Chapter 5 explores the distinct dynamics of Plutarch reception in England prior to the famous 1579–1603 translations of Thomas North (1535–1604). In England at this time, Plutarch’s work was read largely through a Ciceronian lens. I reflect on the vernacular translations of Plutarch’s moral essays by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606), Richard Taverner and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) as well as explore the place of Plutarch in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). I argue that prior to the translations of Thomas North, Plutarch was read predominantly in England as a thinker whose political insights were secondary to his moral ones. While the increasing precariousness of the English realm into the latter sixteenth century changed the tone of political thought, the English never read their Plutarch in the vernacular with the same attention to the nature of public office and the public realm in the way prevalent in France earlier in the century.

This chapter considers the contemporary social and military context of the composition of Coriolanus including civil unrest, governance, education, the influence of the classical world, and later conjecture that Shakespeare himself was a soldier. In considering the performance of the play and its afterlives, attention is paid to stage directions, sound, character, and the subsequent adaptation and appropriation of Coriolanus and his mother in other media – art, poetry, film – that focus on the military, civil, personal, and political conflicts at the heart of the play.