Department of English

• Monday, March 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are excited to welcome Marissa Nicosia (The Pennsylvania State University – Abington College) for a talk titled: “Shakespeare in the Kitchen: Culinary Metaphor, Cookbooks, and Recipe Recreation.” Professor Nicosia writes:

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that William Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. But Shakespeare’s works do more than index his food culture. By using an embodied humanities research method—cooking—to investigate Shakespeare’s poems and plays through and alongside manuscript and printed recipe books, I demonstrate that references to food in Shakespeare’s works are more than mere metaphor. My talk juxtaposes a recipe for strawberry preserves from UPenn Ms. Codex 823 and Desdemona’s strawberry-spotted handkerchief in Othello. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, this handkerchief seems like the only remedy for Othello’s jealous rage. Yet recipes for strawberry preserves advertise their potential to calm feverish anger if they are prepared with the correct ingredients. I propose that if we consider the specifics of the early modern recipe—if we simmer strawberries with honey instead of sugar—we can gain new insights into the geohumoral logic of Shakespeare’s tragedy and read the handkerchief’s stitched strawberries as part of culinary and medicinal culture.

Marissa Nicosia is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University – Abington College and is the author of Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is also an editor, with Emma Depledge and John S. Garrison, of Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2020) and, with John S. Garrison, of Renaissance Futures, a special volume of Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2019). She runs the public history website Cooking in the Archives and is currently finishing a book entitled Shakespeare in the Kitchen, which will (most likely) be published in late 2025.