Menenius Compared To Coriolanus

In the first scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Menenius tells a short story about how a human body degenerated. He begins with the “members” (organs of the body, excluding the stomach) protesting about how the “belly” (the stomach) does no work, while the members do all of the work. Menenius continues by saying that the members felt like slaves obligated to provide for all of the belly’s wants. The members decided to stop doing what they felt was “all the work,” and let the belly starve. Consequently, the entire body began to starve and eventually perish, and the members realized the work of the belly after it was too late.
Menenius extracts this anecdote and compares it to the predicament he is currently faced with. The citizens of Rome

He convinces the public that the senate is concerned not only with themselves, but with the entire population. However, an analogy, by definition, can not portray the two compared subjects in an exact manner because it is a mere comparison between two different subjects on the basis of their similar structures. The similarities are used to explain the subject which is unclear. Since a comparison is not a definition, loopholes can be found in every analogy, and the analogy’s intended purpose can always be distorted and disproved by using the loopholes against

In the realm of the organism, since birth, and even before birth, the “members” are carrying out specific functions within the body. As the body ages, the members age; however, the members’ original functions do not change in the slightest. Back in the political sphere, the citizens’ functions change immensely as they age. For instance, a child’s function is to suckle its mother’s breast. At this stage, the child has virtually no importance in the socio-political sphere. As that child ages and becomes a student, its functions become more important as it learns subjects and grasps different views of the life it once knew. As we fast-forward to when the child is an adult, its influence is maximized in the political sphere, depending on the role it chose to pursue for its own life, and its function is being performed maximally. The concept I refer to in disputing the fact that Menenius has left out the aspect of growth and development in his comparison of the social or political body with a living organism lies within another of Shakespeare’s writings: As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7, 11. 140-166. Shakespeare explicates my argument in the realm of the social body, proceeding from the infant to the school-boy to the lover to the soldier to the justice to the pantaloon, to the second childishness and mere oblivion. Although Shakespeare does not provide us with an