"Like a cook, placing the dishes" Performance of “Eating” Practices in Titus Andronicus

In recent years, Shakespearean scholars have demonstrated that Titus Andronicus was and is still able to work on stage and on a popular level. They have shown how it originates from the successful revenge tragedy of late sixteenth-century England and Europe and from a popular culture able to understand and give (new) values to the empty but violent rhetoric of the play thanks to recognizable contemporary popular discourses and cultural practices on/of the human body that visibly interfere with the play-text. In line with recent studies on this topic, I will interrogate Titus Andronicus’ uses of eating and cooking metaphors and practices. I argue that they originated in the rhetoric of the revenge tragedy, but that they were also re signified thanks to the intersection of classical knowledge, popular imagination and discourses on food and eating practices, which mainly involved the human body and its by-products. Concerns and topics of a popular culture that, as Peter Burke reminds us, was “everyone’s culture”.