Most of the talk, to be sure, had to be in whispers, but it went on all the time in the obsessive, round-and-round-the-same-track way that political discussions always go. Shakespeare repeatedly depicts minor characters—the gardeners in Richard II, nameless Londoners in Richard III, soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V, starving plebeians in Coriolanus, cynical subalterns in Antony and Cleopatra, and the like—sharing rumors and debating matters of state. Such reflections by the lowly upon their betters tended to enrage the elite: “Go, get you home, you fragments” (Coriolanus 1.1.214), an
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