Desdemona’s Appetite Robert Appelbaum (Malmö University, Sweden)
THE IDEA FOR this essay came from a discovery I made when I first began researching food practices in the early modern period. I was looking at Shakespeare’s references to eating and drinking, and I found that Shakespeare sometimes used the word appetite as a trope for love (Appelbaum 2006, 224-35). But when he did that, he had a consistent idea in mind. Appetite is different from love; and love experienced as if it were an appetite is not love at all but rather something less impressive. Here is an example, from Twelfth Night, Orsino speaking. There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart So big, to hold so much. They lack retention. Alas, their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt. But mine is all as hungry as the sea, And can digest as much (2.4.91-99). Now we may well think that what Orsino is saying is foolish, dishonest, and misogynist. But the comparison is a regularly devised trope, which is consistent across most of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Love is big. The appetite is small. Love is a big, endless, unsatisfiable passion. The appetite is easily satisfied. It can lead to cloying and revulsion. And so when someone experiences a love that can lead to surfeit, cloying and
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