This chapter places Marx’s well-known critique of individual rights in On the Jewish Question (1843) in the context of a more widespread indifference to rights languages in the early socialist movements of Britain, France, and Prussia. For all their differences, early socialists agreed that genuine human flourishing would require transcending what Marx was to call the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” The chapter charts the swinging pendulum of rights discourse in the early nineteenth century. While the century began in both Britain and France in reaction against revolutionary rights language, the years from 1815 through the early 1830s saw a revival of rights claims among British radicals, culminating in the Chartists’ embrace of natural rights, and in France, where radical republicans demanded manhood suffrage in the name of the Rights of Man. Proudhon’s What Is Property?, written in reaction to the 1830 Revolution, signaled and also helped to shape a decisive turn against rights among incipient socialist movements: in its explicit critique of individual property rights as failing to recognize the socialized character of production, but also in its more general lack of interest in rights discourse. French socialists, in the splintering Saint-Simonian movement, embraced democracy rather than rights as the language of emancipation, while in Germany the socialists emerging out of the fragmenting Young Hegelian movement likewise saw rights, especially property rights, as impediments to true, human, emancipation. Yet because rights were not central to their adversaries’ program, socialists including Marx largely ignored them. Finally, after 1860, rights claims saw something of a resurgence among socialists, with social democratic textbooks asserting rights demands as appropriate in the early stages of socialism.

This chapter considers the contemporary social and military context of the composition of Coriolanus including civil unrest, governance, education, the influence of the classical world, and later conjecture that Shakespeare himself was a soldier. In considering the performance of the play and its afterlives, attention is paid to stage directions, sound, character, and the subsequent adaptation and appropriation of Coriolanus and his mother in other media – art, poetry, film – that focus on the military, civil, personal, and political conflicts at the heart of the play.

This chapter explores the links between opera’s sublime mode and political power through two case studies from London in 1848: a 4 May performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula at Her Majesty’s Theatre and a 20 July performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at Covent Garden. In these instances, the sublime was routed mainly through the star singer-actresses Jenny Lind and Pauline Viardot-Garcia respectively, whose performances were judged immeasurably moving and powerful by several critics and fans. But in each case Queen Victoria, too, carried her aura of ‘natural power’ into the performative circuit: with Lind, through demonstrative gestures of royal protection; with Viardot, through the framing of Les Huguenots as a ‘command performance’. This chapter argues that at each performance the queen and diva, supported by their respective entourages, formed a circuit in which the ‘command’ of the opera diva and the queen’s innate sovereignty mutually constituted, or ‘surrogated’, one other.