Abstract
Some years ago, in the Machiavellian Moment, J.G.A. Pocock described Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a historically precocious text, one that dramatizes humanist republicanism in advance of the emergence of a civic humanist polity in England.’ When viewed in the context of more recent transitional appropriations of the play, Pocock’s notion of the exceptional and untimely nature of the play seems quaint. Recent discussions have described Coriolanus as transitional not because it is symptomatically republican at a time when England was residually absolutist, but (more radically and anachronistically) because the play dramatizes embryonic capitalism or early modern pragmatism, despite its republican context and seventeenth-century provenance.2
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Notes
See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), 349.
See Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59 (1992): 53–75:
Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 164–195.
Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978), 161.
On the non laissez-faire nature of the early modern state, see Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29–40;
and C.P. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
See Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1963), especially chap. 5.
See Thomas Sorge, “The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion E O’Connor (New York: Routledge, 1990), 237.
For discussions of feudal exploitation see Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Penguin Books, 1972);
and Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Verso, 1990).
Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49.
Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.
See Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Wood writes that “while Plato and Aristotle maintain quite explicitly that direct economic producers should not rule, they are by no means equally explicit that the primary purpose of the state is the protection of private property. They think that the chief goal of the well-ordered polis is to encourage human beings to fulfill their rational nature by the achievement of true moral virtue” (130).
Marcus Tullius Cicero, On The Commonwealth, trans. George Holland Sabine and Stanley Barney Smith (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1929), 132.
Cicero, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9, 95.
A.A. Long, “Cicero’s Politics in De Officiis,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 234.
Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogue on the Government of Florence, ed. and trans. Alison Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85.
Cited in J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), 151.
Sir George Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 1: 167.
See Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict in England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 21.
For an overview of poverty legislation in England, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988).
See Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–1645 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 105. Judson adds, “It would be strange to find Coke, who stood for property and other rights in Parliament, talking general welfare at the expense of the subject’s rights, and it would be unusual to discover royalist judges admitting the dilemma in ordinary law when they were not facing it in the wider sphere of government” (106).
All cites taken from William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. R.B. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 207.
For a provocative account of Coriolanus’s “absolutism,” see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and The Politics of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 186–193.
John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.
Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge, 1986), 51
cited in Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 136.
See A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985).
On Leveller anti-Normanism see Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995).
See King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187.
Janet Adelman, “‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 132.
Susan Dixon, The Roman Mother (Norman: Oklahoma, 1988), 2.
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 54.
Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 200, 208.
Cited in Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 142.
James Holstun, “Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus,” ELH 50 (1983): 485–507.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 37.
In terms more familiar to post-Marxist class theory, we might say that characters in the play occupy what Erik Olin Wright describes as “contradictory locations within class relations”: “Instead of regarding all positions as located uniquely within particular classes and thus as having a coherent class character in their own right, we should see some positions as possibly having a multiple class character. …” Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 985), 43. For an important historical survey of early modern class structures, one that also acknowledges the fluidity of class positions during the period and in the play, see Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and The Middling Sort,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 284–303.
See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chap. 4, on irony.
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© 2004 Paul Cefalu
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Cefalu, P. (2004). The Ends of Absolutism: Coriolanus and Jacobean Political Irony. In: Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973658_3
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