SOURCE: "Topicality and Subversion in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 287-310.

In this essay, Miller understands Coriolanus as Shakespeare's attempt to reconceive the cultural significance of the topical events that shaped the play.

Studies of topicality comprise one tradition within the large body of political criticism on Coriolanus. Jacobean parliamentary battles, the 1607 Midlands Insurrection, conceptions of a renaissance soldier, and the theory of the body politic are some of the historical events and cultural ideas that have been used to read the play.¹ While such explorations of the play's influences gesture towards the interplay between texts and their contexts, these studies have nevertheless tended to see Coriolanus as merely reflecting or replicating topical events rather than re-conceiving of them. Leah Marcus's recent work on the play can be useful in formulating alternatives for interpreting topicality in literature. In Puzzling Shakespeare...