Epilogue: “Lucretius Englisht”: Nahum Tate’s Ecophobic Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

My brief epilogue returns the book to the inception of the Lucretian moment, focusing specifically on Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Coriolanus’s famous admission that “I fled from words” (2.2.84) underscores not only the potency of Lucretian theorems—“‘Tis certain then that Voice, that thus can wound, / Is all material; Body every Sound” (Creech 118)—but also the play’s (ecophobic) fantasies. Tate’s adaptation, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth: Or, the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus, specifically attacks, as the title suggests, opponents to the monarchy who “out of private Interest or Malice” attempt to malign (and thereby) displace (in all senses of the word) those who are “plac’t in Rightful Power above them” (2, 3). Another work of Tate’s—complimentary verses, like Behn’s—also appeared in the frontmatter of Creech’s translation. The publication of these works in the same year suggests that Tate would recognize the dangers of “words”; in effect, the poor and middling sorts, are armed with not only discursive but also environmental toxins. Tate’s stage attempts to contain these, but, in the process, he also estranges dramatic representational strategies from environmental awareness.