Social context

Abstract

It is tempting to find analogies between the events of Coriolanus and late sixteenth-early seventeenth-century English history. The play concerns city mobs, the urban mobs that threatened Parliament throughout the seventeenth century, and which were led by dissenting members of Parliament. The characters on stage are mechanics, apprentices, shopkeepers, traders, not farm workers. The enclosure riots were the result of larger changes within the structure of English society and economics; they were part of the rationalisation of farming, which was in itself part of a movement towards greater centralisation in tax collecting, government, and so on. The kind of urban mutiny shown in the play belongs to the early modern world. The tribunes who represent the people have become a class in themselves. The situation in the play where no one class dominates, but in which there is unresolved potential civil war, is like early seventeenth-century England in which feudal power had been destroyed and the question remaining is whether the court or Parliament will rule.