Ridiculous Subjects: Coriolanus, Popular Representation, and the Roman Tribunes in Early Modern Drama

This essay argues that the famously ambivalent treatment of popular representation in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) is rooted in the play’s examination of a specific class of political representative: the plebeian tribunes of ancient Rome. It begins by tracing the extensive and deeply polarized reception of these officers in English prose before discussing their role in several earlier plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In both print and performance, the imagined figure of the tribune lent historical specificity and human weight to early modern debates about the abstract idea of popular representation, increasingly understood during the period as a political structure through which the material needs of the common people—and perhaps even their distinctive habits or ways of living—might be integrated into government without plunging it into the chaos of direct popular rule. Guided by these contemporary engagements with the tribunate, the essay demonstrates that the tribunes of Coriolanus neither straightforwardly defend nor subvert the political agency of the play’s Roman citizens. Instead, the play advances a more self-reflexive, theatricalized vision of popular representation that opened up new intellectual and aesthetic avenues for exploring this topic in the following decades. [A.B.]