Wendy Wall

Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England

In a famous moment on the early modern English stage, the title character of John Webster’s violent play, The Duchess of Malfi , dies. Having been tortured for her clandestine marriage to her steward, the Duchess stages her farewell by beseeching her servant and friend Cariola to oversee her children’s care: “I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy / Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl / Say her prayers, ere she sleep.” 2 Even critics who assess the Duchess’s actions differently tend to agree that nothing became the Duchess’s life like the leaving it: she is lauded as rising to the stature of a tragic hero in her last scene. Yet, the ideological stakes of her heroism are hotly debated. What does it mean for a “hero” to bid farewell in these terms? How are audiences to understand a character who is prepared to die “like a prince” (3.2.70– 71) but who concerns herself, at this momentous occasion, with administering homey remedies to her children? 3 It is to the Duchess’s

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen

Wendy Wall’s Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen begins with the question, “why were recipes so popular in early modern England?” (xii). Drawing upon a remarkable archive of print and manuscript sources, Wall answers this question by theorizing the recipe as not only a repository of domestic knowledge but also as a site where epistemological and ontological questions could be negotiated. In Wall’s account, recipes become thinking machines: texts that, through the intersection of their conventional generic features and the domestic practices that they describe, allow for the theoretical interrogation of fundamental concepts such as food, writing, taste, nature, letters, matter, and knowledge. Recipes are founded on the “transformation of natural elements into ‘made’ worlds— through labor, contrivance, artifice, techne” (3). Recipes become, therefore, ideal texts for examining the kinds of questions that have traditionally been important, although in different ways, to literary scholars and historians of science. Beginning with a theoretical and historical introduction, Recipes for Thought is thereafter organized into five chapters, each defined by a central problem that the recipe addresses, such as taste, knowledge, or time. The first two chapters focus on recipes in print and tell a story of historical change in the recipe as a genre and in how recipe books address their readers. Chapter 1, “Taste Acts,” examines the preliminary matter of printed recipe books between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Books in the earlier

De-generation: Editions, Offspring, and Romeo and Juliet

In 1933 Ronald B. McKerrow lectured the British Academy in an ambitious attempt to rehabilitate eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare. Rather than dismissing these practitioners as quacks, McKerrow carefully outlined the assumptions and blindspots of their work. In doing so, he constructed a generational line of both editors and of texts, assessing work in part by looking to an editor’s grasp of textual lineage: did he or did he not understand the basic point that earlier, parent texts had authority that their belated textual children lacked? Speaking specifically about Edward Capell, who had labored to transcribe Shakespeare’s earliest quartos in preparation for his 1768 edition, McKerrow writes: Unfortunately having got together this magnificent collection of material for editing Shakespeare, Capell, did not know, any better than his predecessors, how to use it. That he was perfectly capable of working out the relationships of the texts seems obvious…. He saw quite clearly that editions tend to degenerate with each reprint, but he seems never to have drawn the inference that Johnson did, that readings in a late text which differed from those of an earlier one from which it had itself been printed could not possibly be of any authority.2