I

Coriolanus is most often described as “Shakespeare's most political play,” because it “raises issues most recognizably political to the modern mind.”Footnote ¹² The play charts the rise and fall of Caius Martius, a Roman war hero, dubbed “Coriolanus” for his feats against the Volscians at Corioles. Although indisputably the most able Roman warrior who preserves the city from its enemies, the proud Coriolanus is eventually banished because he refuses to show his wounds to the people when asked to do so as part of the process of his election to the senate. In refusing to display his body as a matter of principle he enables the tribunes, who are suspicious of his lack of commitment to the republican values of Rome, to manipulate the people against him. Incensed at his treatment, Coriolanus allies with the Volscians and invades the city, which is only saved when his mother, wife, and young son plead for Rome. When he claims that the treaty he has signed with Rome is to everyone's advantage Coriolanus is killed by an angry Volscian crowd.

As Mark Kishlansky has pointed out in his analysis of parliamentary selection in early modern London, Shakespeare generally follows his sources, Plutarch and Livy, carefully. However, he seems to adapt their accounts of Coriolanus's attempt to become elected senator to his own experience of the selection of officeholders, so that “one must conclude that Shakespeare had first-hand experience, either of wardmote selections to the London Common Council or of parliamentary selections themselves.”Footnote ¹³ Coriolanus, as has been noted often enough, is not a natural politician, and it is not surprising that, although, as Kishlansky further points out, he shares with the citizenry a belief that honor is probably the most vital virtue of the successful officeholder, he fails to secure election.Footnote ¹⁴ The warning signs are clearly there the first time the reluctant war hero meets his supporters:

The description of ordinary Romans as “citizens” links the inhabitants of the Roman Republic to those of London, as the term is also used to describe the people in the English capital who comment on political developments in Richard III.Footnote ¹⁶ More significantly, perhaps, the term is central to an understanding of republican constitutions, as those who are accorded citizen status have the right to participate in the political process. The ideal of citizenship, as J. G. A. Pocock has outlined, was the vita activa, the duty and right of the citizen to play a part in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁷ Coriolanus's contempt for the citizens, part of the pervasive imagery of the mouth and digestion throughout the play, is presumably not heard.Footnote ¹⁸ But there is an unease and hostility expressed through the exchange, with ordinary English words repeated so that emphasis is placed on them and ambiguity exploited. Coriolanus asserts that it is his own “desert” which has led him to seek election, with the barely disguised suggestion that he should not need to be elected by the citizens because his social standing and merit should be obvious enough and cannot seriously be challenged. The citizen's repetition of the word as a question indicates that he assumes that he has the right to determine Coriolanus's “desert” in choosing whether to elect him and is taken aback by Coriolanus's hauteur. The point is developed through a similar repetition of “desire,” with Coriolanus making clear that he does not wish to be elected, implying that it is his duty as a man of high social standing but that no one could really want to take part in such a process when they could be out on the battlefield. Again, the citizen is startled by Coriolanus's contempt for the political culture of Rome, probably asking his question as though he imagines that he has misheard Coriolanus's words, giving him a chance to clarify or backtrack, an opportunity that is unlikely to be taken. And, of course, it is not.

Instead Coriolanus links desire to begging, thinking that any supplication, expression of dependence, or attempt to circumscribe his actions violates his code of honor. His assumption that he acts from noble motives and the citizen from base ones is developed through his question as to what price the consulship should be. For Coriolanus the consulship should be offered to him without question and any attempt to impose conditions is a grubby abuse of a social relationship. The citizen understands the general's assumptions—which is not difficult—and turns their interaction back into social terms in insisting that Coriolanus ask them kindly to elect him. Here there is a rapprochement, with the repetition of “kindly,” a word that they both understand in the same way, and Coriolanus offers to show the citizen his wounds in private. This offer is some form of compromise but it is not what is required as war heroes were expected to show their wounds in public, demonstrating what they had undergone for the people of Rome who would then honor them for their good service.Footnote ¹⁹ Coriolanus is reversing the balance of power between the citizens and the military, insisting that it is his right to decide where and to whom he displays his wounded body. And he returns to his contempt for the citizen with his parting shot, “There's in all two worthy voices begged. I have your alms.” The sarcasm is evident. In casting himself as a beggar who has at least secured two citizens in support of his election to the consulship, a position he does not want, Coriolanus is demonstrating his scorn for the political process that the citizens represent. The rather shell-shocked response of the two citizens, “But this is something odd,” and the reply “An ’twere to give again—but ’tis no matter,” is, like Coriolanus's opening words, presumably not overheard. The citizens are having their doubts about Coriolanus's ability to represent their interests.

It is hardly surprising that with an arrogant reluctant candidate who does not bother to disguise his feelings and who is ridiculously easy to manipulate by more astute political players, and an electorate which wants to be satisfied that their representative respects them and takes them seriously, that the process goes horribly wrong. Coriolanus will not show his wounds to the people to demonstrate the service he has done the citizens of Rome in preserving their liberty, a common custom adopted by other candidates for the senate and still exerting power over the electorate during Augustus's reign, four and a half centuries after Coriolanus's death. Cassius Dio writes of the behavior of the disgruntled candidate, one Licinius Regulus, “enraged because his name had been struck off, while his son and several other candidates to whom he believed himself superior had been elected by lot; he tore open his clothing in the very chamber, stripped his body, listed the campaigns in which he had taken part and showed the assembly his scars.”Footnote ²⁰

In contrast Coriolanus refuses to “counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man, and give it bountiful to the desirers” (2.3.99–100), keeping his body hidden while he lambastes the citizens as hungry mouths with stinking breath, a drain on the resources of the military men who do the real work to preserve the city. Shakespeare uses the story of Coriolanus to explore one of the central themes in Roman history, the fear that as the city-republic becomes more powerful and recruits an ever larger army in order to expand the territories under its control the diverse new inhabitants assembled from the far-flung reaches of the expanding empire along with the increasingly powerful military machine will overwhelm the political institutions of the state and it will descend into dictatorship. For Polybius Rome works best when there is a symbiotic relationship between the different constituencies of the city, and is least successful when one dominates the others, as happens when a republic decays into tyranny or democracy, or, even worse, civil war.Footnote ²¹ As the exchange between Coriolanus and the citizens demonstrates, this was a political lesson that Shakespeare absorbed, especially when we consider that the Jacobean playwright has transformed the nature of his source, Plutarch's life of Caius Martius Coriolanus. In Plutarch the election goes wrong for entirely different reasons:

Martius is indeed proud and the preferred candidate of the Roman nobility, but his failure in the election process is not due to his actions in alienating possible support. Rather, it is due to the people, who decide without any intervention of the tribunes to elect rival candidates as consuls. In Livy's much shorter account of the life of Coriolanus, Sicinius, who reappears as a tribune in Shakespeare's play, is a seditious figure who stirs the people up to rebel against the consuls because bankers and usurers have been allowed to dominate the Roman economy at the expense of the ordinary people. Coriolanus has a specific animus against Sicinius because of his incendiary role, asking in the senate, “I that could not beare Tarquinus to bee King, shall I brooke and suffer Sicinius?”Footnote ²³ It would seem that Shakespeare has this sentence in mind when he casts Junius Brutus, whose namesake deposed the Tarquins and founded the Roman Republic, as the ally of Sicinius in Coriolanus. In Livy and Plutarch the unstable forces of Rome combine to drag Coriolanus down (although his character is largely the same, and Plutarch draws attention to his lack of education which makes him “chollericke and impacient… churlishe, uncivill, and altogether unfit for any mans conversation,” which is a rather damning assessment); in Shakespeare's play the protagonist is far more active in precipitating his own downfall.Footnote ²⁴

The story of the struggle between the political and the military in Shakespeare's play is further complicated by the backdrop of the Midlands’ harvest failures of 1607–8, as many critics have noted.Footnote ²⁵ The citizens protesting at the start of the play are genuinely frightened, angry, and hungry, not just complaining about a perceived lack of justice, because the senators are keeping food for themselves and not distributing it as the citizens think is fair. Coriolanus's many reflections on eating and his representation of the citizens as babies who need feeding can be read alongside Menenius's fable of the belly as astonishingly insensitive and incendiary reactions in a time of food crisis. The fable of the belly is in Shakespeare's principal sources, Livy's History of Rome and Plutarch's Lives. Both historians, like Shakespeare, represent Menenius's analogy in problematic terms, but they are clear that the crisis is caused by extortionate interest rates rather than a restricted food supply resulting from the war. Shakespeare has made the fable more topical for a Jacobean audience aware of food riots, as well as carefully relating aspects of the historical record to focus attention on the behavior of the senate.Footnote ²⁶

Coriolanus combines a series of interrelated political themes about government, perhaps most important being the relationship between government of the self and government of the state. In the opening scene the fable of the belly is designed to persuade the citizens to disperse when they are rioting in protest about the role of Martius, whom they blame, somewhat irrationally, for keeping grain prices high. Menenius's argument that the senators are like the belly and so need support as they distribute food to the other parts of the body can be read as a cynical ploy or as a genuine attempt to adopt the image of the body politic to current circumstances and so try to unite Rome against a common enemy. In terms of a Polybian political analysis, it can be read as an attempt to divide and rule by persuading the citizens to act against their wishes, or as a means of joining the different strata of republican society back together. Menenius faces opposition from the articulate First Citizen, who is skeptical of the explanation provided by the elderly senator, and suggests that other body parts might be more important: “The kingly crowned head, the vigilant eye, / The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, / Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter” (1.1.110–12). Menenius dismisses this alternative understanding of the body politic even though it is in line with the more obvious use of the analogy that usually places the brain or the heart at the center of the state.Footnote ²⁷ The disputed fable casts a shadow over the action, especially if we register the dramatic entry of Martius, who reasserts aristocratic values and insults the citizens for daring to have opinions. The Tribunes, each always on stage with the other, correctly register Coriolanus's patrician attitudes and cleverly use them to undermine his authority:

The Tribunes are correct in their analysis of the social and political attitudes of Coriolanus—which the citizens have witnessed—and are able to bring him down accordingly, but in doing so they almost destroy the body politic of Rome: the parts of the republic turn out to have been more interdependent than anyone had realized, a real body politic. The campaign against Coriolanus is carefully planned and orchestrated, as Sicinius recognizes: “To th’ Capitol, come. / We will be there before the stream o'th'people, / And this shall seem, as partly ’tis, their own, / Which we have goaded onward” (2.3.257–59). Perhaps the key phrase here is “as partly ’tis,” a recognition of mutual insight and the interlocked dependency of different social strata. The hostility to arrogant patricians is not manufactured, but it does have to be nurtured. The Tribunes bring to fruition what is already there and only by working together with the citizens can they achieve their goal, a lesson that Coriolanus never learns. But then again, we need to understand that the tribunes’ political insight is at best partial. They can unite to bring the arrogant patrician to heel, but only at the cost of undermining Rome itself, not realizing that it is all aspects of the republic which need to function together, not just some parts. The pervasive image of the hungry, desperate mouth proves more pertinent than any of the protagonists realize as a divided Rome starts to devour itself. Class cooperation and conflict are problems not easily solved in Coriolanus.

Generational issues are as intractable as class issues. The formidable Volumnia, who would rather see her sons dead than fail in conflict, has made her son what he is and her sense of herself helps to make Rome what it is, bringing the city to the brink of disaster. When Menenius asks Volumnia if she will eat supper with him after Coriolanus's banishment, she replies, “Anger's my meat: I sup upon myself / And so shall starve with feeding” (4.2.50–51). Rome is suffering from dearth, principally because it is consuming itself: Volumnia's logic resembles that of the senate (they are a belly; she eats herself). She cannot see why her son is as he is, and the military code of the ruling class, learned in childhood, deprives the city of good leadership and prevents the balanced interaction that a properly functioning body politic requires. The senators have indeed become the belly of the city, but not necessarily in the way that Menenius imagines. They are eating themselves and so devouring Rome, a process only arrested when Volumnia, Virgilia, and Young Martius successfully plead with Coriolanus to stop the Volscian invasion. At last, a form of authority and normality is restored to the stricken city, but at what price?

If Coriolanus has a moral it seems to be that no man or state is an island able to exist in isolation, a common argument in the period.Footnote ²⁸ The play's message may well be somewhat pointed given the recent accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England who had designs to make himself the first modern king of Britain and Ireland.Footnote ²⁹ James's proposed union of the crowns had met with considerable opposition in 1604, soon before Coriolanus was performed. As Keith M. Brown has argued, “James's mystical conception of union failed to inspire an English audience deeply suspicious of British ideology,” and was rejected in James's first parliament.Footnote ³⁰ Union involved the transformation of the long-established English legal system and parliament was not prepared to make such drastic changes.Footnote ³¹ Countries could not be isolated, but then neither could monarchs who wished to impose their designs on an obviously reluctant and resistant populace. James's plan was perhaps as unlikely to succeed as Coriolanus attempting to secure election to the senate. Of course, the parallels are by no means perfect—James was eager for union, Coriolanus rather reluctant to become a senator—but then there is no perfect link between King Lear and the union of the crowns but there would have to have been an almighty coincidence for a play about the break-up of Britain not to have had a topical meaning at a time when the monarch wanted to unite the kingdoms.Footnote ³²

Coriolanus invites political parallels even as it suggests that the meaning of the play cannot and should not be limited to them: read in similar terms the Duke in Measure for Measure is and is not James and comparisons are as easy to refuse as they are to make.Footnote ³³ As John Kerrigan has pointed out, “Coriolanus, which works with London perceptions of Anglo-Scottish difference in the polarity that it establishes between the fractious, politically complex world of Rome and more archaic, aristocratic, and militaristic milieu of the Volscians… responds to the stubbornness of MPs in the Commons… during the union debate.”Footnote ³⁴ The power of stories in Renaissance England was that they had contemporary application even as they could never be reduced to simple allegory: instead they provided useful parallels for the reader to understand and explore.Footnote ³⁵ James was notorious for telling parliament that it could not tell him what to do and that he would decide whether he would let it influence his decisions as it was merely there to counsel him should he require advice: it had no claim on him. He advised his son to hold few parliaments and only then when it was the monarch wished to pass new laws.Footnote ³⁶ Disgusted with Rome's failure to honor him as he values himself, Coriolanus joins with the city's enemies and leads an invasion that brings Rome to its knees. The parallel to the invasion of Britain by France in King Lear, as well as the invasion of Britain by the Romans in Cymbeline, would seem too potent to ignore and both plays were written in the wake of the political entity England/Britain changing dramatically.Footnote ³⁷

The more obvious lesson would seem to be that Shakespeare, from the Henry VI plays onwards, writes plays which point out the dangers of ambitious, isolated figures at the apex of society who have the potential to cause enormous amounts of damage to those beneath them, implicitly or explicitly suggesting that a more integrated and homogeneous society in which such figures have to be answerable to the people they govern would be preferable. It is a lesson that can be read as conservative, looking back to the ideals of an integrated commonwealth propagated in the mid-sixteenth century and earlier medieval models of limited kingship; or perhaps, one inspired by humanist ideals of classical and vernacular strains of republicanism, and the need to establish institutions which would propagate civic identity and virtuous behavior and so limit the tyrannical ambitions of even the most aggressively selfish monarch.Footnote ³⁸ Or, most likely, a combination of the two, a series of ideas about topics such as kingship, responsibility, agency, duty, citizenship, obedience, and the rights and wrongs of direct action, combining to inform the complicated world of the play, making it hard to pin it down to one dominant strain of political thought. Isn't that what we witness in Coriolanus? The election process that Coriolanus has to submit to is messy and cynical and the tribunes hardly play entirely fair, using their political skills and knowledge to undermine the gullible war hero. Then again, they are right that he is a loose cannon and an obvious danger to himself and others.

Coriolanus would seem to be a play carefully targeted at a London audience in Jacobean England, as John Kerrigan pointed out in his reading of the play as a comment on the failure of the British project. On the one hand there is the thrill of an exotic story of ancient Rome with its unusual cast of characters in the grip of paranoid war fever, a city under siege, which casts its tragic hero with care as a flawed military man beset with dramatic irony after dramatic irony as it is obvious to the audience how he should behave in playing the crowd (the play has many humorous moments brought out nicely in the Globe's 2006 production with Jonathan Cake in the title role).Footnote ³⁹ On the other, the play represents local elections and the issues of riots caused by food shortages, both of which would have had a topical resonance, and reminded an audience that what they were seeing referred to events much closer to home.

There is a far more significant parallel than anything raised so far which might help explain the specific nature of Coriolanus, which is set in a mighty, unstable city of squabbles, egos, and conflicting loyalties unsure how to establish its political identity. The play was first staged in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, a time of acute paranoia when no one was really sure how serious the danger was, who they could really trust, or what they should actually do about what might be happening. Was London/England on a war footing, facing enemies within as well as without, unsure who they really were, and who could be counted loyal and who was a traitor? Coriolanus opens the play as the most loyal of all Romans, and dies a traitor's death, caught between two sides. We can never really be sure who speaks for Rome. The citizens? The tribunes? The senators? Volumnia? All have a stake in the city and are Roman but have overlapping, contradictory, often diametrically opposed values and identities, very like Jacobean England. Political ideas—and modern interpretations of them—varied considerably.Footnote ⁴⁰ More significantly, there were difficult opposed religious loyalties, most acutely between irredentist Catholics, determined to force the hand of the king by whatever means necessary, and loyalists (Appellants), more concerned to reach a compromise with the regime.Footnote ⁴¹ How could their loyalty to the state be ensured, especially when Protestants were hardly a unified group with shared beliefs and clear ideas about how to ensure the security of the realm, whether Catholics should be persecuted, forced to declare their loyalty, or whether a policy of ignoring the deep divisions between religious groups in England was the best and safest way to proceed?Footnote ⁴²

The post–Gunpowder Plot answer was the Oath of Allegiance. The oath gave subjects a stark choice. The loyal subject had to acknowledge James as the “lawful and rightful King of this realm” and publicly declare that the pope had no power to depose the king “or to discharge any of his Subjects of their allegiance and obedience to his Majesty,” a confrontational formula.Footnote ⁴³ The most significant sections required the subject to denounce the claims of the papacy without reservation:

The loyal subject now had to swear that he or she had not equivocated when taking the oath, removing the possibility of ambiguity and deception. The oath was disseminated widely in various proclamations as various antirecusancy laws were passed in order to force the hand of subjects wavering in their loyalty.Footnote ⁴⁵ Catholics, many of whom had eagerly anticipated James's reign, hoping for a tolerant regime, were dismayed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many had to pay exorbitant fines which helped fund James's generosity toward his favorites, and the oath was widely viewed as a cynical way of supporting James's style of rule.Footnote ⁴⁷ They were now divided even more than before, as Michael Questier has argued, the oath claiming to be moderate in only demanding temporal obedience while effectively ensuring that a Protestant public sphere would emerge. In effect it turned “a denial of the deposing power into what could plausibly be regarded as a rejection of the papal primacy,” and was, therefore, “the ideological equivalent of the oath of supremacy.”Footnote ⁴⁸ According to W. B. Patterson, one of “James's conspicuous achievements was to bring English Protestants together in a common front which, for the moment at least, obscured the theological and ecclesiological differences among them.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Read in the light of the imposition of the Oath of Allegiance Coriolanus looks like a fable for the times. There is no compromise between Coriolanus and the citizens and the analogies of the body politic articulated by Menenius serve to point out the deep divisions in Roman society, not the unity the political metaphor is designed to foster. Should each side compromise and pretend that they can get on? Or are the tribunes right to open the wounds and force Coriolanus's banishment (a tactic that works in the end but with high risk and at high cost)? And what should people be loyal to? An ideal of honor, as Coriolanus suggests, or should they work to try and paper over the cracks as Menenius attempts to do? The dilemmas that this troubling play articulates are precisely those surrounding debates over the Oath of Allegiance, as well as generated by its imposition.

II

All's Well That Ends Well has long worried critics because the cunning use of a bed trick—substituting one woman for another unbeknown to the man in question—serves to unite one willing partner, Helena, with an unwilling one, Bertram. Helena is granted her heart's desire by the king of France when she cures his fistula, unfortunately selecting as her prize a reluctant husband who is immune to her charms. For David Scott Kastan, the “epigrammatic title of Shakespeare's play may virtually serve as a definition of comedy,” and the drama, in exploring the “limitations of formal control,” eventually “makes us recognize the inadequacy of a conception either of comedy or of ethical behavior that focuses exclusively on ends.”Footnote ⁵⁰

As a reading of the play in terms of its form it is hard to imagine that Kastan's succinct analysis of the comic nature of All's Well can be bettered. But there is another story that can be told. It is worth considering the chop logic of the Clown, servant to the Countess, Bertram's mother, in the first scene in which he appears. The Clown explores the significance of the words of the marriage ceremony in The Book of Common Prayer which claim that husband and wife cannot be separated, their union “signifying the mistical union that is betwixt Christ and his Churche,” concluding with the exhortation, “Those whome God hath joined together, let no man put asonder.”Footnote ⁵¹ The Clown provides the obviously fallacious argument:

The first part of the speech argues that an adulterer helps and loves the cuckold because they both love the same woman and are therefore all part of the same flesh and blood which forms the mystical union in the marriage ceremony outlines in The Book of Common Prayer. The speech makes a perverse case for unity, arguing that the universal appetite for adultery is what binds people together. In fact, this illicit desire connects both young and old, Catholic and Puritan. The choice of these particular religious identities is surely not coincidental. The formal significance of the sentence would seem to be that everyone commits adultery, but it can be read another way. Perhaps it is the papists and the puritans who desire to undermine marriage, making life more difficult for everyone else. And it surely cannot be irrelevant that Elizabeth described herself as married to the realm she governed, and James represented England as a body of which he was the head, making them one flesh.Footnote ⁵³ In contrast the papists and puritans are like rutting deer fighting to ravish the land regardless of the cost. They might imagine that they love the object of their adultery, and have the best interests of a settled union in mind, but reality would suggest otherwise.

The plot of All's Well is centered on oaths, public promises that have to be made in order for a marriage to be solemnized.Footnote ⁵⁴ Marriage practices in early modern England were a mixture of the informal and strongly binding, with apparent promises made between couples often leading to confusion as to whether an agreement to marry had actually taken place, and the forceful power of an oath binding a couple together forever in the eyes of God and the community in which they lived.Footnote ⁵⁵ When marriages went wrong, either through a promise being misunderstood, or one of the parties deciding not to go ahead with the ceremony, the result was invariably disastrous for at least one of the couple, especially the woman.Footnote ⁵⁶ The confusion surrounding marriage agreements in the play clearly reflects a perceived social problem as All's Well demonstrates how tough and heartbreaking life can be when the course of true love does not run especially smoothly. But it is also an ideal vehicle for commenting on the nature of oaths as binding promises in the years surrounding the Gunpowder Plot, with the Clown's speech early in the play making little effort to disguise the relationship between the public and the private in a wider sense than that of the public promise of a couple to regulate and order their private lives. Shakespeare is able to comment on the problematic marriage between the monarch and the realm, and, more significantly, the uncomfortable situation of individuals in Jacobean England who were forced to negotiate swearing oaths to incompatible authorities who did not necessarily have their best interests at heart: the church and the state. The result was a concentration on ways of making promises which did not commit an individual absolutely, but which did not actually break oaths and become lies. Equivocation and cunning verbal strategies were, accordingly, widespread, and not restricted to besieged Catholics.Footnote ⁵⁷

Soon after the Countess's encounter with the Clown she meets Helena and manages to secure an admission that the young woman loves her son and so they might well have a future relationship as mother and daughter-in-law:

This is a complex and dense passage which reflects on more than simply a problematic marriage suit. The passage seems benign enough, but what takes place is that the Countess uses her verbal skills, social convention, and relationship to Helena to extract a confession: put another way, she acts as both good and bad cop in an interrogation. Helena resists, trying to deflect her questions by responding with some of her own, a tactic also employed by Iago in Othello in order to inflame the jealousy of the Moorish general. When Helena speaks of a mother's love, the Countess refuses any comparison to youthful passion because her love is sanctified by a bond. Cornered and with no room left for maneuver, Helena confesses, but works hard to minimize the damage that her passion will cause, claiming it will have no impact on anyone other than herself.

Here we witness varieties of love and forms of promise in conflict. The countess can assume superiority by virtue of her age, social position and legitimacy; Helena holds no cards and her bodily passion betrays her and places her in the countess's power. Helena's love may be powerful and all consuming but, having no legitimacy, it makes her weak and vulnerable, exactly like the puritans and papists in the Clown's speech. She claims that her love has no effect on anybody and is impotent, which is ironic when read in the light of future events, specifically her bargain with the king to obtain Bertram's hand, but it is in line with the claims of Jesuits such as Edmund Campion that their mission was spiritual not political and would not precipitate rebellion against the crown.Footnote ⁵⁸ Their love and duty were directed at saving peoples’ souls, not initiating regime change. It is not surprising that All's Well has been read as a play with a “Catholic aesthetic.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But the truth is that, like Coriolanus, it is a work which acknowledged how hard it was to live as a public, political animal when an anxious government sought to create conformity through the imposition of oaths. The stubborn and limited Coriolanus cannot work out who or what he should be loyal to, whether he serves a state or an ideal, and ends his life as a traitor even though he has always sought to defend his homeland. Helena has to negotiate conflicting loyalties and calculate whether she can afford to tell the truth. In the play everything ends well, but her desperate confession to the Countess would have made an audience uncomfortably aware that for many who were uneasy with the loyalty demanded by James's regime the choice was between a conflicted conscience or a fate more like that of Coriolanus.