Essay: William Shakespeare, Social Inequality and Politics in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar

William Shakespeare plays are held in high regard till this day because they continue to give us insight into important political motifs, social interactions, and ideas of hierarchy. These ideas are constructed and successfully placed on many of Shakespeare plays and the same can be said for Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. The play Coriolanus follows the elite Roman noble class warrior, Caius Martius and his different heroic exploits throughout the play, even though he is shown as a heroic character throughout most of the play Shakespeare still makes sure to show off his many different character flaws. One of Coriolanus major flaw is his ideas of upper class elitism and disdain for the plebeians, gives the reader insight into the conflict between the upper-class and lower-class citizens of Rome. Using Daniel Juan Gil’s argumentative framework in “The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Life of the Flesh: Absolutism, Civic Republicanism, and “Bare Life” in Julius Caesar” will allow us to understand the complex political climate that is outlined in Coriolanus. For example, how certain ideas that Coriolanus has towards the poor puts him at odd with the lower plebeians from the onset of the play. A close look at different interactions between characters in Coriolanus reveals how Coriolanus disdain of plebeians serves as a way to critique the political ideas regarding a government solely run by the upper-class.
From the onset of this play Shakespeare makes it known that Plebeians want more autonomy within the political sphere, and their public disdain of Coriolanus when they say, “You are all resolved rather to die than famish/ Resolved.resolved / First, you know Caius Marcius is chief enemy to the people. […] We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely” (Act 1 Scene 1). Here the citizens are citing multitude of their grievances with the ruling patrician class, in one of the few social spaces that they are allowed to speak their grievances, and also outline Coriolanus as being there sworn enemy. There suffering in the beginning of this play solely inhabits the “public sphere” that Juan Gil outlines throughout his play, as they are not yet allowed a space to speak within the higher government places. The patricians by “granting” a public space for the plebeians may have given them a place to gather and speak their grievances, but ultimately, they are still being suppressed to using their freedom of speech in only places they are allowed. We know this because if they were given the ability to speak within the government they would not be forced to take up arms and threaten violence to reach their particular goals within the proper allocation of grain.
When the play continues into the introduction of Coriolanus, he makes it clear from the onset that he views the plebeians in negative light and that they deserve to be under the patricians. Coriolanus main goal in opposing the plebeians is in complete contrast to the goals of Julius Caesar that Juan Gil outlines, “The notion that Caesar should be a king, but what seems to provoke him even more at this moment is that Caesar has endowed the people- stripped of their economic markers and converted into proto-citizens assembled in the mass with real political force” (Gil, p.27). Coriolanus disdain for the plebeians does not only reside in his belief that they are inferior to the aristocrats, but also serves to strip them of the entirety of their political voices rendering them nothing more than bodies that serve the state. Coriolanus is at odds with the newly inducted republic because he knows this might ultimately give the plebeians the voice that they had been pleading for. The patricians from the beginning of the play are wary of the potential ability that the plebeians have to disrupt the political hierarchy, and Menenius outlines these fears clearly, “Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them/ Against the Roman state, whose course will on / The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs / Of more strong link asunder than can ever/ Appear in your impediment” (Act 1, Scene 1). The scene perfectly outlines the private fears that the patricians have regarding the plebeians. Menenius attempts to dissuade them from gathering arms against the state by saying that the state is bigger than the plebeians as a whole, and would crush their resistance without any hesitation. Menenius is attempting to conceal his true fears, that this rebellion may strip away the power of the aristocrats rendering them no better than the plebeians that they currently govern. These ideas exactly mirror the fears outlined in Juan Gil’s writing where he states, “For Cassius, the fundamental problem is not that Caesar wants too much state power, but that he organizes state power on a footing that deprives aristocrats […] of an opportunity to use the state to advance their own honor.” (Gil, p.24) Shakespeare makes effective usage of the working-class people to reveal the multitude of insecurities and fears that the aristocrats have regarding them.