Coriolanus and Christ

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus can be read as dramatizing the Augustinian perspective most recently articulated by Oliver O’Donovan, namely, that “within every political society there occurs, implicitly, an act of worship of divine rule.” Through his dramatization of Roman society, Shakespeare points to another act of worship that constitutes a different sort of city, and the play hints, as Stanley Cavell has noted, that the ground of the “mutually participate” social body is Eucharist, understood as an act of communal thanksgiving. Over against the order of forgetfulness, ingratitude, and cannibalism, Shakespeare gestures toward another order, which feeds on another’s flesh without being cannibalistic, which enacts a memorial of a scapegoat’s wounds suffered in service to a city, which is centered on a meal of thanksgiving, a festive and mutual partaking that refreshes rather than devours political community.