Indeed, Coriolanus's reaction to his mother's speech can only strengthen the case for our seeing his selfconsuming tragedy as a reaction to a world full of "roted" and manipulative speech. Coriolanus cries out against the "harlotry" of unrooted language in some of the most moving passages in the play. Three times his mother tries to shame him into lying to the plebs so he can hold on to power. Two times he refuses, and finally, near heartbreak—those who have just discovered that they are bastards in the truth are always heartbroken—he replies:

Pray be content.
Mother, I am going to the market-place.
Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves,
Cog their hearts from them and come home beloved
Of all the trades in Rome.

(3.2.132-36)

What a thing to tell your mother. Coriolanus does not even assume he will come home beloved of her (he has no reason to trust her anymore) but of those he despises.

Coriolanus's actions, misinterpreted throughout as selfinterested (even though it is clear he stands to gain from conforming, not from fulminating: the pun in "I'd rather serve in my way than sway with them in theirs" [2.1.198-99] captures this point marvelously), are indeed a sort of hideous, misdirected response to the deceit he sees practiced. But it is my contention they are understandable, or at least explicable. Operating on the assumption that, as Meninius says, "What his breast forges, that his mouth must vent" (3.1.156) Coriolanus goes through the world believing his thoughts and deeds (as he recollects them—this is "mine own desert") are linked unproblematically to the words that should and do come out of his mouth. So at the confrontation in the marketplace—in which he says he is there not to beg for the consulship, but because his actions by rights should lead inevitably to his becoming consul—he is not behaving as unreasonably as it may seem. He is merely inverting a model that says language is all based on expectations of future reward, and replacing it with the idea language represents past mental states or accomplishments. "Mine own desert" brought me, he says, "not mine own desire" since "'twas never my desire yet to trouble the poor with begging" (2.3.66-67). Of course this is a deliberate insult to the poor citizens (he means that they usually do the begging and not he) but one can see his point. All marketplace negotiations envision language as begging, cajoling, or enticement. They look to future gain rather than revealing what happened in the past, and in the speaker's soul.

Coriolanus's ideas about language, I am arguing, constitute a cogent objection to Fish's claim that "reality is a matter of public specification." In fact, when Coriolanus pokes and pries in his awkward way at the social world surrounding him, the ongoing deceptive revision of public specification turns out to be fantastically unreal. "Part of Coriolanus's tragedy is that he is forever seeking a level of intuition deeper—more essential or more real—than that stipulated by the public conventions of language," writes Fish.¹⁸ However, faced by the sort of all-encompassing deliberate deception we have seen everywhere but in Coriolanus himself, is he really to blame for that assumption? The language others use is self-evidently false. The correct response, in Fish's book and I fear Cavell's, would be that there is no level deeper than public speech. But how do we know until we try?¹⁹ In this case, it is immediately obvious that Coriolanus can go deeper in at least one respect: every person in this world is aware of being (in Greenblatt's words) "profoundly committed to upholding conventions in which no one believes," but only Coriolanus is willing to say as much.²⁰

Yet the act of saying it, or acting out the cognitive dissonance already embedded within that universe, will do something. To act out the antithesis of a profoundly and systematically distorted theory of language is to nudge that theory, to make somewhat more visible the very fissure that is already present—that between private belief and public performance. That is what Coriolanus does, and only those who assume that the system of meaning as-is must be right (present might makes right) are incapable of perceiving that a pathological deviance may also, in the right frame, function as a corrective.

Any theory holding that meaning can only be created and validated by interpretive communities has this fatal flaw; it leaves no space for the possibility of small changes, or of any immanent critique to a society, or of absurd parody that undermines everything without substituting anything. Indeed, it has no space for anything but a crash that topples the semantic order. Thus every change of "communal interpretation" seems to come like an inexplicable revelation.

Because Fish is so concerned to certify the courtesies and ceremonies whereby a community validates any act and gives meaning to it—because Fish is unwilling to admit that Shakespeare may be depicting a world where some things in the public realm are wrong—he is quick to excoriate Coriolanus in all his clashes with those who are (or are supposed to be) his friends. This is an understandable attitude, for it is a sort of empirical given in our, or we might suppose any, world that most people will treat us right most of the time. Understandable or not, however, it is an attitude that simply does not apply to Coriolanus. In Coriolanus even one's allies may be applying to one's actions a set of criteria that it would destroy one's self-respect (which is to say, one's sense of one's own identity as separate from the community around one) to accept.

For instance, Fish argues it is unproblematic that Cominius should rebuke Coriolanus for not allowing him openly to reward Coriolanus (and lay bare Coriolanus's wounds to the troops) so that "Rome can know the value of her own" (1.10.20-21). Fish reads Cominius's rebuke as follows: "In your concern to protect your modesty, to hold yourself aloof from 'good report' you neglect the reciprocal courtesies that make a society civil."²¹ But what is Coriolanus's rationale for that apparent discourtesy, that unwillingness to hear himself praised and rewarded? It is not all that irrational: Coriolanus wants it known that he, like all good men (no matter what side they fight for, interestingly enough) has performed a task to the utmost of his ability, for the sake of the task, and not for any subsequent reward. The reward should be in the action itself.

I have done as you have done, that's what I can; induced as
you have been, that's for my country.
He that has but effected his good will
Hath overta'en mine act.

(1.10.16-19)²²

This passage, usually dismissed as part of Coriolanus's hubristic unwillingness to hear himself praised (so as to avoid the imputation that he fought for the sake of praise), in fact further evidences Coriolanus's belief that the most important duty in a world of deception and lack is to enact to the fullest the deed that is contained within one—to give utterance to all of which one is capable. His theory of action, in other words, is like his theory of speech: it emanates from a dialectical interaction between the contents of one's soul and the precise situation at hand, and it must speak to one's prior sense of what one has been and is, not to what one hopes to gain or to become.²³

Thus Coriolanus's protests that he has been bettered by any soldier who's wholly done his duty—that is, performed all the deeds he is capable of, be he kern or king—strike me as true. Anyone wedded to this denominative theory of deeds and language would feel that he or she—superior though he or she might be to the general mass of untrue rabble—was still not doing all that was within himself or herself. When he says that "Rome must know the value of her own" (1.10.20-21), Cominius in fact gets the point exactly wrong. Reckoning up Coriolanus's value to Rome again suggests what may benefit the "interest" of the state, but Coriolanus could care less about that: caring to do one's best (to behave with virtus) is not the same as caring to get the best out of a situation.