‘Funeral Baked Meats’

摘要

This article argues that the cannibalistic connotations in ‘Hamlet’ may beinterpreted in the context of specific cultural anxieties relating to thepopular and problematic use of corpse medicine, or mumia. I begin byexploring how Shakespeare represents corpses throughout Hamlet in wayswhich reference food and culinary practices. By doing so, Shakespeare notonly emphasises the tragic objectification of the dead, but also links lifeand death inextricably to figurative and literal consumption. The essayproceeds to analyse the cannibalistic allusions in ‘Hamlet’ through the lensof the contemporary medical consumption of corpse medicine. While theuse of corpse medicine was semantically distinguished fromanthropophagy in early modern Europe, I argue that Shakespeare’sdepiction of man-eating in Hamlet forces his audience to confront theirown unsavoury distinctions between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’forms of cannibalism. Viewed through the lens of cannibal discourse,Hamlet’s language over the course of the tragedy takes on newsignificance as the prince displays profane hunger that seems tosimultaneously repel him and imbue him with a macabre vitality.Something is indeed ‘rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67), Shakespearesuggests, and the smell appears to be coming from the kitchen.