SOURCE: “Characterizing Coriolanus,” in Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 140-68.

[In the essay that follows, Goldman examines the unique way in which Coriolanus is discussed by the other characters in the play, noting that the other characters experience great difficulty in characterizing him.]

I

Any discussion of acting is inevitably a discussion of characterization, and studies of Shakespearean tragedy, whatever their approach, inevitably concern themselves with Shakespeare's characters and how we are meant to take them. Though we may feel, for example, that we know Antony or Cleopatra rather differently from the way we know Macbeth, nevertheless we do feel we know them. And when we discuss them, we find ourselves talking about their characters as we talk about people we know in real life—though most of us will adopt a stern tone from time to time and point out that there is a difference between character in real life and character in drama. In fact, there may be less difference, or at least a different difference, than we think—for on what, finally, do we base our confidence that real people have characters and that we are capable of describing them?

This is the trouble with characterization as a critical topic: we think we know what character is—or rather we think we know where it is and what kind of discourse best describes it. We think, or at least we generally speak as if we think, that it is to be found inside people, and we answer questions about character with summaries of inner qualities. This is a reasonable procedure and, it should be stressed, not a recent one. Nevertheless, it is true that in the past 150 years or so the description has tended more and more to stress the problematical and the psychological; character is seen as elusive, a subject for puzzle and argument, depending on the difficult and never entirely satisfactory attempt to chart the way someone's mind works. And debate about dramatic character is likely to turn on whether it is reasonable to expect this kind of novelistic presentation of character from plays, especially plays written before the nineteenth century.

It is at this point that the discussion of character in drama becomes dangerously tangled, through the operation of hidden assumptions. For the implication in the typical debate I have described is that the psychological discourse of novels and novelizing psychology is the most accurate form for describing character in what we helplessly refer to as real life. But does our experience of other people correspond more to the helpful summaries of a novel or to the un-narratized encounters of a play?

I do not mean to argue for any presumed metaphysical superiority of drama to the novel; what I wish to bring out is the potential for error in assuming that the original, as it were, of character is discursive and that drama must thus constitute a translation of that original into more foreign terms. It should be noted that my distinction applies not only to nineteeth-century novels and modern psychology, but to all discursive accounts of character, including Aristotle, Burton, or whom you will. By comparison with any mode of discursive analysis, it can at least be argued that our experience as members of a theater audience comes closer to the way in which we apprehend character in our daily encounters. Surely our efforts to characterize our friends and enemies—even the effort to characterize them as friends and enemies—follow, and always to a degree haltingly, after our experience of them, experience which, in the first instance, we approach through what Francis Fergusson calls the histrionic sensibility, the art, as it were, of finding the mind's construction in the face.

The notion of characterization as description may well have had a significant influence on the study of character in drama. I think it explains why, beginning with Aristotle, critics frequently maintain that character is somehow of secondary importance in drama, the implication clearly being that it is more important elsewhere, presumably in real life. With the conception of character, as with so much else, the hidden assumptions behind our normal critical vocabulary tend to make drama parasitic on narrative, and thus to distort our understanding of the effects and methods of the dramatist from the start.

I turn to these matters now, in my final chapter, because they are engaged with special clarity by Coriolanus. Shakespeare's last tragedy submits the whole question of character to a remarkable analysis. To begin with a point to which I would like to devote extended attention, it exhibits a concern unique in the Shakespearean canon with discursive characterization of the kind we recognize as distinctly modern and familiar—the nice and argumentative discrimination of psychological qualities. It contains many passages in which Coriolanus is discussed in this manner by other characters, and the effect of these characterizations is to strike the audience as increasingly inadequate to its own unfolding dramatic experience of the man.

In no other Shakespearean play do people analyze another character in the fashion they repeatedly employ in Coriolanus. I have in mind not disagreement or uncertainty over motivation, as in Hamlet, but perplexity over what we would call a character's psychological makeup. In Shakespeare we often feel the presence of such complexity, but his characters almost never comment on it. The type of question Othello raises about Iago at the end of his play—what makes him do such things?—is almost never explicitly addressed, and of course in Othello no answer is even hazarded, except the suggestion, immediately rejected, that Iago is a devil. Iago's own motive-hunting is just that, statements of particular reasons for enmity, rather than analysis of his mental constitution.

Hamlet is the play that seems most concerned with the subject, but even there one finds no clear-cut example. When Hamlet asserts that he has that within which passes show, he is referring to an inarticulable depth of feeling rather than some hidden aspect of his character. There is much concern with ambiguous givings out in the play, and it may well point to inner ambiguity, but no character explores the question explicitly. When Claudius says, “There's something in his soul / O'er which his melancholy sits on brood” (III, i, 165-66), his language may suggest the elusiveness to description of a complex personality, but the explicit content is either that something is bothering Hamlet or that he is up to something which, like love or ambition, is capable of simple definition and explicable as the product of an external situation, for example his father's death and his mother's hasty marriage. Perhaps more could be made out of “Yet have I in me something dangerous” (V, i, 262), or “Pluck out the heart of my mystery” (III, ii, 373-74), but again these are matters, at most, of resonance and implication, not explicit statement. And the examples I have just cited are the closest we ever come in Shakespeare to the discussion of character as a complex and problematic psychological essence, with the exception of Coriolanus.

There the discussion begins with the opening scene. Like many of Shakespeare's tragedies, Coriolanus opens with the eruption of a dangerous force. The mob that rushes on stage carrying staves and clubs is meant to be felt as a threat; these “mutinous” citizens are on the verge of extreme violence. Yet suddenly, even before Menenius appears, the rebellion loses momentum. Within moments of their first appearance, the rebels pause—to discuss Coriolanus' character.

This is the issue the second citizen has on his mind at line 14, “One word, good citizens.” He is answered in a well-known speech by a comrade who first says of Marcius that he is proud and, after an interruption, continues:

Though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud …

(37-39)

The phrase has an air of simplicity and of caricature as well, caricature both of the subject and the speaker, but it is also very much a qualification of the speaker's original confident analysis. And the uneasiness of the formulation, “to be partly proud,” which has provoked emendation and extensive commentary, suggests a difficulty in characterizing Coriolanus, even by an angry enemy who is none too scrupulous about his speech.

This kind of difficulty recurs at many moments in the play. Again, I am not talking about simple disagreement over Marcius' character, but about passages which have this habit of qualification, of instability, of attempts to specify a complex essence. The most striking example occurs in Aufidius' soliloquy at the end of Act IV:

                                                                                                    First he was
A noble servant to them, but he could not
Carry his honors even. Whether 'twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of; or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th' casque to th' cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war; but one of these—
As he hath spices of them all—not all,
For I dare so far free him—made him feared,
So hated, and so banished. But he has a merit
To choke it in the utt'rance.

(IV, vii, 35-49)

Aufidius first poses three reasons for Coriolanus' failure to “carry his honors even.” This latter formula, with its obscure suggestion of a difficult balancing act, initiates a meditation that keeps sliding away from fixity and clarity of analysis. Aufidius presents his three explanations as if they were mutually exclusive, but they are not. “Pride” is the old accusation of the Tribunes, “defect of judgment” means perhaps political miscalculation or a deeper-seated inability to calculate shrewdly, and “nature,” of course, can include the first two. But Aufidius quickly limits the application of nature to a specific failing:

                                                                                or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th' casque to th' cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war …

Then, as if he felt that none of his reasons was quite sufficient, Aufidius goes on to complete his thought in a curious flurry of qualifications:

                                                                                          but one of these—
As he hath spices of them all—not all,
For I dare so far free him—made him feared,
So hated, and so banished.

It is the passage's sole point of certainty that most gives it a feeling of bewilderment. Why is Aufidius so sure that but one of these causes is responsible, “not all, / For I dare so far free him”? There can be no logical reason; Aufidius simply feels that it would be too much to accuse Coriolanus of all three failings. Why? A sense of his character, of course, which underlies the entire speech and which Aufidius has been unable to articulate. And a further sense of it seems to rise at this very point, to comment on the difficulties Aufidius is finding:

                              But he has a merit
To choke it in the utt'rance.

This is another line that gives editors problems. The primary meaning, I think, is that Coriolanus' merit breaks in and chokes back the account of his faults, but the “it” is ambiguous; there is a clouding suggestion that his merits choke themselves. And of course Aufidius' own emotions seem to be registered in the verse. Coriolanus and his merits are certainly a bone in Aufidius' throat. The main effect is that the attempt to characterize becomes tangled and chokes on itself.

What has been evoked here, too, is the complexity and elusiveness of the very notion of character itself. The speech delicately catches the way innate predisposition, training, feeling, and choice come together and respond to external circumstance, the shifting changes of politics, and the feelings and actions of the public world—and also how, being a public as well as a private quality, one's character is modified, in a sense created, by the responses of other people, as Marcius' is by Aufidius. Coriolanus' character has something to do with the way other people choke on it. It exists somewhere between Coriolanus and his audience.

The paradoxical impact of Coriolanus on his society is felt strikingly in Aufidius' final speech:

                                                                                          My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
… Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.

(V, vi, 145-52)

Yet is the important word. Though Marcius has done hateful things, nevertheless he will be loved. We have with Aufidius the sensation we have with so many of Shakespeare's tragic characters (though never with Coriolanus) that it is difficult to tell where play-acting leaves off and authentic feeling begins. Is Aufidius shifting gears for political reasons here? Or is he suddenly abashed? Is he asserting that Coriolanus manages, perplexingly, to be nobly remembered, or that he will see to it that Coriolanus is so remembered, in spite of his desert? All these notes mingle in the very believable compound of envy and awe that characterizes Aufidius whenever he contemplates his great rival.

This is not the only point in the play where the notion of Coriolanus' nobility is associated with perplexity about characterizing him. Many less elaborate passages have helped develop the idea. When the servingmen at Antium try to explain the mysterious quality they claim to have detected in the disguised Marcius, their language goes comically to pieces:

SECOND Servingman.
Nay, I knew by his face that there was something in him; he had, sir, a kind of face, methought—I cannot tell how to term it.
FIRST Servingman.
He had so, looking as it were—would I were hanged, but I thought there was more in him than I could think.

(IV, v, 159-64)

Of course this is a joke, whose point is that the servingmen had noticed nothing, but this only refines the question of how a noble character is constituted. The language of the servingmen calls attention to the “something” in Coriolanus over which his friends and enemies quarrel. Even the play's repeated use of “thing” to describe Coriolanus suggests not only his inhumanity, as is commonly argued, but the resistance of his nature to characterization.

In the last act, Aufidius, on the verge of denouncing Coriolanus to the lords of Antium, offers to his fellow conspirators—apparently in all frankness—a further interpretation of his character, which only adds to our sense of elusiveness:

                                                            I raised him, and I pawned
Mine honor for his truth; who being so heightened,
He watered his new plants with dews of flattery,
Seducing so my friends; and, to this end,
He bowed his nature, never known before
But to be rough, unswayable, and free.

(V, vi, 20-25)

Aufidius describes Coriolanus as having changed and become politically manipulative. He has no reason to deceive his listeners at this point, but his account does not square with the Coriolanus we have seen, though we understand how Aufidius may have arrived at it.

There is, moreover, a tendency in the play to keep before us the whole issue of how we characterize people—whether it be by internal attributes or external ones, by simple epithets or puzzled formulas. The three scenes of Act II, for example, have a very distinct parallel structure. This is the act in which Coriolanus, newly named, returns to Rome; and each scene begins with a prelude in which his character is debated by the people who await him. In Act II, Scene I, a conversation about Marcius between Menenius and the tribunes becomes a war of rather Overburyan character descriptions, Menenius topping the tribunes by offering two “characters,” as he calls them, first of himself and then of his opponents. In the second scene of the act, the officers argue as to whether or not Coriolanus is proud and disdainful. Finally, the third scene begins with the citizens arguing over whether Coriolanus should have their voices; this prelude ends with words which sum up the aim of much of the play's dialogue, “Mark his behavior” (II, iii, 42-43). Heightening the parallelism, each scene ends with a conversation between Brutus and Sicinius in which they decide how to make political capital out of Coriolanus' impact on the people.

II

What does this interesting emphasis on character mean? Surely it suggests that the character of Coriolanus is meant to be seen as problematic, and beyond this it raises the possibility that the idea of character itself may be under scrutiny—that the play may force us to confront the question of what a character is and how it is perceived. Here we must pause to examine further the peculiar relation of character and dramatic action.

Let me begin by returning to a point I raised in my introduction.¹ The fictitious person we watch on stage, Hamlet, or Hal, or Othello, is not an object, but a process. He is something we watch an actor making, not the result of making but the making itself. Hamlet, in performance, is not a tenth-century or sixteenth-century prince, not even a twentieth-century one; he is in no way physically separable from the actor who plays him. Yet we perceive him as a self, a character, rather than a series of physical actions. Where is that self? It is there, on the stage; it, too, is inseparable from the actor we are watching. Yet it is not the actor's everyday self, his biographical personality. It is something he is accomplishing by acting. A character, in a play, is something an actor does.

We are all too likely to think of an actor's characterization as an object, a presented mask, something produced and built up by the actor's preparation, as makeup or a dossier on the character might be. Such a product might well be described by a discursive summary. But a dramatic character is an action that goes on throughout the play.

It will be noticed that I have shifted to another meaning of the word “character”—that of imagined person in a drama. The two conceptions are linked. What is the character of a dramatic character? Clearly it, too, must spring from what the actor does. And what an actor does, first of all and ceaselessly, is perform. Dramatic character is inseparable from performance. Thus, as we have already had occasion to see, our view of dramatic character will gain by a consideration of the performance qualities built into the role, the necessary creative action of the actor called for by the script in order to project the part.

In the case of Coriolanus, certain problems of character have always been recognized, and they are illuminated by attention to some of the problems of performance. For the play, properly performed, gives us an impression of its hero rather different from that conveyed by a bare recital of his deeds or a discursive account of his language and behavior. We should start with the observation, particularly striking because of the great amount of discussion the character of Coriolanus receives in the play, that of all the mature tragedies this is the one whose hero seems simplest in inner constitution, a relatively narrow or immature self. Indeed, by virtue of the apparent ease with which he can be manipulated, he runs the risk of being interpreted as comic. Furthermore, many critics feel that the play's rhetoric is chill, and that this corresponds to something uninviting about both the play's ambiance and its hero—a lack of warmth or generosity.²

Now, though I do not think these comments give anything like a complete picture of the response a fully imagined performance of Coriolanus provides, there is a degree of truth in them, and they help define a major acting problem of the role. This might be described as finding what Coriolanus means when he refers to his own “truth” as something he is afraid of ceasing to “honor” (III, ii, 121). Is there more to this truth than doing what his mother wants, or fighting fearlessly, or hating compliments? That is, does the role suggest a freedom and depth of personality to which the audience can sympathetically respond? To keep Coriolanus from being simply comic means finding the passion hidden in the chill rhetoric, the richness of spirit beneath the many signs of poverty.

To indicate one or two ways in which the play addresses this central problem, I would like to draw attention to some qualities of performance that are required by the language of the role. Much of Coriolanus' language requires of the actor a kind of grip, a domination over complexity which is exactly the opposite of comic predictability. This grip depends on an emotional and intellectual penetration by means of which the actor maintains focus on a goal that is delayed and hidden by the movement of his speech. The histrionic action is rather like that of Coriolanus the warrior penetrating to the center of Corioles, thrusting ahead in battle, except that it cannot be rendered as a blind pushing forward; it is not like Macbeth's “Before my body / I throw my warlike shield.” It constitutes an important part of the action which is the character of Coriolanus.

The quality of performance I am describing is largely determined by syntax. A good example may be found in Act III:

                                                                                                              I say again,
In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our Senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed, and scattered,
By mingling them with us, the honored number,
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars.

(III, i, 68-74)

If this sentence were diagrammed, one would see that it is the final pair of subordinate clauses—syntactically very subordinate indeed—which define its energy and direction. Coriolanus is primarily agitated by the idea that the patricians have given their power and virtue to beggars, and it is this which governs the notion of soothing them and is developed as sowing the seeds of rebellion. The actor must be gripped by this idea and render its presence in the speech articulate, even as he must suspend stating it till the very end. Thus the felt movement of the speech is not simply accumulative—this thing, that thing, and another—but a pursuit toward a syntactically buried point.

I think I can make this clearer by comparing another passage from Act III with a speech from Othello. This is Coriolanus' climactic outburst that goes from “You common cry of curs” to “I banish you.” It is a swift and frightening forecast of revenge, but how different in its movement from Othello's

                                                                                Like to the Pontic Sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
N'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.

(III, iii, 450-57)

The Othello actor must start out his passage with a desire for revenge large enough to be measured against the scope and flow of the Pontic sea. But the movement of sweep and obstruction is grandly simple. The Coriolanus actor, by contrast, must struggle forward toward the instigating idea, You corrupt my air, which informs the three preceding lines of imagery and comparison, and which prepares the springboard for “I banish you”:

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate
As reek o' th' rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.

(III, iii, 121-24)

The intricacy here can be expressed another way. The opening lines of the passage appear to set up a neat symmetry: “whose breath I hate / As reek o' th' rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men,” but the following phrase, “That do corrupt my air,” unbalances this symmetry and, thus, to keep the passage alive there has to be an emotional thrust through the symmetries, which allows the crucial half-line to refer back to the earlier, “You common cry of curs.” This problem occurs repeatedly in the role. A lot of the apparent coldness of Coriolanus' rhetoric resides in the balance and opposition he is constantly striking, but very often these balances get disturbed as the speech moves on, demanding a grip that keeps the balances clear and yet enlivens them by something not at all cool or settled.

A variation on this structure occurs when an apparently concluding phrase kicks off new images, requiring a supplementary charge of energy at a position normally felt to be subordinate or merely, as it were, passive:

                                                  What would you have, you curs,
That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you,
The other makes you proud.

(I, i, 170-72)

Here, the subordinate “That like nor peace nor war” cannot be thrown away. The actor must pursue it with an articulation which makes coherent the balanced opposition of “The one … The other.” And if we were to extend the analysis to his whole great concerto-like first appearance, in which Marcius enters at full tilt with what is in effect a long speech over and against the interjections of the First Citizen and Menenius, we would see how the larger structure echoes the tendency of the smaller and in so doing prevents our first impression of the hero from being comic. After all, what is it that keeps Marcius, with his repeated “Hang 'em”s and “What's the matter”s, from playing as a young Colonel Blimp? It is the presence of a source of emotion which governs the entire speech, pursued by Marcius through all kinds of syntactical complications and shiftingly balanced reflections on the Roman populace, and which does not surface till the very end of the sequence, when we learn that the people have been given five tribunes, which Marcius correctly sees as a source of future insurrection.

So, repeatedly, we have this construction, in which the delayed phrase may be modifier or object or even a piece of information. But the effect is regularly that what is delayed is a central source of energy, and we feel it radiating through earlier phrases. Or, to put it more accurately, if even more impressionistically, we feel its radiance being pursued by the speaker down branching corridors which blaze and echo with its force. The pursuit helps establish for us a great quality of the hero—the quality of attacker. In the speeches I have described, the sense of attack comes from the pursuit of the delayed idea, the buried trigger. If it were not buried, if the speaker did not have to work fiercely to reach it, the pursuit would not feel like attack, or at least not that magnificence of attack we associate with Coriolanus.

In the great final outburst before he is murdered, the trigger is the word “Boy”:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. “Boy”! False hound!
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. “Boy”!

(V, vi, 110-15)

The method I have been attempting to describe explains why that speech does not play simply as a confirmation of the Tribunes' and Aufidius' theory that Coriolanus is a manipulable figure: call him certain names and you've got him. Nor does it allow us to accept the explanation the play itself seems at times to put forward—that Coriolanus is, in fact, a boy of tears. The stimulus does not set off a mere raving reaction, but a pursuit, a kind of branching plunge, in which the whole being of the performer attacks the insult. Every phrase, “men and lads,” “Cut me to pieces,” “Alone I did it,” “like an eagle,” responds, separately, to “Boy!” Each bears toward the word, presses in on it, ranges pieces of a multiple attack that bursts into the clear only as the offending word is finally snapped in place.

Awareness of this technique will help us with at least one crucial passage which has often been misinterpreted:

                                                            Though I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen
Makes feared and talked of more than seen …

(IV, i, 29-31)

Most readings focus on the dragon, but the fen is the point. What makes Coriolanus most like a dragon is his isolation; indeed it is not even simply the fen that is at the center of the speech, but the power of fen-dwelling to make someone feared and talked of and hence lonely. It is not, then, a definition of his inhumanity Coriolanus gives us here, but of his felt distance from others. The dragonish qualities seem most to derive from being feared and talked of. They are, at least in part, an aspect of how society characterizes Coriolanus.

“Alone” is of course an important word in the play. But it varies greatly in meaning as Coriolanus pronounces it, and these variations are histrionic—that is, they represent differences in the way the actor projects a character through his performance of the word. In the passage just cited, “alone” suggests isolation, but it also is colored here, as elsewhere, by loneliness. By contrast, when Coriolanus turns on his accusers in the last act, crying, “Alone I did it,” the word means “unaided, singling oneself out.” This is mingled with an implied insult: “The Volsces can be beaten by one man,” and a provocation: “I take full responsibility.” It is a challenging statement of personal strength.

Now, there is another moment when the word is used in a very different sense, which is of the greatest importance for the performance of the role. And it is very different both in syntax and mood from any of the examples we have been considering. This occurs when Marcius addresses Cominius' troops after the successful assault on Corioles and before the battle with Aufidius. He asks for volunteers to follow him, and “They all shout, and wave their swords; take him up in their arms, and cast up their caps.” At which point, he cries:

O me alone! Make you a sword of me?

(I, vi, 76)

This wonderful and startling line is not that of the isolated attacker, or the automaton, or the scorner of the crowd. It has a rush and surprised pleasure we hear nowhere else from Coriolanus. It is his happiest moment in the play.

Significantly, it is presented by Shakespeare as one of a series of stage images which intricately comment upon each other. It reverses the group of images we have had a few minutes earlier, first of Coriolanus scorning the soldiers as they flee, then deserted by them, then scorning them again as they pause to loot; and it will be partially reversed, restated dissonantly, one might say, a few minutes later when he angrily denounces the same crowd as it cheers him again. Finally, it will be most emphatically reversed in the assassination scene, the only other moment in the play when Marcius allows a group of men to touch him. But now in Act I he is elated, he accepts the praise and the physical contact of the crowd, and the word “alone” here means singled out by others, uniquely valued by people with whom he feels a bond. He is the sword of a courageous community—and the attacking hardness of the image of the sword (so often seized upon by critics as an emblem of Coriolanus' harsh character) is modified by the moment of joyous physical contact and celebration. This is the aloneness Coriolanus has felt himself bred up for, to be truly a limb of his country, a healthy limb of an heroic society; and for an instant his dream appears to come true.

III

The shifting histrionic articulations of “alone” in the play are an index, then, of the full dimensions of Coriolanus as a dramatic character. We can, for example, appreciate some of the play's distance from its source in Plutarch if we compare the varying implications Shakespeare gives to “alone” with the idea of “solitariness,” which Plutarch, in North's translation, borrows from Plato to describe Coriolanus. In Plutarch, solitariness is simply a vice, an inability to deal with others, the opposite of “affability.”³ Shakespeare's use of “alone,” as we have seen, suggests not only a different and far more appealing character, but a far more complex notion of how character is to be understood. In the concluding portion of this essay, I would like to focus on how the idea of aloneness in the play illuminates two closely related themes. The first is Coriolanus' own conception of character—that is, not only what kind of person he wishes to be, but also how he understands character to be created and possessed. The second is the critique of this conception of character that emerges in the course of the drama. Taken together, I think they help us to understand more clearly the complex appeal of Coriolanus as a theatrical creation and perhaps something of Shakespeare's intention in writing the play.

We have seen that most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes entertain peculiar ideas about the relation of the self and its acts, ideas which poignantly reflect our own troubled sentiments on this bewildering subject. Coriolanus' version of this peculiarity is his notion that a man may be “author of himself.” It is a phrase that evokes many of the same associations as his use of “alone,” and it stimulates us especially because, while it plainly reflects his gravest folly, at the same time it seems fairly to express the very authority that makes Coriolanus so much more than a fool.

Perhaps no passage in the play has produced such troubled critical discussion of character as the scene in which he announces his decision to go over to the Volsces. His soliloquy seems in the most literal sense an attempt at self-authorship, at rewriting his play in the face of facts well known to the audience. Critics have frequently noted that it is an odd speech for what it fails to say, but it is, in fact, equally odd for what it says:

                                                            Friends now fast sworn,
… shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity. So fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues. So with me:
My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
This enemy town.

(IV, iv, 12-24)

For Coriolanus to describe his banishment, the hatred of the Tribunes, and the accusation of treachery as “a dissension of a doit” or “Some trick not worth an egg” is nearly incredible and suggests how far he has distanced himself from his feelings. The same may be felt in the overly neat conclusion, “So with me,” and the flat and unconvincing assertiveness of:

My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
This enemy town.

This distance from feeling is one of the perils of self-authorship. And in Coriolanus, as in Lear and Macbeth, the relation between feeling, action, and full humanity becomes very important. Certainly the moment of silence with Volumnia in Act V is reminiscent of Macduff's pause. It comes about because in Act IV Coriolanus, unlike Macduff, has failed to feel his banishment as a man. He has attempted to violate the natural relation between feeling and action, and like other Shakespearean heroes he must pay for it. If it is true that the defining problem for the actor in this play is to suggest an inner action deeper than the reflexive manipulable response seen by his enemies, it is interesting that Coriolanus' crisis comes when he tries to manipulate himself. To assert that one can do anything one wants is as humanly insufficient as to assert that one is completely predictable. Coriolanus declares, “I'll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct,” but the creature who will acknowledge no obedience to instinct is as subhuman as the gosling.⁴

But even more than in one's relation to one's feelings, the fallacy of self-authorship may be felt in one's relation to the outside world. Like many of Shakespeare's heroes—Hamlet is the most famous example—Coriolanus must be tutored in the connections between theatricality and life, between the private individual and the social theater in which he plays his part and finds his audience. The lesson he learns, however, is unique to his play. If Hamlet must discover that a connection exists between play-acting and the heart of one's mystery, Coriolanus is forced to explore the relation between one's character and one's audience.

We can feel this even at the very beginning of the play. Most, if not all, Shakespearean heroes initially hold back from the opportunities for action that are first presented to them, and this is usually linked to a rejection of theater, though it is not always so plain as Hamlet's “I have that within which passes show,” or so fearful as Macbeth's “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” At first glance, Coriolanus appears not to conform to this pattern, plunging with his opening words into a deliberately provocative denunciation of the crowd. But his opening line contains a refusal which precedes this eager engagement:

MENENIUS.
Hail, noble Marcius!
MARCIUS.
Thanks. What's the matter, you dissentious rogues …

(I, i, 165-66)

What is Coriolanus holding back from? I would describe it as the authority, the authorship, of an audience. Menenius offers him a name, praise, a characterization: “noble.” It is a term Coriolanus values—in the last act, nobleness will be the quality he prays that the gods give his son. And the word “noble” occurs more frequently in Coriolanus than in any other Shakespeare play. But while he may readily pray to the gods for nobility, he will not consent to be called noble, even by Menenius.

In the same way, Coriolanus seems regularly to reject our interest in him. And this contributes to our perception of his character as cold or unsympathetic. The problems of his Act IV decision to revenge, for example—the “break” in characterization, the lack of transition, the flagrant inappropriateness of his remarks—constitute a defiance of the theater audience comparable to his regular defiance of his on-stage audience. Nevertheless he retains his power over both audiences—and it is clear that he needs them. Just as we feel an invitation to the audience in the actor's mastery of those syntactically difficult passages, or in “O, me alone!” or in the moment of silence, or the moment of assassination, or the physical release of battle—just as there are solicitations of sympathy here, enactments of aloneness which carry us along with the actor—so in his relation with the on-stage audience we see that the apparent defiance is far from complete. How else explain, for example, Coriolanus' repeated appeals to Aufidius to note how honorably he is behaving? As at Corioles, Coriolanus needs an audience to give him the name he has won. He cannot author himself alone.

This dependence of character on audience is echoed in the story of the benefactor whose name Coriolanus forgets:

CORIOLANUS.
I sometime lay here in Corioles
At a poor man's house; he used me kindly.
He cried to me; I saw him prisoner.
… I request you
To give my poor host freedom. …
LARTIUS.
Marcius, his name?
CORIOLANUS.
By Jupiter, forgot!

(I, ix, 82-90)

The point is similar to the one Shakespeare makes in Romeo and Juliet about the way in which names, fate, and society are interwoven. The romantic attitude is that names do not matter; what one is counts. But our name reflects a real connection between our past, present, and future, between our selves, our acts, and our social being. Romeo is a Montague, and his name soon becomes that of the man who has murdered Tybalt. It matters quite as much as whether the name of the bird one hears is lark or nightingale. In the benefactor scene, Marcius has just become Coriolanus, a name which will permanently fix his relationship with Aufidius and help bring about his death, while his poor friend has become a non-person because Coriolanus cannot remember his name.

Now, the relation between one's character and the behavior of audiences, especially as it affects the “name” one proposes to make for oneself, is of troublesome resonance to any great artist, and I imagine Shakespeare was aware of this. At any rate, he seems as he reaches the end of the great cycle of tragedies to become especially interested in the ironies of an artistic career. In Anthony and Cleopatra he tells the story of a man whose gifts have equipped him for the greatest success in the practical world and who instead casts his lot with a greatness that depends wholly on the imagination, on the splendors of gesture, passion, self-dramatization—an achievement as materially insubstantial as black vesper's pageants, and which the practical world will always associate with the arts of the gypsy and the whore. In Coriolanus he tells the story of another man whose ruling passion suggests the situation of the artist, a man who wishes to be the author of himself, an ambition, one would think, not only artist-like, but particularly theatrical—who but an actor can project a new self at will? Certainly it is an ambition easily associated with the appeal of high creativity. Who more than a great poet can make a claim to spiritual independence? Yet the theater is, of course, the most social of the arts. Indeed, it presents in its most unpalatable and least disguised form the fact that no artist is the author of himself, but a dependent part of an inconstant multitude, which is always in some sense interpreting him. Among playwright, actors, and audience, who is the belly, who the members?

There is, it should be noted, another side to the story of the poor benefactor with the forgotten name. For it also projects a vision of Coriolanus' fantasy of unconditioned power which is similar to the artist's fantasy of self-authorship. Perhaps one thinks that by being best warrior (or poet) one will gain absolute power over names—that one can command people by giving names or destroy them by forgetting them, that one can be free of the common cry, can stand outside of society, banish the world at will, that moving others one can be oneself as stone. This is an illusion, as any poet discovers, and as Marcius discovers when he tries to forget his own name and that of friend, mother, wife, and child.

.....

You will by now have grown tired of my saying, with Aufidius, “And yet.” And yet I must say it again. For to end on the self-deluding aspect of Coriolanus' desire to stand alone would be to distort the play. The project of self-authorship, however mistaken, is bound up with the power and magnetism—indeed with the sympathetic appeal—of Coriolanus as a dramatic character. I think the issue here has to do with the nature of tragedy. In a sense all tragic heroes are authors of themselves. I am certain that the writer of a tragedy feels more intensely than in any other form the struggle between what he wants to make happen and what his chief character wants to do. It is true of course that any tragedy exhibits a severe sense of scriptedness, but the play would be flat and tame if we did not feel that its hero had an equally exigent sense of the script he wants to write, of his own authorial power. Faced with some terrible contingency, the tragic hero makes it his own necessity.⁵ Like a great actor, he makes the part he is given his own. And I think that when we argue over whether Coriolanus the character is cold and uninviting, when we ask whether his nature is fully expressed by the facts of his upbringing and the reflexes of his temper, we are asking whether he has the authority, the inspiriting freedom, of a tragic figure.

That is why the play must end with Aufidius' “Yet he shall have a noble memory.” As with both Romeo and Juliet, and as with the self-authorizing ambitions of great poets, there is in Coriolanus something cherishable and indeed social about the lonely impulse which drives him. We return a last time to what I have called Coriolanus' truth. What did Shakespeare see in Plutarch's life of Coriolanus? He found there a great warrior firmly characterized as intemperately angry and hence given over to solitariness—for Plutarch, Coriolanus was a cold and uninviting figure—and he accepted almost everything about him except the characterization, which is to say he accepted everything except what mattered most to his play. Shakespeare seems to have looked at Plutarch's story of the choleric superman and said, “And yet.” Here was a man whose whole life seemed to have been devoted to a notion of character; he was, in Menenius' Overburyan sense, the very character of a Roman warrior. And yet he could decide to betray Rome. And yet, being able to betray Rome, he again could give in fatally—more than fatally, embarrassingly—to his mother's plea. Shakespeare added complexities which show Coriolanus to be determined and manipulable in the most psychologically credible way—all that family history and revealing imagery. But he also added all the details which make him less easily characterized—his moments of unexpected response, the exciting complexity of his speeches, the range of meanings he gives to the notion of aloneness, and, always, that chorus of friends and enemies inadequately, perplexedly explaining him.

To sum it up, Shakespeare insists on the problematics of characterization in Coriolanus because he is there peculiarly concerned with a paradox: that the distinctive quality of an individual is at once incommunicably private and unavoidably social. As such, it is situated neither entirely within our grasp or the grasp of our fellows but, fascinatingly, between us—rather like the meaning of a poem or a play—between us in our encounters on the stage of the world.

Character lies in the interpretation of the time, as Aufidius puts it, and is thus susceptible to change and falsehood. And yet it is the most enduring thing about us. Perhaps this is what tragedy is about—that there is such a thing as human character. Perhaps it is only in tragedy that we feel that character as a personal possession really exists, in spite of the contradictions which surround it as a philosophical conception. For our sense of completion at the end of a tragedy seems to come not from any sense that the action could not have turned out otherwise, nor from our approval or disapproval of the chief character, nor even from the intensity of our identification with him, but from our sense that, through the action, the character has identified himself. Like the actor who plays him, the hero has exhaustively projected his unique genius, a process which can only be accomplished by acting in the world, before an audience, and exactly through those encounters which put most strain upon the defining qualities, the character, the actor is projecting.

All this may help explain why, in spite of much critical effort to the contrary, the idea of tragedy and the idea of character have remained persistently linked. More importantly, it suggests why the tendency to connect character and tragedy—and indeed to connect character and drama in general—seems to have survived what we think of as the particularly modern disassemblage of the concept of character. For our argument indicates that character in drama draws its strength exactly from the problematic status of character in ordinary life. Most important of all, though, at least from the point of view of this book, there is a further relevance. The notion of characterization that has emerged from our study of Coriolanus bears, not only upon the way all tragedies engage us, but on some distinctive qualities of Shakespearean tragedy, especially in relation to the idea of action.

First, it should be clear from the discussion of Coriolanus that “character” occupies the same region of conceptual space as “action.” Like action, it is a radically unsatisfactory concept, and it reflects the same deep human need. To use the language of my opening chapters, it is a way of describing how being may be had, how inner events cohere and how they are connected to outer events. At bottom, the notion of character raises the same questions about self and act that we first encountered in Hamlet. Character implies a relation between inner and outer event. It identifies itself by movement out into the world from a private center of perception and intention, movement, that is, along the spectrum of action. Thus it rests on the assumption that such movement can take place, that motion across the bands of the spectrum exists and has a structure, an idea that Hamlet casts everywhere into doubt. Man is no more than a beast if he does not act, but every action is such as a man might play, and efforts to act significantly regularly lose the name of action. In the great third-act soliloquy, at a moment when Shakespeare has carefully led us to expect the most intimate revelation of Hamlet's character, we are confronted with an opaque abstractness of meditation that both in form and content calls all such revelation into question. We have seen that the difficulty and virtue of this speech lie in its demand that the actor, through his intensity of focus, project a highly specific core of individuality in its most personal relation to the possibilities of the spectrum. Yet he must act out this self in a manner that is virtually actionless, using language that is in large part almost evasively general, and in the very act of denying that the self can utter itself coherently in action. Here, in a particularly concentrated and demanding way, character is enacted by movement against powerful obstructions to even the possibility of such enactment.

But this merely reflects a larger Shakespearean pattern already familiar from these pages. We have seen that the Shakespearean tragic hero typically tries to impose on the world some more or less distorted and self-protective version of the relation between self and act. Like Hamlet, he may insist that his integrity exists independently of any actions that a man might play. Like Lear or Macbeth, he may imagine a monolithic unity of self and act, and strain to sweep so quickly along the spectrum that feeling cannot enter in. Or, like Antony, he may identify the nobleness of life with doing as he pleases. In one way or another, he attempts to be, in Coriolanus' phrase, the author of himself. And in every case the hero learns that he must abandon his confident sense of how the self is authored—how it establishes its authority—in favor of a more compromised relation.

This development constitutes an important part of the process by which the tragic hero attempts to take over the script that has been given him, to “make his part his own.” He learns that he cannot do this by simple fiat, but only by the most difficultly adjusted engagement with the world around him. The Lear who says, “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft,” for example, resembles the later Lear who says, “We two alone shall sing like birds i' th' cage,” in that in both instances he is setting up a relation of self to world that will allow him to impose his own necessity on the contingency thrust upon him. In Act One, he meets Cordelia's defection, Kent's disapproval, and his own agitation by presenting himself as an irresistible engine of authority. In Act Five, he invites Cordelia to a kind of endless visionary reenactment of their reunion as a safe refuge from further disappointment. Similarly, the Hamlet of both “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems,” and “The readiness is all,” is taking over, actor-like, a difficult role and insisting on how he will play it in the face of severe threats to the integrity of his performance. But his first statement is a contemptuous refusal of contact with the world of appearances, the second an engaged acceptance of its scripts and uncertainties. In both plays the examples given chart a significant change of awareness. Both in Hamlet and Lear, the early quotation differs from the later in its much more confident estimate of how simple the process of authoring the self is likely to be, how easily and autonomously the private self can utter itself in the world of action.

One could go further and argue that the distinctive verbal texture of any Shakespearean tragedy is fundamentally linked to its hero's experience of the nature of action. The controlling imagery, the sense of “atmosphere” so richly present in each of the tragedies can be seen as expressing, above all else, the quality of readjustment the hero must make in his forced contemplation of the self/act relation. Thus, as we have seen, the spaciousness and order of the “Othello music” reflects the structure of personality Othello maintains, at first with ease but later only after an agonized recovery. The huge eclipses and frightful alterations which agitate the imagery of that play accompany the collapse of its hero's “perfect soul” and of his early confidence about the structure of his actions. Or, in Macbeth, the feeling of darkness and density, of equivocation and thickening fluids, helps draw us into the movement of the hero's mind as he explores the possibilities of evil he discovers inside/outside him, at once alien to him and yet deeply part of his being.

But if it is correct to say that, through the imagery of the play, we enter into the hero's developing intuitions about the nature of action, it is equally important to remember that we experience this through action and in the form of action. For what we are drawn into when we experience the “inner life” of a dramatic hero is not a static impression or formulation but an enactment. Performer-like, we enter into the actions that constitute a character. In Macbeth, as I have argued, we not only observe the hero's evil acts and learn how he feels about them, but we rehearse his capacity for doing evil, we possess the ground of Macbeth's evil action as an action which becomes our own. Through the actor, as we have frequently seen in these essays, we experience the possession of a self as an action, in which we participate. We have the hero's being because the doing of that being is passed on to us.

Perhaps it is no more than an inevitable bias produced by absorption in the critical method I have been elaborating in these essays, but it seems to me that this way of possessing a self through the mediation of an actor is absolutely central to the experience of tragedy. Indeed it strikes me that in arguing for the appeal of Coriolanus as a character I have been claiming not only that he has the freedom and depth of a tragic hero but, more specifically, that his play is capable of arousing in its audience a crucial type or element of tragic pleasure, one which has always proved difficult to explain, and which in fact can be accounted for only by reference to the actor-audience process. I am referring to the strong impression of positive accomplishment that we feel at the end of tragedy and particularly of Shakespearean tragedy. This feeling goes well beyond, say, the delight we presumably feel in safely witnessing horrible occurrences, or learning through vicarious suffering, or seeing even unpleasant things represented well. Surely it comes, at least in part, from the fact that we have actively participated in a most difficult achievement, the establishment of character against all that deprecates and derogates the coherence of the self. We experience a great expansion of power and knowledge in possessing, in action, an identity so definitively established. The communicability of character—as an internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater, something which possesses us, in mind and body, as an actor's performance possesses us—this is the basic currency of all great drama. Shakespearean tragedy, however, gives it an extraordinary weight of meaning by forcing it to establish itself in the teeth of the most corrosive criticism of action and the self as satisfying concepts. Thus, in making my case for our involvement with Coriolanus, I have finally been insisting that his play engages us with its hero's character in a way fundamentally resembling all the plays studied in this volume. At the end of Coriolanus, I feel that strange response which a less apologetic age would simply call tragic exaltation. And if I have interpreted the significance of that mood correctly, it means we feel, in spite of everything, that there is in the end something about Coriolanus which is truly his, that it characterizes him, and that for us to have shared his character, by participating in it through the process of the actor's performance, has been an experience of irreplaceable value in our own drama of self-discovery.

To conclude in this fashion, by referring to an internal drama of self-discovery, is of course once more to introduce a term that puzzles philosophy, but this is exactly the point. For it returns us to the elusive, unshakeable grip that the idea of action exerts upon us. Certainly, it is not clear in what sense selves exist, let alone that we can discover them. They are, as we experience them in ordinary life, perhaps only spaces, outlined by a desire and movement that never leave us, unfillable and, as such, not to be had. But from these spaces our lives extend. Action is a notion that speaks to our need for such extension, however doubtful its sources, inconceivable its structure, and enigmatic its results. When we speak of self-discovery, we seem to refer to the sensation of having come upon something of our own, a self or part of one, that shimmers or presses at the source of action, that attempts to unfold itself into the world. In Shakespeare's theater we possess the selves of his tragic heroes, through the actors, as remarkably difficult and contagious unfoldings. By participating in their enactment, we touch the questionable shapes inside us, those hungry, ghostly outlines for which our language is at once so necessary and so inadequate. To have what we mean and need when we say we have a self, and to have it in commerce with the world in the way we mean and need when we say there is such a thing as action—this, I suspect, is a not inconsiderable source of pleasure in tragedy and very possibly its defining achievement.

Notes

1. See Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 10.

2. For a very persuasive psychoanalytic study of this impression and its source in the play's verbal imagery, see Janet Adelman, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108-24.

3. “For he was a man to full of passion and choller, and to much given to over selfe will and opinion, as one of a highe minde and great corage, that lacked the gravity, and affabilitie that is gotten with judgment of learning and reason, which only is to be looked for in a governour of state: and that remembred not how wilfulnes is the thing of the world, which a governour of a common wealth for pleasing should shonne, being that which Plato called solitarines. As in the ende, all men that are wilfully geven to a selfe opinion and obstinate minde, and who will never yeld to others reason, but to their owne: remaine without companie, and forsaken of all men.”—Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, V (London, 1964), 519.

   Plato's term is found in the fourth letter to Dion.

4.                                                                                                     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)

5. One of the most interesting things about The Rape of Lucrece as one of Shakespeare's earliest essays in tragedy is the way it pursues—rather doggedly pursues—the connection Lucrece's act of self-definition makes between contingency and necessity, those hoary topics of tragic theory. Through her long speeches in the center of the poem, Lucrece's tragedy emerges as the story of a woman constrained to act so as to preserve a certain idea of self. Her soliloquy insists on the contingent nature of the rape, on the roles that Opportunity and Time have played in it (ll. 869-1029). Under the stress of events she is forced to act, and each possible action involves a different option for self-definition. If she wishes to be the ideal Roman wife, she must kill herself. Once she has made that choice she has no choice, but the choice characterizes her for all time. Responding to the horrors of contingency, she puts on necessity. And Tarquin, whether he likes it or not, has chosen too. But each act produces further contingencies, which in turn demand new puttings-on of necessity by the heroic self. At the end of the poem, Lucrece plus time plus opportunity provides the formula for Brutus' self-defining decision to intervene (1807-48). He takes advantage of the general horror at Lucrece's suicide to abandon his masquerade as a simpleton and lead a successful rebellion against the Tarquins. His political act, in turn, becomes an event of radical importance to succeeding generations. Later, at another crucial moment in history, as Shakespeare and his readers were well aware, Junius Brutus would himself become a rallying cry. Something of the haunting tragic connection between necessity and contingency may be felt when Lucrece addresses time as “Thou ceaseless lackey to eternity” (967).