Coriolanus tells the story of a world that, absent some sort of resistance, is filled with characters who deploy language for future gain. For these characters, all language is designed to persuade rather than to represent, so there is no notion of the truth-value of speech. All that is measured is its success. This theme emerges elsewhere in Shakespeare: the all-pervading verbal deceit of Richard III in Richard III would suit him to inhabit Coriolanus's universe. When he responds to Anne's "I fear me (thy tongue and heart) are false" with "then never man was true" he touches on what irks Coriolanus. Since everyone around him, including his mother, preaches and practices fraudulence, there may be no way to live truthfully.⁸ A more precise comparison might be to the complete fraudulence of Richard and his lackeys in More's History of Richard III, against which, as Greenblatt convincingly demonstrates, silence or sanctuary are the only viable responses, both of limited efficacy.⁹ The genius of Coriolanus is that it surpasses both More's and Shakespeare's Richard IIIs in its attempt to map the dual pathology of a world split between "spectacular" public deceit and alienated, (though not silent) private selfhood.

Just because the play reveals a different way to imagine these problems, however, does not mean it reveals that different way to us. Recent criticism of the play has overlooked so important a strand of Coriolanus's meaning so persistently that it almost seems worth invoking the time-honored Party line, "It's no accident . . ." The most influential critics who address the antagonism between its two rival theories of meaningmaking get Coriolanus seriously wrong; in part because they haven't made an effort to understand Shakespeare in his time; in part because they're too eager to press their own agendas onto him.¹⁰ Both Stanley Cavell's "Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics (Who does the Wolf Love?)," and Stanley Fish's "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,"—although their axiomatic assumptions and intents differ radically—offer readings of Coriolanus that hinge on Coriolanus's unwillingness or inability to follow the rules his society has enacted. To Cavell this seems yet another instance of a Shakespearean tragic hero's refusal to "acknowledge" what the intuitive realist must grasp: that he must find a way to embrace without question the love offered him by some key human being (or beings) in order to affirm his place in the realm of the human. Coriolanus must learn to accept the love of his mother and wife: his inability to do so unsuits him for participation in the polis of Rome.

To Fish, similarly, the fault lies entirely within Coriolanus, but the deviation from rule-following marks not so much a psychological aporia as a spanner in the societal works: Coriolanus cannot grasp the nature of a proper performative and hence he is outcast from a society baffled by the "excessive" demands he puts on language. To both Cavell and Fish, this is a play about a serious failure on Coriolanus's part, and more generally about the obligations of an individual to shape him or herself to the meanings society has instituted. To Fish, this play speaks to the power of "interpretive communities," and addresses an illegitimate threat to the sort of meaning such a community attempts to instantiate.

This paper sets out to show, firstly, that the stable community Coriolanus is supposed to accept is a morass of deception that could not possibly offer the sort of readily workable reality that both Cavell and Fish posit. Secondly, it will attempt to explain how Fish's theory of the power and legitimacy of "interpretive communities," and Cavell's intuitive realism should have led them to misread this play. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the structural weaknesses of the model of interpretive communities, and to reveal more clearly some of its political implications and applications.