'Govern well thy appetite': Feeding imagery and Renaissance thought in Spenser, Dekker, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton

This study attempts to understand some selected Renaissance works within a relatively narrow artistic environment, that of feeding imagery as this particular imagery mirrors the emphases and visions of several poets and dramatists of the period. Feeding imagery refers broadly to sensory and conceptual notions that are associated with food, including the act of ingesting, food-related parts of the human body, and human passions that are figuratively and literally associated with appetite. The Renaissance was an era in which a new humanistic awareness sponsored yet clashed with a new materialism, and accordingly most important issues of the time somehow revolved around man and his worldly desires. Thus, desire--man's passion for bodily satisfaction and for material/social power as well as for knowledge--was basic to moral, social, and religious ideas of the Renaissance. This desire was frequently represented by feeding imagery and its corollaries in various literary works of the time, and such works were effective in illustrating man's moral, social, and religious anxieties and conditions. Feeding imagery in The Faerie Queene depicts Spenser's concepts of moral virtue and of ideal man. His emphasis on temperance in both bodily desire and spiritual aspiration is significantly embodied in his skillful use of feeding imagery as a projection of a character's moral condition. Feeding imagery also manifests the contrasting social visions of Dekker and Jonson, in The Shoemaker's Holiday and Volpone respectively, as well as Shakespeare's profound insight into man's greed and the society to which he belongs, as seen in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice hence, the imagery provides an ambivalent yet accurate illustration of Renaissance attitudes towards materialism and human nature. Furthermore, being at the very heart of Milton's interpretation of man's Fall in Paradise Lost, feeding imagery generates an artistic explanation of the poet's theological concepts. The central theologies of the work--such as evil's nature, man's condition, and God's benevolence--are frequently rendered through food or food-related metaphors. As an effective literary tool, feeding imagery provides a new perspective in understanding Renaissance literature.