ABSTRACT
Even the most private of spaces has its own architecture and rationale and what amounts to a “logic of power,” some mechanism for determining what this space means, what kinds of expression it permits.2 The inhabitants of close or closed quarters may spend more time in conflict with each other than in rebellion against their confines. Shakespeare exposes the tension which can both organize and divide private space in Coriolanus, where housebound wife and mother Virgilia and Volumnia, “manifest housekeepers” (1.3),3 sit and sew together, awaiting news of their kinsman, the warrior Coriolanus. Coupled so closely together, the paired images illustrate age-old discord between in-laws,4 and the spite that orders this particular world is obvious; but Shakespeare also suggests that the early modern household could be a claustrophobic setting for solitude and for pride-a “brewing place of poisons” rather than a “protected place of withdrawal” (see Ziegler, p. 85)—where anxious sublimation ranges unintelligibly alongside fierce and radical revision.
