SOURCE: "Against the Grain: Representing the Market in Coriolanus," in The Seventeenth Century, Vol. VI, No. 2, Autumn, 1991, pp. 111-48.

In the following essay, Wilson interprets Coriolanus as Shakespeare's depiction of an emerging market economy, focusing particularly on his treatment of the fluctuation of values.

I

The famine of the 1590s hit Stratford hardest in the winter of 1597-8. Shortage was so acute the townsmen petitioned local Justices to impose the Privy Council's Book of Orders against hoarding. Their aim was to break a cartel of local farmers, who were withholding corn from the marketplace to inflate prices, and whom Lord Burghley condemned as 'wicked people more like wolves or cormorants than natural men'. Yet the old minister also noted they were 'men of good livelihood and estimation', and what exacerbated Stratford's crisis was the storing of grain for brewing by its maltsters. As Richard Quiney, the spokesman of...