Hunger and History in Macbeth: Images of Food in The Tragedy

Food and hunger are not commonly associated with William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Only the banquet scene seems to spring out when glancing over the celebrated text as having importance and being related to food, and for good reason: what place does food, the necessity and uniter of family and friends have in a tale of nobles and deception but as a symbol of wealth and tool for plots? Food and hunger, when examined more closely, seem to play major symbolic roles within the piece; they not only epitomize the food-centric mindset of the masses during Shakespeare’s time (a mindset aptly reflected in the characters of the work) to make political commentary about the place of food and women at the heart of all of society, but also embody each character’s personal desires and ambitions; and expose, augment, and embody the central concept of Macbeth: that ambition, unchecked, leads to destruction of both one’s self and the world around them.

The want of food which permeated the subconscious of the English at the time of Shakespeare swirls in the back of the characters’ minds in Macbeth, cementing both food’s presence and importance as a symbol for the dominant theme of the play. In Shakespeare’s time,

Food, its abundance and consumption of it, seemed to gain the English a reputation… Eating, the skill of cooking, and the virtue of hospitality were highly regarded both at home and abroad…

Although “what moved the masses most in the societies of five or three hundred years ago… was, above all, hunger, and the need to relieve it through food…”, the nobles of Macbeth seem to be influenced by a similar fixation with food. What Shakespeare shows as the first display of Macbeth’s power, for example, is not his coronation, but the banquet he holds afterwards, and Macbeth becomes visibly wary of Macduff not after he misses the coronation but after Macduff “denies his person / at our great bidding”. Food thus holds symbolic importance to even kings, for whom food is no want. After all, “Eating well was more important than being rich, famous, or of high status -- conspicuous food consumption in fact stood as proof of all these attributes.” The feast was therefore the first material symbol of dominance: “the newly crowned Macbeth is anxious to consolidate his power… publicly by visibly defining it to his courtiers in terms of a formal banquet.” This phenomena is also emphasized in King James VI’s manual on kingship written for his son, the Basilikon Doron, where he says that, “as Kings vse oft to eate publickly, it is meete and honorable that ye also doe so, as well to eschew the opinion that yee loue not to haunt companie, which is one of the marks of a Tyrant”. In this sense, Macbeth expresses his first assertion of his ambition symbolically through food-centered celebration; but, he selfishly and paranoidically demands all of his new lords be present. His over-ambition for control however, results in destruction: all of the lords are thus present to see his episode with Banquo’s ghost, discounting his fitness to be king instead of asserting it.

In the early 1600s, when Macbeth was written and first performed, food was given such importance in part due to contemporary views about hunger and famine: “the failure of four successive harvests from 1594 to 1597 was the cause of a rise in prices dramatic even by the standards of the sixteenth century…”. This crisis resulted in two “early modern European food riots... in London in 1595...the most serious social crises of Shakespeare’s own lifetime.”, and most surely put a lasting connotation of the power of hunger not only in the mind of the bard, but of the people of England, no matter their class. Perhaps this is why Macduff and Malcolm, when listing what the latter lacks in 4.3, omits mention of gluttony - the subject is too sensitive, or implied to an individual 9:

Justice Verity, Temp’rance, Stableness,

Bounty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness,

Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude.

I have no relish of them... 

In fact, all Seven Deadly Sins are mentioned here except for gluttony 10--the sin must have therefore been consciously censored from this list, for the two’s minds are clearly filled with thoughts of food: Macduff remarks that Malcolm cannot possibly have “the vulture in him to devour so many women / as will to greatness dedicate themselves,” provoking a perverted image of eating; and Malcolm describes the extent of his vice in terms of fare: “my more having would be as a sauce / to make me hunger more…”. Such reference to food is common throughout the entirety of the play: Duncan speaks to Banquo: “I have begun to plant thee” and Banquo replies, “there, if I grow / the harvest is your own.” Macbeth remarks, after Duncan’s death, that his “ wine of life is drawn”; and even in the Thane of Cawdor’s famous soliloquy, he describes himself as having “supped full with horrors”. Seemingly, therefore, a present sense of hunger and fear of famine infects the character’s minds to manifest in the language of their views of power (as with Macbeth), ideals (as with Malcolm and Macduff), and within lives in general.

Food also allows Macbeth to make a political statement concerning women and their position of influence around the preparation of meals and both literal and symbolic hunger. Food is first introduced to Macbeth in Act I Scene Three, where the witches recount the following:

First Witch: Where hast thou been sister?

Second Witch: Killing swine. 

Third Witch: Sister, where thou?

First Witch: A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,

And mounch’d, and mounch’d, and mounch’d: ‘Give me,’ quoth I:

‘Aroynt three, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries. 

From a plot standpoint, this conversation, occurring before Macbeth and Banquo’s encounter with the sisters, indicates the witches’ malevolence and capacity for disruption.”  Food, however, enters the scene in the form of the first witch’s encounter with the sailor’s wife. While descriptors such as “rump-fed” and “ronyon” and the repetition of “mounch’d, and mounch’d, and mounch’d” seem to imply that this sailor’s wife is well-fed, the food that she eats - chestnuts - are the food of the utmost poor: in “the sixteenth century, we discover that ‘an infinity of people live on nothing else but this fruit’ the chestnut”. Her fare, along with her being a sailor’s wife, makes her gluttony somewhat ironic: the witch perhaps only “interprets the woman as fat because she herself is even poorer and crucially hungrier than the sailor’s wife.” The fact that the witch simply wanted food from the glutton may even make her a tragic character in this situation, and the accusation of the sailor’s wife of the beggar even being a witch only a coincidence. For, as Diane Purkiss asserts:

In shaping their stories of witchcraft, women focused on an encounter with the suspected women involving either an exchange, usually of food or food-related items, or a failed exchange of food, or sometimes merely a discussion about food… Food is therefore a constant theme in depositions of witchcraft. 

The sailor’s wife’s denial of the witch, centered around access to food, is the opposite to Macbeth’s banquet in Act 1 Scene 7, hosted to welcome the king Duncan into Inverness - a banquet that celebrates the recent victory in the war spurred by the treachery of the former Thane of Cawdor. While showing the effect of food throughout social classes as displayed in Macbeth, the banquet itself falls under further parallel: during “fantasies of abundant diabolical feasts” in “the devil’s Sabbath, food is more central to events than sex…”. Celebratory banquets for the rich contrast banquet revels for the poor witches, but the same fixation on food remains. Further into this parallel is Lady Macbeth, the hostess of the nobles’ banquet, and yet the poisoner of the occasion with her influence upon Macbeth’s mind. In fact, oftentimes, “when medieval men projected their hostility toward women into suspicion of what went on in the women’s quarters, they frequently spoke of the women’s control of food”. In fact, Lady Macbeth does take advantage of this responsibility she has over food: she drugs Duncan’s guards “with wine and wassail”, twisting her assigned task of hospitality to fit her ambitions.

The First Witch, Sailor’s Wife, and Lady Macbeth all seem to hold and cling to food as an object of high importance - whether that be demanding it (food) from other peasants, gorging oneself on pitiful scraps of it, or utilizing it to further one’s ambitions - for it is a woman’s main sphere of influence upon the lives of men in Shakespeare’s time period. While women may be the tenders and preparers of food and therefore the life-givers and nurturers to all of society, they also, then, have immense power for evil over the world. The capacity of evil which people (women in particular) are capable of performing is in no way inhibited by limits to their social influence--this restriction may even enhance the magnitude of the deed. Food is the method through which this concept is exemplified in Macbeth: the perceived “witch” by the sailor’s wife for food-related matters, and the actual treachery of Lady Macbeth expressed through food.

Macbeth’s ambition is his fatal flaw that eventually destroys him. However, he only is able to reach the crushing defeat through his ambition due to the influence of both the Witches and his wife, who both manipulate him through the use of food. “To ingest food is to make oneself vulnerable to its influence and to accidental or deliberate poisoning,” asserts Knowles 20, and while Macbeth may not physically ingest the Witches’ brew or his Wife’s poison, he ingests their ideas, which are just as potent as poison. The apparitions which inform Macbeth of his fate and therefore make him so arrogant as to believe himself invulnerable were conjured from the witches’ brew, and Lady Macbeth convinces the Lord of true manliness and devotion by saying she would rather have “pluck’d her nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed his brains out…”. This perversion of the maternal instinct turns the nurturance of food into destruction, violence, and death which creeps into Macbeth’s mind, as does the sayings of the beckoned apparitions.

Food also seems to symbolize Macbeth’s personal aspirations - the aforementioned parallels between literal and symbolic hunger. When Macbeth, agitated, longs for safety and security when plagued with nightmares, he does so in terms of eating meals in peace, for example, and he expresses his distress when he has “supped full with horrors”. Additionally,

“Food imagery accompanies almost every expression of passion in this play: repeatedly and insistently, characters turn to images of food and feeding to articulate their charged states of mind, reflecting the centrality of food-provision…”.

This is exemplified in the final scene, where Macbeth twice wishes the fate of famine upon others first, the encroaching army: “here let them lie, / Till famine and the ague eat them up.” and second, his own messenger: “Upon the next tree shall thou hang alive / Till famine cling thee.” These allusions reflect both his own ravenous hunger for more that cannot be fulfilled--for he is now trapped in his castle with no recourse - but also unchecked consumption (the ague, consumption of bodies by disease) - perhaps his symbolic route that led him to the present predicament, his greed for power and the pursuit of all of his ambitions, bloodlust unchecked. From food Macbeth’s ambitions rose, and to his hunger he will fall.

The prevalence of food and hunger within The Tragedy of Macbeth is immense, and focus upon it highlights not only political undertones--the dangerous and important presence of women in contemporary society - but also the central theme to the play about unchecked ambition leading to destruction. While the mindsets about food that actually existed in Shakespeare’s time visibly penetrated and permeated Macbeth, their usage serves to link the common (for its intended audience) phenomena and feeling of food shortages and starvation to the plight of the Lord Macbeth, struggling from gluttony for ambition.