The belly -- Coriolanus

I was reading Coriolanus last night, one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays. I was having a hard time getting enthusiastic about the material. 400 years worth of people have decided the play is no good, who am I to debate them? I am just some stupid, average English major, full of aspirations and topped off with a ginormous head! But Shakespeare opens up his play with a few amazing lines. The citizens of Rome are getting prepared to riot, but Menenius tries to dissuade them with the story of the rest of body rebelling against the stomach. Their thought is that it's just a holder of food which sits as they do all the work of bringing the food in. So they get rid of it and slowly starve to death. Here's what the belly has to say:

'True is it, my incorporate friends,' quoth he,
'That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once,
You, my good friends,'--this says the belly, mark me,--
'Though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,
Yet I can make my audit up, that all
From me do back receive the flour of all,
And leave me but the bran.' (Coriolanus, Act I:I)

Shakespeare makes a wonderful case for the state. How it complete a sort of symbiotic relationship like your tum-tum does. I have heard this story before; however, like so many things, I didn't realize it had part of origins at least in Shakespeare. Apparently the fable has its true beginnings with William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine. Usually I have heard it describe the wholeness of existence, in which you cannot have the good without the bad. And apparently, it "has the distinction of being among the few Shakespeare plays banned in a democracy in modern times. It was briefly suppressed in France in the late 1930s because of its use by the fascists element" (Wikipedia). Pretty much true, if you look at it as enforcement for the government to do anything it wants. But I highly doubt that's what Shakespeare was getting at. He had spent his entire career derailing against man's constructed world (Theseus, Augustus, even King Lear), why would he start endorsing the power of the state to anything it wants at the end? Coincidentally, I just finished "Never Let Me Go", a movie based on novel by Kazuo Ishiguro with the same title. It depicts a dystopian Britain where clones' organs are harvested so the rest of the population can live longer. In other words, the belly is literally being ripped out of the countrymen. The movie is heart-breaking, and Andrew Garfield continues to prove his versatility with this and "The Social Network".