'Manhood and chevalrie': 'Coriolanus', Prince Henry and the chivalric revival

The Midlands corn riots of 1607, and the arguments in parliament three year s earlier over the right of the House of Commons to initiate legislation, f orm a well-documented part of Coriolanus' political background. But there w as another political issue that was being debated in the years immediately preceding the writing of the play. It is one that had international rather than purely domestic implications, and that may help to answer Bullough's q uestion: 'What led Shakespeare to write this play on a comparatively minor and early figure in Roman history?' In the last few years of his short life the Prince of Wales was rapidly acquiring a reputation for aggressive mili tarism. By 1607 he had become a symbolic focus for the aspirations of milit ant Protestantism and was celebrated in poetry, masque, portraiture, and pa mphlets as a future scourge of England's Continental enemies. Disturbed in 1608 by a pamphlet entitled 'Arguments for War' put together by a group of Henry's military advisers, James commissioned Sir Robert Cotton to write a reply warning of the dangers of the new cult of chivalric honour associated with the prince. Coriolanus forms part of this embarrassingly public debat e. For his portrait of the martial hero at his most unlovable, Shakespeare turns, not just to a state renowned above all others in the ancient world f or its military adventurism, but to a time when internal order in that stat e had broken down altogether. In doing so he effectively gives the lie to o ne of the most frequently repeated arguments of the war party, namely, the claim that 'when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home' (Sire Walt er Ralegh, A Discourse of War).