Abstract
ABSTRACTMarx didn’t refer to Coriolanus, and Shakespeare didn’t write political tracts. However, that “Roman” play and Marx’s pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) share a surprising similarity. They both present politics as performative, invoking tropes and costumes as essential to history-making offstage and hors de texte, and both meditate on dictator-leaders whose conduct is puzzling. What generates the puzzle is the interaction between personal ambition and transgressive behaviour on the one hand and the political order through which republican institutions operate on the other. This essay demonstrates that in both Shakespeare and Marx the tensions between the personal and the constitutional recur in political struggles that are highly salient today.
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