[In the following essay, Garganigo demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare used the physical body and the notion of the body politic in Coriolanus to indirectly criticize both James I's plan to unite England and Scotland, and the royal patronage system.]

While the metaphor of the body politic preoccupied Shakespeare throughout his career, only Coriolanus (1608) with its fable of the belly subjects the body politic to explicit scrutiny as a theoretical problem, and as a discourse peculiar to the early years of James I's reign.¹ I wish to situate Coriolanus's obsession with bodies natural and politic within the controversy over James's plans to combine England and Scotland into a larger Great Britain—plans not realized until the Act of Union a century later—because, in many ways, the Union debate revolved around the status of the king's body.² The idea of the body politic became increasingly important in a number of texts in the first half-decade of James's reign, with representations of his own body playing a crucial role in James's political program.³ Jonathan Goldberg has demonstrated the significance for literary culture of the fact that, as a monarch with two healthy male heirs, James provided a welcome relief to the succession anxieties that had plagued England under all of the Tudors except Henry VII. The spectacle of his body within an apparently fruitful family life provided a strong argument for his authority and stability.⁴ In the first years of his reign, James made the body politic analogy his almost exclusive property: more than ever before, it became a tool with which to exact and maintain obedience. James's argument against tobacco invoked his duty “as the proper Phisician of his Politick Body … to purge it of all those diseases.”⁵ His speeches to Parliament from 1604 to 1610 referred to himself as the head of the body politic, often invoking the sanctity and safety of his person.⁶ When the Gunpowder Plot nearly succeeded in blowing up king and Parliament in 1605, such fears for James's personal safety were only confirmed, and royal proclamations both before and after the Plot were full of references to the “Royall Person.”⁷ But most importantly for my purposes, James made his body the centerpiece of his argument for Union. He insisted that his body natural, his physical body, had effected a union of the crowns of England and Scotland, that Union was “an Action, which God by the lawes of Nature … hath now in effect perfected in my Person,” and that Parliament ought to make this union more systematic and permanent by uniting their legal and political systems.⁸ In effect, he wanted to codify body politic theory in law.

Historicist critics have read Coriolanus within the contexts of rogue Elizabethan aristocrats such as the earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh,⁹ the Midlands Grain Riots,¹⁰ abstract constitutional debates about king, Parliament, and Parliamentary selection,¹¹ London city politics,¹² the plantation of Ireland,¹³ and Prince Henry's militant Protestantism.¹⁴ Feminist and psychoanalytic readings of the play have begun to focus on Coriolanus's body, especially its erotically charged relations with Volumnia and Aufidius, but have not fully investigated how these matters might be topical.¹⁵ Some recent readings have even focused on the contradictions inherent in mystifying the royal body and the parallels between Coriolanus and James.¹⁶ Approaching some of the feminist-psychoanalytic strand's insights from a historicist vantage point,¹⁷ I argue that the play obliquely criticizes the politics of the body involved in James's Union scheme and the royal patronage system.¹⁸

This essay first investigates the place of James's body in discussions of his Union plan and patronage system around the time of Coriolanus's probable composition, 1607-08. Then it examines how the play as a whole and the belly fable in particular gesture toward these issues by establishing limited parallels between Republican Rome and Jacobean England, between various characters and King James. The third section concentrates on the play's exploration of the relationships between the body of the state and the bodies of several characters, most notably Coriolanus, while the fourth argues that the logic of the royal patronage system informs the play's many scenes of supplication, as well as the relationship between the title character and Aufidius. Last, I return to the belly scene in order to speculate on the role of such topicality and to argue that the play ultimately rejects the body politic metaphor as a medium of public discourse.

I. MENENIUS AGRIPPA AND THE FABLE OF UNION

In order to examine some of the larger issues related to the Union project, let us begin with the fable of the belly that Menenius Agrippa tells to stop the revolt of the hungry Roman plebeians:

there fell forth a great controversie amongst the whole members of the bodie of man (which in itself is a microcosme) carrying a perfit union. The feet and legs made question that they upheld the bodie, the hands that [they] were dailie troubled and employed in maintenance of the belly, the head that it was ever in care and pain in nourishing of the body[;] finally the whole members[,] refusing their ordinary and naturall exercise, and thereby not maintaining the union of the bodie, inclined to a destruction. Even so … shall fall forth of th' estate of this kingdom, to the great destruction thereof, if ye amongst yourselves be not of perfit union and heartly minds; seeing it is the blessing of all blessings amongst people or nations, the restraint of seditions and troubles, express maintenance of peace and tranquility.

It should be clear by now that this is not Shakespeare's belly fable, nor is it Plutarch's, Livy's, or Sir Philip Sidney's—the sources usually cited for Coriolanus.¹⁹ It comes from John Russell's 1604 Treatise of the Happie and Blissed Union Betuixt the Tua Ancienne Realmes of Scotland and Ingland, a pro-Union tract addressed to James by a Scottish lawyer, which I have “translated” from Scots into Jacobean English.²⁰ Although never printed, it demonstrates that the belly fable could be and was employed as an analogy for the Union scheme.²¹ Whether in the mouth of Menenius or not, the body politic trope was a staple of the arguments for Union both in James's speeches to Parliament from 1604 to 1607²² and in the spate of tracts that appeared in 1604 and afterwards.²³

I have deliberately anglicized Russell's fable to make a point. There were many different Union plans, proposals to make permanent the union of crowns in one body natural accomplished by James's accession and solemnized in his change of “style” to “King of Great Britain.” Would there continue to be two parliaments? two sets of laws? two privy councils? two governments? two tariff-protected economic entities? Would the Union consist of a confederation of equals or an absorption of one into the other? But despite the specifics, many English MPs objected to any sort of union on the grounds that it would somehow allow England to be absorbed by Scotland. For them, the least objectionable plan would have been the opposite: England absorbing Scotland by replacing Scottish laws and courts with English ones and (possibly) allowing a few Scottish members into its parliament. Yet even this was a hard sell for those who imagined Scots, like those already in James's entourage at Whitehall, flooding over the border and grabbing English offices and lands. If there were to be any union at all, it would have to be an absorption or “incorporation,” an Anglicization of Scots, like my translation of Russell's fable of the belly.²⁴

Three very specific developments in the discussion of Union and James I's body in 1607-08 are relevant to Coriolanus's body issues: the failure in Parliament of the project of “perfect” Union, the decision in Calvin's Case to naturalize the Scottish Postnati, and the rise of Robert Carr as the first powerful favorite in the king's system of Bedchamber patronage. James began expounding his Union proposal almost as soon as he arrived in England in 1603. In 1604 he set up a Union commission to formulate a plan for gradual union between England and Scotland. This sparked a widespread discussion of the matter in Parliament and in print. As I have shown, many tracts used the body politic in arguments for and against various and widely divergent Union proposals, some citing Menenius Agrippa's belly fable explicitly.²⁵ However, the Gunpowder Plot put off until the 1606 session of Parliament any discussion of the commission's proposals for limited Union, which included free trade, abolition of mutually hostile laws, and naturalization of the Scots.²⁶ After much debate in committee over the specifics of the proposal, particularly over the trade issues, Parliament essentially put an end to any possibility of Union in 1607 by insisting on a “perfect” and immediate union of parliaments, laws, and everything else: it was to be all or nothing, and Parliament succeeded in getting the nothing it really desired.²⁷ For on 2 May, James responded testily by threatening to use his prerogative to dismiss the bill for perfect Union, his words emphasizing his body natural: “I am your King; I am placed to govern you, and shall answer for your Errors: I am a Man of Flesh and Blood, and have my Passions and Affections as other Men: I pray you, do not too far move me to do that which my Power may tempt me unto … make not all you have done, frustrate.”²⁸ And he was as good as his word, dismissing the bill quickly.

James then retreated to a demand for naturalization alone, trying to push through Parliament a bill naturalizing the Postnati, those born in Scotland after his accession. But even on this question, the parliamentary opposition soon forced him to turn to the courts, in a test case he and his ministers manufactured. At issue in the celebrated “Calvin's Case” was whether the Postnati had the right to own and inherit land in England and to bring suit in English courts.²⁹ Robert Colvill (anglicized as “Calvin”) was a four-year-old Scottish boy whose right to inherit land in England was being challenged on the grounds that he could not sue for it in English courts. In direct contradiction to parliamentary arguments that subjects owed allegiance to the king's body politic, a commission of judges headed by Sir Edward Coke and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere ruled in June 1608 that subjects owed allegiance to James's body natural: “although his body politic of king of England, and his body politic of king of Scotland, be several and distinct, yet nevertheless his natural person, which is one, hath an operation upon both, and createth a privity between them.”³⁰ Calvin was thus a subject of the king's body natural, his allegiance being “due to the natural person of the king … [and not] … to the politick capacity only, that is, to his crown or kingdom distinct from his natural capacity.”³¹

The year 1607 also highlighted the importance of James's carnal body natural in the politics of access that determined royal patronage. As Neil Cuddy has demonstrated, James, from the beginning of his reign, doled out offices, monopolies, and other financial rewards disproportionately to the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber, the aristocratic men who attended him in his bedroom and in the audience chambers outside it.³² He made a conscious effort, Cuddy argues, to accomplish a kind of Union through staffing, placing equal numbers of Scots and English in the Privy Chamber (and in other court institutions) and a majority of Scots in the Bedchamber.³³ One MP would eventually complain in 1610 that “the Scottish monopolize his princely person,” beseeching “his Majesty [that] his Bedchamber may be shared as well to those of our nation as to them … and that the same Chamber may have the same brotherly partition which all the other inferior forms of the court, the Presence and the Privy Chamber have.”³⁴ One of those Scottish monopolists, the handsome young Carr, came to James's attention at the Accession Day tilt in March 1607, and in being promoted from Groom to Gentleman of the Bedchamber, became James's principal lover by December.³⁵ Cuddy maintains that parliamentary “opposition to the Union” ultimately “served … as a means of ‘coded’ attack on the king's Scottish entourage,”³⁶ and that in fact Carr's appointment constituted a polemical gesture aimed at the Commons, “an unambiguous signal of the king's attitude to their obstruction of his union measures.”³⁷ Both king and Parliament, it seems, saw the Bedchamber issue as a subset of the Union controversy, with all parties claiming the right to interpret, and thus in a sense to control access to, James's body.³⁸

II. UNION AND CORIOLANUS'S BELLY FABLE

How, then, does the Union issue impinge upon Shakespeare's play? First of all, Coriolanus contains a number of elements analogous to James and his Union plan, paralleling Rome with England and both Coriolanus and Menenius Agrippa with James. Pro-Union tracts frequently adduced the expansion of the early Roman Republic as an example of successful union by conquest and incorporation, citing the Sabines and the Volscians as peoples it had absorbed.³⁹ Thus, the play's Rome and Antium, as states extremely close to one another and so alike in language, customs, and government as to be virtual mirror images, are very similar to England and Scotland.⁴⁰ Like James, Coriolanus, after he defects to the Volscians, plans to unite the two states; his means and motives—conquest and revenge—are different from James's, though, as I have indicated, it would have been quite easy for Englishmen to see James and his Scottish entourage as a kind of invading force. Also like James, Coriolanus fails to unify the two states by force. At the end of the play, Coriolanus has been dissuaded by his family from attacking Rome and lies dead, murdered by Aufidius's assassins. While the historical Rome eventually did swallow Antium and all the other surrounding city-states, the play shows this particular union scheme perishing with Coriolanus.⁴¹

If Coriolanus parallels James by fighting for Union, Menenius Agrippa speaks like James, using the analogy between body and state to quell opposition to his political program:

There was a time when all the body's members,
Rebelled against the belly, thus accused it:
That only like a gulf it did remain
I'th' midst o'th' body, idle and unactive,
Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing
Like labour with the rest; where th'other instruments
Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,
And, mutually participate, did minister
Unto the appetite and affection common
Of the whole body.

(I.i.93-102, my emphases)⁴²

James too represented political Union as an analogue to or even a derivation from the integrity of his own physical body. Take, for example, his now famous remarks to Parliament in 1604, 1605, and 1607: “What God hath conioyned, then let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body”⁴³; “I desire a perfect Vnion of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes vnder mee your King”⁴⁴; Union is “an Action, which God by the lawes of Nature … hath now in effect perfected in my Person.”⁴⁵

But while Menenius Agrippa may be pointing at his own body when he tells the belly fable, his language later in the play identifies the state's body with that of another man, Coriolanus. He uses the same terms to describe the bodies of Rome and Coriolanus.⁴⁶ Compare, for example, a passage from the belly fable in I.i to Menenius's later plan in V.i to beg Coriolanus for mercy only after Coriolanus has eaten. In I.i, the personified belly of Menenius's fable silences the rebellious and hungry members of the body with this excuse:

“True is it, my incorporate friends,” quoth [the belly],
“That I receive the general food at first
Which you do live upon, and fit it is,
Because I am the storehouse and the shop
Of the whole body. But, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood
Even to the court, the heart, to th' seat o'th' brain;
And through the cranks and offices of man
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live. And …”
.....          “Though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,
Yet I can make my audit up that all
From me do back receive the flour of all
And leave me but the bran.”

(lines 127-43, my emphases)⁴⁷

In V.i, when Menenius considers how and when to approach the rebel Coriolanus about sparing Rome, he assumes that the previous attempt by the consul Cominius has failed because Coriolanus was hungry and thus in a bad mood:

He [Coriolanus] was not taken well, he had not dined.
The veins unfilled, our blood is cold, and then
We pout upon the morning, are unapt
To give or to forgive; but when we have stuffed
These pipes and these conveyances of our blood
With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
Than in our priest-like fasts. Therefore I'll watch him
Till he be dieted to my request,
And then I'll set upon him.

(lines 50-8, my emphases)

Note the similar emphasis on food, food being turned to blood, and blood circulating through the body. In both passages, Menenius conceives of the welfare and harmony of Rome's body politic in the same terms as he does the health and humoral balance of Coriolanus's body natural. And like James, Menenius fails in the first scene of the play to quash opposition with his extended metaphor; he only succeeds in delaying the plebeians' onslaught until Coriolanus arrives to quell them.

The belly scene virtually demands that the play be read in terms of James's body. Menenius there manages to use one of James's favorite metaphors in a way characteristic of the king, and with the same lack of success, but, significantly, without mentioning the body part corresponding to the king: the head.⁴⁸ It is the disruptive First Citizen who introduces “The kingly, crownèd head” into what is after all a fable of the belly and the members, not the head and the body (I.i.112). The closest Agrippa comes to the head is to mention the brain in the same sentence as the heart: “the court, the heart, … th' seat o'th' brain” (I.i.133).⁴⁹ However, once the head is introduced by the First Citizen, the fable takes on issues very close to the king and his body: patronage and the king's appetite.

Money and commerce were often described as the blood or sinews of the body politic, and the tale features the stomach (the Senate or Parliament) distributing blood/money to the Court—an at once accurate and inaccurate reflection of the contemporary political arrangement.⁵⁰ It is true that James was often strapped for cash and constantly asking Parliament for more. Yet many fortunes were being made in Jacobean England through access to the king. Vast amounts of money and financial rewards flowed from the king to his courtiers. In this context, the belly's reply to the restive members evokes the language of commerce—“incorporate,” “storehouse,” “shop,” “audit”—as much as that of patronage—“offices” (or jobs) and the “competency” (or salary) they yield. That these “offices” and “competencies” might be specifically royal is suggested both by the reference to the Court as the heart that distributes the blood through arteries and veins to the other organs, and by the First Citizen's mention of a king when he interrupts Menenius Agrippa: “Your belly's answer—what? / The kingly, crownèd head, the vigilant eye” (I.i.111-2). In a republic that has had neither king nor court since Tarquin was banished, the First Citizen thus imagines that the belly will apply the body politic metaphor to the king, the head of the body politic—something the belly's reply studiously avoids.

Yet the belly does resemble the king in the words with which it describes the good of the whole body: “appetite and affection.” The members, it says, accuse the belly of only ministering to its own appetite and affection. The phrase was, of course, a common expression for the body's needs or drives. Within the fable itself, “appetite” refers to the body's need for food; in its application to the play, it may gesture obliquely at the body's erotic needs. Taken this way, the members accusing the belly of obeying its own “appetites and affections” might have sounded like critics who accused James of ignoring the needs of England by giving favor to young Scots who caught his eye, or in a larger sense by pushing the Union plan. As I have mentioned, James harangued Parliament in May 1607 about the power of his own “Passions and Affections” after it insisted upon the impractical “perfect” Union or no Union at all.

III. THE LEADER'S BODIES NATURAL AND POLITIC

Like James and his contemporaries, the play as a whole establishes (and severs) connections between the fate of the leader's body and the state's, between bodies natural and politic. Coriolanus asks how it is possible for any person to be, or to be worth, other people: how one man's body natural (or perhaps a king's second, mystical body) can represent the body politic; how tribunes can represent the people, be the people's mouth. Various characters claim that one Roman is equal to four Volscians (I.vii.78-9), that Coriolanus is worth or equal to all of his ancestors (II.i.87-9) or six of Aufidius (IV.v.168). The tribune Sicinius, in particular, makes two comments that take on added significance in this light. He characterizes Coriolanus as a “viper / That would depopulate the city and / Be every man himself” (III.i.265-7), most obviously implying that Coriolanus wants to remove the other people from the city, but also that Coriolanus wants to be the city or “every man himself.” Sicinius's attack on Volumnia's virago-like mannishness also makes a similar move: “Are you mankind?” he asks her (IV.ii.18). While he accuses her primarily of being too assertive, his diction also hints that she considers herself as important as the human race itself. This problematic move from individual human to community, from one person's body natural to the community's body politic, seems to haunt the play.

In Coriolanus three human bodies compete to symbolize Rome's body: the plebeians' bodies in Menenius's belly fable, Volumnia's body in the supplication scene, and Coriolanus's body throughout the rest of the play. In the first two cases, different characters allege a connection between body and state to further their own ends; in the third, the play considers this connection at length and finds only ambiguity, casting doubt upon the truth and the usefulness of the analogy.⁵¹ I have already discussed the ways in which the belly scene makes the body a symbol of the state. While I have suggested that Menenius may be pointing at his own body as he speaks, I only have space here to add that the hungry body in the fable clearly parallels the hungry bodies of the plebeians demanding grain from the senators. The play's second image of the body politic comes, as Sicinius hints, from Volumnia, who identifies sacking Rome with harming her own body. She warns Coriolanus: “thou shalt no sooner / March to assault thy country than to tread / … on thy mother's womb” (V.iii.123-5), thus transforming Rome into a vulnerable female body coextensive with her own. She presents herself as a kind of Mother Rome.⁵²

The rest of the play, riddled as it is with metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche involving scattered body parts, presents a third and composite image of a wounded and dismembered body politic that seems to find its incarnation in Coriolanus's mangled body in the last act—Coriolanus does become “every man himself” (III.i.267).⁵³ The play is fixated upon connections between this leader's body and the state's. Coriolanus anatomizes the process by which the title character's body becomes a fetish to the other characters,⁵⁴ its beauty, wounds, diet, health, and sexuality all undergoing their intense scrutiny. His mother notes her son's comeliness (I.iii.7-9). Practically everyone in Rome knows the number and location on his body of the wounds he has received in defending the city, and they require him to display them in the marketplace in order to demonstrate his fitness to be consul (II.i.143-5, 227-32; II.iii.5-12). As I have already shown, Agrippa's insistence that he see Coriolanus only after he has eaten underlines the play's concern with the regulation of the body's substances and fluids, its humors and passions. Coriolanus's passions can be “affected” by the sight and touch of other people's bodies: his family's and Aufidius's.⁵⁵ Coriolanus only abandons his assault on Rome when his mother, wife, and child place their famine-lean bodies before him and plead for mercy (V.iii). Only the sight of his family kneeling and the touch of their hands and lips can disturb his ambiguously gendered, at times homoerotic, transactions with the Volscian general Aufidius. I will now turn to the play's eros-tinged politics of access and supplication.

IV. SUPPLICATION AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS

In 1608 access to James's body could plausibly have been thought to count for everything. The roads to obtaining a monopoly on sweet wine, the revenue from royal lands, or a post in the royal household all passed through the Gentlemen and Grooms of the king's Bedchamber.⁵⁶ And access is everything in the five supplication scenes in Coriolanus that involve the title character.⁵⁷ The Roman constitution requires Coriolanus to go through the motions of begging the plebeians for the consulship in act III. But when he does so, his refusal to display his wounds to them sets in motion a chain of events that ends in his banishment from Rome. This first supplication scene combines two types of attempts to gain access. On the one hand, Coriolanus here is in the position of supplicant, asking the plebeians for the highest office in Rome. On the other, since they ask him to display his wounds, they are supplicants trying to gain access to his body. But Coriolanus seems to be more of a supplicant like those handsome young men asking James for patronage, in that he is asked to display his body in exchange for the office. Act III, then, provides a scene of failed supplication. In act V three embassies from Rome plead with Coriolanus to spare Rome: the general Cominius, the Senator Menenius Agrippa, and Coriolanus's family. All three have trouble gaining access to him, and, as I have indicated, the last two embassies make allowances for the state of Coriolanus's body in calibrating their appeals to him. While Menenius is “denied my access” to him even though he has eaten (V.ii.77), Coriolanus's family members succeed by placing themselves before him and touching him. Volumnia brings his wife Virgilia and his son Martius; Virgilia kisses her husband and they all bow and kneel before him. Only when Coriolanus is so moved that he takes his mother's hand does he relent. Only the sight of, and contact with, his family's bodies stop his march on Rome.⁵⁸

The only other successful supplicant in the play is Coriolanus himself. In act IV, after he is exiled, he makes two successful pleas: he begs and fights his way through servants to the Volscian general Aufidius and then secures from him the means to revenge himself on Rome. Coriolanus and Aufidius's relationship points up the place of the body's sexuality in the royal system of Bedchamber patronage, a system whose logic informs these supplication scenes. Bruce R. Smith considers their relationship typical of early modern England's rough, competitive, love-hate homosociality, a homosociality endemic to all its patriarchal institutions and thus essentially unremarkable.⁵⁹ But using Mario DiGangi's distinction between orderly and disorderly homoeroticism,⁶⁰ I contend that their relationship is meant to be seen as faintly disorderly, bordering on the sodomitical, even though the play provides no evidence of physical consummation.⁶¹

DiGangi, elaborating the paradigm for early modern queer studies created by Alan Bray, stresses that only the homoeroticism that somehow threatened the social order signified as the crime of sodomy.⁶² There were no such things as “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality” in early modern England because sexuality itself did not exist as a category definitive of personal identity; there were, however, without doubt, acts of same-sex intercourse. Thus, Smith discusses “homosexual desire” instead of homosexuality in early modern England, while DiGangi prefers the label “homoerotic desire,” calling both feelings and acts, but not identities, “homoeroticism.”⁶³ Homoeroticism was such a fundamental feature of the all-male institutions of early modern English patriarchy that in many or even most cases it was not seen as conflicting with reproductive marriage or the social hierarchy. For the most part, homoerotic acts were not given the vague label of sodomy—a crime associated with buggery, witchcraft, and heresy—unless they involved some violation of the social order such as rape or class mixture, or were accompanied by some other, non-sexual crime. Orderly homoeroticism went unnoticed because it did not violate four important boundaries: between family and lover, master and servant, leader and favorite, male and female.⁶⁴

While Coriolanus and Aufidius express homoerotic feelings for each other, they do not act on them, so those feelings are not sodomitical in themselves. But because their relationship blurs the four distinctions I have just mentioned, the play does code their relationship as suspect and disorderly—perhaps even sodomitical. Two jokes in act IV render the nature of the relationship's gender and power differentials ambiguous: is Coriolanus husband or wife, master or mistress, dominant or submissive, man or woman? When the exiled Coriolanus finally gains access to Aufidius, they embrace almost lovingly after Aufidius exclaims that he is more excited now than on his wedding night and that he has

          nightly …
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me—
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat.

(IV.v.123-6)

A humorous confusion of pronouns earlier in act IV reveals a fundamental confusion between and within Coriolanus's sexual and power relations. In IV.iii, the Roman spy Nicanor describes Coriolanus's banishment as a case of a wife cuckolding an absent husband:

ADRIAN.
Coriolanus banished? …

.....

NICANOR
… I have heard it said the fittest time to corrupt a man's wife is when she's fallen out with her husband. Your noble Tullus Aufidius will appear well in these wars, his great opposer Coriolanus being now in no request of his country.

(lines 25-33)

Nicanor's lines leave unclear who is the woman here. Is Coriolanus the husband, abandoning his wife, Rome, who in his absence commits adultery by embracing the tribunes; or is Rome the husband, abandoning Coriolanus, who in exile commits adultery by embracing Aufidius and the Volscians? Not only does the play gender Coriolanus's, at first powerless, exile ambiguously, but it also attaches that ambiguity specifically to his relations with Aufidius. Upon arriving in Antium, Coriolanus himself jokes—or comes as close to joking as his temperament allows—when he tells Aufidius's servants scornfully that he doesn't “serve” their “master” Aufidius:

CORIOLANUS.
No, I serve not thy master.
THIRD Servingman.
How, sir! Do you meddle with my master?
CORIOLANUS.
Ay, 'tis an honester service than to meddle with thy mistress. Thou prat'st and prat'st.
Serve with thy trencher. Hence!

(IV.v.45-9)

In punning on “serve” (and “meddle”) as “have sex with,”⁶⁵ Coriolanus denies serving Aufidius in the same way the servant waits on him (Aufidius), but he also leaves open the possibility that his own submission to Aufidius is a quasi-sexual meddling, or service, in which Coriolanus might be the man or the woman. By jokingly admitting to some kind of meddling, does Coriolanus construct himself as a man meddling with a man, a woman meddling with a man, or a man meddling with a woman?

The ambiguity over who's on top shows how dangerous it is for Coriolanus to place private passions above public duties. In embracing Aufidius, Coriolanus has violated social order within both Rome and Antium, pitting himself against his family and city and displacing Aufidius as master of the Volscian army. Their relationship ends badly when his family convinces Coriolanus to relent toward Rome: Aufidius has him murdered in front of the Volscian senate, taunting him with the epithet “Boy” (V.vi.103), which Smith lists among a number of other early modern English terms for the penetrated, supposedly passive partner in male-male sex.⁶⁶ The play, then, codes their relationship as disorderly and harmful—not typical. I argue that it is topical as well, and points to the king's propensity to distribute patronage on the basis of his humors and affections, regardless of merit or ultimate political effect. Putting Scots in charge of his Bedchamber and at the top of his patronage system, giving Scots access to the Body Natural, constituted for many of James's opponents a serious violation of hierarchical boundaries. Coriolanus's homoeroticism must have seemed suspect because it is the sign of skewed allegiances within the play: Coriolanus refuses to bear his exile stoically and quietly, plotting with his former enemies, the Volscians, how to destroy Rome. The play suggests that the two soldiers are obsessed with one another in a way that causes the protagonist at times to see family and lover as opposite and mutually exclusive choices—a situation not unlike James's after 1607, when Queen Anne broke ties with him by moving into a separate household, and when he made the Scottish Carr his lover-favorite.⁶⁷

V. THE USES OF TOPICALITY AND THE BODY POLITIC

So how, finally, should we read the topicality of Coriolanus's body issues? The play goes out of its way to suggest parallels between its body politics and those surrounding James, yet it frustrates a search for thoroughgoing parallels that construct an allegorical narrative.⁶⁸ Coriolanus fights and loves like James; Menenius talks like James; Coriolanus supplicates like a client of James; and Aufidius receives such supplication like James. No one consistently represents James throughout the play—though the title character comes closest. But the search for parallels is in large part the subject of the belly fable—the ways in which fables (or plays) can be “applied” to, and thus function in, politics: “It was an answer. How apply you this?” asks the belly (I.i.144). What is so striking about the scene is Menenius's reluctance to apply his fable; he feels that the telling alone will suffice because the fable speaks for itself. He only applies it when the First Citizen presses him.⁶⁹ I have argued that body issues appear in the play in order to apply or gesture obliquely toward matters very close to James in 1607-08—Union and the politics of access to the Bedchamber.

But why raise these issues at all? What is the force of raising them in 1607-08? Several easy answers suggest themselves which assume that invoking these issues carries little or no argumentative force. The first points toward commercial motives and is essentially tautological: body matters were topical and hence of interest to people interested in the Court, patronage, and politics (especially the politics of Union); that alone would have been enough to draw some people to the theater. Or, second, Shakespeare was interested in thinking about the many ways in which the fate of a nation might be connected to one man's body, and Coriolanus is the result. The play does its thinking about the body politic in a way not easily applicable to James, wishing to think rather than to pronounce. It participates in a particular discourse, the discourse of the body, that may have shaped the ways patrons and clients saw themselves at Court, but that does not necessarily criticize the king and his patronage system. Or, third, perhaps such a meditation expresses anxieties about the body politics driven by James or about the use of the body politic as a trope or a language within contemporary politics, but does not direct such anxieties toward expressing praise or blame. Coriolanus not only intervenes in, but comments on, the discourse of the body politic. All three of these reasons may well have played a part in the play's genesis.

Yet say that the topicality does have a rhetorical or polemical force. Coriolanus's topical brinkmanship could be a textbook example of what Annabel Patterson calls early modern “self-censorship,” the tacit understanding that the writer will only criticize the authorities obliquely through discontinous and partial parallels.⁷⁰ The problem with this interpretation of the play is that it has Shakespeare criticizing James in some way for his despotism, his overindulgence of the sensual, and his reduction of all matters to the body or to his body.⁷¹ The playwright of the King's Men would have been foolish to take such a risk. But it is hard to see Shakespeare as royal mouthpiece either. Despite Alvin Kernan's contention that all of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays in some way serve the king's interests, toe the royal line,⁷² I doubt that Coriolanus evokes body issues merely to please James, either by amusing him with matters near and dear to his heart or by condemning Parliamentary opposition to his Union plan through a tale that displays the dangers of plebeian rule in Rome.⁷³ To claim that Shakespeare sought advancement in the king's service by saying what he thought the king wanted to hear about the fractious commons ignores the play's problematic ending. We do not know whether the Roman body politic has died with Coriolanus in Antium⁷⁴ or has simply purged itself of a sickness, amputated a rotten limb.⁷⁵ The play is not unequivocally pro-Coriolanus or pro-plebeian.⁷⁶

It is more likely that Coriolanus expresses frustration with political discourse that analogizes body and state. By 1608 the political air had been saturated with body talk, and Shakespeare may have decided that conceiving of the nation in terms of the body or a single man's body was counterproductive, even dangerous. In its very multiplicity of bodies politic, in the alternatives it offers to the title character as embodiment of the state—Volumnia and the hungry plebeians—Coriolanus argues against a single, king-centered model of the body politic. But the play goes even further than that, because it protests using the body politic metaphor in political discussion altogether. Rather than staking out a definite position in discussions of Union or royal patronage, it rejects the medium in which such discussions were taking place; it protests the need to disguise disagreement with the king in fables of the body.

Coriolanus's protest mimes Parliament's strategy for killing the Union scheme: speak to the king in his own favorite language, turn his favorite metaphor against him, and show him the harm one man's body-centered thinking can do to the state he claims to embody. The play's discontinuous topicality does not only criticize James's fixation upon the body, but it also protests against an atmosphere of repression created by his forbidding discussion or criticism of Scots at Court, by imprisoning offenders such as the MPs Nicholas Fuller or Christopher Piggott—both of whom spoke out in Parliament against the Scots—and by circumventing Parliament through turning to the courts to naturalize the Postnati. A notable feature of the debate over perfect Union and naturalization in February 1607 was MPs' protests that for fear of reprisals they could not speak their consciences and express open opposition to Union. Instead, they had to resort to calling for an extreme version of Union they knew James would not accept. One feature of the belly fable suggests that Coriolanus's topicality may express opposition in a similar way. Menenius mimics the belly's reply to the members with an implied bit of stage business that many directors have interpreted as a burp or a fart:

FIRST Citizen.
Well, sir, what answer made the belly?
MENENIUS.
Sir, I shall tell you. With a kind of smile,
Which ne'er came from the lungs, but even thus—
For, look you, I may make the belly smile
As well as speak—it tauntingly replied
To th' discontented members, the mutinous parts
That envied his receipt; even so most fitly
As you malign our senators for that
They are not such as you.

(I.i.103-11)

The text does not indicate what kind of “smile” might be represented by “even thus.” But in contemporary politics a fart could be very subversive indeed and might be used by a member of Parliament to defy the head of the body politic. Several contemporary poems hint at the meaning and the danger of “A Fart that was Lett in the Lower House of Parliament 1607”: “Be advysed … looke to the lott / If you fart at the Union remember Piggott”; for “'Tis a very bold trick, / To fart in the nose of the Body Politick.”⁷⁷ Perhaps Coriolanus too farts in the nose of the king to show him the folly of imagining the state in terms of his body.

But if Shakespeare grows weary in Coriolanus of a trope that was one of Elizabeth's favorites and remained prominent under James, if he calls in the play for an end to such bawdy body talk, the rest of the reign, and indeed the rest of the century's political and literary history, would surely have disappointed him. We need only look at the reign of James's son to see that Englishmen continued to imagine their nation in terms of a body, usually the royal body, and that even civil war and the execution of Charles I in 1649, instead of killing the metaphor with him, gave it new life. After the Restoration, the body natural remained an important trope in politics and literature under Charles II, surviving his debauchery and failure to produce a legitimate son well into the end of the century. By 1702 the heirless Anne had proclaimed herself a second Elizabeth, reviving the notion of the sacred royal body by touching for the king's evil, and styling herself, like Volumnia, mother of her people.

Notes

1. See, for example, E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 88, 94-100; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 24-41; David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 70-1, 96-107, 13 n. 5; Maynard Mack Jr., Killing the King: Three Studies in Shakespeare's Tragic Structure (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1973); Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 95-113; Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), pp. 80-5, 87, 107-15, 131-43, 144, 125-30; Linda Woodbridge, “Palisading the Body Politic,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 270-98; Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 83-137; and David Norbrook, “The Emperor's New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism,” TexP Textual Practice 10, 2 (Summer 1996): 329-57.

2. Shakespeare critics have long insisted that King Lear, as well as Ben Jonson's court masques Hymenaei and The Masque of Blackness, were engaged in this debate. See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England With a New Introduction (Madison and London: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 66-81; D. J. Gordon, “Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 157-84; and Axton, pp. 131-43. On Michael Drayton's Polyolbion and the Union issue, see McEachern, pp. 138-91. Throughout this essay, a capitalized “Union” will refer both to the hypothetical union of England and Scotland and to the various plans for bringing that union about, usually that of James.

3. See Axton, pp. 131-47. Hale lists the following as contributing factors: “renewed interest in matters of government caused by the accession of a new monarch”; “the uproar in the first Parliament,” on which he does not elaborate; the Gunpowder Plot; and “the publication of an English edition of [James's] The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1603)” (p. 85). Also see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 48-75.

4. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 85-112.

5. A Counterblast to Tobacco (1604), quoted in Harris, p. 56.

6. Charles Howard McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I: Reprinted from the Edition of 1616 (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), pp. 272, 292, 287.

7. See Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume I: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603-1625, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1:9, 32, 8, 21-2, 35, 37, 42-3, 134.

8. McIlwain, p. 287.

9. See Paul A. Jorgensen, “Shakespeare's Coriolanus: Elizabethan Soldier” (1949), in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, ed. David Wheeler (New York and London: Garland, 1995), pp. 47-66; and Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 132-49.

10. See E. C. Pettet, “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 3 (1950): 34-42; and Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59, 1 (Spring 1992): 53-75.

11. See W. Gordon Zeeveld, “‘Coriolanus’ and Jacobean Politics,” MLR [Modern Language Quarterly] 57, 3 (July 1962): 321-34; Clifford Chalmers Huffman, “Coriolanus” in Context (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1971); Andrew Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” ShS 28 (1975): 63-9; Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 3-21; Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge MA and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 120-53; and Shannon Miller, “Topicality and Subversion in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 32, 2 (Spring 1992): 287-310.

12. See Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 202-11.

13. See Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 185.

14. See Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 144-76.

15. See Lawrence Danson, “Coriolanus” (1974), in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, pp. 123-42; Emmett Wilson Jr., “Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom” (1968), in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, pp. 93-110; Janet Adelman, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 108-24; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 186-93, 202-3, and “The Anus in Coriolanus” (1994), in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Renaissance Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 260-71; Madelon Sprengnether, “Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus” (1986), in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, pp. 179-202; Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 151-72, and Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 144-59; Francis Barker, “Nationalism, Nomadism, and Belonging in Europe: Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 233-65. Barker's work anticipates mine in some respects.

16. See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 85-6, 186; and Miller.

17. Compare Kahn's similar fusion of these two approaches in “‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 38, 1 (Spring 1987): 34-57.

18. Huffman (p. 206 and n. 57) and Goldberg (James I and the Politics of Literature, p. 142) have noted in passing the relevance to the play of (respectively) the Union and James's love for men. In its general outlines, my approach owes much not only to Goldberg's reading of the play, but also to those of Hale, pp. 95-107, and Barkan, pp. 57, 95-108.

19. Besides Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus (tr. by Sir Thomas North, 1579) and Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie (ca. 1581), the other source usually cited for the play's focus on the body politic is Edward Forset's A Comparative Discovrse of the Bodies Natvral and Politiqve (London, 1606), rprt. in A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique and A Defence of the Right of Kings (n. p.: Gregg International Publishers, 1969). Sidney also used the belly fable in a 1579 letter to Elizabeth to argue against the Anjou match; see Margaret Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), p. 160 and n. 63. For more on belly fables, see Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 111-37; and Michael Schoenfeldt, “Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 243-61.

20. John Russell, A Treatise of the Happie and Blissed Unioun (1604), in The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, ed. Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh and London: C. Constable for the Edinburgh Historical Society, 1985), pp. 75-141, 105-6. Here is the original:

    thair fell furth ane great contraversie amangis the haill memberis of the body of man (quhilk in itselff is ane microcosme) cariing ane perfyit unioun. The fiett and leggis maid questioun that they upheld the body, the handis that uar daylie trublit and employit in meantinance of the bellie, the head that it ues evir in cair and paine in nurisching of the body, finallie the haill memberis refuisng thair ordinar and naturall exercise, and thairby not meantining the unioun of the bodie inclynit to ane distructioun. Evin sua, concludit he, sall fall furth of the estait of this kingdome, to the great distruction thairof, giff ye amangis yourselffis be not of perfyit unioun and hairtlie myndis; seing it is the blissing of all blissingis amangis people or natiounes, the restraint of seditiones and trubles, expres meantinance of peace and tranquillitie.

21. Also see Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, ed. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press and Scottish History Society, 1909), pp. 19-20, 233-4. On the politics of the Union scheme, see Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603-1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); and Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

22. See the speeches of 1604, 1605, and 1607 in McIlwain. See also passages in James's Basilicon Doron (1598, 1603) and Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598, 1603), in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johan P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 1-61, 62-84, esp. 59, 76-7.

23. See Axton, pp. 117-8. Besides Forset's Comparative Discourse, pp. 57-60, see, for example, Rapta Tatio: The Mirrour of His Maiesties Present Government, Tending to the Vnion of his Whole Iland of Brittonie (London, 1604), sig. H1v; John Gordon, “Enotikon or A Sermon of the Union of Great Britannie,” in Antiquitie of Language, Name[,] Religion, and Kingdome (London, 1604), pp. 8ff.; John Thornborough, The Ioiefull and Blessed Revniting the Two Mighty & Famous Kingdomes, England and Scotland, into their Ancient Name of Great Brittaine (London, 1604), pp. 54-5, 66-7, 75-8, 2, 4-5, 7; and A Discovrse Plainely Proving the Evident Vtiltie and Vrgent Necessitie of the Desired Happie Vnion of the Two Famous Kingdomes of England and Scotland (London, 1604), pp. 15, 17, 30-1, 34; William Cornwallis, The Miracvlovs and Happie Union of England and Scotland (London, 1604), sig. A4v-B2v, B4r-B4v, C3r, D2v, E1v, E2v-E3v; John Hayward, A Treatise of Vnion of the Two Realmes of England and Scotland. By I. H. (London, 1604), p. 8 and A Treatise About the Union of England and Scotland (1604), rprt. in The Jacobean Union, pp. 39-74 (an imperial body politic); Henry Spelman, Of the Union (1604), rprt. in The Jacobean Union, pp. 160-83; Henry Savile, Historicall Collections Left to Be Considered of, for the Better Perfecting of this Intended Union Between England and Scotland (1604), rprt. in The Jacobean Union, pp. 184-240.

24. On 23 April 1604, MP Richard Percival expressed his support for “Mother England who had ‘nursed, bred, brought us up to be able to serve at home for justice, abroad for victories,’” as well as his fear of the word “incorporation,” that is, of England being incorporated into Scotland (quoted in Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604-1610 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), p. 81. See Coriolanus's use of “incorporate” (William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker [Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994], p. 166, I.i.127), and n. 47 below. All subsequent references to the play will be from this edition and will follow the citation in parentheses.

25. Russell, p. 105; Craig, pp. 19-20, 233-4.

26. For details see Notestein, p. 252.

27. Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, pp. 104, 139, 107. Also see Levack, Formation of the British State; and Notestein, pp. 233-5, 242, 248.

28. Quoted in Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, p. 119, my emphases.

29. See Axton, p. 145; Marcus, pp. 124-48, 150-5.

30. William Cobbett, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (1603-27), 21 vols. (London: Hansard, 1816), 2:595-6.

31. Cobbett, 2:624.

32. Those financial rewards included: crown lands and the income from them, certain customs duties, control of the Privy Purse and of other monies from the sale of offices, and other “windfalls” (Neil Cuddy, “The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603-1625,” in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey et al. [London and New York: Longman, 1987], pp. 198-204, 200-1). Also see Cuddy, “Anglo-Scottish Union and the Court of James I, 1603-1625,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., vol. 39 (London: Butler and Tanner, 1989), pp. 107-24; Curtis Perry, “The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England,” RQ [Riverside Quarterly] 53, 4 (Winter 2000): 1054-83; also see n. 55 below. While Forset considers favorites a necessary evil, he compares suitors at court to the body's appetites and the monarch's favor or patronage both to its “affections” and to the blood that courses through its veins (p. 46).

33. Cuddy, “Anglo-Scottish Union,” pp. 108, 110-2.

34. Sir John Holles, quoted in Cuddy, “Revival,” p. 205.

35. See David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 86-8. In a December 1607 letter to Dudley Carleton, John Chamberlain writes: “Sir Robert Carre a younge Scot and new favorite is lately sworne gentleman of the bed-chamber” (quoted in Bergeron, p. 87).

36. Cuddy, “Anglo-Scottish Union,” p. 113.

37. Cuddy, “Anglo-Scottish Union,” p. 116.

38. Ben Jonson's Hymenaei (1606), which celebrated Frances Howard's first marriage to the earl of Essex, also connected the Union and Bedchamber issues. While the masque as a whole pushes James's Union project by making the union of man and woman in marriage a trope for the Union of England and Scotland in James's person, its antimasque features eight men, some of them Grooms of the Bedchamber, who jump out of a “Microcosme, or Globe, (figuring Man) with a kind of contentious Musique.” “[R]epresent[ing] the foure Humors, and foure Affections,” they draw swords and attempt to disrupt a marriage about to take place at an altar in front of them. A note in Jonson's text of the masque printed in the same year explains, “as in naturall bodies, so likewise in minds, there is no disease, or distemperature, but is caused either by some abounding humor, or peruerse affection; after the same maner, in politick bodies (where Order, Ceremony, State, Reuerence, Devotion, are parts of the Mind) by the difference, or prædominant will of what we (metaphorically) call Humors, and Affections, all things are troubled and confused” (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-63], 7:213). Of course, Jonson's Sejanus (1603) is also interested in the idea of the body politic (see Barkan, pp. 90-5).

39. See, for instance, Thornborough, Ioiefull and Blessed Revniting, pp. 45-7, 69; Rapta Tatio, sig. A2r, F2v; and Hayward, A Treatise of Vnion, pp. 10, 38.

40. Similarity was a common argument for Union (see Rapta Tatio, sig. H2r; and Thornborough, Ioiefull and Blessed Revniting, p. 9).

41. My concluding section argues that this set of topical parallels makes neither pro-Union nor anti-Union arguments.

42. See the connection between eating and the body politic in Thomas Dekker's If This Be Not a Good Play (ca. 1612), as quoted in Hale, p. 75.

43. McIlwain, p. 272.

44. McIlwain, p. 292.

45. McIlwain, p. 287.

46. See Barkan, p. 108.

47. Aside from its commercial connotations, “incorporate/-ion” is a term found in many of the Union tracts. See Thornborough, Ioiefull and Happy Revniting, p. 8; Cornwallis, Miracvlovs and Happie Union, sig. C1r.; A Treatise About the Union of England and Scotland, pp. 44, 58.

48. Gurr also notes this absence (see pp. 66, 68).

49. For the king as heart, see Hale, pp. 63, 72.

50. See Richard Martin, “A Speach Delivered to the King's Most Excellent Majestie, In the Name of the Sheriffes of London and Middlesex. By Maister Richard Martin, of the Middle Temple” (1603), rprt. in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, His Royal Consort, Family, and Court, ed. John Nichols, 3 vols. (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828), 1:*131; and the quotation from Barnabe Barnes's Foure Bookes of Offices (1606) in Hale, p. 72, as well as references to the “cistern” of royal patronage in 1610 (Cuddy, “Revival,” p. 204). See also Gordon, Enotikon, pp. 9-10, on the nourishment flowing from James as head of Great Britain.

51. See Thomas Sorge's argument that Coriolanus exposes the body politic as mere rhetorical counter (“The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor [New York and London: Methuen, 1987], pp. 225-41).

52. While interesting in terms of psychoanalytic and feminist theory, the mother-son bond between Volumnia and Coriolanus probably transacts topical business as well in paralleling James's vexed relationship with his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and with the mother figure of Elizabeth. And in doing so, it highlights both the mutability of the monarch's gender and the authority of women as monarch and over the monarch.

53. See Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” SQ 41, 4 (Winter 1990): 455-69.

54. See Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 153; and Barker, pp. 244-6, 254.

55. See the language of affection in King Lear. “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (I.i.1-2), in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (London and New York: Viking Penguin, 1969). Affection here seems to be both precedence in the succession and favor or patronage.

56. Besides Cuddy's work on royal patronage and the Bedchamber (see n. 32 above), see Starkey's pathbreaking “Representation through Intimacy,” in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. Ioan Lewis (London, New York, and San Francisco: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 187-224; as well as Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). For some approaches to the ways specific texts represent patronage relations, see Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 63-81, on Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 153-87, on Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth; and Kahn, “‘Magic of Bounty,’” on Timon of Athens.

57. While there are supplication scenes in many of Shakespeare's plays—Measure for Measure and Richard II come to mind—none has as many as Coriolanus: seven by my count—the five I discuss, as well as two others (see n. 58 below).

58. This scene evidently made an impression on the Jacobean audience, for Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher seem to have imitated (or parodied?) it in A King and No King (John Ripley, “Coriolanus” on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994 [Madison and Teaneck NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Press, 1998], p. 51). Coriolanus's other two supplication scenes are the plebeians begging for corn in I.i and Coriolanus asking to spare the poor man in I.x.

59. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 33-5, 53-6.

60. Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. ix-x, 1-28, esp. 12, 17.

61. For a different view, see Wells, pp. 161-7.

62. DiGangi, pp. ix, 17; Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 23-6, 30-1, 37, 62, 73-4; Smith, pp. 52-3; Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 40-61; Goldberg, Sodometries, pp. 17-20; and Gregory Bredbeck, “Tradition and the Individual Sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire,” in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (New York, London, and Norwood Australia: Haworth Press, 1992), pp. 41-6.

63. DiGangi, pp. ix, 3-4.

64. See DiGangi, chaps. 2-5.

65. See Parker's note on IV.v.46-9; compare Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), p. 161, III.ii.113-6 and notes; and Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), pp. 153, 185.

66. The others are “Ganymede,” “catamite,” “ingle,” and “minion” (Smith, Homosexual Desire, pp. 189-223). Smith discusses the function of “boy” in this scene in “Rape, Rap, Rupture, Rapture: R-rated Futures on the Global Market,” TexP 9, 3 (Winter 1995): 421-44, 431-2.

67. See Bergeron, pp. 105, 88, 90.

68. For a different view, see Miller, who essentially allegorizes the play as a fantasy about Coriolanus/James betraying his state and then being killed.

69. Hale notices that Coriolanus “reflects the political tensions of early Jacobean England by examining the complex problems inherent in the application of Menenius's fable to a specific political situation” (p. 98).

70. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 30.

71. See Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, pp. 120-53; and Marcus, pp. 202-11, 218.

72. Kernan, pp. 1-23.

73. See Zeeveld; and Huffman, pp. 179-80.

74. See Barkan, pp. 106-7.

75. See the tribunes' remarks about infection and amputation at III.i.297-8, 308-12.

76. Ripley describes the play as politically ambivalent (pp. 37-8). Hale argues that “[Coriolanus] raises complex questions to which [Shakespeare] offers no simple answer” (p. 105).

77. Quoted in Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, p. 132 n. 13; “A Censure upon a fart, let in the House of Commons … by Sir Henry Ludlow,” BL Harleian MS 4931, f. 10. I am grateful to Derek Hirst for calling my attention to and supplying a transcription of the second poem.

Many thanks are due to those whose suggestions and conversation helped refine this essay: Steve Zwicker, Derek Hirst, Joe Loewenstein, Brian Walter, and Madhuparna Mitra.