The “Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ in quarantine” meme, which started making the rounds in early March, was meant to goad productivity during the early shelter-in-place phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon, though, it became a punch line for jokes about sourdough starters and Netflix binges, and it had the added disadvantage of being not quite accurate—for “King Lear” was not composed when plague struck but, rather, during a respite from the periodic visitations that swept through London between 1603 and 1610. The plays that Shakespeare did write while plague raged around him included “Coriolanus,” a tragedy steeped in allusions to “contagion,” “plague,” and “the dead carcasses of unburied men.” In exploring the political rifts that threatened to upend the fledgling Roman Republic, the play is an account of what happens when, at a time of crisis, a ruling clique chafes at the constraints imposed by representative government, and in this respect it could not be more timely.
Shakespeare likely wrote “Coriolanus” in 1608, in the aftermath of a popular uprising in the Midlands against the ravages of agrarian capitalism. Thousands of laborers there protested the enclosure of common pasture by wealthy landowners, and those in authority swiftly and brutally crushed the revolt, killing dozens of protesters, then executing ringleaders. In some areas, the rich hoarded food supplies, driving up the price of grain, and starvation followed.
Not long after this, plague revisited London. In the early seventeenth century, no one knew what caused bubonic plague, yet those in charge recognized that social distancing was crucial and crowded theatres were dangerous places. So, whenever more than thirty or so Londoners a week died of plague, the authorities ordered the city’s public playhouses closed. As a result, the Globe Theatre was likely shuttered for most of the next thirty months, from late July, 1607, when the weekly plague-death count rose to over fifty, until December, 1609, with, at most, eight months’ respite during that long stretch—a period in which Shakespeare wrote “Coriolanus” and reflected on the social and economic crises of his times.
The playwright turned pamphlet writer Thomas Dekker described the depressed mood of London in late 1607: “Dead unto us . . . are our liveliest days, whilst this pestilent vapor hangs over our heads. Dead are our pleasures, for we do now take delight in nothing but mourning. Dead are our hours of leisure, and those which are full of business.” “Coriolanus” was a product of this dark moment. For his main source, Shakespeare turned to the “Life of Coriolanus” in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans” (a hefty volume he likely owned, so had close at hand). Plutarch began his biography with Coriolanus’ early years; Shakespeare started his story later in the narrative, when Rome’s citizens, not easily stirred to rebellion, became desperate enough to confront those in power—a flash point that recalled recent events in the Midlands.
In Plutarch, Romans were weighed down by usurious interest rates. Shakespeare altered the nature of their grievance: his starving citizens are furious that the rich are hoarding much-needed food supplies. To that end, Shakespeare reworked Plutarch’s famous “Fable of the Belly,” a speech intended to silence dissent, delivered by an eloquent patrician, Menenius. In the opening scene of “Coriolanus,” Menenius spars with his questioners, insulting the most aggressive of them—even mockingly assigning him a nickname, the “great toe” of the assembly. He asserts that what hungry, desperate people ought to do is pray, not demand relief. Those in power, Menenius insists, bear no responsibility for the calamity that ordinary citizens are now facing: “For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it, and / Your knees to them, not arms, must help.” Complaints against their leaders must stop, he adds, because “you slander / The helms o’ the state, who care for you like fathers, / When you curse them.”
The casual insults, the condescension, and the refusal to accept responsibility will be familiar to anyone who has lately tuned in to the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic. Menenius’ defense of top-down government policies ends with him telling the crowd to back off; they are mistaken in believing that the stockpiles controlled by those in power belong to the people, for the government is in fact “the store-house and the shop / Of the whole body,” and that any “public benefit which you receive . . . proceeds or comes from them to you / And no way from yourselves.” It is startling how closely his argument presages what Jared Kushner said when he was challenged recently on why the government was hoarding lifesaving resources. Governors of badly afflicted states, desperate to get hold of supplies sitting idly in federal warehouses while their citizens are suffering, cannot fathom any more than the plebeians in “Coriolanus” why supplies aren’t being shared. “The notion of the federal stockpile,” Kushner said, “was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.” That proprietary “our” feels lifted right out of Shakespeare’s play.
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to follow up on Kushner’s declaration in a Presidential tweet and subtweet. As far as Trump was concerned, the desire to wrest away what is his to give will always be partisan and relentless: “Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). Remember, we are a backup for them. The complainers should . . . have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit.” Trump’s tweet calls to mind Coriolanus’ disdain for the ingrates that “presume to know / What’s done i’ the Capitol.” And he shares with Coriolanus—another outsider lacking in empathy, who is pressed by his supporters into a political role for which he is completely ill-suited—the conviction that any concession to those who have “vented their complainings” is a sign of weakness, one that will “make bold power look pale.”
Rome may be at war with its neighbors and on the verge of civil strife, but what really rankles those in power is ingratitude, a word that echoes through the play. Leaders must be thanked for doing their job: “for the multitude to be ingrateful, / Were to make a monster of the multitude.” At a more recent pandemic briefing, after Trump went on at length about which governors were “gracious” and which were not, a reporter asked, “Why does that matter if they’re gracious or not gracious if they need the supplies?” Trump answered, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” But it does to him, as it does in “Coriolanus,” where the failure of those who distrust Coriolanus to pay homage to him is condemned as “a kind of ingrateful injury.”
“Coriolanus” has long been read as a play about the dangers posed by unchecked authoritarianism. When the people are finally fed up and banish Coriolanus, the tribune of the people, the feisty Sicinius—Rome’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—reminds the patricians of an essential truth they seem to have forgotten: “What is the city but the people?” Those who are suffering and dying are fellow-citizens, not an abstraction. In the midst of our own devastating pandemic, it remains to be seen whether those who desperately need warehoused supplies will get them in time, and whether the majority of citizens in our own divided republic will reach the point where they too have had enough, and take action.
