| Famine in Early Modern England was not simply a condition of not having enough food. While most critical treatments of famine have discussed it solely in terms of supply and demand, or of harvest yields failing to keep pace with a growing population, famine can more productively be considered a political and social failure, or the inability of the social mechanisms that might normally check famine (such as markets and charity) to provide for at-risk populations.; In Early Modern literature, famine's association with social failure allowed it to be employed as a metaphor or metonym for a wide range of social and political disorders---a point that most critics, who have been long obsessed with supply and demand, have missed. Shakespeare's Coriolanus and first sonnet, Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus all present different metaphorical and metonymic uses of famine to describe different types of social failure, and use famine to rework not only the language of durable metaphors like the body politic, but also rhetorics of cannibalism, autophagy, justice, and revenge. |
