Food Gifts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England

Abstract

Shakespeare was intrigued by gifts and their consequences. So it is not surprising that in Richard III he develops an incident described in Thomas More's text of the same name. In the play, Shakespeare has Richard (then Lord Protector) storm into a meeting at which the duke of Buckingham, Lord Hastings, John Morton bishop of Ely, and others are present. Hastings is about to become a spectacular victim of Richard's plot to seize the throne. But before he begins the substance of his denunciation Richard needs to conspire with Buckingham and, apparently as a further diversionary ruse to distract one of the upright councillors, he asks the bishop of Ely for some strawberries that he has seen in Morton's Holborn garden. The request seems odd: even odder is the celerity with which Morton leaves the tense scene in front of him to order a servant to Holborn. ‘Marry’, he says in Shakespeare's text, ‘and will, my lord, with all my heart’.1 More's original narrative makes no assumption that Morton leaves the room, but places equal emphasis on his anxiety to please Richard. Since the bishop was probably already implicated in plotting against the Protector, the strawberries should perhaps be seen as a gesture cloaking deception by both participants to the exchange.2 The story throws a fascinating light upon the gift culture of sixteenth-century England. The strawberries are a characteristic food gift, their seasonal rarity lending them a certain fragile status and value. Their significance, however, is symbolic: in this case expressing the absolute right of a ruler to ask and obligation of the subject to obey. But they are also dumb witnesses of the abuse of the gift, which has not been offered freely by the giver. Here the language of the gift, uncontrolled by the giver and abused by the recipient, has been perverted. The strawberries, one must presume, remained uneaten. They become one element in Morton's alienation, and his subsequent flight to Henry Tudor. The apparently trivial process of asking and receiving would also have resonated with contemporary audiences attuned to reading significant messages about social and political obligations through the language of the gift.