Best Piece of Fruit

Ten of the best pieces of fruit | Stage | The Guardian

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

The Duchess has secretly married her steward, but her pregnancy is revealed by her irresistible appetite for apricots. These are offered to her as a test by the Machiavellian Bosola, who knows that pregnant women cannot resist them. She is duly allured, gorges herself, and vomits. The game is up.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The naughty apple is a special temptation because, before the Fall, Adam and Eve appear to be fruitarians. Milton's poem contains some juicy-mouthed descriptions of the luscious fruit in Eden, especially the "Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughs / Yielded them". "The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde, / Still as they thirsted, scoop the brimming stream". Yum.

"The Garden" by Andrew Marvell

Marvell based his garden poems on the horticulture at Nun Appleton house in Yorkshire, where he lived as a tutor. "The nectarine and curious peach / Into my hands themselves do reach." The Yorkshire climate must have been different in his day.

Emma by Jane Austen

Anyone who has made themselves sick doing pick-your-own will recognise Mrs Elton's experience at Mr Knightley's summer strawberry party. As she picks, she rants about her favoured varieties, before the heat gets to her: "delicious fruit — only too rich to be eaten much of — inferior to cherries — currants more refreshing — only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping — glaring sun — tired to death — could bear it no longer — must go and sit in the shade".

"The Eve of St Agnes" by John Keats

If you want to win your girl, do it with fruit. As Madeline sleeps, her would-be lover Porphyro "from forth the closet brought a heap / Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd". "Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd / From Fez" are piled on golden plates . No wonder he gets his way.

"Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti

Luscious fruit bring some strange sexual perdition in Rossetti's beautifully weird verse fairy tale: "Crab-apples, dewberries ... / Dates and sharp bullaces, / Rare pears and greengages, / Damsons and bilberries, / Taste them and try". There are more varieties in the first paragraph of this poem than anywhere in Eng. lit.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

No accident that there are fruit in the very title of Steinbeck's chronicle of depression America. The Okies flee the dustbowl for California, where they hope for work picking fruit. There they can only survive by eating the fruit, and make themselves sick. The land of plenty gives you gut rot.

Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

Naturally, Beckett's tormented old monologist seizes on that most absurd of fruit: the banana. "He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him ... He treads on skin, slips, nearly falls, recovers himself, stoops and peers at skin and finally pushes it, still stooping, with his foot over the edge of the stage into pit."

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Fruit is variously symbolic in this auto-biographical novel. Everyone believes in God and eats oranges. The narrator's mother shows barmy broad-mindedness by collecting tinned pineapple for the town's "mission for coloured people".

"Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath

A homely seasonal activity edges into psychosis. "Blackberries / Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / Ebon in the hedges, fat / With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers." Fresh fruit has never been like this before.