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.

This chapter explores the links between opera’s sublime mode and political power through two case studies from London in 1848: a 4 May performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula at Her Majesty’s Theatre and a 20 July performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at Covent Garden. In these instances, the sublime was routed mainly through the star singer-actresses Jenny Lind and Pauline Viardot-Garcia respectively, whose performances were judged immeasurably moving and powerful by several critics and fans. But in each case Queen Victoria, too, carried her aura of ‘natural power’ into the performative circuit: with Lind, through demonstrative gestures of royal protection; with Viardot, through the framing of Les Huguenots as a ‘command performance’. This chapter argues that at each performance the queen and diva, supported by their respective entourages, formed a circuit in which the ‘command’ of the opera diva and the queen’s innate sovereignty mutually constituted, or ‘surrogated’, one other.