ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus in terms of the various political bodies that structure the narrative and its language. 1 The reading moves through a number of registers. First, and most obviously, the question of the body politic, which is recounted in a fable told to hungry citizens. It moves from this to discuss actual physical bodies and wounds, and then turns to the recurrent language of infection and infected bodies. This relates to the bodies of non-human animals, frequently mentioned as approbation or condemnation, particularly as this is played out in terms of the clash between the elite and the multitude, the singular and plural, and the understanding of the city as being both the people and the place. There are a number of examples of animals as the hunter and hunted, consumer and consumed. Finally, the chapter addresses the theme of banishment and the conquest of territories, in terms of bodily aspects in other political senses. In Coriolanus territory as the body of the state is only one aspect of its corporeal nature.
