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This essay examines how two major modern adaptations of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Bertolt Brecht's unfinished Coriolan and Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes's multimedia Coriolan/us, reconceive political spectatorship in different historical contexts. Starting from Shakespeare's staging of authorization, in which “the people” grant and revoke Coriolanus's identity through collective witnessing, this essay argues that the play is best understood as a theater of the demos, rather than a tragedy of an isolated hero, since sovereignty is constituted before the crowd's gaze. Brecht seizes on this structure to historicize the hero and relocate tragic weight in the people's political learning, reframing the play as a dialectical drama of class struggle and civic education. This essay proposes Augusto Boal's notion of the “spect-actor” as a conceptual bridge for understanding the shift from critical spectatorship to participatory forms of engagement. Pearson and Brookes develop this participatory impulse in a different register and create an immersive dramaturgy that incorporates spectators into the networks of a mediatized public sphere. Across these reworkings, Coriolanus becomes a laboratory for rehearsing democracy and shifts the spectators from witnesses of authority to participants in the making of social structure.