SOURCE: "Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 455-69.

In the following essay, Jagendorf characterizes Coriolanus as a political drama in which the body politic is sundered by class struggle.

Political thinking and, consequently, writing about politics have traditionally made use of certain master tropes that remain constant in principle even when the nature and content of political discourse change. At the foundation of Western political thought, for instance, is the trope of the dialectical relationship between man in the state of nature (that is, man fending for himself and caring for the propagation of his species) and man in the domain of culture (that is, man in the embrace of community, of polis, of an organism that, ideally, is himself writ large, but that also dominates him, subjecting him to a necessity beyond the easily graspable one of his own needs...