FRIDAY FORUM PRESENTS

“The Real Potatoes of Peru” in Shakespeare’s Windsor

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A talk by Vin Nardizzi
Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

Awaiting the arrival of the merry wives to Windsor Park, Shakespeare’s amorously minded Falstaff ejaculates, “Let the sky rain potatoes!” (5.5.16-17). Critics have long glossed the meaning of the line as Falstaff’s articulation of a desire for aphrodisiacs because the sweet potato was thought to be an erotic stimulant. Aslant this tradition, I identify these “potatoes” as ancestors of our common potatoes, “the real potatoes of Peru,” in the words of James Garret, Jr., a Dutch immigrant naturalist living in late-Elizabethan London. Based on Garret’s correspondence and social position in the European community of scientists, I put forward two revisionary arguments. One concerns the common potato in the history of English botany, especially the inclusion of its first visual and verbal descriptions in John Gerard’s monumental Herball (1597). The second, Shakespeare’s play, which, its parochialism notwithstanding, has a geographic imagination that is expansive, even circumnavigational. The link between them is “les vrayes papos de peru.”
Prof. Nardizzi is the author of Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and is writing a book called Marvellous Vegetables in the Renaissance.

Thursday, October 5
4:00 – 6:00 PM
English Department Lounge (Room 4406)

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