ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Shakespeare's Coriolanus, which dramatized issues of class difference, the body as metaphor, patriarchy, and virtue. Among historians of seventeenth-century politics and political thought, the work of James Harrington is highly regarded. Woolrych described Oceana as the greatest work of republican thought in early modern England, while J. G. A. Pocock called it a major revision of political thought, the true pioneer of civic humanist thought in England, which forged a vital link between Florentine republicanism and that of the American colonists. The play was set in ancient Rome, with most of the action occurring in the city and its hinterland, and it encompassed a number of political and social narratives. A number of authorities agree that contretemps in government made it harder and harder to represent government using an organic metaphor. These upheavals signified that the Jacobean state was clearly not unified around a universally accepted organic analogy for a model of society and government.
