Review of Periodicals (69.2)

Bodies in Coriolanus and Northern Ireland

Nicholas Taylor-Collins compares the ways the dismembered body functions as a trope for civil discord both in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and modern Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson’s collection Belfast Graffiti. Both works represent deadly civic dissension through repeated references to separated hands, toes, bellies, and limbs, physical components that should work together but don’t. In Coriolanus, a spokesman for plebeian protesters is contemptuously called the “big toe” of the assembly by the patrician Menenius. Later, the hero Coriolanus seems to see the citizens not as whole beings but as mere tongues, or “voices,” which he needs for his election to consul. The titles of some of Carson’s Belfast poems invoke a similar vision of a polis divided into parts, like a body in pieces. We have, for example, “The Knee” (about the kneecapping of one’s political opponents), “Bloody Hand” (about a planned assassination), and “The Mouth” (about a talkative police informer). Taylor-Collins’s statement that Carson’s vision of the Protestant-Catholic Troubles of modern Belfast was foreshadowed in a “version of early modern London” found in Coriolanus, is too glibly stated; apart from a footnote mentioning the 1607 corn riots in the English Midlands, he offers nothing to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s version of Republican Rome was a disguised image of seventeenth-century England, let alone London. But fortunately, that claim is peripheral to his main argument, which is complex, but compelling. Beyond showing that for both Shakespeare and Carson, the fragmented-body images stand for a fractured…