ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we argue that attending to early modern theories of animal language can productively change our understanding of the politics of voice in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The chapter takes as its starting point a phrase in the 1623 Folio text of the play that has become a textual crux to modern editors. Though Coriolanus states that he is forced to beg for votes in a “Wooluish [wolvish] tongue,” modern editors, finding the idea of wolvish language unintelligible, typically emend this phrase to change his animal tongue into a woolen toge or toga. We argue, however, that such emendation is not necessary, as Coriolanus is explicitly in dialogue with the literary tradition of speaking animals found in Aesopian fables in ways that go beyond the play’s early retelling of the fable of the belly and the members. Reading the play in conversation with fables and other sources that explore early modern fantasies of speaking animals shows how Coriolanus decouples language from politics, and animality from noise. This, in turn, allows us to reorient the typical way of understanding the play’s politics: we argue that, rather than opposing the patricians to the plebians, the play stages a tension between sovereign forms of power and potentially non-sovereign forces that oppose that sovereignty. The play, that is, uses animal imagery and invokes fantasies of animal language in order to rethink the relationship among inarticulate noise, political voices, and sovereign power in the body politic.
