Coriolanus

Eating and consumption are major motifs throughout Coriolanus, representing the destructive impacts of anger. The play opens with a riot caused by a lack of food. The plebeians protest against the senate because of a grain shortage, demanding that storehouses be opened up instead of saved for an emergency. While the citizens of Rome are literally protesting due to hunger, they perceive the senate as the consuming entity, feeding upon the common people. One citizen claims, “If the wars eat us not up, they will; / and there’s all the love they bear us” (1.1.87-88). Likewise, Menenius views the plebeians as the consumers during his exchange with the tribune Sicinius:

MENENIUS. Pray you, who does the wolf love?

SICINIUS. The lamb.

MENENIUS. Ay, to devour him, as the hungry plebeians

would the noble Martius (2.1.7-10).

Both the plebeians and the patricians see the other side as having an excessive appetite that causes them to consume what they hate.

Anger, aggression, and dominance are all described using the metaphor of eating. Shakespeare describes Coriolanus’s ferocity in battle as a form of eating up his enemies. One of Aufidius’s servants remarks that Coriolanus has defeated their general before and claims that if he “had been cannibally given / he might have boiled and eaten him too” (4.