There is a general assumption that men and women operate very differently when it comes to friendships: whereas for women the focus is on emotional intimacy and support with a smaller number of friends, men tend to have more friends but their friendships are more transactional and based on shared activities and interests. Continue reading “Male friendship and food”
Tag: Shakespeare
From blog post to plate
Whilst my blog is grounded in cooking that I actually do, inspired by the plays, novels and poems I have read, I suspect that, for the vast majority of my readers, my blog provides them with reading matter (rather than with recipes). Continue reading “From blog post to plate”
Food and grief
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet imagines the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, and the death of their son Hamnet. Continue reading “Food and grief”
Dangerous women
In Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c.1623-24), which I wrote about here, women are presented as their own worst enemies. At the centre of the play is the character Livia, who engineers the downfall of two young women, Bianca and Isabella, persuading them to embark on dangerous sexual relationships (Bianca’s adulterous and precipitated by a rape, Isabella’s incestuous) which bring about their downfalls and ultimate demise. In her dying breath Bianca, realising what Livia has done, laments ‘the deadly snares / That women set for women’. Continue reading “Dangerous women”