In Sir John Falstaff, William Shakespeare gave us English literature’s supreme, if often supine, drunkard-in-residence.   

    He was enormously fat. He was loud. He was a braggart and a wench-chaser. He also had quite a few less admirable qualities. 

    Referred to by Yale’s masterful scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom as "the greatest of all fictive wits," his character graces the stage of the Richmond Shakespeare Festival at Agecroft Hall this summer. Henry IV, Part 2 gives audiences a chance to see the underachieving Prince Hal finally rise to the English throne and Falstaff sink, in the end, beneath a wave of ingratitude. As the preeminent Lord of Misrule, he deserves better.

    But imagine for a moment that Falstaff stumbled into Agecroft’s Tudor kitchen, seeking to satiate a ravenous appetite, the only kind of appetite he ever seemed to have. What would he have reached for?

    Well, a good drink, for one thing. Sack, or what we refer to as sherry, was a particular favorite of Falstaff, as he makes clear in Part 2:

"If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack."

    The word "sack" is derived from the French "vin sec" for dry wine, and referred in particular to the dry wines of Southern Europe, particularly Spain and the Canary Islands.

    Falstaff was a man who could tilt back a few, and he rarely appeared without a bottle near at hand, if sometimes hidden from view. Sack might have seemed all the more tasty after Sir Francis Drake captured a large quantity of Spanish wine during his glorious 1587 raid on Cadiz. At the same time, Falstaff was hardly one to allow the ebb and flow of late sixteenth- century geopolitics to stand between him and a good drink, regardless of English fortunes.

    The second thing Falstaff would have reached for in the kitchen would have been another bottle of sack. By this time pangs of hunger might have set in. A capon, bread, and anchovies were itemized on a tavern bill Falstaff carried in Part 1 (along with two gallons of sack!). Doubtless his pronounced paunch owed its size to a diet more expansive and varied than that.

    According to The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., Inc., 1966), meals in Elizabethan times tended to be heavy by 21^st-century standards. Breakfasts often included more than one meat dish and were typically much more than the mere snatching of a snack on one’s way out the door. A yeoman farmer needed physical strength to get through his day; a low-calorie diet just wouldn’t do.

    No doubt Falstaff reserved his highest regard for dinner: it was the main meal of the day. It was generally served between 11 and noon and, in times of plenty, would sometimes last three hours or longer. "A typical gentleman’s dinner might include a piece of beef, a loin of veal, two chickens (with accompanying sauces) and oranges. Supper, between five thirty and seven o’clock, was a somewhat lighter version of dinner."

    Different kinds of bread sometimes graced the list of gastronomic possibilities, and it should be noted with a bit of geographic pride that the white potato, called the "Virginian" because of its New World provenance, was regarded at the time as a rare luxury.

    Various kinds of sweets and cakes were consumed with enthusiasm among servants as well as their social superiors. Shakespeare has one servant in Romeo and Juliet, after a banquet, ask another to save a piece of marchpane, a confection of pounded almonds, pistachio nuts, sugar, and flour. Falstaff mentions confections when he appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor, referring to "kissing comfits and eringoes." The former were meant to sweeten the breath, the latter were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities.

    There was considerable demand for fruit in Elizabethan England, and strawberries, apples, pears, plums, cherries, apricots, figs and grapes were cultivated, although England fell flat in its efforts to produce wine-making grape varieties. It was wishful thinking in a damp, cloudy climate.

    Imported wines that graced the palates of the English people included alicant (a dark red wine from Alicante in Spain), claret from Bordeaux, muscadene, and Rhenish, along with Falstaff’s omnipresent sack among others.