibalistic overtones, as she repeatedly seduces and sexually consumes the bodies of her partners. Her transgressive enjoyment of this new-found sexual freedom is indicated through her celebration of her first husband’s demise: "I mourn thus fervent, ‘cause he died no sooner; / He buried me alive, / And mewed me up like Cretan Daedalus / And with wall-eyed jealousy kept me from hope / Of any waxen wings to fly to pleasure." As the play demonstrates, however, the pressure placed upon women is two-fold: for, unlike men, women are incapable of mastering themselves, of controlling their "appetite," and must be trained to avoid the very corruption that proves so alluring to them. Such training is a constant process, a tutelage without end: as Isabella’s slippage back into her "innate" and "natural" desire following the death of her husband indicates, women, when left to their own sense of moral approbation, are all too prone to their "cannibalizing" desires. Within the cultural logic of the revenge tragedy, therefore, morality is always gendered: women can never "stand" firm, but are always "rising" to virtue or "falling into" vice. Only man maintains the ability to stand still within a morally chaotic world; and it is precisely woman’s inability to remain constant that authorizes the male’s morally pure (and socially licensed) position.

As Catherine Belsey explains, this "demonization of women who subvert the meaning of femininity is contradictory in its implications. It places them beyond meaning, beyond the limits of what is intelligible. At the same time it endows them with a (supernatural) power which it is precisely the project of patriarchy to deny." In this manner, the relationship of women to the symbolic order (as typified by Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing or Isabella in The Insatiate Countess) is analogous to cannibalism’s function as a threatening specter behind/beyond the act of revenge. Women’s bodies always harbor the (barely checked) threat of devouring the male subject, a threat which must be exorcised from the symbolic order yet must simultaneously haunt its margins as a precondition of that order’s definition and cohesiveness. Likewise, the consumption of human flesh by the revenger must haunt his actions, simultaneously authorizing his appetite for vengeance yet serving as a limit point of community, the word which must not be uttered, the act which must not be realized.

©University of Maine at Presque Isle   AA/EEO
181 Main Street, Presque Isle, Maine, 04769-2888 USA
Phone: (207) 768-9400, http://www.umpi.maine.edu
Updated: 7/8/00 by Ray Rice. E-mail:Webmaster