‘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.