The title of Matt Williamson's Hunger, Appetite and the Politics of the Renaissance Stage aptly summarizes the book's focus, which reviews both broad and nuanced topics around the way these two concepts—hunger and appetite—operate in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays to reflect socioeconomic shifts and conflicts of the early modern era. Subjects range from the role of servants and women vis-à-vis restricted food access to the radical implications of hunger as a precursor to revolt. Williamson dissects plays by, among others, Lyly, Chapman, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, and Shakespeare, for evidence of broader struggles distinct from such physiological drives. Extensive consideration is given to understanding the difference between the demands of hunger on the body as opposed to appetite cravings and what each represents when embodied in stage action. Marxist perspectives imbue Williamson's critique through a focus on characters of different classes who are shown to represent broader class conflicts. Food allows Williamson to analyze the plays to source evidence of anxieties over access to food during the transition from feudal to capitalist economies.

I confess part of my reaction to the book is based on how the title misled me, although I could be responsible for looking for something more focused on stagecraft, whereas Williamson's concerns are with hunger and appetite as political subjects; theater functions in his analysis more as an institutionalized space for ideological reflection. Once I allowed myself to follow his argument about the ways hunger and appetite display a variety of social disruptions, I was drawn to the range of topics covered, including religious, economic, and class structures, staged for anxious playgoers who themselves may be experiencing hunger. Relatedly, the evolving function of feasting and fasting as sacred communal experiences shifts to the world of the playhouse. Williamson finds evidence in prologues and epilogues to argue for a contemporary awareness of the connection between food and theatrical consumption as means for uniting community.

Williamson's excellently researched and sourced work expands a reading of these plays and excavates the hierarchical relationships driven by hunger. Sixteenth-century England's inflation and resulting shifts in class structures are interrogated using John Lyly's Campaspe, for example, which gives focus to lower-class resentments as embodied in the desires of the servingmen. Compellingly, Williamson situates the performance of Lyly's play in the exclusive private playhouse and court, to suggest coy dramaturgic strategies for critiquing elites, who were increasingly seen as controlling access to food while often conspicuously consuming it. With Campaspe and Philip Massinger's The Unnatural Combat, Williamson considers the onstage feast in performance. I would have liked more focus on the staging of such spectacles, but the metonymy of the stage life of food is less a focus in this study than is an investigation of the political dynamics of what it means for characters to crave, need, or reject food.

Hunger, appetite, and their connection to sexual desire in early modern drama are also examined in relation to a range of gender dynamics. Women characters, such as Anne in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, are seen embracing hunger as a way to perform (both in the world of the play as well as to those in the playhouse) the increasing domestication of women. Along with religious, class, and gender issues, the lens of colonialism allows for an exploration of excess and starvation in perhaps my favorite chapter, “Imperial Appetites,” which focuses on tales of the New World as a place not only of richness but of loss. The most extreme result of hunger—cannibalism—is contextualized using contemporary explorer tales and lesser-known plays like The Sea Voyage by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.

Williamson's exacting examination of hunger and appetite on the early modern stage offers scholars a thoroughly researched and insightful resource. While theater scholars might seek a more visually explicit and playful reading of some of the works (comedic and camp elements are missed), Hunger, Appetite and the Politics of the Renaissance Stage contributes a sophisticated context for understanding the cultural forces that animate an anxious period of socioeconomic change.