[In the following essay, Velz argues that Coriolanus does not reflect a Plutarchian perspective, as is traditionally thought; instead, the play draws on Vergil in its depiction of "the cosmic Necessity that destroys a great but flawed man. "]

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was realized that Plutarch's lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Brutus, and Caius Martius Coriolanus were Shakespeare's sources for his three great Roman plays, it has been widely assumed that Shakespeare's Rome is an entirely Plutarchian world, and that Shakespeare the Englishman and Plutarch the Greek saw Rome from exactly the same sympathetic outsider's point of view. John Dennis, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (1711), recognized that the primary source for Julius Caesar and Coriolanus was Plutarch; indeed he blamed Shakespeare for not using other authorities. In An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), Richard Farmer showed that Shakespeare had used North's translation, not the original Greek, and no one thereafter took any background other than Plutarch very seriously until the middle of the twentieth century. In Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (1910), for instance, Sir Mungo MacCallum considered only Plutarch, Amyot, and North in the chapter titled "Ancestry of Shakespeare's Roman Plays"; MacCallum's book is still in print—and his bias is still current.¹

The tacit assumption that Shakespeare's Rome was Plutarch's Rome has enough truth in it to make it understandable. Shakespeare and Plutarch both admired the altruism and patriotism of Roman character at its best. Moreover, Shakespeare, like Plutarch, was quite sure that character is destiny; and it has been proposed that Plutarch had something important to contribute to Shakespeare's tragedies of character, even outside the Roman plays.² Shakespeare also adopted Plutarch's interest in the disparity between principles and behavior, in a philosophy adhered to but not adequately lived by. One thinks of Caesar's abandonment of "the main opinion he held once" of superstition,³ and of Cassius' similar turn away from "Epicurus . . . / . . . his opinion" (JC: V. i. 76-78). We may compare Antony's decline from spartan fortitude (Ant. I. iv. 55-71) and Coriolanus's inability to carry out his determination to "stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin" (Cor. V. iii. 35-37ff). Hints for these inconsistencies are to be found in the relevant lives. Beyond all this, Plutarch's interest in the Delphic ethical principle, . . . nothing too much, informs the Roman plays. Plutarch's Antonius and Caesar are among his most compelling exempla, and Shakespeare carries over the Plutarchian emphasis.

But granted these connections, there is more in Shakespeare's Roman plays, more in Shakespeare's Rome, than Plutarch can account for. As an example, Titus Andronicus contains touches from the lives of Scipio and Coriolanus, yet is essentially a non-Plutarchian play. It is of interest that the general neglect of this play before the mid-twentieth century coincides with a prevalent assumption that Shakespeare's Rome is Plutarch's. MacCallum did not find a place for Titus among "Shakespeare's Roman Plays," and even recently some commentators (such as Charney, Simmons, Platt, and Cantor) have given little or no attention to the play. Shakespeare's Roman world also embraces the non-Plutarchian Cymbeline and the non-Plutarchian Lucrece, about both of which one might say something similar to what has just been said of Titus. Although these three portraits of Rome are not the concern of this essay, it is worth remarking that a purely Plutarchian perspective eliminates one half of the six works in which Shakespeare contrived a Roman setting. We must look beyond Plutarch if we are to find the full meaning of Rome in Shakespeare.

It can be argued that Shakespeare's Rome owes a very great deal to Vergil.⁴ Shakespeare saw the conflict between history and human individuality as Vergil saw it, a heroic struggle with cosmic implications. The tragedy of Shakespeare's Roman heroes is the tragedy of men brought into conflict (as Dido and Turnus are in the Aeneid) with the inexorable movement of history: men who (however heroic) are doomed by their opposition, witting or unwitting, to the mystical process by which Rome is fulfilling its destiny. Like Vergil, Shakespeare had a strongly teleological view of history: to both writers the destiny to be fulfilled is the whole meaning of history.⁵ To Shakespeare the reign of Elizabeth was what the reign of Augustus was to Vergil, the destined peace which Providence has awarded a favored nation after the anguish of assassination and civil war. Richmond's prophecy of a fertile and peaceful Tudor future (R3 V. v. 18-41) and Cranmer's prophecy of the glorious reign of Elizabeth (H8 V. v. 17-38) are "Vergilian" speeches: we may compare either one with Anchises' prophecy of the Augustan hegemony (Aeneid VI, 789-807). In their providential view of history, Shakespeare and Vergil are kindred spirits. The fact that British history had putative roots in Rome through the Matter of Britain as Spenser, for example, dealt with it in Book III of The Faerie Queene would simply reinforce for Shakespeare the analogy between the Pax Elizabethana and the Pax Augusta.⁶

If there is an analogue to Vergil's world-view in Shakespeare's English histories, the Roman histories would surely seem an appropriate place to look for Vergil also. I believe that Vergil is there—that new dimensions emerge in Shakespeare's Roman world if one stands on the Aeneid to observe it. The subject is a large one, and what can be said in brief compass can be no more than indicative. The concepts and the possibilities for interpretation are best seen, perhaps, in Coriolanus, with its intensities and its hyperboles of action and moral posture; it will be the model here. But mutatis mutandis what can be said of Coriolanus is valid for all six of Shakespeare's Roman works.

Before turning to Coriolanus and to the ways in which a Vergilian perspective can inform a reading of that play, it should be pointed out that beyond a teleological view of history Shakespeare and Vergil also share Janus' vision: to Shakespeare as to Vergil the present looks both ahead and back. The Trojan past and the Roman future are equally present in Vergil's epiphanies. In a similar manner Julius Caesar constantly reminds us of the Caesarism that will come eventually, even as we are made aware of the morally significant past inhabited by Pompeius Magnus, Cato Uticensis, and Lucius Junius Brutus. Marcus Brutus's tragedy is partly that he is living in the unrecoverable past as if it were the present. Vergil and Shakespeare both had eminently diachronic minds; by comparison with these two, Plutarch seems a synchronic thinker. In the Henriad Shakespeare focuses moral attention on the seminal deposition and assassination of Richard II, much as in the Aeneid Vergil focuses moral attention on the seminal fall of Troy. And Shakespeare's English histories are dominated by prophecies as Vergil's epic is. There is, in short, a prehistory and a posthistory to a Shakespearian history play, whether English or Roman, as there is to Vergil's poem.

This Janus vision is a particularly prominent feature of the Roman works. Shakespeare's sense of Roman history is something like that of Lucius Annaeus Florus, who divided the life of the nation into ages or periods, as one divides a human life into stages.⁷ Shakespeare exploits the dramatic possibilities inherent in movement from one "age" to another—each of his six Roman works is set at the confrontation between two periods of political and social history, a morally tense moment when a diachronic vision may offer scope and with it both irony and pathos. The action of Lucrece is a prologue to the fall of the old Tyranny and the institution of the Rupublic; Titus portrays Rome at the other end of its history, just at the point of its submission to barbarian invasions; in Caesar Rome is at standing water between Republic and Second Triumvirate; Antony and Cleopatra shows the death of the Second Triumvirate and the birth of the Imperium—at the climax of that play "The-time of universal peace is near" (IV. vi. 5); Cymbeline, as several recent commentators have pointed out, suggests the advent of the Pax Christi as well as the Pax Romana (as Holinshed informed Shakespeare, Cunobelinus was King of Britain at the time of Christ's birth).⁸ The "tide of times" (JC III. i. 257) is just at the moment of turning in each of Shakespeare's six Roman settings, and that, surely, is not a coincidence. What it may mean can best be shown by an examination of Coriolanus, perhaps Shakespeare's most compelling portrayal of the tragic possibilities of Roman history.

Coriolanus is a play set at the shadowy moment between the first and second ages of Rome (to use the Florian categories).⁹ As Shakespeare dramatizes it, this moment comes between the heroic age of personal achievement and the age of the city-state in which an organic society will be the moral standard. So close to this moment is the action that we are told that Martius first proved his valor in the struggle against the old order, the Tarquins (II. ii. 85-96), while we see the tribuni plebis created as an institution of the Republic in the first scene of the play. Menenius Agrippa lectures on the organic nature of the body politic to a club-wielding mob in that same first scene. The conflict between past and future—or perhaps we should say the conflict between past and a present being born out of the past—pervades the play. If we wish to put the conflict in Greek terms, we could say that the play pits a Mycenean hero of Achilles' stamp against a Periclean polis in the birth pangs. To put it in Vergil's version of this Greek paradigm, the play pits a Turnus figure, titanic, passionate, visceral, atavistic, against the inexorable momentum of history.

In Vergil this momentum is divinely sanctioned; in Shakespeare, history is less obviously the utterance of the gods. But in Coriolanus Rome is nonetheless caught up in the current of history: the triumphs and the failures of the Republic lie ahead and the movement towards them has begun.¹⁰ We see this in Rome's hesitant movement towards the political and civic arts and away from those military arts that Martius clings to as Turnus clings to them in Latium when Latinus and Aeneas would move towards negotiation. That there is no Aeneas in Coriolanus to prefigure Rome's maturity—to personify its teleology—and that Rome itself is embryonic in the play, still in many ways a Mycenean society, has concealed from critics the analogy between Coriolanus and Turnus. The one exception known to me is Howard Felperin, who speaks of Coriolanus as like "the Turnus of the ninth book of the Aeneid, also a caricature of martial bloodlust and an unwitting opponent of Rome's unfolding destiny."¹¹

Coriolanus is strikingly like Turnus. Alone and invincible, he fights inside the enemy's walls and, Turnus-like, is characterized by imagery of beasts of prey. In Aeneid IX Turnus is an eagle preying on swans and rabbits (253), a wolf skulking outside a sheep pen (59), and a wolf carrying off a lamb (563-66); Coriolanus is an eagle in a dovecote (V. vi. 113) and a bear pursuing children (I. iii. 29). The sortie inside the walls of Corioli is in Plutarch, but Martius does not fight alone there as in Shakespeare. In Livy, Shakespeare would have found Coriolanus alone inside the walls, but it seems likely that the prominence of the Volsci in the assault on the Trojan palisade in Aeneid IX (see, e.g., 11.503ff.) would have encouraged Shakespeare to conflate Vergil with Plutarch (and perhaps Livy), although the Volscians are assailants in Vergil, defenders in Plutarch, Livy, and Shakespeare.

The wall is as morally significant a symbol of Roman civilization in Shakespeare as it is in Vergil. In Vergil and Shakespeare alike, the sempiternal moenia are the protection of the urbs against the predator, the barbarian, the monster. Particularly compelling emblems for the play, then, are the wild beast raging within the gates of a beleagured town and the quasi-barbarian horde advancing against the gates of another town in company with a dragon. In a metaphorical sense the walls are as fragile in Coriolanus as the Trojan palisade is in Book IX of the Aeneid. The civilization to come is, as it were, as far off in Shakespeare's play as it is in Vergil's poem. Rome, like its greatest hero and enemy, is immature—just emerging into youth from infancy, to use Florus' terms. The hero, who is constantly compared to a boy, seen as a son more than as a father or husband, is immature in just the same way (Shakespeare and Vergil would maintain) that archatic heroism and heroic societies are immature. And what is maturity? Rational discourse, as opposed to impulsive violence, for one thing. Mammocking a butterfly in impatience is a child's gesture, not a man's; the vignette in I. iii is a central symbol for this play, because Volumnia reminds us that the temper and the violence of the child are "one on's father's moods"—like son, like father. When we see Coriolanus prepared to pile up bodies hyperbolically (I. i. 192-95) rather than engage in rational debate with his opponents, we may remember what Cicero and Quintilian say of the mature man in a mature society; he is master of the arts of persuasion and, in his decorum, in his "offices," master of himself.¹²

Or we may remember Turnus, for whom violence is the language of response to any opponent. When Coriolanus prefers the battlefield to the marketplace or the Forum, when he seeks to revoke the mandate of the Tribunes, when in the wound-showing scene he sets himself against the traditional folkways of the society, when he refuses accommodation and compromise, when he acts on instinct and acts alone rather than coolly leading his men in battle—then he is Turnus, or, if we prefer, Achilles,¹³ because Vergil's Turnus is Achilles given a flavor of barbarism and additional hubris. "Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer" is Horace's phrase for Homer's Achilles, and he goes on "jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis."¹⁴ The terms would fit Turnus and Coriolanus equally well.

The arrangement of Shakespeare's play imitates the arrangement of Roman history as Vergil sees it in the prophecies of Aeneid VI: it begins with violence and then moves to political action. This is an exact inversion of Shakespeare's usual pattern in political tragedies. In plays such as Richard III, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Macbeth the battle scenes are in Act V and the tragic resolution comes out of a climactic battle that displaces political negotiation. In Coriolanus Shakespeare inverts the pattern, showing a movement from violence to politics: the battle scenes are in the first act, followed by scenes of civic life. This inversion serves Shakespeare's "Vergilian" purpose by allowing us to see Martius in his historical element in the violent world of the early scenes. He fights like Turnus in Latium, awesomely, striking at his enemies with nearly cosmic power—like a planet, as the play has it (II. ii. 111-12). Then, when in Acts II and III the Forum and the agora displace the battlefield, we see Coriolanus utterly unable to adapt to the new environment. If Rome is to go from valor to politics, Coriolanus cannot go with it. Like Turnus who angrily rejects Latinus' efforts at reconciliation, compromise, negotiation, Coriolanus does not want to turn away from the easier, more primitive world of unilateral action and personal confrontation, where opponents "ever strike / Till one can do no more" (I. ii. 35-36).¹⁵

When he is banished later, it is for precisely this misapplication of the old ways in the new world. The refusal to adapt is barbaric and monstrous, as Shakespeare suggests by making Coriolanus boast that he is like a lonely dragon (IV. i. 30). We may recall Vergil's many monsters lurking in dark places beyond the polis, always threatening, always distorted and barbaric; they dominate Book III: the Cyclops, Scylla, the Harpies, and other threats to a city-less wanderer. In Book VIII there is Cacus, Evander's enemy in past time; in Book II the most awesome of all, the horse pregnant with armed men. Symbolically Coriolanus, the lonely dragon, takes the Heroic Age with him outside the wall of Rome into exile among the barbarians. And when Coriolanus is destroyed in the fifth act it is accommodation and negotiation that are most dangerous to him, indeed most mortal, as he himself sees when his mother prevails on him to abandon the revengeful sack of Rome (V. iii. 188-89).¹⁶ Like a creature deprived of its natural habitat, Coriolanus must die when the world grows older. Perhaps it would be more precise to state the converse: the greatness that Aeneas foresees in Book VI and that Vergil wrote to celebrate will not be possible unless and until Coriolanus and what he stands for are set aside in favor of reciprocity in the city-state, the realization of Menenius' fable. Like Turnus before him, then, Coriolanus is Rome's enemy in a figurative as in a literal sense. There can be no Rome until Turnus goes under; there can be no "Vergilian" Rome until Coriolanus goes under. One day Rome will succeed in growing from youth to manhood, as Florus puts it, but Coriolanus, like Turnus, is fixed immutably in the childhood of history. No evolution to maturity is possible for Coriolanus, any more than for Turnus. That is Coriolanus' tragedy, an eminently Vergilian tragedy: to become an anachronism in his own time and to be crushed, bewildered, by the ineluctable momentum of history.

In this paradigm Aufidius plays a most ironic role: his people are the descendants of Turnus's allies, and Aufidius is still carrying on a struggle which Turnus began. The history in Coriolanus is a mediate extension of the history in Books VII-XII of the Aeneid, and it is therefore of intensified moral consequence that Coriolanus should ally himself with Aufidius's camp. As an ectype of Turnus, Aufidius serves another and more profound purpose in the moral scheme of the play; his character offers us assurance that Coriolanus is not an improbable anomaly but a recognizable, if titanic, representative of a world that is very real, although about to pass. Replication lends both credibility and intensity.

It is replication, clearly: Aufidius and Coriolanus are constantly portrayed as counterparts. They are toe-to-toe opponents, allies, and analogues. If Coriolanus is a Turnus-like beast of prey, so is Aufidius: Coriolanus himself says Aufidius "is a lion / That I am proud to hunt" (I. i. 230-31). It has often been pointed out that Plutarch offered Shakespeare Aufidius in sketch only and that the character is therefore largely Shakespeare's invention. In fleshing out Aufidius as a second Turnus figure, Shakespeare ended with a pair of mutual analogues in the manner of Plutarch. The ironies of comparison and contrast between Greek and Roman in Plutarch are shadowed in the comparisons Shakespeare invites us to make between Volscian and Roman.

One of the most ironic analogies between Martius and Aufidius is that they are characterized by their use of the same shocking imagery. Martius exclaims to Cominius in the euphoria that follows the Battle of Corioli:

O, let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done,
And tapers burned to bedward!

(I. vi. 29-32)

Much later at Antium as he and Coriolanus make their vengeful alliance against Rome, Aufidius echoes this strange epithalamial image:

Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

(IV. v. 114-19)

It is disturbing, even perverse, this simile that both men use, but it is perverse in a manner that readers of the Italian books of the Aeneid may recognize. There, where a bridebed is the issue of war, Amata and Turnus are utterly unable to separate sexuality and violence. By Vergil's and Shakespeare's standards they are true primitives.

If the old order must be superseded by the new, there is pathos, not irony only. Despite the doctrinaire political interpretations to which Coriolanus has been subjected by Fascists, Marxists, and many others of less extreme views, the play is not a mere polemic; we should decline an interpretation in which Coriolanus is an exemplum of unadaptable man in a fluid society, a mere object lesson showing how not to comport oneself in the presence of history. Neither Vergil nor Shakespeare is that didactic, that dispassionately narrow. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Martius is the pathos of his démodé values. Turnus affects us in the same way. We know that he is the barrier that must be surmounted before the future can unfold as Fate has planned it. Nevertheless, we balance his hubris against his prior claim to Lavinia and we experience mixed emotions for which Vergil is very careful to arrange. Similarly, Martius never really understands that his heroic code is on the verge of anachronism; he sees himself, in fact, as the embodiment of Roman greatness in the presence of latter-day moral decadence.¹⁷ And it is moving that at the end of his life he should defiantly shout "Mycenean" values at his enemies:

If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it.

(V. vi. 112-15)

This defiance is profoundly meaningful at a symbolic level also, for Coriolanus precipitates his own death, actually asking for it, with this appeal to his outdated values. And we must recall that Aufidius has evoked this furious outburst by sneering that Martius is a "boy." It is both ironic and pathetic that Martius should respond to the taunt with what Vergil and Shakespeare both see as an immature proof of male maturity, a record of heroic violence.

We feel pathos, then, but awe also, because the defeat of the Turnuses, the Coriolanuses, the Didos, the Amatas, and whoever else stands in the way of Roman destiny is so utterly inevitable. Menenius puts the matter powerfully in the lines from the first act that provided the title of this essay. They come very close to beginning the play and they inform our response throughout. Menenius is addressing the rebellious Plebeians, but he speaks, as it were, of Martius—and as it were he speaks of Amata and Turnus as well:

you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them

Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment.

(I. i. 63-68)

To the extent that we feel the truth of this "Vergilian" avowal on Menenius's part we shall see the struggle between Rome and her heroes in virtually cosmic terms. Vergil's chosen theme is the teleological inevitability of Fatum and the futility of the impiety that opposes the self to the call of history. Vergil therefore achieves something of the tragic in Dido and Turnus, both of whom are destroyed by . . . Necessity. If Menenius has struck the keynote of the play—if the course of the Roman state "will on" in Shakespeare's play as in Vergil's epic, crushing inexorably anyone who opposes it—then we have heroic tragedy in the Vergilian manner in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, whether or not the moenia of Rome yet enclose a mature society. Certainly the opponent of history in Shakespeare's play is worthy of Turnus. The incredible superbia of Coriolanus when he defies the codes of familial piety that Vergil valued so highly may remind us of the hubris of Turnus, setting himself against the gods themselves as he sets himself against the future.

Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy! I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.

(V. iii. 33-37)

Shakespeare knew well what the gods do to heroes who make such horrifying claims; two or three years after writing Coriolanus he portrayed the consequences of analogous hubris in III. ii of The Winter's Tale. In the Aeneid and The Winter's Tale the gods themselves exact retribution. In Coriolanus nemesis is less personal, although not less cosmic: the irresistible tide of times, in Vergil the Fatum or utterance of the gods, is in Shakespeare's Coriolanus the cosmic Necessity that destroys a great but flawed man. The high tragedy that A. C. Bradley and many a critic since have missed in the Roman plays of Shakespeare may have been there all along.¹⁸

Notes

This article is based on a paper read in October 1979 at the conference on "Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth" sponsored by The Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghampton.

¹ Four books of the past twenty years on Shakespeare's Rome can stand for several that precede them in confining "backgrounds" to Plutarch: Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); Judah Stampfer, The Tragic Engagement: A Study of Shakespeare's Classical Tragedies (New York, 1968); Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Salzburg, 1976); Paul A. Cantor, Shakespear's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca and London, 1976). There are exceptions to this bias, of course. Geoffrey Bullough cast a wide net in Vol. V of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London and New York, 1964); T. J. B. Spencer had argued brilliantly a few years earlier that Shakespeare's Roman world was the turbulent world of Tacitus and Suetonius (Shakespeare Survey, 10 [1957], 27-38); William Blissett had maintained that Lucan's portrait of Julius Caesar as a villain-hero had something to contribute to Shakespeare's sense of Rome, at least indirectly (Studies in Philology, 53 [1956], 553-75); more recently J. L. Simmons has reasoned that Shakespeare's Roman plays should be read in light of Augustine's De Civitate Dei (Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies [Charlottesville, Va., 1973]). And there are others. My review of Simmons' book (Modern Philology, 73 [1976], 293-95) gives reasons for preferring a thesis like the one to be advanced here. I would, however, stress Shakespeare's eclecticism—his Rome was a composite of Plutarch's republicanism, Seneca's political morality, Vergil's sense of history, Cicero's gravitas and eloquentia, and much more. If the focus falls here on one dimension and its background, no one should make a false inference from that focus.

² See J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London, 1952), pp. 242-54. Cf. the elaboration by Walter Oakeshott in "Shakespeare and Plutarch," Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London, 1954), pp. 111-25; and cf. Hardin Craig's remarks on Plutarch's tragic view of history in An Interpretation of Shakespeare (London, 1948), pp. 169-70.

³Julius Caesar II. i. 195-97, The Shakespeare text cited throughout is the Pelican, 1969.

⁴ It has not been argued, however, at least not in any comprehensive way; see the brief account of relevant scholarship in Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 12. T. W. Baldwin's scholarly chapter on the likelihood that Shakespeare studied Vergil at the King's New School, Stratford, concludes with the opinion that he "had mastered much more than the first four and the sixth books [of the Aeneid], but later found use principally for the parts which concerned the fall of Troy and the love story of Aeneas and Dido" (William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), II, 456-96 [495]). This article will propose that the Italian books of the Aeneid were more prominent in Shakespeare's mind than Baldwin implies, that in fact they lie behind his sense of tragedy in the Roman plays.

⁵ In A Preface to "Paradise Lost" (London, 1942), C. S. Lewis aptly terms this view of history in the Aeneid "vocation" (see Ch. VI).

⁶ Albert C. Labriola makes cogent brief remarks on the role of Vergilian myth in Tudor myth in "'This seeptered isle': Kingship and the Body Politic in the Lancastrian Tetralogy," Shakespeare and English History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Paul G. Shafer (Indiana, Pa., 1976/1977), pp. 45-64.

⁷ In personifying Rome with a life history (infancy, youth, manhood, old age), Florus was imitating Seneca the Elder's (now lost) history of Rome in the late Republic and early Empire. There is some likelihood that Shakespeare encountered Florus's Epitome Bellorum Omnium Annorum DCC in grammar school; it was regarded in the Renaissance as an epitome of Livy and was frequently used in Elizabethan grammar schools as a supplement to Sallust and Caesar. See Baldwin, passim, esp. II, 575-77.

⁸ See Hugh M. Richmond, "Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: The Climax in Cymbeline" Studies in the Literary Imagination, 5 (1972), 129-39, and references therein.

⁹ "Coriolanus came at the beginning of the second age, which lasted about 150 years after the expulsion of the Tarquins, while the Romans were subjugating the rest of Italy" (Bullough, V, 473).

¹⁰ Gail Kern Paster argues that Rome's future is implicit in Coriolanus in "To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 123-44, esp. 125-26.

¹¹Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, 1977), p. 113.

¹² Shakespeare reduced Plutarch's eloquent politician to a nearly inarticulate soldier whose utterance is blunt and graceless, although powerful. See Reuben Brower, "The Deeds of Coriolanus," Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971), pp. 354-81, esp. 376-77. Cf. Brower's "Introduction" to the Signet Classic Shakespeare edition of Coriolanus: "In Coriolanus, Shakespeare seems to turn his back on the richness of language in Antony and Cleopatra, with the deliberate intention of creating a protagonist who will deny much that is common to his own and the Renaissance heroic ideal" (p. xlvii).

¹³ H. D. F. Kitto (see note 18 below) and Richard C. Crowley ("Coriolanus and the Epic Genre," Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod [Athens, Ohio, 1974], pp. 114-130) both compare Coriolanus to Achilles, but neither sees the relevance of Turnus. Cf. Brower, Hero and Saint, who mentions Vergil only in passing, positing Plutarch and Homer as critical vantages for the play.

¹⁴Ars Poetica, 121-22.

¹⁵ See Richard Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: 1980), which shows that on the early-seventeenth-century stage the heroic soldier was portrayed as a tragic anachronism, "a memorable relict of the past." Paul A. Jorgensen argued earlier [1973], 3345A), which shows that on the early-seventeenth-century stage the heroic soldier was portrayed as a tragic anachronism, "a memorable relict of the past." Paul A. Jorgensen argued earlier (Shakespeare's Military World [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956], pp. 208-314) that the military man dislocated in a civic world is a standard Elizabethan tragic type. I would agree that Coriolanus fits the convention, and then add that a Vergilian perspective greatly enriches that convention in Shakespeare's play.

¹⁶ Eugene Waith reasons somewhat differently: that in abandoning heroic pride and wrath for conciliation Coriolanus submits to the "policy" that Rome and Volumnia represent. Waith's template for Coriolanus is Hercules and the tradition that stemmed from the Hercules myths; for Waith, Coriolanus's heroic stance should command from us "respect and veneration" (The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden [New York, 1962], pp. 121-43 [143]).

¹⁷ Here I differ with Felperin, who interprets the histrionic imagery of the play to mean that the role of an intransigent epic hero is not intrinsic to Coriolanus but adopted by him, although he claims to "play / The man I am" (III. ii. 15-16). Such an interpretation must, I feel, diminish the irony and the pathos of Coriolanus' tragedy.

¹⁸ On quite different grounds from Vergilian worldview, H. D. F. Kitto has also argued that Coriolanus attains the grandeur of classical tragedy; he compares the play to Sophocles' Trachiniae and Ajax in "Why Blame Aristotle?" Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, Vancouver, August 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto, 1972), pp. 133-43.