[In the essay below, Dean examines the play’s politics, dismissing the ‘ideological’ approach and contending that Coriolanus is a “tragedy of thwarted love.”]

That the story of Coriolanus was known to Shakespeare at the outset of his career is proved by the allusion to it in Titus Andronicus IV.iv.68, which he probably derived from a reading of the 1579 edition of North's Plutarch.¹ The whole strand of plot in Titus in which Lucius, banished from Rome, returns at the head of a hostile army, adumbrates the essential movement of the later play, though the moral issues at stake are not so complex. It is interesting to notice other incidental similarities, such as Titus's opening with an opposition between autocratic and popular power and its derogatory references to tribunes, Titus's deference to the ‘voices’ of the people in the imperial election (I.i.217), the use of ‘boy’ as a pejorative term (I.i.290, II.i.38, 45), the irony that the damage to Rome comes from one of her favourite sons, the concern to define Romanitas itself and the nightmare vision of the city as ‘a wilderness of tigers’ preying upon one another. Then, too, the spatial structure of Titus, with its dependence upon the interplay between Roman and Gothic civilizations and values, anticipates the relationship between Rome and Antium in Coriolanus (and that between Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra). In a manner entirely characteristic of Shakespeare's habits of composition, the genesis of a late play appears in the superficially quite different form of an earlier one, and the ‘steadily advancing independence of thought in the reconsideration of the Roman world’² which has been detected in the group of Roman plays is matched by a progressive structural clarification and sharpness, indeed bleakness, of focus.

One way of suggesting the nature of Shakespeare's intellectual independence is to say that Coriolanus is politically subtle where Titus is politically naive. This is not a matter of historical ‘realism’ or authenticity of detail; none of Shakespeare's Roman plays can hold a candle to Jonson's on that score. Yet it is Shakespeare, not Jonson, who commands our respect as a political thinker, not least because he was able to advance beyond the straightforward revenge motif which supplies the context for the reference to Coriolanus in Titus to a profound apprehension, in Coriolanus itself, of the psychological complexities of his central figure, a proud individualist and idealist who is at once the product and the scourge of his society's values.

However, while we may agree with Anne Barton that Coriolanus is ‘Shakespeare's most political play, the only one specifically about the polis’³, we must be careful about our use of ‘political’. Recent discussions of the play have, I believe, gone too far towards a narrowly ideological interpretation of the term, and have oversimplified and distorted in consequence. Coleridge's comment that Coriolanus ‘illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare's politics’,⁴ familiar though it is, cannot be quoted too often if it will help us to avoid the level of abstraction which can feel satisfied with the statement that the play is about ‘the clash of political forces, rather than the exploration of characters’.⁵ The falseness of that antithesis should be apparent. Rather, the tragedy resides in the inextricability of political forces and the human characters who are called upon to embody and manipulate them. Coriolanus is not Brecht's Coriolan, that political morality play whose heroes are the tribunes.⁶ Shakespeare's scrutiny of political activity here is radical, boldly exploratory and detached in the best sense—that which defers commitment while seeking profound understanding. A. P. Rossiter comes nearer to defining the kind of interest Shakespeare has:

Coriolanus plays on political feeling: the capacity to be not only intellectually, but emotionally and purposively, engaged by the management of public affairs; the businesses of groups of men in (ordered) communities; the contrivance or maintenance of agreement; the establishment of a will-in-common; and all the exercises of suasion, pressure, concession and compromise which achieve that will (a mind to do) in place of a chaos of confused appetencies.⁷

Yet even this needs some modification: Rossiter's insistence on necessary compromise in pursuit of a communality of purpose slights the complexity of the play (and implies excessively noble motives in the protagonists). It also leaves us wondering how to take Coriolanus as an emphatic dissenter from this ideal of political activity.

My approach to the play's politics will have a different emphasis. I do not think it sentimental to see Coriolanus as a tragedy of thwarted love on the part of a man who, like Lawrence's Tom Brangwen, ‘knew he did not belong to himself’ yet was unable to give himself either to anyone or anything else.⁸ It seems more natural to think of Coriolanus as a story of frustrated love and betrayal than to see it as a drama about warring ideologies, if only because frustration, love and betrayal are human feelings while an ideology is an impersonal abstraction, and Coriolanus is neither impersonal nor abstract. Human feelings and character are as much out of critical fashion as ideology is in, but we cannot help noticing the extent to which the characters in Coriolanus are obsessed with the character of Coriolanus. As Peter Ure wittily says, ‘It is an irony of the play that in it most of the characters spend most of their time discussing a hero who cannot bear to be talked about.’⁹ Moreover, they make scarcely any reference to his beliefs: they are engrossed by the man himself.¹⁰Coriolanus, even more than Othello, is a play which tempts us to focus exclusively on the character of its central figure, and insofar as exponents of an ‘ideological’ approach are wary of this I agree with them. There is a larger structure within which Coriolanus has—or often, actually, doesn't have—a place. But this is in turn peculiarly dependent on him: the ‘world elsewhere’ to which he bends his exiled steps turns out to be merely another Rome, in which he is equally incongruous, and the main reason for the change of location would seem to be to emphasise that, in Emrys Jones's words, ‘Coriolanus is first a Roman among the Romans, and then a Roman among the Volscians.’¹¹ What gives the play a concentrated force unique even in Shakespeare is the impetus with which the various contentions, public and private, all converge upon this one man, whose tragedy is that his emotional and political awareness are ultimately inextricable.

I

In the opening scene one citizen rebukes another who accuses Caius Martius of acting out of pride rather than patriotism, ‘What he cannot help in his nature, you account a vice in him’ (I.i.40-41). The speaker, though not the play, begs the questions—can he help it, and even if he can't, is he to be placed beyond moral censure? The question of Martius's motives is bound up with that of his loyalties. Much of Act I is devoted to establishing his view of himself as ‘constant’ (I.i.238), reliable, full of integrity even if the opinions he professes are unattractive. Like Thomas of Woodstock in the anonymous play of that name, he disdains to be other than himself, refusing to ‘give good words’ and ‘flatter’ the citizens as Menenius has done (I.i.166-167). Love of country, it would seem, conditions and inhibits any feeling for his fellow-citizens. Also like Woodstock, he has the pride that apes humility and two of his remarks put his vaunted constancy in an odd light. He detests Aufidius so much that

Were half the world by th'ears, and he
Upon my party, I'd revolt to make
Only my wars with him

(I.i.232-234)

while he rebukes the deserters before Corioles:

Mend and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven, I'll leave the foe
And make my wars on you.

(I.iv.38-40)

The idea that Martius will, in certain circumstances, change sides is thus firmly implanted in our minds: and we notice that he represents the change as really a continuity—it is everyone else who is disloyal. The impulse towards self-isolation which this habit of mind reveals is apparently justified by his single-handed victory at Corioles where ‘he is himself alone, / To answer all the city’ (I.iv.50-51) and by the recurrence of the word ‘alone’ in the play (e.g. I.iv.73, 76, I.viii.8, II.i.33-34, 161, II.ii.110). The heroic act which wins him his new name comes to have talismanic significance to him; he recalls it moments before his death—‘Alone I did it’ (V.vi.116). But by this time his aloneness has ceased to be splendid isolation, or even a straightforward self-giving in the service of something supra-personal which commands his loyalties. It has come close to being an indicator of profound inner unease. Some words of Montaigne's, from the essay ‘Of Solitarinesse’, are apposite here:

Therefore it is not enough, for a man to have sequestred himselfe from the concourse of people: it is not sufficient to shift place, a man must also sever himselfe from the popular conditions, that are in us. A man must sequester and recover himselfe from himselfe.¹²

Coriolanus never achieves the kind of peace that implies, and his wish to ‘stand / As if a man were author if himself / And knew no other kin’ (V.iii.35-37)—a hypothesis which the play shows to be quite untenable—hints at how far he is from fulfilling another Montaignian prescription later in the same essay: ‘The greatest thing of the world, is for a man to know how to be his owne.’¹³

It is not surprising, then, that this obsessive self-advertisement is paradoxically accompanied by a deprecation of his own worth and importance. He rouses the failing enthusiasm of the soldiers by an appeal to anyone who thinks ‘his country's dearer than himself’ (I.vi.72) to rejoin the battle, and when it is over he brushes aside congratulations with

I have done
As you have done, that's what I can; induc'd
As you have been, that's for my country.

(I.ix.15-17)

Against this Cominius urges that ‘Rome must know / The value of her own’ (I.ix.20-21); and this conflict of views is echoed in II.ii, when Coriolanus quits the Senate before Cominius's speech in his praise. His individual bravery redounds to Rome's glory as well as his own. Having so emphatically advertised his patriotism he can hardly refuse the new name which is conferred upon him in a symbolic appropriation of his identity, but his new status brings new and unwanted claims. His need is to value himself, and find in his ‘freedom’ from all ties of loyalty an absolution from obligation. His much-remarked failure to remember the name of his benefactor in I.ix is, in a peculiar way, a compliment: he forgets as he wishes to be forgotten. Our divided feelings about him are well caught by a snatch of dialogue at the end of Act I when a Volscian soldier calls him ‘the devil’, to which Aufidius replies, ‘Bolder, though not so subtle’ (I.x.16-17). There is an impressive directness about him which is also dangerous naivety. Indispensable in war, he will prove intolerable in peace. Volumnia's superb evocation of him as a fighter—‘Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie, / Which being advanced, declines, and then men die’ (II.i.159-160)—contains a significant ambiguity, for the destructive action which brings military victory is followed by a ‘decline’ in his fortune which will number him ultimately among the dead.

Election to high political office now seems inevitable for Coriolanus, yet he remains torn between his desire to preserve his ‘own truth’ (III.ii.121) and his acknowledgement of the claims of Roman custom. He anticipates difficulties (‘I had rather be their servant in my way / Than sway with them in theirs’, (II.i.201-202)) and Brutus and Sicinius repeatedly exploit his lack of political suavity (‘He cannot temperately transport his honours’ … ‘Being once chaf'd, he cannot / Be rein'd again to temperance,’ II.i.222, III.iii.27-28)). But Coriolanus is right not to want to be like Menenius or Volumnia, who show themselves skilled in trimming their convictions when expedient. One of the soldiers defends his ‘noble carelessness’ (II.ii.14) of common opinion, as he himself will later defend his dislike of the plebeians by claiming it is ‘more virtuous, that I have not been common in my love’ (II.iii.93-94). Yet, as the other soldier points out, such honesty is also bad policy, for in crucial ways Coriolanus needs his fellow-Romans.

The ‘voices’ scene (II.iii) brings that point out with striking success. Requested to do ‘as your predecessors have’ (II.ii.143) in courting popular confirmation of his election as consul, Coriolanus submits to the ‘part’ (II.ii.144) with an ill grace, complaining in the first of his three soliloquies that if we always did as custom demanded ‘the dust on antique time would lie unswept’ (II.iii.118). Beneath the patrician hatred of innovation we glimpse unconscious depths of iconoclasm. Coriolanus tries to live free even of history, of the traditions of the country he so prizes, and of the social constraints and bonds he elsewhere (eg. in III.i) defends. These are beautifully caught in the comment of the Third Citizen when one of his fellows points out that they have the power to refuse to accept Coriolanus's election: ‘We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do’ (II.iii.4-5). Their theoretical power is, as they all know, limited by the demands of the ritual, and they begin to catechize Coriolanus accordingly; but his barely polite responses, not in the script, leave them puzzled, as, no doubt, the concept of a power which one has but is powerless to use would baffle him. Unlike the citizens (despite the threatened riot in I.i), Coriolanus resents the checks and balances of a system which limits his independence. Hence his repeated use of theatrical metaphor to describe his behaviour: to be like others is, for him, to act a part. The way in which our view of this scruple has changed since Act I is underlined by a recall of the opening scene: the First Citizen denies that Coriolanus was scornful in his electioneering—‘'tis his kind of speech’ (II.iii.159). But we do not respond as sympathetically to this as we did to ‘what he cannot help in his nature’, for we have now seen more clearly the drawbacks of that nature.

Shakespeare will not, however, allow the play to become a Brechtian diagram. Our unease at Coriolanus's inflexibility is always tinged with awareness of how superior he is to others with more malleable principles, and Act III shows him deliberately forced out of Rome by a mob cynically manipulated by Brutus and Sicinius. Shakespeare manipulates our sympathies with equal skill, though no cynicism. The tribunes are right to fear what would happen if Coriolanus ruled unchecked; his defence of ‘the fundamental part of state’ (III.i.150) rests on a belief that democracy and strong government are incompatible (which surely would have raised the spectre of Machiavelli for many in Shakespeare's audience).¹⁴ And, seeing how easily the plebeians are swayed by the tribunes, we feel Coriolanus is right to reject the maxim that ‘the people are the city’ (III.i.198) and to say that they are ‘though in Rome littered, not Romans’ (III.i.237).

There are in fact two Romes, that of Coriolanus's vision, which is real only as he incarnates it (and only he does), and the city in which he lives, populated by political intriguers. Gail Kern Paster has finely remarked that the early debate between Menenius and the Plebeians displays ‘a fundamental contrast between Rome as a concretely realized setting and as a city located in the mind, a symbol of human possibility’.¹⁵ This is indeed the civil war at the heart of the play and of its protagonist, who is the conscience of a Rome which has forgotten what conscience is, but which instinctively knows that Coriolanus will not be appeased, and so must be destroyed. Brutus sees Coriolanus's behaviour as not only treason but ingratitude: ‘When he did love his country, / It honour'd him’ (III.i.302-303). Yet Coriolanus never wanted such ‘honour’, with its assumption of reward for services rendered, and according to his lights he loves his country still. In the heroic world of which he is an increasingly anachronistic representative, the reciprocity assumed by Brutus's comment hardly exists. We cannot but applaud his honesty when, having temporarily agreed to Volumnia's plea to act another part which would be ‘false to my nature’ and cause him to ‘surcease to honour mine own truth’ (III.ii.105, 121), he allows himself to be goaded into fury by the tribunes and turns on them with the great cry ‘I banish you! […] There is a world elsewhere!’ (III.iii.123, 135). The last straw is the accusation of treason—as it will be in Act V—and he finds this so unbearable because a traitor is a hypocrite who dissimulates his loyalties, and Coriolanus will not do that, even at the cost of his life. In contrast to the show-trial intended by the tribunes, and to the tacking and veering of Menenius and Volumnia, Coriolanus does not deviate from his ideals. ‘I banish you!’ is a declaration of war on the rottenness of Rome, and ‘There is a world elsewhere!’ a denial that this Rome is all there is. He hopes, we deduce, that his ideal state can be realised, even if not here. His loyalty is ultimately not to the real Rome but to the Rome of his imagination, a state so exalted that he could be himself there without feeling out of place.¹⁶ He describes himself as ‘despising for you the city’ (III.iii.133-134); his real quarrel is with Rome's inhabitants, who have turned it into a ‘city of kites and crows’ (IV.v.43).

In a little-noticed but trenchant article more than twenty years ago, J. C. F. Littlewood, looking back from the end of Act III, remarked:

The tragedy […] is apparently going to be the tragedy of a man, a Roman, in whom this passionate strength, this ability to invoke, and, in a sense, embody, the national idea at a crisis, is inseparable from a blind passion to destroy both the nation and himself. Yet in Acts IV and V our impressions of his distinctive strength, of the nature of that vital/lethal power of his, are allowed to fade away and fall quite out of the reckoning, with the result that, though we may talk in a general way of the tragic waste of Rome's greatest man, we can have no vivid conception of whatever it is that's been wasted, and cannot therefore care very much about it …

And he commented on ‘I banish you!’:

Even as this magnificent cry fills the air, his Roman pride attaining its supreme expression, the pride is already on the verge of losing its more-than-personal quality, which makes the difference between colossal egotism and greatness.¹⁷

Littlewood argues vigorously that the play falls apart in the last two Acts because Shakespeare doesn't know what to do with his hero. It is true that Coriolanus's motives, once out of Rome, are purely those of revenge and that he undergoes a deterioration in character during Act IV and much of Act V. But why shouldn't this be Shakespeare's intention? It seems to me that what Acts IV and V show is the searing irony that, whilst Coriolanus's habits of speech and bearing remain what they were, he has changed without knowing it; that, without Rome, he almost ceases to exist; that it was only in Rome, soured and sordid though it was, that he could be fully himself. The Rome of his imagination continues to exist only in himself: and, when not there, nowhere.

II

Coriolanus, however, sees no need for essential change in himself simply because he is exiled from Rome: his words again project a self-image of consistency and continuity:

While I remain above the ground you shall
Hear from me still, and never of me aught
But what is like me formerly.

(IV.i.51-53)

If Shakespeare needed warrant for this stoicism he could have found it in Plutarch—not just the Lives but the essay ‘Of Exile or Banishment’ in the Moralia:

But surely a man may avouch more honestly, and with greater modesty and gravity, that he who in what place soever feeleth no want or miss of those things which be necessary for this life, cannot complain and say: That he is there out of his own country, without city, without his own house and habitation, or a stranger at all; so as he only have as he ought, his eye and understanding bent hereunto, for to stay and govern him in manner of a sure anchor, that he may be able to make benefit and use of any haven or harbour whatsoever he arriveth unto. For when a man hath lost his goods, it is not so easy a matter to recover them soon again; but surely every city is straightways as good as a native country unto him, who knoweth and hath learned how to use it; to him (I say) who hath roots as will live, be nourished and grow in every place and by any means …¹⁸

But Coriolanus, whatever he may think, is not such a person, and it is very doubtful whether his sense of self can be maintained outside the city with which he has become so closely identified that Menenius' recalling of the time when ‘Martius stood for Rome’ (IV.vi.45) becomes almost a statement of symbolism. Significantly, Shakespeare makes no use of the conventions of the soliloquy to illuminate his hero's inner self, such soliloquies as there are being brief and colourless. Commenting on the markedly public world in which the action of the play unfolds, Gail Kern Paster attractively suggests that ‘in this exclusion of private moments and settings, Shakespeare dramatically embodies the sacrifice of self which Roman citizenship demands.’¹⁹ In the most important soliloquy Coriolanus begins from generalities—‘O world, thy slippery turns!’—and moves to a declaration as empty of emotional charge as it could be: ‘My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon / This enemy town’ (IV.iv.23-24). Yet the flatness and bareness of this is arguably more chilling than any amount of Timonian invective.²⁰ The bending of a relentlessly destructive will upon Rome is felt almost physically in the words, whose impersonality is a major source of their power. Coriolanus has frequently been taken as cold and incapable of feeling, but ‘love’ is not a word he uses lightly. He goes to Antium as a spurned lover of Rome. Brutus will later say that he was ‘self-loving’ (IV.vi.32), which is true, but in a subtler way than he can know: Coriolanus loved Rome, he saw himself as Rome, therefore he loved himself. Conversely, his hatred of Rome, the virulence of which is indicated by the unaccustomed baseness of his motive—‘mere spite / To be full quit of these my banishers’ (IV.v.83-84)—is also a rejection of the self he used to be.

The contempt with which the servants treat him initially, and their comically abrupt transition to awe after Aufidius has welcomed him, emphasise how vulnerable he is where he is not acknowledged (the word ‘name’ is used repeatedly in his dialogue with Aufidius).²¹ The scene (IV.v) has its counterpart in V.ii, where Menenius is similarly scoffed at but told ‘The virtue of your name / Is not here passable’ (IV.vii.12-13) and taunted anew after Coriolanus has rejected him.²² Coriolanus, it seems, has only to name himself to command respect. Yet we are made increasingly aware in Acts IV and V of the emptiness of his name and of the self it expresses. We hear of him by other names too: ‘son and heir to Mars’ (IV.v.197), the Volscians' ‘god’ (IV.vi.91), ‘a thing / Made by some other deity than nature’ (IV.vi.91-92), most terribly ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’ (V.i.13). This is what his attempt to be ‘author of himself’, his announcement ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’ (V.iii.80), come to: he simply ceases to exist, at the core, because of his betrayal of the Rome which he, in a sense, was, is a betrayal of himself. This fate makes movingly clear the depth of our human need for each other, the mutuality upon which society must rest if it is to survive.

III

What holds the political and psychological levels of the play together is the central emotional relationship in Coriolanus's life—that with his mother. This has recently been interpreted in increasingly extravagant terms by exponents of psychoanalytic and gender criticism,²³ but the key point is a simple one. It is contained in Volumnia's warning:

thou shalt no sooner
March to assault thy country than to tread—
Trust to't, thou shalt not—on thy mother's womb
That brought thee to this world.

(V.iii.122-125)

The imagery identifies Volumnia with Rome—both ‘mothers’ to Coriolanus—and insists that what he does to one he does to the other. The psychology is not Freudian but Plutarchian:

Martius thinking all due to his mother, that had bene also due to his father if he had lived: dyd not only content him selfe to rejoyce and honour her, but at her desire took a wife also, by whom he had two children, and yet never left his mother's house therefore.²⁴

It is a means of compensating for the emotional deprivation of both of them; she is rewarded for her struggle to rear a son unaided by seeing him grow into a superb representative of Roman male virtue, in whose deeds her own strongly aggressive character can vicariously rejoice, while he, having made himself into an unbeatable fighter to compensate for having no father, mentally installs his mother in his father's stead and attributes his own manliness to her. To go further than this in psychoanalytic interpretation seems to me to risk becoming self-indulgently speculative.

The mother/country identification, explicitly stated only in the passage quoted above, implicitly informs other parts of the play, particularly its imagery. In I.iii, where Volumnia indulges dreams of how she would behave ‘if my son were my husband’ (1. 2), she scoffs at Virgilia's squeamishness when blood is mentioned:

Away you fool! It more becomes a man
Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forhead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword contemning.

(I.iii.39-43)

In a somewhat surreal image, the milk issuing from the mother's breast is slighted in comparison with the blood spilt by the hero in his country's service. Hence Volumnia's joy in her son's wounds (II.i.120): they show his heroism but also his lineage as a true Roman.²⁵ She takes up the image in Act III, when she urges Coriolanus to moderate his absolutism in pursuit of political gain: ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'st it from me, / But owe thy pride thyself (III.ii.129-130). In fact the qualities are inseparable. Because Volumnia is so archetypally a Roman matron, and because she is an analogue for Coriolanus's ‘mother’-city, she can represent a potential failure in public duty as a failure in private affection. This is why she ultimately succeeds with Coriolanus where all others fail. That, however, is in the future. At the end of Act III he rejects the political deviousness urged upon him by his mother—a representative Roman of the new type in this too—and leaves both Rome and her to self-destructive passions: ‘Anger's my meat: I sup upon myself / And so shall starve with feeding’ (IV.ii.50-51). That is, she will be kept going by the desire for revenge, knowing this is deadly; a war within her physical constitution paralleling that within the body politic.

The metaphorical intermeshing of love and civic duty is approached from a complementary angle in Coriolanus' words to Cominius—

Oh! Let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd; in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done,
And tapers burn'd to bedward.

(I.vi.29-32)

—echoed by Aufidius' to Coriolanus:

Know thou first,
I lov'd the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold

(IV.v.114-119)

Moments later the Third Servant comments, ‘Our general himself makes a mistress of him’ (IV.v.199-200). Coriolanus is ‘married’ to war (‘Bellona's bridegroom’ more even than Macbeth), and his desertion of Rome for Antium becomes a kind of adultery, as the anonymous Roman, bringing news of the banishment to Aufidius, confirms: ‘I have heard it said, the fittest time to corrupt a man's wife is when she's fallen out with her husband’ (VI.iii.31-32). In Coriolanus's mind the double identification of his country with his mother and his wife is a source of anguish.

It is against this background that the events of V.iii may be better understood. Coriolanus hails first ‘the honour'd mould / Wherein this trunk was fram'd’ (V.iii.22-23)—Volumnia, but as Professor Brockbank's note points out, ‘mould’ can also mean ‘earth’. She comes as an embodiment of what she herself calls ‘the country, our dear nurse’ (V.iii.110); the connection with the earth is re-inforced by a series of ceremonial kneelings during the scene; she speaks the lines already quoted at the beginning of this section, and, when he seems obdurate, taunts: ‘This fellow had a Volscian to his mother; / His wife is in Corioles’ (V.iii.177-178)—Aufidius, metaphorically.

Do we blame Volumnia for exerting all her eloquence and influence to save Rome from destruction, or Coriolanus for relenting? Perhaps ‘blame’ is almost a useless feeling in circumstances where all are trapped in such irresoluble conflicts of loyalty:

how can we for our country pray,
Whereto we are bound, together with thy victory,
Whereto we are bound?

(V.iii.107-109)

So Volumnia puts the dilemma. Her suggested solution is a creative synthesis of the warring sides:

If it were so that our request did tend
To save the Romans, thereby to destroy
The Volsces whom you serve, you might condemn us
As poisonous of your honour. No, our suit
Is that you reconcile them …

(V.iii.132-136)

The success of her plea causes her to become more emphatically identified with Rome in the eyes of its grateful people. Menenuis declares that ‘This Volumnia / is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, / A city full’ (V.iv.53-54), while the First Senator praises her as ‘our patroness, the life of Rome’ (V.v.1) and Plutarch reminds us that the temple of Fortuna Mulieris was erected to commemorate the victory.

We may suppose that Coriolanus yields out of mere filial duty, but I believe his motives are more complex. He knows that his submission means his death, but, perhaps remembering the previous occasion in III.ii when, against his better judgement, he indulged his mother's awareness of Realpolitik, and remembering how unendurable it proved, he realises that there is no longer a place for him in the Rome which she and Menenius have conspired with the tribunes to establish, that the Rome where he could be himself is now an unrealisable place, indeed that the self he wanted to be is now unrealisable too, is almost extinct. ‘But let it come’ (V.iii.189) is the utterance of an exhausted man.

Coriolanus recovers his heroic nature in his last moments, ironically because of Aufidius's contemptuous treatment of him, which shows how little his kind of heroism now counts for: and his recurring, just before his final defeat, to the victory which gave him his name, has undeniable poignancy. ‘Alone I did it!’ (V.vi.116)—because no-one else could have done it, but also because he would brook no assistance. As I suggested earlier, the inseparability of his eminence and his isolation is wonderfully caught here—we see that this greatness resides in the very qualities which cut him off from happiness, and from any political awareness. Aufidius is able to represent him as simultaneously cringing and insufferably haughty:

He bow'd his nature, never known before
But to be rough, unswayable and free. […]
… at the last
I seem'd his follower, not partner …

(V.vi.25-26, 38-39)

Aufidius reserves his most withering comments for Coriolanus's emotional susceptibility however—

At a few drops of women's rheum, which are
As cheap as lies, he sold the blood and labour
Of our great action.
You lords and heads o'th'state, perfidiously
He has betrayed your business, and given up
For certain drops of salt, your city Rome,
I say “your city”, to his wife and mother …
… at his nurse's tears
He whin'd and roar'd away your victory …

(V.vi.46-48, 91-94, 97-98)

—and he galvanizes Coriolanus into retaliation with the insulting term ‘boy’, belittling not only his manhood but his independence from Volumnia. In the light of this Coriolanus's continuing attempt to present himself as a model of constancy, ‘no more infected with my country's love / Than when I parted hence’ (V.vi.72-73), is particularly maladroit. Yet we scorn Aufidius's account of the harrowing interview between mother and son we have just witnessed; we reject its reductive devaluation of the conflict of loyalties which Coriolanus has undergone.

IV

Even so, the politics of Aufidius—which are also those of the tribunes, Menenius, and even Volumnia—win the day. The winding-up of the play after Coriolanus's death is unique in Shakespeare—A. P. Rossiter rightly judged it ‘flat, hurried, twisted off and depressing.’²⁶ The Second Lord's ‘Let's make the best of it’ (V.vi.146) sums up the tone perfectly. The real moral issues are fudged in favour of a dreary and empty decking-out of the corpse in fine words. Coriolanus, though dead, remains more essentially alive than his killers. But we must ask, even if they do not—what was the quality of his life? Shakespeare gives us several possibilities in the much-discussed speech of Aufidius at IV.vii.35-53, which seems to collapse into utter relativism—‘our virtues / Lie in th'interpretation of the time’ (lines 49-50). Coriolanus would reject the suggestion here that our merit depends upon others' valuation of us, yet could he escape that? Aufidius's comment amounts to saying we are what history judges us to have been; we do not belong to ourselves, not in the exalted sense that we can acknowledge the claims of others than ourselves, but in the sense that we are deterministically trapped by events. Coriolanus was trapped; and he trapped himself.

J. C. F. Littlewood's charge that there is a major breakdown in Shakespeare's control after Act III seems to me quite untenable. What he sees as incompletely imagined by Shakespeare seems to me to have been deliberately intended, that Shakespeare has decided to treat, for once (Othello's case is ambiguous), a central figure who achieves almost no measure of self-understanding beyond knowing that he is better off out of the world. The sense of tragic waste which Littlewood denies the play resides, for me, in that very fact of Coriolanus's thwarted love—he gives himself for an ideal with which his sense of self is so closely bound up that when the ideal is destroyed he is destroyed with it. The play does not ask us to accept this ideal, and he is clearly in many ways an unadmirable person whose ‘love’ is ultimately narcissistic, introverted and destructive. Yet the element of renunciation, of deliberate self-sacrifice, remains, and Coriolanus's emotional struggle is dramatised with a power that makes critical patter about ideological conflict look wildly irrelevant.

Notes

1. R. A. Law, ‘The Roman Background of Titus Andronicus’, Studies in Philology, 40 (1943), pp. 145-153.

2. T. J. B. Spencer, ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), p. 33.

3. ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), p. 128.

4. S. T. Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and other English Poets (London: George Bell, 1907), p. 309.

5. Thomas Sorge, ‘The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: the Text in History and Ideology (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 225.

6. See Gunter Grass's preface to his play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) for some informed criticism of Shakespeare's play and what Brecht did to it.

7. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London: Longman, 1961), p. 239.

8. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Heinemann, 1915), ch. 1. I feel some sympathy for Jacqueline Pearson's assertion that ‘Despite its political background, the play's crucial question becomes how it is possible to value and express love in a loveless world’ (‘Romans and Barbarians: the Structure of Irony in Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies’, in Malcolm Bradbury and D. J. Palmer, eds., Shakespearian Tragedy [Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20. London: Arnold, 1984], p. 167]). However, I feel ‘political background’ is too reductive: the treatment of love is inextricable from the political element in the play.

9. Peter Ure, ‘Shakespeare and the Inward Self of the Tragic Hero’, in his Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1974), p. 17.

10. On this aspect of the play see Michael Goldman, ‘Characterizing Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 34, (1981), 74-76.

11. Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 81.

12. Montaigne, Essays, tr. Florio (1603) (London: Dent, 1910), I.253. On this topic see also D. Dillon, “‘Solitariness’: Shakespeare and Plutarch”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 78 (1979), 325-344.

13. Montaigne, Essays, I.256.

14. In Anne Barton's view ‘it would be more surprising if it could be proved that Shakespeare had managed to avoid reading Machiavelli than if concrete evidence were to turn up that he had’ (art. cit., 122.) She discusses the play interestingly in the context of Machiavelli's Discourses.

15. Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: Georgia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 62. She later notes that, although the word ‘Rome’ occurs 88 times in Coriolanus, it is never used by the plebeians and only six times by the tribunes: otherwise it is exclusively spoken by the patricians (p. 67).

16. J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare's Pagan World: the Roman Tragedies (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1974), detects resonances of St Augustine's City of God in the play, but becomes too schematic and too idealising of Coriolanus in claiming that ‘the ideals defining Roman virtue may be entirely of the Earthly City, but Coriolanus maintains and defends those ideals in a manner characteristic of one whose devotion is to the Eternal City’ (p. 23).

17. J. C. F. Littlewood, ‘Coriolanus’, Cambridge Quarterly 2 (1966/7), pp. 33-34, 40.

18. Plutarch, Moralia, tr. Holland (1603) (London: Dent, 1911), pp. 395-396.

19. Paster, Idea of the City, p. 67.

20. The tantalizing links between Timon of Athens and Coriolanus are well-known (Alcibiades, a major character in Timon, was Plutarch's Greek parallel to Coriolanus). I accept the commonly-held view that Timon is the earlier play, and find convincing H. J. Oliver's suggestion that Alcibiades and Timon developed respectively into Aufidius and Coriolanus (New Arden Timon [London: Methuen, 1959], p. xlix]).

21. The classic study of this topic remains D. J. Gordon, ‘Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, in G. I. Duthie, ed., Papers Mainly Shakespearean (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1974), pp. 40-58.

22. The rejection of Menenius bears many similarities to that of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV—yet how different the effect!

23. Two recent examples are Lisa Lowe, “Say I play the man I am’: Gender and Politics in Coriolanus’, Kenyon Review, 8 (1986), pp. 86-95, and Madelon Sprengnether, ‘Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus’ in Mary Beth Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 89-111.

24. Plutarch, Life of Coriolanus, printed as Appendix to Brockbank's edition, p. 317.

25. The emphasis on wounds evokes the prototype Elizabethan Roman play, Lodge's Wounds of Civil War (1586-1587), ed. Joseph W. Houppert (London: Arnold, 1969). In an important article, Vanna Gentili has drawn attention to similarities between Anthony's treatment of Sulla in Lodge's play, and Menenius's of Coriolanus, and more significantly to Lodge's female couple Cornelia and Fulvia as foreshadowing Volumnia and Vergilia (‘Thomas Lodge's Wounds of Civil War: an Assessment of Context, Sources and Structure’, REAL: Yearbook of English and American Literature, 2 [1984], 155, 159). One might add further examples, such as Sulla's arrest of the cowardly Romans in flight (I.ii) compared to Coriolanus's action in I.iv, or Marius's deserting Rome for her enemies, vowing to become ‘a scourge for Rome that hath depress'd us so’ (III.iv.110). Vastly different though the plays are, I do not think the possibility can be ruled out that Shakespeare remembered some of Lodge's effects.

26. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, p. 238.

All references to Coriolanus are to the New Arden edition by J. P. Brockbank (London: Methuen, 1976).