What role eating plays in the constitution of knowledge is unclear, but that it plays some role is incontestable to all but the most devout Platonists. Few of us would nowadays agree with the Socrates of the Phaedo that “for a philosopher to concern himself with the so-called pleasures connected with food and drink” is always an epistemological error.2 By contrast, as Michel Serres puts it, “Taste institutes sapience.”3 Eating courts knowledge. It does so in at least two ways: first, knowledge of the other body. Once a body enters my body through the mouth—usually in the form of food—it becomes incorporated into me. It becomes something I know. This knowledge can be mundane (we know the taste of apricots from apples), erotic (we know the taste of a lover’s body, and that taste recollects the fruits therein), phenomenological (tasting apricots is a way of tasting the world). Food can give us too much knowledge, or the wrong kind of it. In tasting, one can overshoot. Eating is so powerful that the knowledge it brings can exceed our ability to apprehend it rationally or even morally, and such excess can threaten that very rationality, as in the Christian account of the Garden of Eden. Eating can impart a dangerous kind of knowledge, as dangerous as sex. Perhaps more so, since eating frequently comes at the expense of another creature’s death.
The second form of knowledge eating can impart is the knowledge of the other self, or at least of the fact that there are other selves, ranged around us, eating or hoping to eat, full or starving. The second knowledge is the knowledge of the table and our relationships with those who sit around it or help make it possible. These two kinds of knowledge might loosely be called the culinary and the commensal—the knowledge of objects and incorporations on the one hand, and the knowledge of interactions and articulations on the other.4 Each of these epistemological gateways of eating embeds the human in the matrix of the world—socially, philosophically, ecologically. There is nothing sentimental about this embedding. What brings together also tears apart. Eating with is also eating of. Yet it is a fact nonetheless that eating embeds us in the various comprehensions of our environment.
For Emmanuel Levinas, one of the foremost phenomenologists of eating, the question of food’s relationship to epistemology is especially vexed.5 This is because epistemology is already a vexed category in Levinas. If Cartesian philosophy is founded in knowing, the cogito ergo sum, or what Levinas calls “the animation of a body by thought,” Levinasian philosophy begins with an ethical interruption that is not reducible to knowing or even to thinking (OB 79).6 “This strangeness of the Other,” writes Levinas, “his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics” (TI 43). That irreducible strangeness lies beyond, and is not predicated upon, knowledge or understanding. If we could know the Other entirely, we could reduce the other’s particularity to our own thematic categories; we could in some sense absorb the other, incorporating him or her into our own worldview, a process which ultimately “reduces the other to the same” (TI 42). To reduce the other to ourselves differs little from treating the other as something one owns or controls (EN 9). In the formative early essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, Levinas argues that “expression,” by which he means a reaching out toward the other in verbal terms, “consists, prior to any participation in a common content through understanding, in instituting sociality through a relationship that is, consequently, irreducible to understanding” (EN 7). We don’t speak to someone because we know them. The whole reason we need to speak, to acknowledge, is because we don’t know them.
Although being is not reducible to knowing, neither are the two mutually exclusive. The fact that we cannot know the aspect of identity that refuses comprehension, or what Levinas calls the “hither side,” “does not mean,” as J. W. Clegg and B. D. Slife argue, “that this hither side is beyond experience (or relation), and thus beyond some form of ‘knowing.’ It only means that it is beyond the realm of the fully articulate.”7 Levinas argues not that understanding plays no part in recognizing the other, but that understanding does not precede the recognition of the other; it is not the means by which we recognize the other. Understanding is formed simultaneous to the establishment of relationship; in fact we might think of it as an essential substance of conversation. “The other is not first an object of understanding and then an interlocutor,” writes Levinas. “The two relations are merged. In other words, addressing the other is inseparable from understanding the other” (EN 9).
For Levinas, eating plays a central role, perhaps the central role, not only in ethics but also in epistemology—the place and development of knowledge in relation to the other, and to the inaccessible and inarticulate “hither side” of the self. Eating makes us more fully cognizant beings—aware of ourselves and of others. For Levinas, “The signification proper to gustative sensation consists somehow in ‘breaking through’ the knowledge gathered, to as it were penetrate into the inwardness of things” (CPP 117). The act of eating, in other words, pierces through knowledge to something like essence. Levinas’s account of culinary epistemology rejects the dualistic Platonic model in which eating and the pursuit of philosophy are fundamentally at odds. Eating offers a different kind of knowing: a knowledge of the self that is also a knowledge, somehow, of otherness. Even nausea for Levinas is an experience of material self-knowledge, of knowing ourselves from within. “The nature of nausea,” he writes, “is nothing other than its presence, nothing other than our powerlessness to take leave of that presence.”8 Nausea conducts to us the landscape of our own inaccessible presentness to ourselves. It maps the region of identity that lies beyond our ability to articulate it. Simultaneously, eating pushes us out toward others: In “Judaism and Revolution,” commenting on why the rabbis of the Talmud insist that one must serve a meal to one’s workers, and that the meal must include a sweet, he writes, “Sublime materialism, concerned with dessert. Food is not the fuel necessary to the human machine; food is a meal” (NT 97). Eating, in other words, structures sociality. The material act of eating gives shape and movement to self-other interactions, and in so doing it provides a conduit for encounters with the other that are epistemological as well as ethical.
The Levinasian approach to eating is thus rooted in a skeptical analysis of the grounds of knowledge. To eat is to destabilize supposed ethical certainties—of received ways of knowing and categorizing the other, of “gathered knowledge,” and even of supposed self-knowledge—and to enter into a renewed instability which redraws relationships according to other forms of knowledge, other laws. Material beings’ “relationship with a mouth”—a relationship that occurs through eating as well as speaking—“is not an adventure of knowledge or of action” (OB 78). It is instead an opening of the one to the other, a passive relation of extreme vulnerability. The meaning of eating evolves only in relation to the other, and more specifically to eating with responsibility for the other’s hunger. “Being torn from oneself for another in giving to the other the bread from one’s mouth is being able to give up one’s soul for another” (OB 79). Food-sharing thus becomes both metaphor and metonymy for absolute vulnerability to the other, which in turn becomes a way of recognizing the other’s irreducibility to oneself. To eat ethically is not to know, but to listen.
Both Michel de Montaigne and Shakespeare anticipate Levinas’s claim that eating forms a material basis for both a skeptical inquiry into the grounds of knowledge, and for establishing an ethics based on that skepticism. In reading Shakespeare and Montaigne through each other, I am reading them both through Levinas, and vice versa. This is not the first time that all three thinkers have been placed in fruitful relation; Paul Yachnin, for example, argues that Montaigne and Shakespeare both practice a kind of “ethical reading” that “is related to a quasi-Levinasian calling toward a recognition of the other within the literary text.”9 Reading, like eating and foodsharing, is also a kind of incomplete movement toward knowing—a necessary but not sufficient “calling toward a recognition.” My intertextual argument here is twofold: first, that Shakespeare’s As You Like It—a deeply skeptical play riddled with what Robert Watson calls “pyrrhonist anxieties”10—uses eating as a tool to explore and articulate that skepticism; and second, that its approach is strikingly reminiscent of Montaigne’s own brand of culinary skepticism, expressed most clearly in the last of his Essais, “Of Experience.” Whether Montaigne directly influenced the play is not my concern, although I have suggested that Montaigne crops up in Shakespeare’s consciousness as early as Titus Andronicus.11 Rather, I aim to explore resonances between As You Like It and “Of Experience,” in which Montaigne writes extensively about several subjects also dear to the play: eating, old age, and most importantly, the relation between the grounds of knowledge and the material body. Many critics have identified some sort of skeptical materialism operating in each author.12 But the culinary skepticism I find in As You Like It has not been fully explored, either in this play, or in the play’s relation to Montaigne. For Levinas, the alternative knowledge made possible by eating goes by the word “ethics.” Montaigne referred to it as “experience.” Shakespeare called it “drama.”
Part I.
Shakespeare excels at staging or reporting acts of communal eating that accentuate exclusion and violence, rather than fellowship and good cheer. As John Mahon notes, “Shakespeare uses meals more often than not to dramatize the absence of good fellowship and a sense of community.”13 The most famous scenes of eating in the plays, especially its banquets, follow this pattern. The final banquet of Titus Andronicus, it seems hardly necessary to say, does not suffer from an excess of conviviality. Its commensality, however, is precisely the point, since Titus’s revenge—the revenge of the marginalized and excluded—takes the form of the literal and violent reincorporation of the other (Tamora’s children) into the self (their mother)—a nasty parody of the feasts of social reconciliation that abound in comedy. In the banquet scene of Macbeth, the return of Banquo, the murdered other, reminds Macbeth of the cost of his exertions in forming a community he can administer and control. The meals in Timon of Athens form a series of skeptical studies about the vexed relationship between eating with the other and being consumed by that other. Even the comedies tend to favor the commensal at the expense of the convivial. The banquet that closes The Taming of the Shrew stages Katherine’s incorporation into the community in a particularly uncomfortable and ironic way. In The Tempest, Shakespeare doesn’t even bother to serve the food—Ariel offers Alonso and his party a banquet and snatches it away, as if to say: you could eat this meal, but it wouldn’t make your company any more tolerable.
How striking it is, therefore, to find in As You Like It an unambiguously happy moment of staged eating—perhaps the happiest act of eating in Shakespeare—the “alfresco meal” of Act 2, scene 7. One would extrapolate such a scene from the play’s opening, which uses food and eating to challenge the very possibility of ethical recognition. In the play’s first speech, Orlando declares that his brother Oliver essentially keeps him in a captivity more benighted than those of the estate’s animals. “His horses are bred better” than Orlando, partly because “they are fair with their feeding”—their diet keeps them looking well. By contrast, Oliver lets Orlando “feed with the hinds”—meaning with the servants, although the secondary meaning of “deer” both reinforces the reference to horse feeding, and prepares the reader for the deer hunting scenes in the forest of Arden (AL 1.1.11-18).14 When Oliver enters, Orlando confronts him by explicitly comparing his eating to that of the farm’s pigs:
| ORLANDO: | Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent that I should come to such penury? |
| OLIVER: | Know you where you are, sir? |
| ORLANDO: | O, sir, very well: here in your orchard. (1.1.35-39). |
Having called attention to the lowly material conditions of his existence under his brother’s thumb, Orlando parries Oliver’s haughty rejoinder by returning the debate again to the matter of food. The answer to the question “where are you” is not, as Oliver would have it, social, but rather material: I am in a cultivated landscape surrounded by fruit that is denied me. Sublime materialism, concerned with dessert.
At the same time that Orlando uses food to refer to the disparity and want of his material conditions, he also calls attention to the spiritual dimension of hunger by comparing himself to the prodigal son, who “wolde faine haue filled his bellie with ye huskes, that the swine ate: but no man gaue them him.”15 But the reference absolves Orlando of ethical responsibility, reversing the polarities of obligation: it is not the son who profligately spends his father’s wealth, but the father figure (i.e., the elder brother) who prevents the younger man from claiming the resources that are rightfully his. The play opens, therefore, with a debate about the material and spiritual obligations of eating and feeding. Oliver stands accused of refusing to heed the call of the hungry, and of refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the other person. As Levinas famously wrote, “The material needs of the neighbor are my spiritual needs” (NT 99). Oliver fails spectacularly to address either. From the beginning of the play, then, eating is posited as a chief way of encountering and knowing the other. But the accounts of eating immediately produce uncertainties: is Orlando telling the truth? Is Oliver incapable of recognizing Orlando as a full human being? How is Orlando’s call to ethical obligation shaped by the class ramifications of his call, since Orlando objects to eating with the hinds not primarily because he is human, but because he is noble? Will hunger lead to acknowledgment and the resumption of obligation, or will it lead to further conflict? Food forms the basis here for skeptical inquiry, posing a set of questions about the nature of brotherly relations and about the relation between human and animal—questions that the play will continue to consider.
In the Forest of Arden, questions of hunger and feeding arise first through hunting and the killing of animals: to eat is often to cause another’s death. When Adam, attempting to convince Orlando to flee Oliver’s manor, declares, “This is no place; this house is but a butchery” (2.3.27), his words unwittingly echo the Duke’s manly exhortation, “Come, shall we go and kill us venison?” (2.1.20). The line suggests that to be worthy of being considered a “place”—in other words, a location in which one can readily exist, can dwell—it has to be free from violence. Oliver’s house is thus “no place” at all. Yet the Forest of Arden, for all its utopian characteristics, is also “no place” (u-topia) in a negative sense, at least for the deer who inhabit it: under the reign of humans, it becomes a “butchery,” in which the threat of violence is transferred (largely successfully) from humans to animals. The utopian space becomes less a space free from violence than a space in which one can control the distribution of violence.
Although critics tend to place the play’s attitudes about hunting deer in relation to Elizabethan sport, the deer are connected unavoidably to eating through the Duke’s offhanded transformation of deer to venison, from animal to food.16 As Watson argues, “Even before the hunt begins, [the deer] are already no longer their animal selves, already a product for consumption by the human mouth, through the presumption of the human mind.”17 Whereas deer might provide a way to encounter the inalienably other, both the Duke and Jaques co-opt such a possibility, relentlessly converting deer into humans or their products, absorbing the other into a self that already understands, and therefore controls and even destroys it. This line of thinking reaches its logical outcome when the bodies of deer and human merge late in the play, with the first forester (again under Jaques’s direction) singing, “What shall he have that killed the deer?/ His leather skin and horns to wear” (4.2.10-11). If Orlando contrasts himself polemically with the well-treated animals of his brother’s farm, arguing that how he eats circumscribes his opportunities while clashing with his core identity as a noble individual, the Duke’s merry warriors invite a comparison with the deer they kill, arguing both that what they eat becomes what they are, and that the deer, those “native burghers of this desert city” (2.1.23), also become like the humans who hunt them.
The politics of deer hunting, by interrogating the ways in which eating both establishes relationships among creatures and complicates those relationships with threats of violence, ingestion, and co-optation, prepares us for the al fresco banquet, with its complex ethics and multilayered examination of commensality. The banquet really takes up three scenes, as Raphael’s meal in Paradise Lost takes up four books. Act 2 scene 5, the scene of the meal’s preparation, begins inauspiciously. Amiens enters, singing about birds warbling of love under the greenwood tree. Jaques, in saying of himself that he can “suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs,” uses a culinary metaphor to reimagine the song as yet another kind of animal meal—Amiens’s singing bird is now an egg, fit to be emptied out by the carnivorous weasel of Jaques’s melancholic hunger. When, in Twelfth Night, Orsino wonders if music be the food of love, he means that music whets love’s appetite. Here Jaques, although he calls for more song, suggests the opposite—music is a food that quenches itself in the listening, a meal that is never allowed to get started, all egg and no bird. As the interlude progresses, the Duke’s men begin to prepare a meal under the shade of a tree, and the song obediently shifts from the subject of love to that of labor and food:
And loves to live i’th’ sun,
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither! (2.5.33-37)
In this evocation of the Arcadian shepherd, Amiens invokes a picture of enjoyment in solitude—what Levinas might call culinary egoism, the utter and closed enjoyment of the eating self who is unaware of others (TI 115-118). But Amiens then revises this image with his refrain: “Come hither!” Let all who are enjoying their private meals come to the table and eat. The lines become an invitation to hospitality, paralleling Corin’s hospitable and Levinasian beckoning to Rosalind and Celia in the prior scene: “But what is, come see, / And in my voice most welcome shall you be” (2.4.85-86). Through the song and its dialogue, Jaques and Amiens engage in a subtle war of words over the nature of commensality. Is a meal to be consumed, or does it rejuvenate? Is it a passive or an active phenomenon? Does it eviscerate fellowship or invent it?
The scene switches to Orlando and his servant, Adam, deep in the forest and starving. “O, I die for food!” (2.6.2) cries Adam, echoing Celia, who faints “almost to death” (2.4.62). Neither Rosalind nor Orlando seems particularly hungry, but each responds to the call—Rosalind with money and Orlando with his sword. If Amiens invoked the negative Levinasian image of a man alone with his food, Orlando describes what for Levinas is the signal act of human ethics, the giving of oneself so that another may eat. “To give,” writes Levinas, “to-be-for-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one’s own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting” (OB 56). This is precisely what Orlando sets out to do, proclaiming with forced cheer, “if this uncouth forest yield anything savage I will either be food for it or bring it for food to thee” (2.6.6-8). In Shakespeare’s main source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Orlando is even more gallant and macabre, offering to open a vein and let Adam drink his blood. In dropping this detail, Shakespeare keeps the focus of these interlocking scenes upon material food, and therefore of the importance of staging that food, rather than on the potentially cannibalized human body.18 Instead, Shakespeare underlines the ethical nature of Orlando’s proposed action by having Orlando notice that Adam also needs shelter: “Yet thou liest in the bleak air. Come, I will bear thee to some shelter and thou shalt not die for lack of a dinner” (2.6.15-16). The recognition that humans need shelter and food, the ignorance of which fact lies at the heart of King Lear’s horrendous third act, here emerges as a matter of course. Whatever Orlando’s problems, his basic ethical relationship to Adam is not one of them. His Levinasian responsibility to his faithful servant is instinctive.
While Orlando searches through the forest, Duke Senior’s men prepare their meal of fruits on the grass, while Duke Senior and Jaques continue to prepare the audience by trading in food metaphors. Jaques, relating his encounter with Touchstone, extends the melancholic emptying of the culinary as a means to skeptical knowledge or community. Quoting Touchstone’s own melancholic comment, “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,” Jaques describes how he “did laugh sans intermission” to hear the fool “thus moral on the time” (2.7.26-32). While it’s true that Touchstone’s comment is a cliché, it is a cliché Shakespeare takes seriously in King Lear, where “ripeness is all.”19 Jaques goes on to describe Touchstone’s brain as “dry as the remainder biscuit/ After a voyage,” whose observations he “vents in mangled forms” (2.7.39-42). The image of a brain as a cracker leached of all taste and nutrition, chewed up and spat out into discourse, indicates that for Jaques, culinary epistemology is a dead end: the more like food this fool becomes, the less nutritious his language, and the less available he is to the dynamics of relationship.20 Jaques’s derision suggests a contrast between Orlando’s Levinasian approach, which in its naiveté may risk insufficient skepticism, and a melancholic approach so skeptical as to risk corrosion. Jaques’s readiness to empty out the meanings of eating as if draining an egg proves as significant a challenge to the possibilities of hospitality and fellowship as Oliver’s denial of his own responsibilities to others.
Orlando bursts into the clearing, sword drawn, just as the lords are sitting down to eat. In Lodge, Rosader, the Orlando character, enters hospitably and gives a nice speech, just as Orlando does not. By contrast, Orlando demands the cessation of the meal even before it has begun:
| ORLANDO: | Forbear, and eat no more! |
| JAQUES: | Why, I have ate none yet. |
| ORLANDO: | Nor shalt not till necessity be served … But forbear, I say! He dies that touches any of this fruit. (2.7.88-99) |
Jaques’s deadpan response to Orlando’s violent expostulation again characteristically empties the food of its meaning: “Why are you getting upset? We aren’t even eating! You think you’ve interrupted a meal, but you’ve only interrupted the prelude to one.” Duke Senior, however, responds differently, immediately engaging with Orlando in a debate about hospitality and host-guest relations that challenges Orlando to a profound ethical beckoning:
| DUKE SENIOR: | What would you have? Your gentleness shall force More than your force move us to gentleness. |
| ORLANDO: | I almost die for food—and let me have it. |
| DUKE SENIOR: | Sit down and feed and welcome to our table. (103-106) |
Here, finally, is commensality unadulterated, or what Levinas calls, quoting Isaiah, “the openness, not only of one’s pocketbook, but of the doors of one’s home, a ‘sharing of your bread with the famished,’ a ‘welcoming of the wretched into your house’” (OB 74). If Rosalind opened her purse to feed Celia, Duke Senior opens his proverbial home to Orlando and Adam. Helen Gardner writes that the scene epitomizes “love and companionship, sweet society,” a sentiment echoed by John Mahon, for whom “the action in the scene is an icon of communion and brotherhood.”21 For Marcia McDonald, the scene “depict[s] hospitality—the sharing of one’s material possessions, especially food, with one’s neighbors—as the key to social harmony.”22
The Biblical resonances in Orlando’s injunction—the whole play, as Russell Fraser has argued, is in dialogue with the book of Genesis—appear to underscore this harmonious intertwining. In wearing “the countenance of stern commandment” and forbidding an onstage fruit (which, as Michael Dobson argues, is almost always staged as an apple) Orlando of course attempts to play the part of God, only to be swiftly corrected.23 First, Orlando thinks the fruit is forbidden to him, and thus attempts to forbid it for others. In a reversal of Genesis 3, he quickly learns that the fruit is forbidden only to those who are inhuman, who act like savages. Knowledge—of gentility, civility, commensality—is not the result of eating the fruit, but the prerequisite for obtaining it. Instead of offering knowledge and death, or a knowledge that results in death, the fruit offers commensality and life, a felix culpa without the culpa. In revising his errant understanding of the forest meal, Orlando also revises his deific role, but instead, “like a doe,” goes to find his fawn (AL 2.7.128). He is transformed, in other words, from God to Eve, feeding his Adam the now permitted fruit. What better way to dismiss “pyrrhonist anxieties” than by rewriting the fall to offer a recuperative relation between knowledge and eating? It is Amiens’s banquet we find here, not that of Jaques’s empty eggs. These metaphorics come as close as Shakespeare gets to suggesting that Arden, or certain aspects of Arden, might approximate a prelapsarian golden age.
The banquet forms the resolution for Orlando’s trajectory of the first two acts. He begins in a tragic commensality, eating with the wrong people—the servants—and eating like an animal, which is by definition a creature sans commensality. By the end of act 2, Orlando has found his place at the table—he is eating with his peers, learning proper table manners, and taking the mantle of his lost father upon him. The first two acts of As You Like It are, from Orlando’s perspective at least, about eating one’s way back to the father.24
Inherent in Orlando’s trajectory, however, is a kind of parthenogenesis—literally, a Genesis without women, in which Orlando can play both God and Eve. If commensality includes, it also excludes. The fusion of the commensal and the convivial we find here appears to come at a cost, and that cost is women. In the scene’s “liturgy of male utopia,” as Peter Erickson argues, “The men take over the traditional female prerogative of maternal nurturance,” with the ultimate effect that a play that appears to be about female androgyny and independence becomes instead “a defensive action against female power.”25 This defensiveness develops most clearly in matters of hospitality and feeding, those realms most closely associated with women. That the world of men, and only the world of men, can achieve commensality suggests, by contrast, that including women at the table would apparently induce violence—not against the women but against the men. When Rosalind and Celia joke, in Act 3 scene 2, about the secret identity of the writer who keeps posting his terrible sonnets on trees throughout the forest, Celia tells Rosalind that by drinking her tidings she “may put a man in [her] belly” (3.2.198). Rosalind’s abilities to engender and to devour emerge from the same metaphorics. If she were invited to dinner, flashing her sharp teeth, she might well put a man in her belly, as a hungry lioness attempts to do to Oliver late in the play. Humans are the only primate that shares food while sitting around in a circle, exposing our teeth. The bio-archaeologist Martin Jones points out “at some point, our own ancestors turned those danger signals around and transformed them into the very essence of conviviality that defines humanity.”26 Yet that transformation is always in process and incomplete—no matter the cultural barriers around cannibalism, teeth can still tear human flesh.27 Inviting a woman to join the feast threatens to turn commensality into carnage. When Duke Senior announces, “Here we feel not the penalty of Adam” (2.1.5), critics take the penalty of Adam to mean seasonality, labor, language, mortality.28 But from the perspective of the forest banquet, the penalty of Adam is Eve.
As You Like It thus turns out to have more in common with Titus Andronicus than one would hope: both attempt to deal with the invented problem of the vagina dentata by structuring a meal to defuse the threat.29 The difference between the tragedy and the comedy isn’t the philosophical issues at stake, but rather the solutions to those issues. Cannibal banquet? No thanks, I’ll have the fruit cup. But I’ll eat it down here in my man cave with just the guys.
Does this analysis of positive commensality simply relocate us within the well-known argument about Shakespearean comedy, that it temporarily removes the strictures of patriarchy only to reinstate them at the close of the play? Perhaps, but another, more recuperative possibility, emerges from a comparison between this scene and Montaigne’s writings about food in “Of Experience.” Montaigne’s emphasis on what it means to truly inhabit one’s own body suggests that perhaps the exclusion of women at the forest banquet, rather than build a wall between the genders, instead provides a training ground for men to learn civility, so that they can behave better toward the opposite sex—not to bite, but to offer and accept food.
Part II.
“Of Experience,” the last essay in Montaigne’s three-volume Essais, addresses the question of what it means to know oneself, or indeed to know anything at all, through the realm of bodily and practical experience. Strikingly, Montaigne devotes almost a quarter of “Of Experience” to discussions of food. After opening sections that meditate, in language laced with culinary puns, upon the relationship between experience and reason, habit, opinion, and other sources of knowledge, he turns, with the barest flicker of a transition, to his behavior at meals. “I make little choice at table, and attack the first and nearest thing,” he informs us, in an apt description of the apparent structure of his wide-ranging essay.30 There follow several pages of meticulous description of his eating habits, which oscillate unpredictably from apparently minor details (he prefers bread without salt) to major ethical claims, such as the importance of helping the poor (844).31 The insights are both culinary—what the narrator likes to eat—and commensal—how or with whom he eats. Without letting go of his usual penchant for ironic deflation—“Long sessions at table annoy me,” he reports dryly—Montaigne communicates strongly the importance of commensal relationships among people who dine together (844). “We should not so much consider what we eat as with whom we eat,” he maintains, capping the sentiment with a paraphrased proverb: “There is no preparation so sweet to me, no sauce so appetizing, as that which is derived from society” (846). “The act of eating,” writes Michel Jeanneret of this passage, “does not only belong to the world of instinct, it also helps to build social relations.”32 The discussion of commensal eating segues, as if to underscore its importance, into an analysis of Socrates’s and Plato’s attitudes toward eating and the body.
Montaigne’s attitudes toward food in the Essais run the gamut from scorn to veneration. In “Of Presumption,” he pokes fun at himself for not knowing cabbages from lettuces or the role of leaven in bread. “[I]f you give me all the equipment of a kitchen,” he laments, “I shall starve” (495). Christian Coulon writes drily of this passage, “One must gather from the evidence that Montaigne was incapable of boiling an egg.”33 In “Of the Vanity of Words,” Montaigne famously relates a discussion with an unnamed Italian who had served as chief steward to Cardinal Caraffa. “I asked him about his job,” writes Montaigne, “and he replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling [science de la gueule], delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he had been expounding some great point of theology” (222). While at first glance we might take this passage as a critique of taking gastronomy too seriously, Coulon points out that the historical context of the scene transforms our understanding of it, both because the Roman papacy was legendary for its gluttony, extravagance, and obsession with culinary vanity; and because Caraffa himself was “known for his cruelty, licentiousness, and libertine sprit.”34 Thus Montaigne’s apparent attack on la “science de la gueule” is really an attack on hypocrisy—that Caraffa’s steward would hold forth on the correct way to serve a salad while showing cruelty to the people eating it is as insulting to Montaigne as the French who deride Tupinambá cannibalism while massacring Protestant Huguenots in “Of the Cannibals.”35
Montaigne’s emphasis on eating in “Of Experience” is therefore not to be read as disingenuous or merely humorous, but rather as a fundamental way of exploring how knowledge derives from body as well as mind. The central question that the prevalence of food in the essay raises is why eating is so important to the issue of experiential knowledge. Without saying so directly, Montaigne implies that eating is one of the chief ways in which we know ourselves; he develops, as Victoria Kahn puts it, an “epistemology of taste.”36 Throughout the Essais and especially in “Of Experience,” Montaigne uses the body—its facts, demands, and habits—to establish an ethics of knowledge at once skeptical and generative. In exploring and documenting our own materiality—especially through practices of eating and defecating, since these actions expose us at our most material—we resist most effectively the ideology of abstract perfection that Montaigne finds so societally destructive in “Of the Cannibals,” among many other essays. For Jules Brody, for example, the facts of eating form a kind of resistance to the risks of homogeonizing ideologies, an affirmation of the fundamental “condition mixte” of the heterogeneous human.37 All these mundane actions of eating and living add up to what Montaigne refers to as “faire bien l’homme,” or in both Florio’s and Frame’s translations, “to play the man well.” “There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate,” he writes (and here I use Frame’s translation, while noting that Florio italicizes the sentence to indicate a sententious phrase), “as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being” (852).38 To play the human well—literally, to make the man—is to inhabit most fully the matter of humanity. Playing the human is in turn inextricable from the matter of eating and tasting. “Taste applies first of all to sensible knowledge,” writes Marc Foglia of this passage, “but it also includes experience and knowledge in all their forms. To play the human well involves drawing upon this function of taste, of which pleasure is an essential trait.”39
Perhaps it is counter-intuitive to assert that in playing we most become ourselves. We might assume, as did the anti-theatrical English Puritans, that self-knowledge and playing are opposed. For Montaigne, by contrast, to “play the man well” is to construct the human from within: to accept, with as little fanfare as possible, the gift of being. This notion of course differs from professional Elizabethan acting, in which one often (though not always) plays not-oneself. But it is not so different, especially if we consider Montaigne’s statement in relation to As You Like It, a play in which characters frequently “play the man” and in so doing, attempt to play themselves.
Part III.
Let’s return to the banquet scene in As You Like It, examining it this time from the Montaignean perspective of “faire bien l’homme.” The encounter is marked by various modes of performing maleness and humanness, and at the risk of being overly schematic, it seems to me that each of the major characters in the scene embodies a different clause in Montaigne’s insightful sentence. Orlando feels he must play the part of the warrior—a part that does not sit easily with him, and which he quickly revises when countered by the Duke’s performance of hospitable humanity. The Duke’s response to Orlando’s incivility, at once both instinctive and measured, encapsulates precisely Montaigne’s idea that “There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly.”40 Nobility, as expressed in the Duke’s welcome, is not as much innate—the Duke’s brother has no such gene—as it is, simply, legitimate, in the sense that the Duke performs the civilizing intersection of law and custom. Meanwhile, Orlando’s about-face suggests, as Montaigne does, that there is “no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”41 Throughout the first half of the play, Orlando oscillates between physical aggression (at his brother, at Charles the Wrestler) and courtliness.42 To produce a harmonic convergence between the two in which the former ultimately gives way to the latter, is his great project—as the second half of the play, in which he plays himself opposite Rosalind’s gender-bending performance as Ganymede, makes clear. And this project’s resolution (which I would say occurs in the offstage scene in act 4 when Orlando rescues Oliver from the snake and lioness) makes him capable of becoming a worthy husband to Rosalind. It is the experience of hospitality and the shared meal that begins Orlando’s transformation into a man who can play himself “well and properly.” As Peter Holbrook writes, “[R]eading Montaigne and Shakespeare together is to be returned to a very simple, and a practical, question, a question ultimately of an existential kind … how am I to live as myself and not as someone else?”43 As You Like It, with all of its subterfuges and disguising, asks the same existential question. And what it means to play oneself well becomes inseparable from what it means to eat well, and to treat others well at table. The route to knowledge of the other goes through the gullet.
What then of the last clause in Montaigne’s sentence, that “the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being” (852)? As Fred Parker and others have argued, Shakespeare often takes Montaigne’s skepticism into a darker register, resisting the “precious sense of integration” to which Montaigne often clings.44 He does so here in the character of Jaques. Jaques, the quintessential skeptic, would seem the appropriate mouthpiece for Montaignean skepticism in As You Like It. But he is more of a “condition mixte,” and not quite in the laudatory way Montaigne often means. As he says derisively of Touchstone, Jaques himself is “crammed with observation, which he vents in mangled forms” (2.7.42). On the one hand, he provides the ironic deflation for Orlando’s aggression—when Orlando threatens “forbear, and eat no more,” Jaques responds, usually with an appropriate bit of stage business, “Why, I have ate none yet” (2.7.89). And earlier, Jaques expostulates, “as I do live by food,” thereby acknowledging that we do live by food, and from it, and through it. On the other hand, Jaques also embodies the last part of Montaigne’s sentence: he is the man who “despises his being,” whose melancholy unintentionally interferes with his ability to grasp the material grounds of self-knowledge. In the al fresco banquet, the part Jaques performs is the part of the skeptic-melancholic, culminating in the play’s best-known lines: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.140). But rather than expand upon Montaigne’s notion of “faire bien l’homme” in his speech, Jaques makes the opposite claim. For Jaques, people are “merely” players. For Montaigne, it is the fact that they are players that rescues people from mereness. To play oneself fully and appropriately is to embrace aliveness. To despise this condition is to become merely alive—so ill with this “barbarous malady” that one might as well be dead. In Jaques’s conception, our acting is rote, hitting the stereotypical moments of a life. For Montaigne, it is these mundane features of existence that allow us to traduce meaning.
Jaques’s “seven ages” speech itself is, if not about eating per se, then about hunger. Every one of the seven ages is marked by either appetite or the nauseous rejection of appetite: the “puking” babe, the “unwilling” snail-like schoolboy, the lover with his furnace-like sighs, the soldier who “seeks” reputation “in the canon’s mouth,” the justice with his belly full of capon, the pantaloon yearning for youth, and finally the second childhood of old age, whose most notable quality is the disappearance of appetite: “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.167). Hunger, Jaques suggests, is the engine of life, and its disappearance marks life’s end. But Jaques himself struggles with appetite throughout the play, sucking melancholy at one moment while declaiming against the appetite that causes the death of deer at another. Jaques is a careful, even a crammed observer of matter and materiality—he is, as Duke Senior says, “full of matter” when he “moralizes [a] spectacle (2.2.69, 44). But he translates materiality into the philosophical rather than letting philosophy be governed by the material; he makes the moral matter rather than making matter be the moral. This trouble with matter is, of course, a trouble he shares with Hamlet, another ambivalent and melancholic foil to Montaigne. As You Like It is a Montaignean play, and Jaques at times functions as the mouthpiece for the Montaigne of “Of Experience,” but he is ultimately less a Montaignean character than a cautionary tale about the misapplication of Montaignean philosophy.
The al fresco banquet of As You Like It uncovers a moment in which food, eating, and hospitality force all characters involved to play themselves rather than to play whatever role they feel themselves bound to play. The scene is an exercise in playing well and properly, as opposed to the more troubled, straitened playing of the first act, and it sets the stage (so to speak) for the experiments in playing that follow. The scene constitutes not so much a ripping away or reducing to basics, as in King Lear’s hovel, but a calling to an honest relation between actor and act. This relationship is embodied in the final moments of the banquet, where after Jaques’s haunting meditation upon old age, Orlando arrives bearing Adam tenderly on his back. Montaigne closes “Of Experience” with the comment that “old age needs to be treated a little more tenderly” (857). This is what the combination of Jaques’s speech, the song that follows it, “Blow Blow thou winter wind,” and Orlando’s action—the master carrying the servant upon his shoulders, to feed him in a Levinasian gesture from his own plate—achieves. The Duke’s first word upon Orlando’s arrival is “Welcome,” and the healing performance of the luncheon commences.
Notes
1 I wish to thank Lars Engle, for inspiring and commenting upon the first iteration of this essay; audiences at the Shakespeare Association of America (2011), Modern Language Association (2013), “Banquets and Borders in Language and Literature” at the University of Western Illinois (2013), and “Food, Citizenship, and the Environment” at Laurentian University (2015), where portions of the argument were first presented; and my students at York University, who have taught me a great deal about eating in As You Like It.
2 Plato, “Phaedo,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 47, 64d.
3 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2008), 154.
4 For a somewhat different and more standard account of the difference between these terms, see Jordan Rosenblum, Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. On the complexity of commensality as a concept, see especially Claude Grignon, “Commensality and Social Morphology: An Essay of Typology,” in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Berg Publishers, 2001), 23-33; Penny Van Esterik, “Care, Caregiving and Caretakers,” Food and Nutrition Bulletin 16.4 (n.d.): 378-388.
5 On Levinas and eating, see especially David B. Goldstein, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating,” Gastronomica 10.3 (Summer 2010): 34-44; Angela Hirst, “Levinas Separates the (hu)man from the Non(hu)man, Using Hunger, Enjoyment and Anxiety to Illuminate Their Relationship,” Cosmos and History 3.1 (2007): 159-190; Marc-Alain Ouaknin, “Grand Est Le Manger!,” Le Magazine Littéraire 419 (April 2003): 45-47.
6 For an examination of Descartes in relation to Levinasian skepticism, see Jan de Greef, “Skepticism and Reason,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 173.
7 Joshua W. Clegg and Brent D. Slife, “Epistemology and the Hither Side: A Levinasian Account of Relational Knowing,” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 7.1-2 (June 2005): 68.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, ed. Jacques Rolland, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford University Press, 2003), 68. For an extended discussion of Levinas and nausea, see Goldstein, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating,” 35-36.
9 Paul Yachnin, “Eating Montaigne,” in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 158.
10 Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 77. My focus here upon how As You Like It considers whether we may know the other without ingesting it into the self bears philosophical similarities with Watson’s exploration of similitude in the play.
11 David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36.
12 See for example Lars Engle, “Sovereign Cruelty in Montaigne and King Lear,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (2006): 119-139; Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism, and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Yachnin, “Eating Montaigne.”
13 John Mahon, “‘For Now We Sit to Chat as Well as Eat’: Conviviality and Conflict in Shakespeare’s Meals,” in Fanned and Winnowed Opinions: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John Mahon and Thomas Pendleton (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 237.
14 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre, 3rd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006) 1.1.11-18. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
15 Luke 15:16, Geneva Bible. Qtd in Ibid., 151, n. 5.
16 On the deer scenes in the play, see especially Edward I. Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stuart Daley, “To Moralize a Spectacle: As You Like It Act 2, Scene 1,” Philological Quarterly 65 (1986): 147-169; Chris Fitter, “The Slain Deer and Political Imperium: As You like It and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98 (1999): 193-218; and Claus Uhlig, “‘The Sobbing Deer’: As You Like It, II.i.21-66 and the Historical Context,” Renaissance Drama 3 (1970): 79-109.
17 Robert N. Watson, “As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness,” Shakespeare Studies 56 (2003): 81.
18 Such imagery, it should nevertheless be noted, is apportioned both to the next scene, when Orlando says of Duke Senior’s first speech, “You touched my vein at first” (2.7.95), and to the earlier deer-hunting scene, with Jaques’ cannibalistic invocation of the hunted deer as those “fat and greasy citizens” of Arden (2.1.55).
19 See Dusinberre’s note on the passage in the Arden edition of the play.
20 In her discussion of the line, Dusinberre reads “mangled forms” as a printing metaphor, but the obvious meaning is “chewed up.”
21 Mahon, “For Now We Sit to Chat,” 243.
22 Marcia McDonald, “The Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Stage in the Late 1590s,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 131. Not all commentators trust the apparent fellow-feeling of the scene. In Howard Cole’s sour but not unjustified view, the passage “couche[s] valid values in a mechanical exchange of flat parallelisms and imagery reminiscent of the mindless sentimentality of II. i.” Howard C. Cole, “The Moral Vision of As You Like It,” College Literature 3 (1976): 24.
23 Michael Dobson, “‘His Banquet Is Prepared’: Onstage Food and the Permeability of Time in Shakespearean Performance,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 145 (2009): 68-73.
24 I thank David Riggs for helping me to see this point.
25 Peter Erickson, “Sexual Politics and the Social Structure in As You like It,” The Massachusetts Review 23.1 (Spring 1982): 75, 82.
26 Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.
27 See Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 78 for another version of this argument.
28 See, for example, Andrew Barnaby, “The Political Conscious of Shakespeare’s As You like It,” Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 384-385; Stuart Daley, “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 301-302; Richard Knowles, “Myth and Type in As You Like It,” ELH 33 (1966): 11; Watson, “As You Liken It,” 81.
29 Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 292.
30 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford University Press, 1958), 843. Unless otherwise noted, all further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
31 An avowedly Levinasian idea, of which more could be said.
32 Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquet and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago and Cambridge: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 28.
33 Christian Coulon, La table de Montaigne (Paris: Arléa, 2009), 37. This and all subsequent translations of quotations from this text are my own.
34 Ibid., 45.
35 Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 52, 64.
36 Victoria Kahn, “The Sense of Taste in Montaigne’s Essais,” MLN 95 (1980): 1270.
37 Qtd. in John O’Brien, “At Montaigne’s Table,” French Studies 54 (2000): 1. O’Brien provides a useful summary of recent critical reflections on food in “Of Experience.”
38 Florio: “There is nothing so goodly, so faire, and so lawfull, as to play the man well and duely; Nor Science so hard and difficult as to know how to live this life well. And of all the infirmities we have the most savage is to despise our being.” Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), 661.
Montaigne’s original: “Il n’est rien si beau et legitime que de faire bien l’homme et deuement, ny science si ardue que de bien et naturellement sçavoir vivre cette vie; et de nos maladies la plus sauvage c’est mespriser nostre estre.”
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais ed. P. Villey and Verdun L Saulnier, vol. 3 (Chicago: The Montaigne Project), 1110, accessed April 29, 2015, http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:4:12.montaigne.
39 Marc Foglia, “Existe-t-Il Un Style Sceptique ? Écriture et Pensée Du Rebond Chez Montaigne” (l’écriture philosophique, University of Reims, France, 2005), http://www.e-litterature.net/publier2/spip/spip.php?page=ancientxt&cel=280&repert=marc&titre=reims&num=787&id_auteur=8&crit=Foglia, translation mine.
40 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 852.
41 Ibid. 852.
42 Cf. Maurice Hunt, who writes, “The ability to refrain from forms of physical violence enters into any consideration of whether Orlando in As You Like It is an Elizabethan gentleman.” Shakespeare’s As You Like It: Late Elizabethan Culture and Literary Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117.
43 Peter Holbrook, “Introduction: Special Section: Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited,” ed. Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop, Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (November 27, 2006): 13.
44 Qtd. in Engle, “Sovereign Cruelty,” 135.