When Coriolanus rejects politics-as-usual, the commoners reject him, and banish him from the city. His response is characteristic: “I banish you…. There is a world elsewhere” (3.3.127, 139). Banishment in Shakespeare is always highly fraught, whether it is Romeo's banishment from Verona or Bolingbroke's banishment from England, but for Coriolanus the experience is especially destabilizing. (Unlike those other cases, where the banished character temporarily departs from the play, here the play's action follows the banished hero.) His “I banish you” is a gesture of alienation, not only from Rome
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