Abstract
Fat figures prominently in a number of William Shakespeare’s plays, but most notably in the Henry IV plays I will consider here. That fat is not a self-evident natural bodily category for Shakespeare is apparent in the multiple and even conflicting ways he represents it. Characters see the same fat body of Falstaff in strikingly different and even opposing ways. For the lower-class figures of the tavern world, Falstaff’s fat body is, for the most part, a sign of his greatness and his great generosity and wit. For Hal, who creates a new bodily style to secure his newly achieved authority, the same fat body is a sign of Falstaff’s essential lowliness, excessive appetite, and innate selfishness. In short, fatness represents everything that Hal must suppress if he is to assert his own privilege as a virtuous king.
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Notes
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 195–205.
Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 203–4.
see Patricia A. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 21–2.
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See also Coppelia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Ldentity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 72.
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Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 152.
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Karl Siegfried Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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© 2008 Elena Levy-Navarro
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Levy-Navarro, E. (2008). Lean and Mean: Shakespeare’s Criticism of Thin Privilege. In: The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610439_4
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