This paper re-evaluates William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus through the lens of New Historicism to explore its nuanced engagement with early modern political ideologies. While earlier criticism has often aligned Shakespeare’s Roman plays with royalist values and monarchical ideology, this study argues that Coriolanus subtly reflects republican tensions embedded within the political consciousness of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Drawing upon the works of Stephen Greenblatt, Montrose, and Paul Cantor, the research situates the play within the broader context of Tudor absolutism, civic republicanism, and state censorship. By referring to classical sources such as Plutarch’s Lives and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita the paper foregrounds the plebeian voice and institutional experimentation in Coriolanus as expressions of resistance, revealing Shakespeare’s ambivalence toward authoritarian governance. The article also accounts for intertextual political events such as the Essex Rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot, suggesting that Coriolanus may be read as a veiled critique of absolute power. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the re-reading of Shakespeare’s political vision by emphasizing the play’s republican undertones and its relevance to contemporary debates on governance, public voice, and political agency.

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape illustrates the repetitive and seemingly futile labour of its protagonist, Krapp, who listens to and records tapes cataloguing his past. This article explores and tries to problematise Krapp’s actions and identity through Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s (1992) framework of testimony as a crisis of witnessing, alongside Cathy Caruth’s (1995) theory of trauma. It argues that Krapp’s compulsive listening to previous tapes and recording further to listen to in future, is a mechanism of bearing witness to his trauma both as the survivor as well as listener to his testimony. However, this testimony is inherently fragmented, perpetuating his need to shape and reshape it every year till he has the last tape. Krapp’s tapes furnish an archive that testifies to the oppressive truth of abandoning love life as a result of which his present self has neither any comforts of personal relationships nor any intellectual attainment, the realisation of which reinforces his trauma.