Drinking down all unkindness

Abstract

Wine references are so frequent in Shakespeare’s corpus that it is easier to name the plays in which it does not appear than those in which this drink is consumed (or referred to) in multiple occasions and contexts. In Shakespeare’s plays, wine plays several roles. Unsurprisingly, wine appears in most of the author’s corpus in socializing and celebration contexts. More importantly, wine is also frequently used to characterize characters from a moral perspective. The goal of this paper double. On the one hand, I will analyze the tremendous importance wine had in British literature. Secondly, I will have studied in depth the role and variety of functions wine plays in the author’s whole corpus.