SOURCE: “‘Manhood and Chevalrie’: Coriolanus, Prince Henry, and the Chivalric Revival,” in Review of English Studies, Vol. 51, No. 203, August, 2000, pp. 395-422.

[In the following essay, Wells reviews the conflict between war and peace in ancient Rome as it is depicted in Coriolanus and examines how these conflicts parallel the political situation of Shakespeare’s own time.]

The Midlands corn riots of 1607, and the arguments in parliament three years earlier over the right of the House of Commons to initiate legislation, form a well-documented part of Coriolanus's political background. But there was another political issue that was being debated in the years immediately preceding the writing of the play. It is one that had international rather than purely domestic implications, and that may help to answer Bullough's question: ‘What led Shakespeare to write this play on a comparatively minor and early figure in Roman history?’ In the last few years of his short life the Prince of Wales was rapidly acquiring a reputation for aggressive militarism. By 1607 he had become a symbolic focus for the aspirations of militant Protestantism and was celebrated in poetry, masque, portraiture, and pamphlets as a future scourge of England's Continental enemies. Disturbed in 1608 by a pamphlet entitled ‘Arguments for War’ put together by a group of Henry's military advisers, James commissioned Sir Robert Cotton to write a reply warning of the dangers of the new cult of chivalric honour associated with the prince. Coriolanus forms part of this embarrassingly public debate. For his portrait of the martial hero at his most unlovable, Shakespeare turns, not just to a state renowned above all others in the ancient world for its military adventurism, but to a time when internal order in that state had broken down altogether. In doing so he effectively gives the lie to one of the most frequently repeated arguments of the war party, namely, the claim that ‘when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home’

(Sir Walter Ralegh, A Discourse of War).

It is when the tribunes accuse him of being a traitor to the people that Martius' self-control finally breaks. Despite all his mother's careful coaching in the art of ‘policy’, he is no more capable of restraining his fury than is a child in a tantrum. Hurling insults at the ungrateful plebeians, he resolves to avenge his injured pride by destroying the city that has shown so little gratitude to its most magnificent warrior. Like all Shakespeare's martial heroes, Caius Martius Coriolanus is a liability to the state he serves. The honour code that is so valuable to Rome in time of war comes very close to ensuring the destruction of the city.¹

But at the beginning of Act IV we see a new Martius. Gone is the raging scorn for the feckless plebeians, and in its place is a restrained and dignified stoicism. Bidding his mother summon her ‘ancient courage’, he tells Menenius to remind the weeping valediction party that ‘'Tis fond to wail inevitable strokes / As 'tis to laugh at 'em’ (IV.i.27-8).² As he makes his last farewell, his words have an elegiac tenderness that is rare in Coriolanus:

                                                                                                                        Fare ye well.
Thou hast years upon thee, and thou art too full
Of the wars' surfeits to go rove with one
That's yet unbruised. Bring me but out at gate.
Come, my sweet wife, my dearest mother, and
My friends of noble touch. When I am forth,
Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you come.
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. 45-54)

Paradoxically, this new, eloquent Martius is far more dangerous than the old, volatile, aggressive upholder of patrician military values. The danger lies in his ability to win our sympathy in spite of so much negative evidence. For all his political ineptitude, this is something that Martius himself is at least partially aware of. Echoing Octavius' reflections on the fickleness of political reputation (‘the ebbed man, ne'er loved till ne'er worth love, / Comes deared by being lacked’, A&C, I. iv. 43-4), Martius predicts the revival of his own reputation: ‘I shall be loved when I am lacked’, he tells his mother (IV. i. 16). True to his prophecy, the play ends, not with sober reflection on the perils of unreliable leadership, but with sentimental tribute to the memory of a man who, for all his vaunted Roman constancy,³ and his contempt for the capriciousness of the mob, has brought two cities to the brink of destruction through his own double treachery. ‘Let him be regarded / As the most noble corpse that ever herald / Did follow to his urn’ (V. vi. 143-5) says an unnamed Volscian Lord in the expected conventional tribute. But the final speech of the play is no mere epideictic formula.

                                                            My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow

says Aufidius with obvious feeling,

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

(V. vi. 147-8, 151-4)

The least charming of Shakespeare's heroes, Martius is nevertheless capable of inspiring awe and admiration in friends and enemies alike. It is the power of the charismatic leader to inspire devotion that is his most dangerous quality. And it is this phenomenon that the theatre is uniquely capable of reproducing. As Emrys Jones argues in Scenic Form in Shakespeare, a theatre audience is like a ‘charmed crowd’: just as a crowd can turn law-abiding citizens into credulous barbarians, so intelligent, civilized people become susceptible in the theatre to feelings which in other circumstances they would probably disown.⁴ Martius' greatest conquest is not Corioli, but the hearts of theatre audiences and critics alike. Responding to his final explosion of rage at Aufidius' taunts (V. vi. 103-17), one recent critic of the play writes: ‘it is impossible to hear this in the theatre without a sense of exhilaration, and without sensing too that this is a noble anger and a noble pride … here is a solitary hero defying his inevitable fate’.⁵ And he is right. The fall of a man whose heart is ‘too great for what contains it’ (V. vi. 105) cannot but be a moving spectacle. But as Oscar Wilde reminds us, the advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray. Like all Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Martius is a warning of the seductive charm of the charismatic hero. To offer that warning by evoking the sentimental reactions of your audience is risky dramaturgy. But if it is bound to backfire with at least some playgoers, it has the advantage of making it possible to glance at matters of state without too much risk of attracting the attentions of the censor.

II

Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most political play. It is also, despite its austere Roman authenticity,⁶ his most topical. The Midlands corn riots of 1607, and the arguments in parliament three years earlier over the right of the House of Commons to initiate legislation, form a well-documented part of the play's political context.⁷ But there was another political problem that was being hotly debated in the years immediately preceding the writing of Coriolanus, one that had international rather than purely domestic implications, and that may help to answer Geoffrey Bullough's question: ‘What led Shakespeare to write this play on a comparatively minor and early figure in Roman history?’⁸ This is that most vexed of Jacobean foreign-policy issues—the question of war and peace.

Martius' defining characteristic is his heroic virtus. In his tribute to Rome's most terrible warrior, Cominius declares,

                                                                                It is held
That valour is the chiefest virtue, and
Most dignifies the haver. If it be,
The man I speak of cannot in the world
Be singly counterpoised.

(II. ii. 83-7)

As Cominius defines it, ‘virtue’ means above all prowess in battle. Whatever contemporary audiences might have thought of an ethical system that placed paramount value on virtus—and the way Cominius phrases his speech suggests that it was a matter of debate—they would have known, at least if they had read their Plutarch, that such a code of values was intrinsic to the greatest military society of the ancient world.⁹ Without explicitly revealing his own Greek distaste for Roman military values at their harshest, Plutarch explains in his ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’ that in the early days of the Republic ‘valliantnes was honoured in Rome above all other virtues: which they called Virtus by the name of vertue [it]selfe, as including in that generall name, all other speciall vertues besides. So that Virtus in the Latin, was asmuche as valliantnes’.¹⁰ Eugene Waith has argued that the pride and the arrogance that modern audiences find objectionable in Martius are inseparable aspects of that Roman virtus. In portraying a valour that is almost godlike in its terrible single-mindedness, Shakespeare was not asking us to make moral or political judgements, says Waith; in the face of such Herculean superbia ‘both approval and disapproval give way to awe’.¹¹

Waith is concerned to restore to Shakespeare's hero something of the grandeur that modern criticism, with its sceptical distaste for martial heroism, has tended to belittle; his achievements, says Waith, ‘border on the supernatural’.¹² The evidence is compelling. Named after the Roman god of war and patron deity of Rome,¹³ and compared by Cominius to Hercules, the mythological founder of war (IV. vi. 103-4), Martius is repeatedly likened to some implacable force of nature (I. v. 27-32; II. ii. 99, 108-22; IV. vi. 94-6; V. iv. 18-21). Believing that he has been killed inside the gates of Corioli, Titus Lartius pays tribute, not to Martius' bravery (which must entail some measure of fear), but to his seemingly godlike powers of destruction:

                                                                                                    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. v. 27-32)

Of Martius' apparently superhuman qualities there is no question: even in a society that holds that ‘valour is the chiefest virtue’, he is regarded as exceptional. ‘Thou hast affected the fine strains of honour, / To imitate the graces of the gods’, his mother tells him (V. ii. 150-1). But in claiming that he is in some mysterious way beyond good and evil, Waith does not consider the fact that the heroic ideal was a highly politicized topic at the time Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus. Indeed so contentious had the issue become by 1608 that dramatic treatment of such a sensitive subject would have required careful avoidance of anything that might have struck a censor as tactless topical allusion. It was a matter that went to the heart of government foreign policy and involved dispute within the royal family on the wider question of fundamental social and political values.

III

In November 1612 England was in deep mourning for an 18-year-old national hero. Shortly after Prince Henry's death, the Venetian ambassador in London sent a dispatch in which he described the man who had touched the nation's heart. His portrait is not particularly flattering and sounds oddly familiar: according to the ambassador, the prince's ‘whole talk was of arms and war’; he was ‘grave, severe, reserved, brief in speech’; he was keenly interested in extending his country's territories; and he was ‘athirst for glory if ever any prince was’.¹⁴

Henry had been interested in the martial arts from his earliest years. With his passion for history,¹⁵ he would doubtless have found inspiration in Plutarch's description of the young Caius Martius Coriolanus, who, like himself, ‘beganne from his Childehood to geve him self to handle weapons, and daylie dyd exercise him selfe therein’.¹⁶ In his Life and Death of our late most incomparable heroic Prince John Hawkins describes Henry's obsession with all things military:

He did also practise Tilting, Charging on Horseback with Pistols, after the Manner of the Wars, with all other the like Inventions. Now also delighting to confer, both with his own, and other strangers, and great Captains, of all Manner of Wars, Battle, Furniture, Arms by Sea and land, Disciplines, Orders, Marches, Alarms, Watches, Strategems, Ambuscades, Approaches, Scalings, Fortifications, Incamping; and having now and then Battles of Head-men appointed both on Horse and Foot, in a long Table; whereby he might in a manner, View the right ordering of a Battle. … Neither did he omit, as he loved the Theorick of these Things, to practise … all manner of Things belonging to the Wars.¹⁷

The Prince's public career began officially with his investiture as Prince of Wales in June 1610. To mark his entry into the life of the nation Henry commissioned Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones to produce a series of mythological entertainments, the first of which was performed on Twelfth Night 1610. Prince Henry's Barriers was designed as a public statement of the role that the new Prince of Wales intended to play in national and international affairs. Henry was going to be a holy warrior. Introduced by the spirit of King Arthur as a fulfilment of Merlin's prophecy that a prince would one day restore the glories of ancient Britain, Henry is discovered ‘like Mars … in armor clad’.¹⁸ After a roll-call of English monarchs from ‘warlike Edward’ to ‘great Eliza … fear of all the nations nigh’ (ll. 179, 200-2), the sleeping figure of Chivalry is roused by Merlin to invite combatants to the lists. ‘Break, you rusty doors / That have so long been shut,’ cries Chivalry,

                                                                                                                        and from the shores
Of all the world come knighthood like a flood
Upon these lists to make the field here good,
And your own honours that are now called forth
Against the wish of men to prove your worth!

(ll. 385-90)

There then followed the Barriers proper with all the pageantry of medieval warfare—pavilions, plumed helmets, heraldic devices, swords, pikes, and lances. In the Annales John Stow describes how ‘the Prince performed his first feates of armes, that is to say, at Barriers against all commers … with wonderous skill, and courage, to the great joy and admiration of all the beholders’.¹⁹ After the tournaments were over, Merlin delivered a final encomium to James in which he prophesied that the young prince would in time relieve the king of his cares in government and ‘shake a sword / And lance against the foes of God and you’ (ll. 415-17). Although, in deference to James's pacifist principles (and, it may be presumed, his own inclinations), Jonson qualified the warlike tone of the Barriers by claiming that ‘Defensive arms th'offensive should forego’ (l. 99), Henry's message was transparent: as an enthusiastic believer in chivalric values, the Prince of Wales would realize the thwarted ambitions of the old Elizabethan war party by actively pursuing an anti-Habsburg crusade in Europe. After his death the Venetian ambassador spoke of how the prince had aspired to lead a confederation of Protestant princes,²⁰ while George Wither imagined the role he might have played as head of an anti-Catholic army:

Me thought ere-while I saw Prince Henries Armes
Advanc't above the Capitoll of Rome,
And his keene blade, in spight of steele or charmes,
Give many mighty enemies their doome.(21)

All this took place after the first performance of Coriolanus (probably in late 1608 or early 1609).²² But there was nothing new in the iconography of the Barriers. From infancy Henry had been portrayed by militant Protestants as a future warrior-hero.²³ Invoking, not James's own patron deity, Eirene, but Mars, the Roman god of war,²⁴ and Hercules his champion, Protestant iconographers surrounded their young prince with images of chivalry and arms, representing him, even at the improbable age of 9, as a conquering hero. In the portrait of 1603 by Robert Peake the Elder, Henry is shown in belligerent posture with drawn sword, and an impresa on his tunic depicting St George slaying the dragon. In the miniature by Isaac Oliver in the London National Portrait Gallery he is shown in the guise of a Roman general. The military theme continued throughout Henry's teenage years. A year before the investiture, when Henry was still only 15, George Marcelline described him as ‘a COMMET of dreadfull terrour to [England's] enemies’.²⁵ ‘This young Prince’, wrote Marcelline,

is a warrior alreadie, both in gesture and countenance, so that in looking on him, he seemeth unto us, that in him we do yet see Ajax before Troy, crowding among the armed Troops … Honour [is] all his nouriture, and Greatnesse his pastime (as it was saide of Alexander) and Triumph the ordinary end of al his Actions.²⁶

In the same year the Venetian cleric Paolo Sarpi wrote: ‘from all sides one hears about the great virtù of the Prince’.²⁷ As J. W. Williamson remarks, ‘rarely had such a young boy managed to surround himself so with the odor of masculinity’.²⁸

The blatant advertisement of Prince Henry's military ambitions by his Protestant supporters was bound to cause friction between him and his father. Indeed their differences were public knowledge. Noting that James was not ‘overpleased to see his son so beloved and of such promise that his subjects place all their hopes in him’, the Venetian ambassador wrote: ‘It would almost seem, to speak quite frankly, that the King was growing jealous’.²⁹ Though his dearest wish was to see Europe at peace, James was not an uncompromising pacifist. Following early sixteenth-century humanists like Erasmus and Vives,³⁰ he recognized that defensive wars were sometimes necessary.³¹ But he was implacably opposed to wars of expansion. Henry, by contrast, was an enthusiastic supporter of the militant-Protestant campaign for a renewal of the war against Spain, and even drew up strategic plans for a naval blockade of the Spanish fleet in the West Indies.³² Matters came to a head in 1608 when a group of Henry's military advisers, by whom the prince was, according to the Venetian ambassador, ‘obeyed and lauded’,³³ put together a pamphlet entitled ‘Arguments for Warre’. The ‘Arguments’ is a lightweight document that does little more than rehearse well-worn apologies for war: namely, that arms are the original foundation of civilization; that states which lack an external enemy will all too easily rush ‘from arms to pleasures, from employment to idleness’; and that ‘when people have no enemies abroad, they find some at home’.³⁴ The most contentious part of the ‘Arguments’ is its concluding call for an expansionist policy towards Europe. Claiming that the rewards that accrued from England's wars with France and Spain far exceeded the costs involved, the pamphlet concludes by summarizing the advantages of an aggressively expansionist policy:

Our Honour, as the Stile of our Kings, by confluence of so many Titles increased; and by accession of so many territories as we held in France, our dominions and liberties so far inlarged. The facilities to effect this being now more than ever by the addition of strength, and substraction [sic] of diversions, in this happy union of the Britain Empire.³⁵

Alarmed by such a provocative challenge to his own humanist belief in a united Europe in which he himself would act the part of mediator and peacemaker, James commissioned his trusted adviser the parliamentarian Sir Robert Cotton³⁶ to write a reply warning of the dangers of the new cult of chivalric honour associated with the young prince. Unlike the ‘Arguments for Warre’, Cotton's ninety-page Answer is a scholarly document citing classical authority and historical example in a measured refutation of the claims of the militarists. It is particularly pointed in its allusion to recent history. Among the claims of Henry's militant-Protestant supporters was that he was the spiritual heir of the second earl of Essex,³⁷ who had himself been compared to Caius Martius Coriolanus.³⁸ Alluding to the earl's rebellion, Cotton warns of the dangers posed by over-ambitious nobles who identified themselves with the honour code:

Our own times can afford some, whose spirit improved by Military imployment, and made wanton with popular applause, might have given instance of these dangers … And every age breeds some exorbitant spirits, who turn the edge of their own sufficiency upon whatsoever they can devour in their ambitious apprehensions, seeking rather a great then a good Fame; and holding it the chiefest Honour to be thought the Wonder of their times.³⁹

The pamphlet concludes with a restatement of James's belief in the importance of his own role as international mediator:

Since then by Situation and Power we are the fittest, either to combine or keep severall the most potent and warlike Nations of the West, it is the best for Safety, and the most for Honour, to remain … Arbiters of Europe, and so by Neutralitie sway still the Ballance of our mightiest Neighbours.⁴⁰

But Cotton's admonitions did nothing to dampen the prince's interest in war, or his enthusiastic support for expansionist ventures. The following year saw a new expedition to Virginia. Commemorating the event, Michael Drayton wrote a poem for his young patron praising colonial conquest as an expression of the heroic spirit and suggesting, like the authors of the ‘Arguments for Warre’, that there is something shameful in peace:

You brave Heroique Minds,
Worthy your countries name;
          That Honour still pursue,
          Goe, and subdue,
Whilst loy'tring Hinds
Lurke here at home, with shame.(41)

The appeal of the Virginia expedition to a neo-medievalist like Henry is obvious: as Drayton imagines it, the voyage sounds like a combination of Homeric peregrination mediated through Spenser, and the achieving of a chivalric quest. Commenting on the prince's enthusiastic interest in colonial expansion, the Venetian ambassador wrote: ‘To the ears of the Prince, who is keen for glory, come suggestions of conquests far greater than any made by the kings of Spain.’⁴² Ironically of course, Henry never had the opportunity to win the military glory he craved. As Erasmus wryly put it, ‘dulce bellum inexpertis’⁴³—war is a beautiful thing to those who have not experienced it.

In the tense political situation that existed between Whitehall and St James's Palace in 1608-9, praise of ‘Heroique Minds’ could mean only one thing: it was a coded indication that you subscribed to the ideals of militant Protestantism and that you were a supporter of its charismatic and bellicose young patron. So when a character in a contemporary play declares ‘It is held / That valour is the chiefest virtue’, contemporary audiences could hardly fail to make connections, however oblique, with the conflicts that were currently being played out in such a public way in London, particularly when the precocious youthfulness of the heroic mind in question is given such pointed emphasis.

There is no particular reason why Cominius should dwell on Martius' youth. Plutarch simply mentions briefly how Martius first went to war as ‘a strippling’.⁴⁴ But in commending Martius to the tribunes, Cominius spends a dozen lines rehearsing, not, as you would expect, the leadership qualities of the mature general, but the exploits of a 16-year-old. After telling us his precise age (roughly a year older than Henry when Coriolanus was first performed), he goes on repeatedly to emphasize his boyish appearance and his ‘pupil age’:

                                                                                                                        At sixteen years,
When Tarquin made a head for Rome, he fought
Beyond the mark of others. Our then dictator,
Whom with all praise I point at, saw him fight
When with his Amazonian chin he drove
The bristled lips before him. He bestrid
An o'erpressed Roman, and, i' th' consul's view,
Slew three opposers. Tarquin's self he met,
And struck him on his knee. In that day's feats,
When he might act the woman in the scene,
He proved best man i' th' field, and for his meed
Was brow-bound with the oak. His pupil age
Man-entered thus, he waxèd like a sea,
And in the brunt of seventeen battles since
He lurched all swords of the garland.

(II. ii. 87-101)

None of this has any special bearing on Martius' suitability for political office and is not the subject of thematic development in the play (Aufidius' taunt of ‘Boy’ that so enrages Martius in the play's final scene does not depend for its effect on what Cominius has told us about the hero's adolescence). In the absence of any structural or thematic reason for dwelling on his hero's youth, we have to assume that Shakespeare meant to remind his audience that, half a dozen or so years after Essex's death, and the apparent demise of the neo-chivalric values he stood for, support was growing once more for the old heroic ideal, this time embodied in a charismatic young warrior-hero in the making. In his account of Martius' entry into Rome following the sack of Corioli, Brutus reports how ‘All tongues speak of him, and the blearèd sights / Are spectacled to see him’ (II. i. 202-3). So stirring is this triumphal display that it seems to the Roman populace ‘As if that whatsoever god who leads him / Were slily crept into his human powers / And gave him graceful posture’ (II. i. 216-18). It has been suggested that, in his description of Martius' triumphal return, Shakespeare was echoing contemporary accounts of James's delayed coronation entry of 1604.⁴⁵ But as David George admits, any comparison between a middle-aged pacifist and Shakespeare's charismatic, battle-hardened warrior-hero is inherently implausible. What seems far more probable is that, like Wither, Shakespeare was using his own imagination (as he did in the final chorus of Henry V when he pictured Essex returning like a conquering Caesar, with plebeians swarming at his heels) and evoking an image, not of an unathletic pacifist, but of an altogether more youthful and warlike royal hero.

Volumnia too puts special emphasis on Martius' precociousness, recalling for Virgilia the time ‘when youth / with comeliness plucked all gaze his way’ (I. iii. 7-8). Again, Plutarch says little about Martius' childhood, and merely reports that as an adult he ‘dyd not only content him selfe to rejoyce and honour [his mother], but at her desire tooke a wife also’.⁴⁶ The long conversation with Virgilia in Act I, scene iii—in which Volumnia tells of her concern for her son's honour; of how she sent him when still ‘tender-bodied’ to a ‘cruel war’; and how if she had had a dozen sons she ‘had rather had eleven die nobly for their country / than one voluptuously surfeit out of action’ (ll. 5-25)—is all invention on Shakespeare's part and is reminiscent, incidentally, more of contemporary panegyrics to Prince Henry than of Plutarch. (Like Shakespeare's Martius, Henry had from an early age been encouraged in his military obsessions by an unusual mother. According to James's eighteenth-century biographer Thomas Birch, Queen Anne ‘used all her efforts to corrupt the mind of the Prince by flattering his passions, diverting him from his [academic] studies and exercises, representing to him, out of contempt for his father, that learning was inconsistent with the character of a great General and Conqueror’.⁴⁷)

The plays that Shakespeare wrote after 1603 contain many indirect allusions to James I: Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Tempest all touch on issues that were of keen interest to the king, or else portray authority figures whose problems resemble those that James himself was grappling with. These plays are not pièces à clef. But they do deal with topics of contemporary political concern. If Coriolanus makes oblique allusion to the vogue for heroic values that was rapidly gaining support at St James's Palace, this does not mean that the play's warrior-hero represents the austere and arrogant Henry any more than he stands for the prince's peace-loving father, as Jonathan Goldberg has rather implausibly suggested.⁴⁸ What it does mean is that, along with the flood of militaristic books and pamphlets dedicated to Prince Henry, the play forms part of a public debate on the contentious question of war and peace. For his last anatomy of military values⁴⁹ Shakespeare chooses, appropriately enough, a story from the state noted above all other politically advanced societies in the ancient world for its ferocious expansionism. As Livy puts it, ‘such is the renowmed martiall prowess of the Romans, that all nations of the world may as well abide them to report Mars above the rest, to the stockefather both of themselves and their first founder’.⁵⁰

IV

After completing his cycle of English history plays dealing with dynastic conflict in fifteenth-century England, Shakespeare turned to Roman history for a new perspective on the problems of a society emerging from civil war to a new order.⁵¹Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra dramatize events from the most momentous period in Roman history—the transition from republic to empire. In Coriolanus he goes back 500 years to the semi-legendary early years of the Republic. His knowledge of this period of Roman history was based largely on Florus, Livy, and Sallust—staple authors of the Elizabethan grammar-school curriculum⁵²—and of course Plutarch. Machiavelli's Discourses, several translations of which were circulating in manuscript in Elizabethan England,⁵³ provided a heterodox modern view of republican Rome. Though these writers differ from one another in their view of the early Republic, they all emphasize one fact of overriding significance: this was a time of rapid expansion when the Roman people acquired a reputation throughout Italy for their ferocity in battle. In his abridgement of Livy's Roman History Florus contrasts the Augustan period, when Octavian ‘settled peace thorow all the world’, with the early years of the Republic. The latter was ‘a time most famous for manhood, and deeds of Chevalrie’ when, having freed themselves from the tyranny of the Tarquins, Romans took up arms agains alien peoples, ‘till running like a plague through every nation … they brought all Italie at last to be under their subjection’.⁵⁴ This is the relentless Roman military machine that Shakespeare evokes in Menenius' speech to the citizens in the opening scene of Coriolanus:

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

(I. i. 67-70)

Sallust also describes the period following the overthrow of the Tarquins as one of aggressive expansion when virtus and gloria came to be the defining values of Roman society. ‘It is incredible to report’, writes Sallust,

in howe short a time, the Citty, having obtained … Liberty in Government … so infinite a desire of glory, had possessed the minds of al sorts … Valor was resolute, & at times victorious. Their emulation was glorious: Every mans strife was, who should first attack the enemy … These exploits they accounted Riches, Reputation, and true Nobility … [they were] desirous of glory above measure.⁵⁵

Machiavelli, rebutting Plutarch's claim that the Romans owed their extraordinary successes as much to good fortune as to military valour, insists that it was virtù alone that enabled the early Republic to expand so rapidly: ‘if never any Republique made the same progress, that Rome made; it is because never hath any Republique beene so order'd to make its advantage, as Rome was: the valour [virtù] of their armyes gain'd them their Empire’.⁵⁶

During the early years of the Republic Rome was more or less continuously at war. Plutarch, less enthusiastic than Florus and Sallust about the military ethos of republican Rome, attributes the grain crisis he describes in the ‘Life of Coriolanus’ to this state of perpetual warfare, reporting that one of the grievances of the plebeians was the fact that they were never free from war service: ‘Moreover, they sayed, to dwell at Rome was nothing els but to be slaine, or hurte with continuall warres’.⁵⁷ This plebeian complaint about unremitting war is echoed in the response of Shakespeare's First Citizen to Menenius' unconvincing professions of social concern: ‘If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us’ (I. i. 83-4). As Sallust explains, Rome's national culture of violence fed on a system of social values that placed paramount importance on gloria. Since eligibility for public office depended on reputation, and since the kind of reputation that mattered most was the glory of victory in battle, the military ethos was self-perpetuating.⁵⁸ Describing the vicious circle of military honour leading to desire for further glory, Plutarch writes:

Valliant mindes … esteeme, not to receave reward for service done, but rather take it for a remembraunce and encoragement, to make them doe better in time to come: and be ashamed also to cast their honour at their heeles, not seeking to increase it still by like deserte of worthie valliant dedes.

He goes on to describe how, as a product of this system of laus and gloria, Martius ‘strained still to passe him selfe in manlines’.⁵⁹

It is this expansionist military society with its exaggerated regard for ‘manlines’ that Shakespeare evokes in Coriolanus. For those who had spent many hours translating Florus, Livy, and Sallust at school, Cominius' words about valour being counted the chiefest virtue would have had an immediate resonance. If you were a supporter of the Prince of Wales and you believed in a heroic ideal of what Florus' translator calls ‘manhood and Chevalrie’, they would be like a rallying cry to military action; if you were of the king's party, they would be more likely to sound like a threat to international stability.

One of the most frequently rehearsed arguments of the war party was that peace, as Aufidius' serving-man puts it, ‘makes men hate one another’ (IV. v. 234-5); hence the belief that an astute prince should busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels. ‘When Wars are ended abroad’, writes Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘Sedition begins at home, and when Men are freed from fighting for Necessity, they quarrel through Ambition.’⁶⁰ This familiar claim is echoed by Paul Jorgensen, who argues that Coriolanus shows ‘the domestic hazards of peace’.⁶¹ That Shakespeare himself may have felt some sympathy with this view is suggested by the fact that it is one of his most saintly characters—Imogen—who says that ‘Plenty and peace breeds cowards’ (Cym., III. vi. 21). But it would be wrong to attribute to heroic values that quasi-religious sense of common purpose which is so often generated by war. Many writers and diarists in the First World War habitually use the language of medieval chivalry in describing their experiences and feelings.⁶² However, it was not a culture of violence that gave rise to the extraordinary acts of civilian as well as military courage and altruism that are part of the social history of the time, and that held even pacifists and suffragettes in its euphoric grip, but something more deeply rooted in our human metaculture. Discussion of the question of what atavistic causes may be responsible for the universal tendency to sacralize war is beyond the scope of this article (Barbara Ehrenreich deals brilliantly with it⁶³). What is clear, however, is that one effect of choosing a story from the early republican period (to answer Bullough's question) is to show that a heroic culture does not promote social cohesion: Coriolanus's opening scenes of civil discord take place, not in a ‘weak piping time of peace’ (RIII, I. i. 24), but during Rome's ‘present wars’ against the Volsci (I. i. 258). Considered in the context of the contemporary quarrel between militarists and pacifists, the Martius story is significant because it concerns a time, not just of ‘continuall warres’, but also, as Appian tells us, when civil order within the city breaks down altogether.⁶⁴ One of the most striking messages that Coriolanus has to offer is that, far from uniting people against a common enemy, heroic military values in their most exaggerated form are inherently divisive, setting citizen against citizen, and obliging warrior-aristocrats to assert their superiority over lower orders in the relentless competition for laus and gloria.

V

At the battle of Corioli Martius is in his true element. Cursing the ‘common file’ for their cowardice, and performing deeds of extraordinary daring, he impresses even his fellow warrior-nobles with his manly valour. During a lull in the battle he greets his old friend Cominius:

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

(I. vii. 29-32)

These lines, together with those in which Aufidius greets Martius at Antium (IV. v. 102-36), have caught the attention of critics looking for evidence of homoeroticism in Shakespeare.⁶⁵ Bruce Smith finds it odd that Shakespeare should apparently be talking about a male friendship in erotic terms. He says it is surprising for two reasons: first, because ‘Renaissance writers ordinarily contrasted, not likened, the friendly ties between man and man with the sexual ties between man and woman’; and second, because ‘in legal discourse, sodomy was a capital offence’.⁶⁶ In fact it is not at all surprising to find a relationship between warriors described in quasi-erotic language; indeed it was commonplace in chivalric literature. But this does not necessarily mean that Martius and Cominius are sodomites. In his recent History of Gay Literature Gregory Woods suggests that it is ‘fear and loathing’ that leads critics to resist gay readings of such scenes.⁶⁷ One would hope that this is not true. The important consideration is surely what language and action tell us about a play's central concerns, rather than what we can deduce from these things about its characters' offstage lives. With a play like Edward II homosexuality is a crucial element in the unfolding of the political drama; with Coriolanus it is not at all clear that this is so. Since Martius and Cominius are characters in a play, not real people with a life beyond the stage, it makes more sense to enquire what their metaphors have to do with war, military values, and social conflict than to ask how these men spend their hypothetical private moments. The key to the significance of Martius' imagery lies in Cominius' reply: ‘Flower of warriors!’ (I. vii. 33). These three words may not tell us very much about Martius' and Cominius' supposititious private life, but they tell us a great deal about the kind of leader Martius is and the values he subscribes to.

Although it is not at all uncommon to find knights in medieval romance embracing and kissing with all the apparent fervour of lovers, such extravagant displays of affection are not normally a sign of sexual interest.⁶⁸ They echo early Christian social customs. In his Epistles St Paul regularly signs off with the injunction to affirm brotherhood ties by ‘salut[ing] one another with a holy kiss’ (Rom. 16: 16; cf. 1 Cor. 16: 20, 2 Cor. 13: 12, 1 Thess. 5: 26). Though the last of the three kisses with which Gawain and Bertilak seal their exchanges of winnings⁶⁹ might be thought to echo Judas rather than St Paul, the kiss is normally a way of showing brotherly loyalty in chivalric romance. The recognition scene in the tenth book of the Morte D'Arthur is a good example. In Book II Merlin prophesis to King Mark that at the tomb of his son Launceor a great duel will take place. It will be ‘the grettist bateyle betwyxte two knyghtes that was or ever shall be, and the trewyst lovers; and yette none of hem shall slee other’ (II. viii).⁷⁰ Eight books later the mysterious battle takes place. Two knights arrive at Launceor's tomb and immediately start fighting. The battle lasts for four hours, during which time neither says a word. When they can fight no longer they pause on the blood-soaked grass and ask each other's name. It turns out that one is Launcelot, the other Trystram. When Trystram realizes whom he has been fighting he says ‘Alas! what have I done! For ye ar the man in the worlde that I love beste.’ They then take off their helmets and, embracing each other, ‘ayther kyste other an hondred tymes’ (X. v).⁷¹ These men are not homosexuals, or even bisexuals. Both are extravagantly, even compulsively, heterosexual, and Malory doesn't shrink from relating how they sometimes spend whole nights of passion with their lovers. But there is never any question of them sleeping with other men. Their relationship is the idealized heroic love of brothers-in-arms. What they are in love with is the idea of their own flamboyant chivalry mirrored in another.⁷² There are similar scenes in The Faerie Queene. In Book IV Triamond and his brothers spend some thirty stanzas fighting Cambell for the hand of Canacee. But no sooner have Triamond and Cambell felt the power of Cambina's magic wand of friendship than hostility gives way to love:

                                                                      each other kissed glad,
And lovely haulst from feare of treason free,
And plighted hands for ever friends to be.

(IV. iii. 49)⁷³

But again, for all the kissing, their love is no more a homosexual love than that of Launcelot and Trystram: the conflict had been over a woman in the first place, and when it has been resolved Triamond marries Canacee and Cambell marries Cambina.

Like Palamon and Arcite, Launcelot and Trystram, Triamond and Cambell, and many other pairs of knights in romance literature, Martius and Cominius are sworn brothers-in-arms. When Martius asks Cominius to let him fight against Aufidius he appeals to their brotherly pact:

                                                                                                              I do beseech you
By all the battles wherein we have fought,
By th' blood we have shed together, by th' vows we have made
To endure friends, that you directly set me
Against Aufidius and his Antiates

(I. vii. 55-9)

As Cominius' greeting, ‘Flower of warriors’, suggests, their friendship has more to do with medieval chivalric traditions than with either homoerotic desire or with the kind of amicitia that plays such an important part in Julius Caesar.

In the final years of the Republic friendship was an essential part of the political process. As Plutarch's ‘Life of Cicero’ so vividly shows, the upheavals of this momentous period were a story of friendships made and broken, of ‘betrayals, renewals and re-betrayals’.⁷⁴Julius Caesar captures brilliantly the suspicions and the jealousies that are inevitable in a world where friendship, for all its personal rewards, serves a primarily political purpose. It is repeatedly evoked by both conspirators and avengers as evidence of loyalty to a cause. When Cassius tells Brutus,

                                                  I do observe you now of late.
I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have.
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand
Over your friend that loves you.

(JC, I. ii. 34-8)

both know that he is testing the strength of his friend's political allegiance, and Brutus is quick to apologize for neglecting his ‘good friends’ and for forgetting those ‘shows of love to other men’ (ll. 45, 49) that are such an important part of republican political life. It is one of the ironies of the conspiracy that the man who wrote so nobly on the subject of friendship was himself executed on account of his own friendship with the leader of an assassination plot. Cicero's De Amicitia, that favourite handbook of Tudor humanists,⁷⁵ is more than just a popular essay intended for the general reader echoing commonplaces from Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Theophrastus. With its urbane discourse between politicians and statesmen, it enacts an ideal conception of civilization, an ideal that is far removed from the Machiavellian scheming that was the reality of late republican politics.

Though it is generally agreed that Martius is the most Roman of all Shakespeare's heroes,⁷⁶ his friendship with Cominius is as remote from the De Amicitia, with its idealized conversation between cultured statesmen, as it is from the machinations of a Cassius or an Antony. While those around him, both in Rome and Antium, are busily involved in political scheming, Martius lives in his own heroic world, a world where friendship means, not a strategic alliance between politicians, but a pact of ‘manhood and Chevalrie’ between heroic brothers-in-arms, and where, despite avowals of heroic patriotism (I. vii. 71-3), personal honour is more important than national security. Brutus, the tribune, knows that a more wily career strategist would be content to play second fiddle to his general (I. i. 263-70). But Martius lives for the dream of gloria won through heroic combat. Confessing his lust for honour, he admits that battle with a worthy opponent is his greatest ambition:

Were half to half the world by th' ears and he
Upon my party, I'd revolt to make
Only my wars with him. He is a lion
That I am proud to hunt.

(I. i. 33-6)

Knowing his man, Aufidius shrewdly appeals to this obsessive passion for chivalric conflict when he welcomes Martius to Antium.

To interpret Aufidius' talk of twining his arms about Martius' body and contesting ‘As hotly and as nobly with thy love / As ever in ambitious strength I did / Contend against thy valour’ (IV. v. 112-14) as evidence of homosexual desire is to divert attention from the important signals that the Volscian general is sending to his enemy. Aufidius wants his old adversary to know that he recognizes in him a kindred spirit who will be a Trystram to his own Launcelot. It is an invitation that Martius cannot resist. In doing so he fails to recognize one of the oldest tricks in the trade. The distinction between true and false friendship is a favourite topic in classical, medieval, and Renaissance writing. A lyric from Timothy Kendall's Flowers of Epigrams (1577) is typical of verses on friendship that were produced in their dozens in the sixteenth century:

Not he so muche annoyes and hurtes
          that saies I am thy foe:
As he that beares a hatefull harte,
          and is a frende to showe.
Warnde of my foe, I shunne my foe:
          but how should I take heede
Of hym that faines himself my frende,
          when as he hates in deede?
Moste sure a wretched foe is he,
          whiche frendship firme doeth faine:
And sekes by all the shifts he can,
          his frende to put to paine.(77)

Martius' failure to notice the deceit in Aufidius' declaration of chivalric friendship is the more ironical when he himself has just been reflecting on the vicissitudes of friendship in lines that frankly acknowledge his own act of betrayal:

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin as 'twere in love
Unseparable, shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity.
.....                                                                                                    So with me.
My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
This enemy town.

(IV. iv. 12-24)

But it is not just gullibility that Martius is guilty of. As a class, the patricians in Coriolanus show little sympathy for the plight of the plebeians; even Menenius, commonly regarded as a jovial conciliator, is openly sarcastic to them. But as the embodiment of ‘manhood and Chevalrie’ in its most exaggerated form, it is Martius who is the chief architect of discord in Rome. A measure of his divisiveness as a leader is the gulf between his own conception of heroic manhood and the view of society expressed in the play's ruling image of community—the body/state analogy.

VI

When Martius curses the common soldiers for their cowardice at the battle of Corioli the fate he wishes on them is boils and plagues (I. v. 2). As a natural ramification of the body/state analogy, disease is an important thematic image in Coriolanus and is used by patricians and tribunes alike in their attempts to diagnose Rome's sickness: while Martius regards the tribunes as an infection threatening the health of the body politic, they see him as a gangrenous limb that needs to be cut away (III. i. 152-60, 296-309).

From its earliest use in Greek antiquity,⁷⁸ the anthropomorphic analogy served to illustrate the importance of co-operation of all members of the state for the good of the whole. In the De Officiis Cicero writes:

if everie parte of the bodie should have this imagination: to think, it might be strong, if it had conveyed to itself the strength of the next limmes: of force it should folowe, that the holle bodie should be weakened, and perish: evenso if everieone of us catche to himself the commodities of other, and pulleth from eche man what he can, for his owne profites sake: the felowship, and common companie of men must needes be overthrown.⁷⁹

It is this classic ideal of social co-operation in which all members contribute to the good of the whole that Menenius appeals to in his fable of the belly.

Considered from a Marxist point of view, the anthropomorphic analogy is a classic piece of ideological indoctrination: by persuading the lower orders of society to believe that a ‘kingly crownèd head’ is as much part of the natural order of things as the ‘muniments and petty helps / In this our fabric’ (I. i. 113, 116-17), their willing collusion in maintaining a status quo that favours the aristocracy is assured. For if human society is, in Sir Thomas Elyot's words, ‘a body lyvying, compacte or made of sondry estates and degrees of men’, then it is as necessary for the state to have a head as a ‘great toe’;⁸⁰ take away either, and the body can no longer function effectively. It is a measure of the hegemonic power of the anthropomorphic analogy and its ability to persuade people that social hierarchies are natural and God-given, it might be argued, that plebeians are still thinking in anachronistic terms of a ‘kingly crownèd head’ in a republican state (actually more of an aristocratic oligarchy than a true republic) that has banished its ruling dynasty.

While this type of analysis has its own sociological value, it is of limited interest to the historicist. The anthropomorphic analogy has such a long history in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance,⁸¹ and is used in such a wide variety of constitutional contexts, that no analysis which speaks in general terms about strategies of power that are effectively transcultural and transhistorical can tell us much about early seventeenth-century England and the particular political problems it was grappling with. A contemporary playgoer listening to Menenius' fable of the belly would be likely to be struck less by the inherent implausibility of this familiar story,⁸² than by the patronizing tone of the Belly. It is not so much that the organic metaphor is too simple a model for dealing with complex political realities, as David Hale argues,⁸³ as that the meaning of the traditional model has been travestied. The one constant factor in the countless variations on the anthropomorphic analogy is the value to the community of all its members and the importance of cooperation in the corporate enterprise; as Thomas Starkey puts it, ‘the strength of the politic body standeth in every part being able to do his office and duty’.⁸⁴ In Menenius' version of the classic fable this fundamental principle has been violated.⁸⁵ It is not just that the Belly is frankly contemptuous of the ‘other instruments’, and replies to their complaints with a ‘taunting’ smile; as Menenius interprets the story, the plebeians are idle recipients of a one-way flow of benefits from patricians to the common people:

The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members. For examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o' th' common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you,
And no way from yourselves.

(I. i. 146-52)

Shakespeare's Menenius is a very different character from the ‘mediator for civil attonement’, beloved of senators and commoners alike, that Livy describes.⁸⁶ In retelling the fable of the belly Menenius transforms the traditional meaning of the anthropomorphic analogy, characterizing the plebeians, not as supporting limbs, but as social parasites sponging off the body politic.

There has been much debate on the question of whether Shakespeare's political sympathies are republican, or monarchist, or whether he favoured a mixed constitution. Contrary to the view, widely expressed in postmodern criticism, that Shakespeare wrote his later plays under an absolutist regime that was willing to tolerate little freedom of speech,⁸⁷ there was lively discussion of constitutional questions in Jacobean England.⁸⁸ Francis Bacon is said to have told James personally that Venice, renowned for the longevity of its republican constitution, was the ‘wisest state of Europe’.⁸⁹ The fact that Shakespeare uses the anthropomorphic analogy in plays about republics (JC, II. i. 66-9), empires (Titus, V. iii. 69-71), hereditary monarchies (King John, IV. ii. 112), usurper monarchies (2HIV, III. i. 37-42), elective monarchies (Hamlet, I. iii. 21-4), and ducal states (MM, I. ii. 147) suggests that he is concerned more with the underlying causes of social disorder, be it in ancient Rome, medieval England, or Renaissance Europe, than with the merits of any one particular system of government.⁹⁰ As the Roman plays show, irresponsible leadership and corrupt government can just as easily be found in a republican democracy as in a hereditary monarchy or a patrician oligarchy. In Coriolanus there is no one single cause of the breakdown of order.⁹¹ Of the fickleness of the plebeians there can be no question. It is one of the menial Senate officers who acknowledges the capriciousness of plebeian opinion: ‘there be many that they have loved they know not wherefore, so that if they love they know not why, they hate upon no better a ground’ (II. ii. 9-11), while the Third Citizen succinctly sums up the futility of relying on plebeian judgment in affairs of state when he admits of the banishment of Martius: ‘That we did, we did for the best, and though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will’ (IV. vi. 152-4). However, if the plebeians characterize themselves as hopelessly indecisive, they are at least tolerant and open-minded, and can hardly be blamed for the conflict between the orders. That responsibility is shared jointly by the politically astute but cynical tribunes and the self-serving patricians. But though relations between the orders are tense, it needs Martius' intervention to bring this volatile state of affairs to combustion point. Indeed, Peggy Muñoz Simonds points out that, as a type of Mars his very existence in the city is inflammatory:⁹² since Mars, in Roman mythology, is a god whose purlieus lie beyond the civilized world, his presence within the city can be almost guaranteed to cause ‘strange insurrections, / The people against the senators, patricians, and nobles’ (IV. iii. 13-14).

However cynical individuals may be in their interpretation of it, all three orders in Rome do at least agree that the body is a valid analogy for debating political issues. It is Martius alone who rejects the traditional co-operative model, not just refusing to take seriously the plebeians' grievances, but actively ‘seek[ing] their hate with greater devotion than they can render it him’ (II. ii. 18-19). If he had his own way he would eliminate, not just the plebeians' voice in political affairs (III. i. 159), but the common people themselves:

Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves as high
As I could pitch my lance.

(I. i. 195-8)

Nor is this very surprising. As Erich Auerbach notes, in the world of chivalry the proving of knightly valour is everything, and the historically real aspects of daily life are typically ignored.⁹³ It is such a world to which Martius would like to belong, an idealized world of heroic combat in which the mundane realities of class and politics are refined out of existence.⁹⁴

In one of his more thoughtful speeches Martius warns of the folly of having more than one authority in the state (III. i. 112-15), a theme rehearsed not only by Plutarch and Machiavelli,⁹⁵ but also dramatized in plays like Gorboduc and King Lear. In doing so Martius merely shows how incapable he is of providing that responsible leadership himself. ‘You speak o' th' people as if you were a god / To punish, not a man of their infirmity’ (III. i. 85-6), Brutus tells him. But it is Volumnia who articulates most vividly the true meaning of Martius' rejection of the notion of community as expressed in the play's ruling image of the state as living body. Pleading with him to spare Rome, she describes him as a monster ‘tearing / His country's bowels out’ (V. iii. 103-4). But for all his iron-hearted determination, Martius is unable to achieve the break with nature that he strives for. Jonathan Dollimore argues that Coriolanus exposes the essentialist belief in a universal human nature for the myth that it is: in reality we are merely the product of social forces, with no underlying core of shared humanity.⁹⁶ It would be difficult to imagine a reading that is more completely at odds with the meaning of the play's central thematic image. In the act of denying nature, instinct, and essence, Martius affirms those very things; in the act of suggesting that a man might be his own author (V. iii. 36) he demonstrates its impossibility. Confronted by the combined pleas of ‘mother, wife and child’ (V. iii. 101), the supreme solipsist is unable, finally, to deny the ‘bond and privilege of nature’ (V. iii. 25). Radical anti-essentialism not only makes nonsense of the early modern belief in the value of history; it also negates the play's most fundamental political principle—namely, that irrespective of the particular constitutional form of the body politic, men and women are by nature social beings who depend on one another for their political as well as their personal well-being.⁹⁷ To the modern anti-humanist the anthropomorphic analogy is either pre-scientific make-believe, or a particularly successful form of ideological interpellation, or both. But for Shakespeare's contemporaries it expressed a truth subscribed to by monarchists and republicans alike. Reuben Brower puts it well when he writes, ‘metaphors of the body politic keep reminding us that the great natural order is realized in a whole of which the single man is only a part’.⁹⁸

Analysis of Coriolanus as political drama has tended to deal with the play either in terms of class warfare⁹⁹ or in the context of early modern debate on constitutional theory.¹⁰⁰ Allusions in the play to the parliamentary wrangles over the winning of the initiative in the early years of James's reign, and to the Midlands riots of 1607, give a uniquely topical flavour to Shakespeare's picture of a society divided against itself. But it is the immediate and controversial issue of martial versus humanist values, rather than the more academic question of the merits and demerits of republican government, that is the play's central concern. Like Chapman's Byron,¹⁰¹ the play's hero is a passionate militarist who despises the kind of pageants of peace to which the London populace had been so lavishly treated in 1604: ‘plant love among 's’, he tells Menenius with undisguised sarcasm, ‘Throng our large temples with the shows of peace, / And not our streets with war!’ (III. iii. 36-8). Martius' whole world revolves around extraordinary feats of masculine prowess, while his marriage appears to be almost non-existent. A warrior to the core of his being, he has no more notion of representing the political interests of lower orders than King Arthur's knights do: his main concern is to prove his masculine honour, and to do this he must show that his fellow citizens are lacking in this quality, leaving, as Sicinius remarks, ‘nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite’ (II. ii. 20-1). ‘Worshipful mutineers,’ he sneers at the hungry plebeians, ‘Your valour puts well forth’ (I. i. 250-1). As if in confirmation of his fundamentally asocial cast of mind, Martius' professions of humility after the battle of Corioli are immediately followed by the revealing incident of the Volscian host he claims to want to reward (I. x. 81 ff.). When two common soldiers meet on the plain of Antium after what is presumably a period of months or even years, they have no trouble remembering each other's names, despite their altered appearance (IV. iii. 1-7). But, in a departure from Plutarch, Shakespeare has Martius find he cannot recall the name of the man whose hospitality he has so recently received. Like his virtus, his display of magnanimity serves only one cause—his own reputation. His world is in truth a fantasy world of chivalric deeds in which plebeians play no part. And when he goes into exile, the creature he compares himself to is a lonely dragon (IV. i. 31)—a monster that exists only in the worlds of mythology and romance.

While recognizing the importance of courage in defence of one's country, classical humanists cautioned against the dangers of self-seeking ambition.¹⁰² Their warnings were regularly repeated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writers. In A philosophicall discourse (1576) Thomas Rogers argues that ‘an unmeasurable desire for glory’ is ‘the most daungerous thing in a common weale’.¹⁰³ It was the politically destabilizing effect of neo-chivalric values that concerned Sir Robert Cotton when he warned of the dangers of the cult of masculinity that the Prince of Wales was so eager to promulgate. ‘The last mischief is the disposition that military education leaveth in the minds of many,’ he wrote in his reply to Henry's Protestant advisers,

for it is not born with them that they so much distaste peace, but proceeds from that custom that hath made in them another nature. It is rarely found that ever Civil troubles of this State were dangerously undertaken, but where the plot and pursuit was made by a spirit so infused.¹⁰⁴

Shakespeare's Martius is the supreme example of the mischief that Cotton feared in 1608. Whatever naturally aggressive inclinations he may have been born with—and Brutus knows that irascibility is in ‘his nature’ (II. iii. 258)—these qualities have been exacerbated by a mother determined that he should be a model of Roman virtus (I. iii. 1-25). As Menenius says, ‘he has been bred i' th' wars / Since a could draw a sword, and is ill-schooled’ (III. i. 322-3). The same schooling is now being repeated with Martius' son. Sounding remarkably like Queen Anne in Birch's account of the way Prince Henry was encouraged to believe ‘that learning was inconsistent with the character of a great General and Conqueror’, Volumnia reports that ‘He had rather see the swords and hear a drum / Than look upon his schoolmaster’ (I. iii. 57-8).

VII

In his discussion of the Roman character Cicero allows himself a moment of national congratulation as he considers his country's extraordinary military successes. ‘Specially,’ he writes in the De Officiis, ‘the people of Rome did exceede in greatnesse of corage. And their desire of martial glorie is declared: in that wee see, their images of honour be set up, for the most parte, in warrlike aray.’¹⁰⁵ But Cicero is aware that there is an intractable problem here. While successful nations need strong leaders, the qualities that make for effective military leadership all too often threaten the very stability that it is the leader's job to safeguard. In a military society masculine values are glorified, often by comparing them unfavourably with their female counterparts. ‘That seemes to shine brightest: which is wrought with a greate and lofty corage, despising worldly vanities’, says Cicero; and when you want to insult a man you tell him he has a ‘womens herte’.¹⁰⁶ But as Cicero himself points out, the man who displays ‘greatnesse of corage’ is likely also to have a keen interest in the rewards of power:

as everie man is of the hyest corage, and disirous of glorie: so is he soonest egged to unjust doinges. Which is indeede a verie slipper place: bicause scase ther is anie man founde, who when he hathe susteined travailes, and aventured daungers, dooth not desire glorie, as reward of his dooinges.¹⁰⁷

This is a conundrum that interested Shakespeare deeply. Apart from Coriolanus, the plays that address the problem most directly are Hamlet and Macbeth. The former shows a potential national leader torn between military and civic-humanist ideals; the latter considers the problem of the use of violence in the pursuit of peaceful ends. Neither play offers a solution to the problems it poses: a sweet prince gives his dying voice to the Viking irredentist who has been trying to seize Danish territory, and a pacifist monarch who passionately denied the right of resistance is complimented by a story that shows how his ancestors fought tyranny with heroic violence. Coriolanus is less equivocal than either of these plays. Written at a time when ‘manhood and Chevalrie’ were once again acquiring a powerful popular appeal, it is Shakespeare's last and most emphatic denunciation of heroic values.

Notes

1. Paul N. Siegel writes: ‘it is precisely Coriolanus' sense of honor which causes him to seek revenge against the country that has wronged him’: ‘Shakespeare and the Neo-Chivalric Cult of Honor’, The Centennial Review, 8 (1964), 61. On the honour code in early modern England see M. James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (1978; repr. Cambridge, 1986), 308-415; on honour and fame in Coriolanus see D. G. Gordon, ‘Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, in G. I. Duthie (ed.), Papers Mainly Shakespearean (Edinburgh and London, 1964), 40-57.

2. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford, 1986).

3. On Martius' constancy see G. Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford, 1996), 149-68. As Miles rightly says, ‘Coriolanus is proud that everyone knows what to expect of him, and that he is seen to be always the same’ (p. 152). See also C. Martindale and M. Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London and New York, 1990), 179-81.

4. Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), 6, 132.

5. T. McAlindon, ‘Coriolanus: An Essentialist Tragedy’, Review of English Studies, 44 (1993), 517. Cf. A. C. Bradley: ‘the pride and self-will of Coriolanus … are scarcely so in quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being’ (Shakespearean Tragedy (1905; repr. London, 1963), 64), and H. Heuer: ‘With all his want of polish, his revulsion from the mob and his naive display of unbounded vitality, the solitary protagonist is meant to claim our sympathies as a tragic figure’: ‘From Plutarch to Shakespeare: A Study of Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), 57.

6. For a valuable discussion of Shakespeare's unique combination of anachronism and calculated Romanitas see Martindale and Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, 121-64.

7. See E. C. Pettett, ‘Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607’, Shakespeare Survey, 3 (1950), 34-42.; W. G. Zeeveld, ‘Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics’, Modern Language Review, 57 (1962), 321-4; A. Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, 1989), 127-46; R. Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (New York and London, 1993), 88-117.

8. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1957-75), vol. v, Roman Plays (London, 1964), 454. Cf. B. King: ‘Does Coriolanus represent … a feudal order remembered with nostalgia?’; ‘why should this come up in Shakespeare's work at this time?’: Coriolanus (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1989), 65-6, 65.

9. See R. A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971), 358, 372-5. See also E. M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London, 1962); Siegel, ‘Shakespeare and the Neo-Chivalric Cult of Honor’; P. A. Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY and London, 1976).

10. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, 6 vols., trans. Sir Thomas North (London, 1895-6), vol. ii (1895), 144.

11. The Herculean Hero, 127.

12. Ibid. 125.

13. For an excellent discussion of the significance of Martius' name see McAlindon, ‘Coriolanus: An Essentialist Tragedy’, 507-8. See also P. M. Simonds, ‘Coriolanus and the Myth of Juno and Mars’, Mosaic, 18 (1985), 33-50.

14. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian, 1610-13), 13, quoted in J. W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror. Prince Henry Stuart: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Personation (New York, 1978), 162. The following paragraphs are based on Williamson, and on R. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 1986). See also F. A. Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London, 1975), 19 ff.; N. Council, ‘Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and the Transformation of Tudor Chivalry’, Journal of English Literary History, 47 (1980), 259-75; D. M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia, Oh. and London, 1991), 92-109.

15. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 145.

16. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 144-5.

17. Quoted in Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 68.

18. Ben Jonson, ‘Prince Henry's Barriers’, 137-8, in The Complete Masques, ed. S. Orgel (New Haven and London, 1969), 147.

19. John Stow, Annales (London, 1631), sig. Ffff4^v, quoted in Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 65.

20. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian, 1610-13), 13, 450.

21. George Wither, ‘Prince Henries obsequies’, Juvenilia (Manchester, 1871), 394.

22. See R. B. Parker's introduction to his edition of The Tragedy of ‘Coriolanus’ (Oxford, 1994), 2-7. See also J. Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994 (Cranbury, NJ and London, 1998), 34-5.

23. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 8-10.

24. On Mars's association with war in Roman mythology see G. Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, trans. P. Krapp, 2 vols. (Chicago and London, 1970), i. 205-13.

25. The Triumphs of King James the First (London, 1610), sig. A2, quoted in Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 77. The Triumphs was first published in French in 1609.

26. The Triumphs, 66, quoted in Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 34.

27. Quoted in Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 76.

28. The Myth of the Conqueror, 32.

29. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian, 1603-4), quoted in Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 41.

30. See P. C. Dust, Three Renaissance Pacifists: Essays on the Theories of Erasmus, More, and Vives (New York, 1987).

31. Advising Henry on preparations for war James writes ‘Let first the justnesse of your cause be your greatest strength; and then omitte not to use all lawfull meanes for backing of the same’: Basilicon Doron, Political Writings, ed. J. Somerville (Cambridge, 1994), 32.

32. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 72.

33. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian, 1610-13), 13, 450.

34. ‘Propositions of Warre and Peace delivered to his Highness Prince Henry by some of his Military servants: Arguments for Warre’, printed in Sir Robert Cotton, An Answer made by Command of Prince Henry, to Certain Propositions of Warre and Peace, Delivered to his Highness by some of his Military Servants (London, 1655), 1-2.

35. Ibid. 3-4.

36. Before the accession Cotton had supported James's claim to the English throne and as an antiquary enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an ancient kingdom of Great Britain: see K. Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979), 227.

37. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 14.

38. In 1601 Bishop William Barlow referred to Martius as a ‘discontented Romane, who might make a fit parallel for the late Earle [of Essex]’: quoted in C. C. Huffman, ‘Coriolanus’ in Context (Lewisburg, 1971), 25.

39. An Answer … to Certain Propositions of Warre and Peace, 22.

40. Ibid. 95.

41. ‘To the Virginian Shore’, in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1931-41), vol. ii (1932), 363, quoted in Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 61.

42. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian, 1610-13), quoted in Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 63.

43. ‘Dulce bellum inexpertis’ is the title of Erasmus's most celebrated pacifist essay: The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus, ed. and trans. M. M. Phillips (Cambridge, 1964), 308-53.

44. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 145.

45. D. George, ‘Coriolanus’ Triumphal Entry into Rome’, Notes & Queries, 241 (1996), 63-5.

46. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 147.

47. Thomas Birch, The Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 1760), 46, quoted in Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 40.

48. Goldberg describes Martius as an ‘absolutist’, claiming that ‘it is on such absolutist models as the king … that Coriolanus is imagined’: James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore, Md. and London, 1983), 193.

49. In a revisionist article entitled ‘Shakespeare's Pacifism’ Steven Marx writes: ‘I believe that, as political satire, [Coriolanus] makes most sense when it is regarded … as an attack on the bellicose policies that create the war that provides the framework of the play's action’ (Renaissance Quarterly, 45 (1992), 80). Like Adelman, Kahn, and Sprengnether, Marx looks for an explanation of those ‘policies’ in the hero's psychology rather than in contemporary events; see J. Adelman, ‘“Anger's My Meat”: Feeding, Dependency and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in M. Schwartz and C. Kahn (eds.), Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore, Md., 1980), 129-50; C. Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1981), 151-72, and Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York, 1997), 144-59; M. Sprengnether, ‘Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus’, in M. B. Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse, NY, 1986), 89-111.

50. The Romane Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1600), 2.

51. See J. Leeds Barroll, ‘Shakespeare and Roman History’, Modern Language Review, 53 (1958), 327-43.

52. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Less Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1944), ii. 564.

53. See F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation 1500-1700 (London, 1964), 53.

54. The Roman Histories, trans. E. M. Bolton (London, 1619), sig. B3, 36-7.

55. The Conspiracie of Catiline, trans. Thomas Heywood (London, 1608), 7-8.

56. Machiavels discourses upon the first Decade of T. Livius, trans. E. Dacres (London:, 1636), 252.

57. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 156, 148-9.

58. See W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 BC (Oxford, 1979), 11-12.

59. ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 146.

60. ‘A Discourse of War’, in The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, 2 vols. (London, 1751), ii. 65.

61. Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), 184.

62. See P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, and New York, 1975), 114.

63. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London, 1997).

64. An Auncient Historie, trans. W. B. (London, 1578), sig. A3.

65. There is a widespread assumption in recent gay studies that homosexuality, along with human nature, did not exist in early modern England and was ‘invented’, according to different scholars, either in the 17th, 18th, or 19th cents.; see A. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982). This counter-intuitive claim has been effectively demolished by Joseph Cady, who shows that the Renaissance had a very clear sense of homosexuality as a distinct category: ‘“Masculine Love,” Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in C. J. Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (New York, London, and Norwood, Australia, 1992), 9-40.

66. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, 1991), 35. On the ‘quasi-homosexual relationship’ between Martius and Aufidius see also R. Berry, ‘Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus’, Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 301-16.

67. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New Haven and London, 1998), 99.

68. See R. Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1994), ch. 3. Hyatte points out that not even the relationship between Galehout and Launcelot in the 13th-cent. Prose Launcelot—widely assumed to be homosexual—is consummated on a physical level (p. 103).

69. In a recent discussion of Sir Gawain, Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the kisses that Gawain and Bertilak exchange should be read ‘as components of a specific inflection of a broad heterocultural strategy of unintelligibility’, by which I think she means that the poem is hinting that the relationship between Gawain and Bertilak could, in other circumstances, have been homosexual, but in fact isn't: ‘A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics, 24 (1994), 205-6.

70. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, rev. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1990), i. 72.

71. Ibid. ii. 570.

72. Cf. B. Hatlen: ‘both Coriolanus and Aufidius seem to be fixated at Lacan's mirror stage, entranced by a “perfect” image of the self’: ‘The “Noble Thing” and the “Boy of Tears”: Coriolanus and the Embarrassments of Identity’, English Literary Renaissance, 27 (1997), 408-9. While it is true that Shakespeare's warriors are fascinated by each other in much the same way that medieval knights and present-day boxers are both attracted and repelled by rivals, it is not easy to see how a purely speculative theory of child development helps us to understand this familiar phenomenon.

73. Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, New York, and Toronto, 1912), 230.

74. H. Hutter, Politics as Friendship: The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship (Waterloo, Ont., 1978), 136.

75. Thomas Lupset writes: ‘Howe you shall know them that be worthy to be your frendis & by what menes, & what wey frendes be both gotten & also kept, ye shall best lerne in Ciceros littell boke De Amicitia’, quoted in L. J. Mills One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, Ind., 1937), 96. Mills lists some of the many Tudor translations of De Amicitia, 79-80.

76. Brower, Hero and Saint, 372.

77. Quoted in Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain, 126.

78. D. G. Hale, ‘The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature’, Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1965, 14.

79. Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, trans. N. Grimald, ed. G. O'Gorman (Washington, 1990) 153-4.

80. The Boke Named the Governour, ed. F. Watson (London, 1907), 1, 153.

81. See Hale, The Body Politic. See also L. Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven and London, 1975); R. Brower, introduction to the Signet Classic edn., The Tragedy of Coriolanus (New York and Toronto, 1966), pp. xlii-xlvi.

82. Among writers who rehearse the fable of the belly are Aesop, Livy, Plutarch, St Paul, Erasmus, Elyot, Forset, Sidney, and Camden. See Hale, The Body Politic, 25-8, 134; A. Gurr, ‘Coriolanus and the Body Politic’, Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 66; Parker, introduction to The Tragedy of ‘Coriolanus’, 19.

83. D. G. Hale, ‘Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 197-202.

84. A dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, ed. K. M. Burton (London, 1948), 57.

85. Cf. Gurr, ‘Coriolanus and the Body Politic’: ‘Menenius is not offering a rationale of the state as a single organism so much as conducting a cynical delaying action’ (p. 67).

86. The Romane Historie, 66.

87. See A. Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals’, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), 95-108.

88. In The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (1940; repr. New York, 1972), James Emerson Phillips Jr. writes: ‘In learned treatises and popular pamphlets alike … a variety of theories and attitudes were developed concerning such individual political problems as the authority of the king, the function of the law, the duties of subjects and the right of rebellion’ (p. 64). See also M. A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603-1645 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949); Huffman, ‘Coriolanus’ in Context, 135; B. Coward, The Stuart Age: A History of England 1603-1714 (London and New York, 1980), 102; D. Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England 1603-1658 (London, 1986), 40-1; G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642 (Basingstoke and London, 1992), 110-12; P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London and Rio Grande, 1994), 31-57; M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 3-4.

89. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, 179.

90. Cf. G. Burgess, ‘Revisionist History and Shakespeare's Political Context’, in H. Klein and R. Wymer (eds.), Shakespeare and History, vi (1996), 5-36.

91. Brian Vickers rightly notes that Shakespeare does not offer explicit judgement on the political conflict: ‘He votes … against both sides’: Returning to Shakespeare (London and New York, 1989), 135.

92. ‘Coriolanus and the Myth of Juno and Mars’, 44.

93. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Garden City, 1953), 119.

94. For a recent counter-argument to the one I have set out in the last two paragraphs see T. Clayton, ‘“So our virtues lie in th' interpretation of the time”: Shakespeare's Tragic Coriolanus and Coriolanus, and Some Questions of Value’, Ben Jonson Journal, 1 (1994), 147-81. Quoting Ibsen's Enemy of the People (‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone’), Clayton writes: ‘Ibsen obviously saw and valued such a spirit in Coriolanus, and there is every reason in the play to think that Shakespeare and probably his “target” audience did, too’ (p. 151).

95. Plutarch, ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, 162; Machiavels discourses upon the first Decade of T. Livius, 47-53.

96. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984; repr. Brighton, 1986), 218-30.

97. For a recent challenge to anti-essentialist readings of the play see McAlindon, ‘Coriolanus: An Essentialist Tragedy’.

98. Introduction to The Tragedy of Coriolanus (Signet Classic edn.), p. xlvi.

99. See above, n. 7.

100. See Huffman, ‘Coriolanus’ in Context; P. K. Meszaros, ‘“There is a world elsewhere”: Tragedy and History in Coriolanus’, Studies in English Literature, 16 (1976), 273-85. For one of the best recent discussions of the play's engagement with classical and early modern constitutional debate see A. Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 115-29. On Shakespeare's use of Machiavelli see also V. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 119-24.

101. Comparing himself to the earl of Essex, Byron complains of the way ‘sensuall peace confounds / Valure’: The Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, I. ii. 15-16, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. J. B. Gabel (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Wolfeboro, 1987), 339.

102. See e.g. Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, 83-4.

103. A philosophicall discourse, entituled, the anatomie of the minde (London, 1576), fos. 10^v-11^v.

104. An Answer made … to Certain Propositions of Warre and Peace, 20-1.

105. Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, 74.

106. Ibid.

107. Ibid. 76.