There’s much ado about dinner (and supper for that matter too) in the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Lavishly expensive dinners; wedding breakfasts; funeral suppers; sheep-shearing feasts; al fresco meals; and even magical banquets that disappear before the guest can eat a morsel, grace his pages.
Meal times are the perfect vehicle for conveying the plot. We witness the gradual unravelling of Macbeth when he sees the ghost of Banquo at the banquet. The disgust of Hamlet at his mother’s hasty remarriage following the death of his father is palpable when he spits “The funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” (Act I, Scene ii). There are bawdy suppers at Mistress Quickly’s Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap, London, a genuine public house from Shakespeare’s day.
