SOURCE: “Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus,” in ELH, Vol. 50, No. 3, Autumn, 1983, pp. 485-507.

[In the essay that follows, Holstun discusses the genre of Coriolanus, and considers the play’s relation to both tragedy and comedy.]

Shakespearean drama provides the history of ideas with no better exposition of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance metaphor of the body politic than Menenius' fable of the belly in the first scene of Coriolanus.¹ It is quite possible to put oneself in the position in which Menenius would put the Roman plebeians, taking his organic analogy for a dramatic as well as a political exemplum, and to read Coriolanus as the tragic failure of the Roman state to live up to its own organic ideal. In The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays, James E. Phillips, Jr. writes, “If … we take Menenius's speech on the belly as a key to the political structure and action of the play, we can see immediately that this is not the tragedy of a ruler alone or of a people alone, but a picture of the threatened disintegration of an institution including and yet superior to them both—the state.”²

Part of the problem with such an approach, which takes a dramatic excerpt as evidence of some Renaissance political deep structure, is that it tends to neglect the political context of Shakespeare's play. Phillips does trace a complex history of theoretical discussion of the organic state all the way back to Aristotle's Politics, but the Jacobean state was clearly not unified around a universally accepted organic analogy during the Midlands Corn Insurrections of 1607, and recent historical criticism has persuasively argued the parallels between the rebellions of Shakespeare's contemporaries and of his Roman plebeians.³

But further, even the formal textual analysis produced by such an approach tends to ignore Shakespeare's own specifically dramatic consideration of the contradictions within the organic analogy. Insisting as he does that Shakespeare's play merely translates a logically unified and nearly universal Renaissance world view, Phillips himself practices a sort of organicism which denies that literature can examine a conflict between political and literary institutions; not the least of the reductions of such criticism is its suppression of literature's analysis of its own political and generic genealogy. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare analyzes both the fictional and constructed nature of a political analogy on the decline and the political affiliations of a literary genre dependent on that analogy. In the process, he constructs an alternate model for the state and an alternate genre for the play which the folio calls, somewhat deceptively, The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Shakespeare satirizes those generic aspects of tragedy that depend on an unquestioning faith in the complex medical and political analogy of the body politic, taking as his butt so many tragic conventions that it becomes difficult to think of Coriolanus as sharing a dramatic genre with Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet.

This satirization begins with Shakespeare's construction of the dramatic situation to which Menenius responds with the fable of the belly. Shakespeare formed the rebellion of the plebeians that begins Coriolanus by collapsing two distinct rebellions in his principal source, North's translation of Plutarch's The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus.⁴ In the first of these, the plebeians rebel against usurers whose excessive rates of interest have forced them to sell their few goods. The plebeians leave Rome and gather at a hillside outside the city where they hear Menenius' fable of the belly. An appeal to the model of the body politic seems to have substantial force in this Rome, for Menenius, after promising the yearly election of five tribuni plebis, manages to persuade the plebeians to return to the city.

The second rebellion in Plutarch, like the rebellion in Shakespeare, is caused by a famine. Because the wars with the Volscians have made it impossible either to till Roman fields or to purchase foreign grain, there is a general famine in Rome, and “those busie pratlers” (presumably the tribunes) accuse the nobles of manipulating the market and causing the famine. The solution the nobles propose for this problem relies upon a somewhat different application of the body politic metaphor. The neighboring city of Velitres has been decimated by plague and has petitioned Rome for colonists:

So the wise men of Rome beganne to thincke, that the necessitie of the Velitrians fell out in a most happy hower, and howe by this occasion it was very mete in so great a scarsitie of vittailes, to disburden Rome of a great number of cittizens: and by this meanes as well to take awaye this newe sedition, and utterly to ryd it out of the cittie, as also to cleare the same of many mutinous & seditious persones, being the superfluous ill humours that grevously fedde this disease.

(329)

Despite their protests, the “superfluous” citizens are to be sweated off, and the nobles do send many of them to plague-infested Velitres. We can see even in Plutarch something of the versatility of the body politic metaphor: far from a static, analogical system of social unity, it is a complex and reversible device that can be used at one time to argue for national unity and at another for the forcible expulsion of the troublesome elements in a population. The body politic is not so much a unified and informing idea as the name of a number of potentially contradictory political practices grouped under the heading of a metaphor that claims an organic unity for them.

In his combination of these two rebellions, Shakespeare comically underscores the complexities and contradictions of the metaphor. Menenius finishes the fable and asks the rebels, “What say you to't?” The First Citizen responds, “It was an answer. How apply you this?” (I.i.145-46). His difficulty in supplying the appropriate moral for the fable is understandable. Andrew Gurr observes that, while the fable of the belly serves quite well in Plutarch as an argument against a plebeian rebellion inspired by usury, it is an almost contemptuously inappropriate choice for an argument against a rebellion of plebeians starved by aristocratic hoarding.⁵ The implicit moral of Menenius' fable in Plutarch is that the rebellious plebeians will suffer if they refuse to recognize the organic unity of the Roman body politic, just as the body members in the fable will weaken and die if they fail to consider their dependence on the belly. But in Shakespeare, the figurative weakening and starvation of the body threatened by the moral of the fable are identical with the literal situation of the plebeians, since the reason for their rebellion is their near-starvation. Menenius' didactic bravado even leads him to assure the plebeians that they will understand the benevolence of the aristocrats if they will but “digest things rightly.” Menenius' fable is a skillful attempt to argue that the hunger which causes the rebellion is in truth the effect of the rebellion, thus shifting blame from the noble grain hoarders to the rebels themselves. The plebeians are cowed long enough for Coriolanus to arrive on the scene; he continues Menenius' vitriolic tone and his attempt to transform the cause of the revolt into its effect through organic analogy:

                    What's the matter, you dissentious rogues
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?

(I.i.163-65)

Though the belly in Menenius' fable promises an accounting for all the food it takes in, Coriolanus rails at the plebeians' claim of a right to know about food distribution and longs for an excuse to chop them into pieces.

Plutarch's analogy between the movements of superfluous humors and of surplus populations is also an object of dramatic scrutiny for Shakespeare, not an article of faith. From the beginning of the play, Shakespeare shows that the ideological language of organic “superfluities” hides different superfluities arising from economic monopoly and hoarding. The First Citizen complains,

What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear: the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.

(I.i.15-21)

But for certain of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the description of mass depopulations in the vocabulary of humor physiology was a proper and convincing application of the metaphor of the body politic. Edward Forset, writing in 1606, describes a sort of political preventive medicine:

So in our bodie of the Commonweale it is not to be disliked that (though there be no great fault found, and all things seeme to stand in good order) yet now and then physicall courses be used, by opening some veine, by purging of superfluities, and putting to payne some part thereof, for the more certeintie of the generall good: that not onely diseases themselves be avoided, but even all feare and suspition may be prevented to the preserving and assuring of an inviolable stabilitie of the publique quietnesse.⁶

This use of the body politic metaphor is present in vestigial form in Coriolanus; when Coriolanus hears that the Volscians are preparing for war, he echoes Plutarch as he exclaims, “I am glad on't; then we shall ha'means to vent / Our musty superfluity” (I.i.224-25). In Coriolanus' pun on “vent,” which evokes both the medical venting of excess humors and the commercial vending of excess stock, Shakespeare plays on the principle of exchange implicit in Plutarch, where the gain of the Velitrians will be the gain of the Roman nobility as well, for the former will gain a populous city and the latter a quieter one. But Shakespeare's Coriolanus intends an even less humane exchange: the lives of troublesome citizens for the lands they will win in battle. This and the subtle comparison of the citizens to the hoarded grain (which must after all be getting somewhat musty) show that the human superfluity is no longer a pathological superflux, but an economic surplus to be vended at the highest price possible. Shakespeare moves the medieval medical/political metaphor toward a theory of planned demographics and political economy more compatible with colonial mercantilism than with the “organic” Tudor state; Christopher Hill observes, “One of the arguments put forward in propaganda for colonizing Ireland in 1594, Virginia in 1612 (and on many similar occasions), was that ‘the rank multitude’ might be exported, ‘the matter of sedition … removed out of the City.’”⁷

But there are additional problems in thinking of Menenius' fable as a textbook illustration of the Renaissance body politic, for it lacks an indispensable element of that commonplace, one that the First Citizen implies when he asks Menenius what the belly could say to the complaints of the “kingly crown'd head” of the body (I.i.114). This is somewhat jarring, for in Menenius' Rome as in his fable there is no kingly crowned head, and it becomes apparent that his version of the body politic is the product of a purely political and ad hoc fable, not of some Roman (or Jacobean) political cosmology. In all of Coriolanus, in fact, there are only two other references to kings, and these are both trivial.⁸ The only other mention of a crown comes when Menenius, in a moment of patrician exuberance, greets the returning hero Coriolanus and exclaims, “Now the gods crown thee!” (II.i.178). Given his martial preeminence and his regal haughtiness, Coriolanus seems the closest thing in this play to a natural-born king, but there is no room in Rome for a monarchy: Coriolanus is to be elevated no higher than a consul's seat, for the complementary republican political forces of the noble senate and the plebeian tribunate will tolerate no throne. Coriolanus is the true superfluity that the action of the play must vent, for he is a tragic king-figure in a satiric drama that does not need a king. He is a tragic hero only in so far as he is tragically miscast.

Other Shakespearean tragedy draws its claims for universality from the idea that total social upheaval will follow from the absence of a proper king. The tragedy of King Lear follows from Lear's division of his kingdom—his mutilation of his body—and his wish to maintain “the name and all th'addition to a king” without the integrated national body and powers appropriate to the office (I.i.136). Hamlet shows that national chaos follows when there are only inadequate successors (Hamlet and Claudius) to a worthy, murdered head of state. Ernst H. Kantorowicz argues in The King's Two Bodies that medieval political theorists thought of the body politic not only as a simultaneous unity of all persons within a nation, but also as a historical unity: the unity through time of the mystical body of the nation. The place of the king in this unity is particularly important:

By interpreting the People as an universitas “which never dies” the jurisprudents had arrived at the concept of a perpetuity of both the whole body politic (head and members together) and the constituent members alone. The perpetuity, however, of the “head” alone was of equally great importance, since the head would usually appear as the responsible part and its absence might render the body corporate incomplete or incapable of action. The perpetuation of the head, therefore, created a new set of problems and led to new fictions.⁹

Kantorowicz shows that tragedy itself was among the legal, theological, and literary fictions that responded to this problem of transition and continuity. For instance, Shakespeare provides a symbolic resolution of the difficulty in the transition from the House of Plantagenet to the House of Lancaster by having Richard II willingly hand over his crown to Henry IV, making himself the agent of transition.

We can even define the political function of one limited strain of tragedy as the rationalization of such crises of royal transition—a rationalization that simultaneously provides a principle of historical continuity and maintains the structural separation of the monarchical governors from the plebeian governed. In the process of his frantic questioning in Oedipus the King, Oedipus suggests an explanation for the terror of Jocasta, who has just fled the stage:

Break out what will! I at least shall be willing to see my ancestry, though humble.
Perhaps she is ashamed of my low birth, for she has all a woman's high-flown pride.(10)

But such a confusion of classes belongs to the world of comedy and romance, and Oedipus' hints of a generic shift here only intensify the tragic irony through their futility. Oedipus' origins are, if anything, excessively monarchical.

The ideal organic unity of the body politic is essential for the sorts of claims for social universality that Shakespeare's plots typically make, whether it serves as a utopian ideal amidst the political chaos of a kingdom gone wrong, as in the history plays that chronicle the turbulent English fifteenth century, or whether it is made concrete as the organic state, as we see in the restorations of monarchical order at the conclusions of Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. Shakespearean tragedy seldom offers any extensive dramatic treatment of the lower classes, but it does not simply ignore them. It shows the organic unity in the kingdom's turmoil by indicating that the crises and conflicts examined at length in the royal houses are felt simultaneously by the subordinate members of the body politic. In the milling and changeable crowds of Julius Caesar and The Second Part of Henry VI, we see that the true head, the true authority, is temporarily indeterminable. In the riotous welcome the people of London give to Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV, and in the silence with which they answer Buckingham's suggestion in Richard III that they acclaim Richard their rightful leader, we see the ways in which the body politic accepts or rejects a transplanted head of state. Richard II's queen is certain of the failure of his kingship when she overhears her gardener's discussions of his fatal excesses. The lower classes are not heard, but overheard, and so serve as a sort of natural portent.¹¹ In no case is the attitude of the people a cause of the rise and fall of kings; it is only a sign of the state of health of the body politic. There is never any popular election of a king, but only a natural sympathy or antipathy between the populace and the king or would-be king. Rosencrantz's theory of the relationship between the bodies of the state and of the king in Hamlet is relevant to the Shakespearean tragedy of transition in general:

                                                                                          The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it; or 'tis a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

(III.iii.15-23)

However, such a cess of majesty cannot describe the dramatic impetus for Coriolanus or for its analysis of “inorganic” class conflict; of all the explicitly political Shakespearean tragedies, only Coriolanus is unconcerned with questions of kingly transition. In this play, Shakespeare moved out of the Tudor conception of the body politic into the seventeenth-century critique of the body politic as an outmoded fiction. One may trace the historical decline in the persuasiveness of the metaphor in several ways. Andrew Gurr sees the peculiarly Tudor version (which stressed the unity of the nation through the unity of the kingly head and the parliamentary body) breaking down with the abrogation of parliamentary prerogatives under the Stuarts (63-67). David Hale sees a general decline in the acceptability of the metaphor during the English Civil War. This brought the substitution of a contractual conception of the state for the organic analogy by both the supporters of absolutism (Thomas Hobbes stressing the binding nature of the contract) and the most radical revolutionaries (the Leveller John Lilburne stressing its revocability).¹² Clifford C. Huffman shows that the Jacobean model of the body politic ruled absolutely by the monarchical head, such as we see in Forset's Stuart apologetics, was just one Jacobean political model among others. For instance, the alternative merits of a “mixed government” of monarch, nobles, and commons were widely debated by Jacobean political theorists, and this debate often drew its metaphors and analogies from the days of the Roman republic. Huffman sees Coriolanus participating in this debate from the moment in the first scene of the play when we hear of the offstage birth of the tribunate, which corresponds to the commons in the mixed government ruling Rome for the remainder of the play.¹³ J. G. A. Pocock has shown that as the century progressed, English political thinkers turned more and more from theories of metaphysical organicism to theories of balanced state power, such as we see in James Harrington's attempt to Anglicize Machiavellian classical republicanism in Oceana. Even Charles I (or his advisers) spoke in terms of mixed government in 1642, when he issued His Majesty's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament.¹⁴

The Rome of Coriolanus looks back to an earlier rule of kings (Coriolanus himself helped to expel Tarquin, who had royal ambitions), and forward to a later kingship (Julius Caesar is to emerge from a military triumvirate as emperor, just as Coriolanus threatens to do), but it has no use for a king itself, and is awake to the threat of potential kings. The tribunes' opposition to Coriolanus is not the product of some plebeian ressentiment for the most noble of the nobles, but of their genuine fear that he will institute a revolutionary monarchy that will destroy the new republican balance. The tribune Brutus accuses Coriolanus of affecting “tyrannical power” (III.iii.2) and fears that he will gain too great a preeminence, overshadowing his fellow generals:

                                                  Fame, at the which he aims,
In whom already he's well grac'd, cannot
Better be held, nor more attain'd than by
A place below the first.

(I.i.262-65)

Similarly, Sicinius accuses him of “affecting one sole throne, / Without assistance” (IV.vi.32-33). Their uneasiness seems well justified, for Coriolanus seems to have an almost physical aversion to mixed government:

                                                                                                              By Jove himself,
It makes the consuls base; and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by th'other

(III.i.106-11)

Though Coriolanus is undoubtedly a state drama, it dramatizes not a tragic threat to monarchical stability but a monarchical threat to mixed republican stability.

In Coriolanus, many of the formal features we generally associate with Shakespearean tragedy disappear along with the body politic. Maurice Charney sees in Coriolanus none of the lyric meditation, tragic recognition, and figurative language we generally associate with Shakespearean tragedy.¹⁵ And A. C. Bradley observes that there are no images of the supernatural in Coriolanus as there are in the other tragedies—as there are even in the life in Plutarch Shakespeare drew from.¹⁶ True, Menenius does attempt a pious diversion:

                                                                                                                        For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help.

(I.i.71-73)

But Coriolanus, with customary disregard for aristocratic fictions, reveals that the nobles have caused the famine by withholding grain from citizens who were reluctant to fight in Rome's foreign wars. The Roman gods play no material part in the play and are no sooner piously invoked than shown to be a merely political device.

More surprising, there are none of the supernatural portents that we see in all the tragedies and histories associated with crises of transition. These portents are sometimes the signs of an improper transition in the body politic, as in the witches' prophecies to Macbeth and the curses of the procession of ghosts at Bosworth Field upon Richard III. Or they may be signs of the divine ordination of a transition that might otherwise seem to involve some sort of dynastic discontinuity, as in the witches' prophecy of the future rule of Banquo's line and the blessings of the Bosworth ghosts upon Richmond and the House of Tudor. But with its rejection of the body politic as the fundamental structuring analogy for political drama, and with its depiction of a system of mixed republicanism in its place, Coriolanus demystifies the link between political life and the supernatural in drama.

This is not to say that the Rome of Coriolanus is devoid of religious institutions, as we can see in the Roman custom that prescribes Coriolanus' exhibition of the wounds he earns in battle with the Volscians. And the public veneration of these martial stigmata seems at first to suggest that there is a close connection in this play, as in the tragedies of transition, between religion and tragic form. The institution of display itself has the trappings of tragedy, for it aims to elevate a heroic figure through a public spectacle centered on his near-martyrdom. And we can certainly see a close connection between the veneration of wounds and tragic plot in other Shakespearean drama. At Julius Caesar's funeral speech, for example, Mark Antony attempts to persuade the plebeians to venerate the assassinated Caesar as a near-deity, to “Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths, / And bid them speak for me” (III.ii.225-26). By the conclusion of the tragedy, those wounds have actually begun to speak through the appearance of Caesar's bloody and prophetic ghost to Brutus.

But though it is set in a much younger Rome than that of Julius Caesar, the system of civil ceremony in Coriolanus is much further removed from a naive identification of religious and political power. The tragic plotting that allows Shakespeare to turn the eminently political Caesar of the early part of the play into the tragic hero and supernatural agency of the conclusion has already become a political institution in the Rome of Coriolanus. The “speaking of the wounds” is a regulated political ritual designed to invest a military hero with the limited, nonregal powers of a consul. The wounds themselves have no ritual authority apart from their function within a formalized political ceremony. Shakespeare is not representing a tragic transition inside an organic state but is showing that tragic rituals with their origins in organic theories of the state may be turned to good use even in a nonorganic republic.

Though the aristocratic-dominated Roman republic is not an organic body politic and has no desire for the political realization of the body politic's fictions of cataclysmic transition, it is still conscious of the power of tragic representations and rhetoric in political life. In Act III, Scene ii, the aristocrats vainly attempt to school Coriolanus in the techniques of aristocratic stagecraft, urging him to adopt the role of the tragically scarred defender of his country in order to gain the consulate more easily. Volumnia suggests that he abandon his expressive, aggressive theory of language for a more calculated dramatic rhetoric, saying he should speak

                                                                                not by your own instruction,
Nor by th'matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but roted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom's truth.

(III.ii.53-57)

Here the aristocrats have a Nietzschean insight into the nature of tragic self-representation, resembling not the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, who sees tragedy as the metaphysical battleground between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the later Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals, who insists on distinguishing between the origins of social practices and the uses to which they may be put:

There is no set of maxims more important for an historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origin and its eventual uses, the manner of its incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart; that everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions; that all processes in the organic world are processes of outstripping and overcoming.¹⁷

Though tragedy itself may have had its origins in a time when political life was ruled by theories of political “organicism,” its usefulness has not disappeared with the disappearance of belief in that sort of organicism.

In the Rome of Coriolanus, tragic self-representation is useful because it helps prevent envy: the sort of political and class rivalry that might follow from a breakdown of the Roman political balance. In “Of Envy,” Francis Bacon discusses such politic uses of tragedy by the rulers of a state:

Those that have joined with their honour great travels [travails], cares, or perils, are less subject to envy; for men think they earn their honours hardly, and pity them sometimes; and pity ever healeth envy: wherefore you shall observe, that the more deep and sober sort of politic persons, in their greatness, are ever bemoaning themselves what a life they lead, chanting a quanta patimur [how much we suffer!]; not that they feel it so, but only to abate the edge of envy.¹⁸

Bacon's remarks, explicitly about statecraft, also apply to tragedy considered as its literary adjunct, and his conception of the education of a Renaissance prince prescribes this stategic cultivation of a tragic persona. Radical seventeenth-century Protestants also see tragedy's dissipation of envy as a function of aristocratic Realpolitik, but from a critical perspective. In Paradise Lost, Satan chants a quanta patimur for the audience of his fallen host, arguing that his willingness to take upon himself the perils of his elevated station in Hell is a sign of his fitness to rule over them:

                                                                                                              The happier state
In Heav'n, which follows dignity, might draw
Envy from each inferior; but who here
Will envy whom the highest place exposes
Foremost to stand against the Thunderer's aim
Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share
Of endless pain?(19)

But Coriolanus would rather encourage “the cruelty and envy of the people” than play the tragedian in order to produce this sort of insulating pity and fear (IV.v.75). He shrinks from a public performance that might bring him the ritual authority of tragedy:

                                                                                Your honours' pardon:
I had rather have my wounds to heal again
Than hear say how I got them.
.....I had rather have one scratch my head i'th'sun
When the alarum were struck, than idly sit
To hear my nothings monster'd.

(II.ii.68-70, 75-77)

He wishes his wounds to remain truly sacred wounds-in-themselves, apart from all integration in the political and religious rituals of Rome. He increases class tensions in Rome by refusing to allow himself to be exalted in the traditional fashion and by acting as if he were already a king—a natural king with no need for the mediation of social institutions and forms. He displays his wounds only grudgingly, and as Sicinius predicts, he asks for the voices of the plebeians, which are almost purely a formality, “As if he did contemn what he requested / Should be in them to give” (II.ii.157-58). Though his own refusal to acknowledge tragic fictions puts him outside the pale of acceptable social behavior, this is not a tragic isolation. In a sense, the entire critical debate over whether or not Coriolanus is a sympathetic tragic hero is beside the point; his character is not presented as an object of Aristotelian pity (he is not “a man suffering undeservedly”) nor of Aristotelian fear (he is not “a man like ourselves”), but as an object of functional analysis from the point of view of a settled republican order dominated by an aristocracy eager to prevent any actual tragedy of transition that might threaten property or the public quiet.²⁰

Swinburne's effort to depoliticize Coriolanus by diverting attention from the conflict of classes to the integrity of the family tragedy of mother and son is not altogether misguided, for the family “tragedy” has a peculiar independence from the working out of the public and political plot.²¹ Coriolanus' concession to Volumnia is not in any sense the single realization of his tragic flaw that unifies the plot and leads it to its final resolution. Long before Coriolanus' hatred of Rome begins to relent, Aufidius has begun an “interpretive” program to get rid of him:

                                                                                          So our virtues
Lie in th'interpretation of the time,
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
T'extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
Come, let's away. When, Caius, Rome is thine,
Thou art poor'st of all: then shortly art thou mine.

(IV.vii.49-57)

Aufidius is a Machiavellian strategist interpreting the temporal flux of fortuna in order to seize upon the proper occasione in which to assert his virtù. This characterization of Aufidius is unusual for Shakespeare, not because it is unique (one need look no further than to the watching and waiting of Edmund in King Lear or to Richard III), but because this vision of political power prevails at the end of the play. There are no deathbed recantations such as Edmund's, no movements back into a divinely sanctioned political order such as we see at the conclusion of Richard III. There is no organic alternative to the play of power and domination: “One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail.” In no other play does Shakespeare show political conspiracy so widespread that it is the norm rather than a pathological deviation. But even though Aufidius' aristocratic conspiracy parallels the earlier plebeian conspiracy of the tribunes, we need not conclude with Coleridge that Shakespeare is somehow equating the two and seeing the struggle between patricians and plebeians with “wonderful philosophic impartiality.”²² Rather, Shakespeare shows that political life is by nature social, a product of alliances among men, not of the sympathy or antipathy between monarchs and the organic cosmos. However odious “conspiracy” may be on an abstract moral level, it is fundamentally social—a “drawing of breath together”—and throughout the play, Coriolanus shrinks from the praise of the aristocrats as well as from the voices of the plebeians, “whose breath I hate / As reek o'th'rotten fens” (III.iii.120-21).

Coriolanus' utter isolation is clear even in his first meeting with Aufidius, the only character who might seem to be his equal in natural nobility and kingliness. They draw up against each other and trade ritual taunts preparatory to a trial by combat of their respective virtues. But after they begin to fight, several Volscians spoil the form of the duel by coming to Aufidius' aid, causing Coriolanus to remark, “Officious, and not valiant, you have sham'd me / In your condemned seconds” (I.viii.14-15). After this battle, Aufidius reveals his own conversion from a role of open heroic valor to one of strategic policy:

                                                                                                                        Mine emulation
Hath not that honour in't it had: for where
I thought to crush him in an equal force,
True sword to sword, I'll potch at him some way,
Or wrath or craft may get him.

(I.x.12-16)

In the final scene of King Lear, Shakespeare provides some relief from the succession of tragic revelations and some sense of a proper and divinely ordained transition of power in the trial by combat of Edmund and Edgar, in which Edgar's noble virtue reveals itself and vanquishes Edmund's base-blooded libertine naturalism in battle. There is no such ritual of transition in Coriolanus, however, and Aufidius and the Volscian conspirators finally potch away quite efficiently at Coriolanus.

The banishment of Coriolanus seems at first to bring the play a ritual form reminiscent of such tragedies of transition as Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy, King Lear, or Richard II: after the ritual designation of a scapegoat, he is expelled from society and by this very expulsion achieves some sort of compensatory tragic apotheosis. But it is difficult to think of Coriolanus' banishment as tragic scapegoating, for it contains no tragic excess: however villainous the tribunes' conspiracy, Shakespeare makes plain the dangers he poses to the Roman state as a potential king, as a “traitorous innovator, / A foe to th'public weal” (III.i.173-74). Even as he leaves, Coriolanus attempts to make himself into a king, as he responds to his banishment with “I banish you! / And here remain with your uncertainty!” (III.iii.123-24). Stanley Fish observes that Coriolanus, by attempting to banish all of Rome simply by force of will, seeks to negate the entire socially constructed system of linguistic preconditions for the speech act of banishing: “He makes explicit his rejection of the community and his intention to stand alone, as a society of one, as a state complete in himself, independent of all external supports and answerable only to the laws he himself promulgates. In short, he decides to become a God.”²³ But kingship as well as godhead allows one to claim such an immediacy of word and will: even though Richard II is a depraved king, his “one little word” is sufficient first to effect the banishment of Mowbray and Bolingbroke and then to shorten the banishment of the latter (I.iii.213). Coriolanus' attempt to make a state of himself here is a fiction with considerable institutional support for a king, but in republican Rome, it is the threatening and presumptuous fiat of an unincorporated head.

Even leaving aside questions of its political motivation, Coriolanus' banishment is unique in Shakespeare for its dramatic effects upon both the person banished and the society banishing him. The tribunes, with the support of the plebeians and the reluctant acquiescence of the patricians, banish Coriolanus, and he responds,

                                                                                                                        Despising
For you the city, thus I turn my back.
There is a world elsewhere!

(III.iii.133-35)

Coriolanus finds no more in Antium, however, than variations on themes familiar in Rome: class stratification, complex political life, and rule by conspiracy. In this play, exile brings neither the Edenic green world it brings in the comedies and romances nor the elemental landscapes of tragic exile. More important, it does not bring their perspectival wisdom to Coriolanus; as he leaves Rome, he quite accurately predicts that Rome will hear “never of me aught / But what is like me formerly” (IV.i.52-53).

The effects of the banishment on Rome are peculiar for Shakespearean drama because they are so beneficial. Even in so late and atypical a tragedy as Timon of Athens, the exiled Alcibiades returns to Athens promising to execute those who exiled him and cozened Timon. But after Coriolanus leaves, Rome becomes a peaceful and prosperous market town, as Sicinius remarks:

                                                                                Here do we make his friends
Blush that the world goes well; who rather had,
Though they themselves did suffer by't, behold
Dissentious numbers pest'ring streets, than see
Our tradesmen singing in their shops and going
About their functions friendly.

(IV.vi.4-9)

Menenius arrives on the scene, and he and the tribunes engage in a surprisingly civil conversation:

MENENIUS
Hail to you both!
SICINIUS
Your Coriolanus is not much miss'd
But with his friends: the commonwealth doth stand,
And so would do, were he more angry at it.
MENENIUS
All's well, and might have been much better if
He could have temporiz'd.

(IV.vi.12-17)

Of course, this calm disappears with the unexpected news that Coriolanus has returned with the Volscians to burn Rome. But even this is a distinctly nontragic and external threat. Presumably, Rome could have gotten along quite well without Coriolanus; it is not wracked by the sorts of conflicts that follow the murder of Julius Caesar, the deposition of Richard II, and the expulsions of Cordelia, Kent, Lear, and Gloucester.

Admittedly, Menenius at first attempts to sketch out a Roman Tragedy:

SICINIUS
The gods be good unto us.
MENENIUS
No, in such a case the gods will not be good unto us.
When we banished him, we respected not them; and, he returning to break our necks, they respect not us.

(V.iv.31-35)

But as the previous scene has shown, Volumnia has prevailed with her son. Within six lines, Menenius' dire predictions are nullified by a messenger who brings the news, significantly comparing it to the Roman republic's previous expulsion of a threatened monarchy: “A merrier day did never yet greet Rome, / No, not th'expulsion of the Tarquins” (V.iv.43-44). The political situation at the end of the play is quite like that at the beginning, to the great relief of most Romans. To project a Volscian conquest of Rome following the assassination of Coriolanus is a last-ditch attempt to rewrite the play as a tragedy.²⁴ This is not even authorized by Plutarch, who tells us that the Roman republic rallies, defeats the Volscians, and kills Tullus Aufidius. Shakespeare's final depiction of Roman life in Coriolanus is quite positive: the city unites in the joyful innovation of a female triumph honoring Volumnia, and its political integrity is restored.

This integrity is not that of a body politic, but neither is it that of a democratic state. Shakespeare's depiction of the plebeians and of the tribunes in particular is certainly not favorable, and the plebeians time and again show themselves to be “the beast with many heads,” readily changing their minds under aristocratic threats or the manipulations and schemes of the tribunes.²⁵ Instead, it is the integrity of a nonmonarchical republic dominated by aristocratic rule. Act III, Scene i contains the play's major debate over the nature of a state. The tribunes and the plebeians propose a sort of contractual democratic populism:

SICINIUS
What is the city but the people?
ALL Plebeians
True,
The people are the city.
BRUTUS
By the consent of all we were establish'd
The people's magistrates.

(III.i.197-200)

The aristocrats oppose an inertial architecture of the state to the more active proposals of the plebeian levellers:

MENENIUS
                                                                                                    Fie, fie, fie!
This is the way to kindle, not to quench.
FIRST Senator
To unbuild the city and to lay all flat.

.....

COMINIUS
That is the way to lay the city flat,
To bring the roof to the foundation,
And bury all which yet distinctly ranges
In heaps and piles of ruin.

(III.i.194-96, 202-05)²⁶

At the same time, the Roman aristocrats resist the threats to this hierarchical architecture of the state that a potential king like Coriolanus could bring. After his return, his speech becomes most immediately regal and most threatening, as Menenius tells the tribunes: “He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding” (V.iv.21-23). While Plutarch's Coriolanus sacks the outskirts of Rome selectively, singling out the plebeian farms in order to increase class tensions, Shakespeare's Coriolanus sits outside Rome like an avenging god, threatening to level the entire city. Aristocratic Rome has no desire for such a crisis of transition.

Just as the monarchical model of the body politic is allied with the tragedy of kingly transition, so too is this aristocratic model of property and strategy allied with a literary genre: aristocratic satire. Such a political system cannot allow the emergence of a tragic king-figure, but it will allow the sort of satiric comedy of humors that provides a plot parallel to the less openly satiric “tragic” action of the play. We can see the aristocratic nature of this satire in Menenius' scathing analysis of the characters of Brutus and Sicinius in Act II, Scene i; in the conversations of the scatterbrained citizens in Act II, Scene iii; and in the belated and comically servile recognition of Coriolanus by Aufidius' servingmen in Act IV, Scene v. This implicit plot is most closely identified with the voice of Menenius, the most astute judge of character in the play; he even provides an analysis of himself as a “humourous patrician” (II.i.46), but his raillery is typically aimed at the plebeians and their tribunes. While such agents of class conflict in tragedy are the signs of the threatened collapse of the great chain of being—the untuning of the string of degree—in Coriolanus, they are targets for satire: for analysis, classification, and control. Where the totalizing political vision of the tragedy of transition postulates a sick body politic that can be cured only through an act of political and psychological catharsis, the comedy of humors assumes a relatively stable underlying social structure that allows a gentler satiric correction of those characters whose intemperate humors cause them to aspire above their fixed positions in the social hierarchy. The comedy of humors tends to chasten and preserve its agents of disorder, rather than martyr them in a tragic ritual. Its structural ideal, like that of the classical republic, is a dynamic balance of forces. Menenius has no desire to banish or obliterate the tribunes, for his raillery would then have no object. Aristocratic satire allows him to have his tribunes and ridicule them too.

The primary object of this comedy of humors, however, is the choleric Coriolanus himself, along with the threat of a tragic transition he brings. The two “tragic” climaxes of the play—Coriolanus' botching of the civic rituals of Rome and his giving over the Volscian conquest after the intercession of his mother—are not so much instances of tragic hamartia as acts of solipsistic presumption upon the considerable but limited prerogatives of a Roman consul and a mercenary general of the Volscians. Because Coriolanus' presumption poses a greater threat to aristocratic Rome than does the agitation of the tribunes, his satiric chastening does take on a particular dramatic urgency; like a tragedy, Coriolanus singles him out as a victim whom the action of the play must sacrifice. But like a satire or comedy, Coriolanus argues that he richly deserves this punishment, like Egeus, the uncooperative father of A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Johnson's various confidence men. Rome and Antium chasten Coriolanus with tragic finality but with satiric good conscience. Coriolanus satirizes tragedy and the tragic affiliations of the body politic by placing a tragic king-figure within a satiric plot as its gull.

Complementary to this chastening of Coriolanus is the play's peculiar way of preserving him, of showing that his death is a sign of the restoration of republican order, not of tragic instability. Paradoxically, tragedy itself plays a role in its own satiric banishment. For just as the aristocrat Menenius may make strategic appeals to the body politic without wholeheartedly espousing it, so too aristocratic satire may use tragic modes of thought and speech without itself taking on a tragic form. The body politic, tragedy, and Coriolanus himself are cancelled to the extent that they claim a totalizing worldview, but they are preserved to the extent that they are useful items in the aristocratic repertoire of political strategy. Shakespeare does not exclude tragic representations from Coriolanus, but shows so many attempts to dispose of Coriolanus “tragically” that he reveals tragedy itself to be a repeatable and strategic mode of political rhetoric rather than an attempt to come to terms with the brute metaphysical fact of kingly transition. Jacques Lacan writes that the crisis of transition structuring Hamlet turns on the insufficient and delayed performance of mourning, one of the key rituals of transition.²⁷ In Coriolanus, the situation is precisely the reverse, and the result is satire, not tragedy; for Coriolanus is the object of an embarrassing number of premature elegies that attempt to turn him into a safely dead and buried tragic fiction.²⁸ Titus Lartius begins this wishful discussion of Coriolanus in the past tense when he has been shut inside the gates of Corioles and is presumed slain:

                                                                                                    Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish, not fierce and terrible
Only in strokes, but with thy grim looks and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds
Thou mad'st thine enemies shake, as if the world
Were feverous and did tremble.

(I.iv.56-61)

But Coriolanus reappears, is acclaimed a hero, and returns to Rome. Here, after he has made his own exile almost inevitable, Menenius begins the tragic transformation once again:

His nature is too noble for the world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for's power to thunder.

(III.i.253-55)

However, Coriolanus does return to Rome, and in quite a worldly form: at the head of an army of conquering Volscians.

The third attempt to deliver a funeral elegy for Coriolanus succeeds, however, and effectively transforms him from a potential conqueror and king of the Romans and Volscians into a safely mute and impotent tragic fiction. The Volscian Third Conspirator first instructs Aufidius in the transformative powers of tragic elegy:

                                                            Therefore, at your vantage,
Ere he express himself or move the people
With what he would say, let him feel your sword,
Which we will second. When he lies along,
After your way his tale pronounc'd shall bury
His reasons with his body.

(V.vi.54-59)

After Aufidius and his fellow conspirators assassinate Coriolanus, Aufidius overhastily mounts the nearest podium, Coriolanus' bleeding body, and begins to deliver such an oration. The Volscian lords chide him for this, and he descends to a more temperate height.

But the play does not then open onto any eschatological tragic visions such as conclude the tragedies of transition. Instead, attention in Corioles (as presumably in Rome) shifts instantly to the administrative business of managing a city and a military campaign. The Second Lord surveys the scene and offers the commonsensical and politic advice, “Let's make the best of it” (V.vi.146). Aufidius does just that, and after a rather perfunctory description of his tragic purgation (“My rage is gone, / And I am struck with sorrow”), he concludes the play with a more respectful and ritually correct elegy:

                                                            Though in this city he
Hath widow'd and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist.

(V.vi.150-54)

If we continue to see Coriolanus as a tragedy, then this is surely the least satisfying of Shakespeare's tragic elegiac resolutions, for the logic of Aufidius' syntax reduces the entire tragic transformation from political threat to noble martyr to a bare, mechanical “yet.” But if we see this as the conclusion of an aristocratic satire in which Aufidius invokes tragedy with comic abruptness in order to naturalize the assassination of Coriolanus and to help get his body quickly below ground, then we can see how Shakespeare dramatizes the conflicts between the origins of a literary genre and the concrete uses a society may make of that genre. For while Coriolanus alive in all his tragic and regal potential was a threat to the aristocracies of the nonorganic Roman and Volscian republics, Coriolanus dead comes alive in the “noble memory” of those aristocracies as a much more manageable and unifying tragic fiction.

Notes

1. All references to Coriolanus are to the Arden Edition, ed. Philip Brockbank (London: Methuen, 1976). All references to Shakespeare's other plays are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

2. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft, 1940), 9-10.

3. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), 5: 456-58, 553-63; and E. C. Pettet, “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrections of 1607,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950), 34-42. Pettet provides convincing internal and biographical evidence of Shakespeare's concern with his contemporary situation.

4. All references to North's translation of Amyot's translation of Plutarch are to the first appendix of Brockbank's edition of Coriolanus, 313-68, which is taken primarily from the edition of 1579.

5. Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), 63-69.

6. Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London, 1606; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; and New York: Da Capo, 1973), 70-71.

7. Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster,” in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 189. Hill quotes from William Strachey's For the Colony of Virginia Britannia (1612).

8. One (I.iii.8) is a proverbial usage, and the other (II.iii.238) is a passing reference to Rome's ancient history.

9. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), 314.

10. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in Sophocles I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), lines 1076-79.

11. I am grateful to Alan Bewell for this point and for many other helpful comments on this paper.

12. David Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

13. Clifford C. Huffman, Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1971). Huffman sees Shakespeare finally siding with the monarchist side of the debate.

14. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 333-400; and James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977). Harrington refers to the fable of Menenius in Oceana, saying that the organic fable hides the unstable structure of the Roman commonwealth, for “it is plain that the fathers were a distinct belly, such an one as took the meat indeed out of the people's mouths but, abhorring the agrarian, returning it not in the due and necessary nutrition of a commonwealth” (276).

15. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of the Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961).

16. A. C. Bradley, Coriolanus: Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912).

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 209.

18. Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Envy,” in The Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, ed. Samuel H. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1890), 59. Bacon alludes to the fable of the belly in “Of Seditions and Troubles.”

19. John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.24-31), Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1975).

20. See, for example, Willard Farnham's consideration of Coriolanus' “pride” as his tragic flaw: “The deeply flawed Coriolanus, as Shakespeare sees him, is one of the chief reasons why the government headed by the patricians is imperfect, and yet he is also one of the chief reasons why that government has virtue in it.” (Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1950], 235.) In Shakespeare's Satire (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), O. J. Campbell contrasts Coriolanus with Shakespeare's noble tragic heroes and decides that he is no tragic hero, but a continuing object of satiric derision. This is perceptive, but Shakespeare is not merely writing more in a satiric than a tragic vein: he is satirizing tragedy.

21. Algernon Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1880; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), 187-89.

22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London, 1836; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967), 2:135-36.

23. Stanley E. Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism,” MLN 91 (1976), 1001.

24. Huffman, for instance, gives an exceedingly monarchist reading of the conclusion: “In his death, he leaves Rome on her knees, for the tragedy of the hero has not led to the regeneration of his country. Rome is threatened by a foreign army in which no one will respond to an appeal to pity, divided within by her unresolved political situation, in danger because led by evil tribunes, and without a young and righteous future leader” (221).

25. In addition to Hill, see Farnham, 227-36; and C. A. Patrides, “‘The Beast with many Heads’: Renaissance views on the Multitude,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965), 241-46. See also Stephen Greenblatt's superb analysis of the ways in which Dürer, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare “memorialize” the defeat of peasant rebellions in “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1 (1983), 1-29.

26. In view of the spatial analogy and probable composition of Coriolanus between 1607 and 1610, it is interesting to note that the antidemocratic epithet “leveller” first entered political controversy in 1607, when it was applied to those peasants who pulled down agricultural enclosures during the Midlands Insurrections.

27. Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” trans. James Hulbert, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, in Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 11-52.

28. Christopher Givan, in “The Premature Epitaph and the Butterfly,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979), 153-58, also analyzes Titus Lartius' speech, but concludes that it is part of the tragic process of Coriolanus' dehumanization.