SOURCE: Garganigo, Alex. “Coriolanus, the Union Controversy, and Access to the Royal Person.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42, no. 2 (2002): 335-59.

In the following essay, Garganigo demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare used the physical body and the notion of the body politic in Coriolanus to indirectly criticize both James I's plan to unite England and Scotland, and the royal patronage system.

While the metaphor of the body politic preoccupied Shakespeare throughout his career, only Coriolanus (1608) with its fable of the belly subjects the body politic to explicit scrutiny as a theoretical problem, and as a discourse peculiar to the early years of James I's reign.¹ I wish to situate Coriolanus's obsession with bodies natural and politic within the controversy over James's plans to combine England and Scotland into a larger Great Britain—plans not realized until the Act of Union a century later—because, in many ways...