Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- Part IV The empowered community
- 8 ‘The first pace that is sick’: the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 9 ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways
- Index
- References
8 - ‘The first pace that is sick’: the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- Part IV The empowered community
- 8 ‘The first pace that is sick’: the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 9 ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways
- Index
- References
Summary
His nature is too noble for the world…
His heart's his mouth.
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent.
(Coriolanus III, i, 257–8)‘Take but degree away’
Elizabethan and Jacobean England offered other new ways of assimilating and interpreting information. Shakespeare's Coriolanus represents a world where politics explode out of narrow, institutional, prescribed limits, and engulf the whole community. The play gives us another way of looking at the revolutionary transition from elite to popular politics. Its setting is ancient Rome and its context is early modern England. Shakespeare feared that something that we might call ‘politics’ was happening in Jacobean England. The play's motif is that hoariest of all political metaphors, the body politic. It transports its audience to the legendary source of a metaphor that had been a reflex of popular and learned political discourse for centuries. According to Livy, Shakespeare's ultimate source, the oracle was a certain Roman Senator, Menenius Agrippa, in 493 BCE. Coriolanus pursues the primeval political idea further than any of his learned or popular predecessors, perhaps to the point of absurdity. The body politic described in the play is not just limbs and organs, as it was for John of Salisbury and his ‘sources’, Plutarch and Pope Adrian, or for the earliest surviving version in English, written c.1400. Shakespeare's body politic has mercurial emotions, sexual proclivities, and stinks. On the evidence of the poetic imagery, the mood of the author seems to have been one of disgust.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Commonwealth of the PeoplePopular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649, pp. 399 - 415Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010