SOURCE: “Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 170-85.

[In the essay that follows, Walker studies Coriolanus as a play focused on the battle between “body and speech.” Walker observes that in Coriolanus's derision for speech, a parallel hatred for time is revealed and contends that Coriolanus seeks to live in a single moment that transcends time.]

Critics have long been accustomed to reading Shakespeare's plays as though they were constructed out of speech. Since most scenes create their time and place in spoken text, it has been easy to locate the plays close to narrative poetry and to rely on critical techniques derived from the study of non-dramatic works. Under this strategy the theatrical essence of the plays is contained in the safe concession that these are texts for speaking, and that the essential activity of the audience, as the word suggests, is not to watch but to listen. In the theater, of course, voices must have bodies, but the oratorical tradition that prevailed through the nineteenth century often treated the body as a container of the voice, serving primarily to make the text present in the space of performance. Traces of this view remain in recent formulations such as that of Bert O. States: “The very thickness of Shakespeare's world is derived from the way in which poetry triumphs over neutral space.”¹

But poetry's triumphant march through space can falter when it encounters the human body, especially when that body is violent or is displaying the results of violence. Titus Adronicus, for example, repeatedly juxtaposes graphic violence with unanchored poetic flights. In this play the violent actions of bodies compel speakers to describe them, but the speech is rendered grotesque when visibly juxtaposed with the acts described. Poetry is thus trapped into ridiculing itself, an effect that James Calderwood calls “the rape of language.”² Gillian Murray Kendall notices that violence in Titus seems to parody specific poetic forms; severed limbs, for example, “reveal both the artificial and grotesque nature of synecdoche.” As Kendall puts it, “in Titus Andronicus reality begins to take vengeance on metaphor: … to lend one's hand is to risk dismemberment.”³

While we are used to the voice and the body playing complementary roles in a unified semiotic process—the body containing the voice, for example, while the voice defines the body's role in the narrative—Titus keeps them radically isolated and shows them competing to perform identical semiotic tasks, often to parodic effect. We see this most literally in 2.4, when Marcus comes upon the mutilated Lavinia, a body that will never speak, and responds with a long, static, ornamented speech that describes what everyone can see. His speech and her body both tell the same story, but their relationship is one of pure redundancy.

In such extreme moments ontological differences between speech and the body are most visible. For example, considered in isolation, speech and the body imply utterly different perceptions of time. Speech—especially metrical verse—tends to insist on time as even and linear. Even when its semiotic value is in question, speech remains a calibrator of time; it keeps one moment distinct from the next, and assures us that we are indeed progressing through time and through the play. The body, when divorced from speech, can undermine this assurance. The spectacle of the mutilated Lavinia testifies not to a linear, measurable time but to time bifurcated into before and after by a single violent moment. A similar conflict occurs, of course, in the denouements of many of the tragedies: the dead bodies onstage testify to a time that has stopped, while speech goes on for a while, unconvincingly marking time toward a peaceful, linear future.

Such moments offer a paradigm for approaching Coriolanus, which of all the tragedies is the one most obsessed with the conflict between body and speech. Though Caius Martius Coriolanus is as verbose as any tragic hero, he uses his voice as one weapon among others, denying speech any special status as a mode of signification. His contempt for speech, I will argue, is also a contempt for linear time and a desire to live in a single transcendent moment, such as the moment of violence. The pervasive anticipations of violence in the play are strikingly interwoven with references to silence, most obviously in the person of Virgilia, so that both violence and silence are always available as alternatives to linguistic interaction. Through the hero's obsessions, we get glimpses of an alternate universe in which there are only bodies, active or still, violent or sexual, but never needing words.

The hero has in fact so fully isolated himself from the linear time of speech that he is literally unnamable. Long before Menenius calls him “a kind of nothing, titleless” (5.1.13),⁴ we may sense that the names “Caius Martius” and “Coriolanus” do not quite refer to the same person, and that the man himself, if we are to imagine one, must lie in a referential void between them. “Caius Martius”—a name given him by his parents and echoed in the name of his son—emphasizes the hero's origins and fate in linear time. By contrast, the surname “Coriolanus” enacts what I will argue is the hero's most characteristic move, the reification of a single violent act (in this case, the conquest of Corioles) into a stable, eternal condition. The hero, understandably, prefers the name “Coriolanus,” and many critics have been so obliging as to call him that even when speaking of Act 1, before the name is given. Since we must call him something, I follow Adrian Poole in calling him “Martius,” a name that at least has some hold on him throughout the play.⁵ We must keep in mind, though, that to call him anything is to tilt our perception either toward the realm of the voice, the linear time of natality and death implied by “Caius Martius,” or toward the realm of the body, where one violent action can overwhelm time and record itself in eternity.

The characters of Coriolanus seem to recognize the body and the voice as the most basic categories of phenomenal experience.⁶ When more complex rhetorical strategies fail—as they do quickly in this play—characters fall back on defining reality in terms of bodies and voices, often reducing one to the terms of the other. Martius pretends to see and smell the people's voices rather than just hearing them; for him these voices have no special ontological status but are merely an insignificant, lightweight form of bodily material. The play's great narrators—including Cominius, Menenius, and Volumnia—all perform the opposite movement, converting bodily action into spoken narrative, with the implication that the former exists for the purpose of the latter.

These debates, amplified by striking stage images in which the body and voice are radically isolated, give Coriolanus a dimension of distinctly phenomenal self-reference. Many Shakespeare plays refer to their own nature as plays or illusions, but that more common kind of self-reference is notably absent here. Instead, Coriolanus insistently points to the sheer uninterpreted fact that bodies are arrayed before the viewer, and that, now and then, voices are heard. Throughout this essay I use the terms body, voice, presence, and speech to denote these theatrical phenomena, even when describing events and conditions internal to the fiction of the play. These phenomena are the materials of theatrical representation, but in this play they are also the battleground of the fictional conflict itself.

Facing an audience that may have come to “hear” a play, Shakespeare begins by launching a frontal assault of bodies.

Enter a company of mutinous Citizens, with staves, clubs, and other weapons.

(I.1.1 SD)⁷

As Philip Brockbank notes, Coriolanus is the only play of the period to open with public violence.⁸ What is more, violence is literally the play's first impression, the very first thing we are meant to perceive. The stage direction insists that the armed citizens that have stormed the stage are “mutinous,” not, as we later learn, that they are, specifically, hungry. Hunger is certainly a physical state, one that could be conveyed by the appearance of bodies; but the direction suggests the opposite, so that we learn of their hunger only when they speak. At once a gap is opened between violence and its avowed cause; the first is conveyed by bodies, the other by speech.

The cause of the revolt emerges only gradually. The first sign of it is a striking comparison: “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” (I.1.3.). In saying this, the First Citizen mimics familiar slogans such as “death before dishonor,” and, as in such slogans, “death” can be understood to mean “anything, even death.” Such a formula expresses a resolve to perform some potentially dangerous act, but the act itself is absent, unnamed, and perhaps not yet clearly imagined. The line calls, in effect, for a moment of supreme not famishing. The citizen seeks to escape the prolonged time of suffering by collapsing it into a single event.

The collective resolve must now find an object, an act that will represent not famishing. The First Citizen suggests such an object:

FIRST Citizen
First, you know Caius Martius is chief enemy to the people.
ALL
We know't, we know't.
FIRST Citizen
Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price. Is't a verdict?

(ll. 6-10)

The First Citizen may mean to suggest that Martius is the primary cause of their famishing and hence that his death will bring the end of it, but he never says this. The issue of the moment is not causation but symbolism. The need to name a single representative of their adversity is more important than perceiving its actual sources. Thus Martius is proposed as “chief enemy to the people,” the unifying symbol of their famishing. His death, then, will represent not famishing, the goal to which they have just sworn. In the ensuing debate with the Second Citizen, the issue is not whether killing Martius will end their sufferings but whether he deserves to be the symbol of their sufferings and the object of their violence.

Though this consensus can be built only through speech, it is driven by an impulse that speech cannot describe. Summing up his litany of the patricians' oppression, the First Citizen reveals the depth of the plebeians' confusion: “Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes. For the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge” (ll. 21-24). He claims not to desire revenge; however, revenge is the only word he has for what they want to do. So he must insist that, though revenge is the act, it is not the motive; the motive is hunger. Act and motive must be kept some distance apart or the act will contaminate the motive. The price of this rhetorical separation is that the movement from motive to act can never be described; it can be made only by the body, in violence. The cause/effect distinction is revealed as a matter of speech. Violence bridges and collapses the distinction; it is both cause and effect, both act and motive. Neither “hunger” nor “revenge” really describes the proposed act; the two words can only revolve around it on opposite sides, pointing to it as something that cannot be named.

Marxist readings of this scene tend to accept the idea that hunger is the cause of the revolt. To be sure, Shakespeare has enhanced the citizens' case by making the revolt a matter of food rather than, as in Plutarch, the more abstract matter of usury. But the representation of hunger is insulated from the driving force of rebellion: hunger is presented only in speech, while the rebellion is driven by bodies. Brecht sensed some of the complexity of the matter, even while adhering to Marxist priorities:

I don't think you realize how hard it is for the oppressed to become united. Their misery unites them—once they recognize who has caused it. ‘Our sufferance is a gain to them.’ But otherwise their misery is liable to cut them off from one another, for they are forced to snatch the wretched crumbs from each other's mouths.⁹

The unity of the people requires not just misery but also an object. But this does not mean, as Brecht assumes, that the object is seen as the cause of the misery. In jumping to such a conclusion, Brecht is apparently focusing on the First Citizen's accusation against the patricians, the clearest statement of the plebeian grievance:

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

(ll. 15-21)

This explanation is clear enough, but it is not what drives the revolt. The First Citizen had already triggered sufficient resolve simply by naming Martius as the symbol of their oppression. The people were ready to go: “No more talking on't; let it be done. Away, away!” (ll. 11-12). But the Second Citizen then asks to speak, offering a moment of calmer thought that could blunt their purpose, and it is to this possibility that the First Citizen responds with the speech above. The First Citizen must preempt the calm reasoning that he expects from his comrade; to do this, he must himself calm down enough to lay out his own reasoned argument and then whip up resolve again with his circular appeal to hunger and revenge. But the Second Citizen's next question gives the lie to this rhetorical project: “Would you proceed especially against Caius Martius?” (ll. 25-26). And indeed they would, for until Menenius enters, they speak of nothing else. The people may agree with the First Citizen's explanation of the cause of their misery, but, Brecht to the contrary, this is not what unites them. The people are held together by the specific image of Martius, not by abstract thoughts about cause and effect.

The actual dynamics of the scene are better described by René Girard's theory on the role of violence in primitive society. For Girard, violence is not the result of specific causes but a constant warp and woof of the social fabric. Every society must devise strategies for controlling its internal violence, and in pre-legal societies the standard strategy is sacrifice. As Girard writes: “… society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.”¹⁰ While Brecht also recognizes that the people will be driven to attack each other if they do not act together, Girard sees, as Brecht does not, that action requires only a specific victim, not an assignment of blame. Assigning blame requires speech; in contrast, a society's relationship to its sacrificial victim is a silent, bodily one—indeed, the sacrificial system fails if the relation is openly described.

Later in this first scene of Coriolanus, Martius invokes the Girardian view:

                                                                                                    … What's the matter,
That in these several places of the city,
You cry against the noble Senate, who
(Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else
Would feed on one another?

(ll. 183-87)

Rome, it seems, has moved beyond the sacrificial societies studied by Girard. The oligarchic senate controls the inherent violence of the people, both by keeping them “in awe” and by frequently sending them to war. But now, in rejecting this oligarchy, the people are beginning to reenact the older pattern of sacrificial culture. Though they may direct their rhetoric toward the patricians as a whole, their violence is fixed on the person of Martius. It is as though they have elected him to represent the patricians, as “chief enemy to the people,” and though he is unaware of his election, he readily accepts the role the moment he enters.

Martius is the perfect “indifferent victim” (in Girard's sense) for reasons that many critics have discussed. He is a citizen of the city and yet forever out of place in it. He acts on the city's behalf with such purity of motive that he seems to be acting only for himself. He has no place in Menenius' model of the interdependent body politic: as a patrician, he must be part of the belly; but in the third act, when Sicinius calls him “a disease that must be cut away,” Menenius counters that Martius is “a limb that has but a disease” (3.1.292-93). Sicinius is almost right: in a body characterized by interdependence, Martius' absoluteness makes him a foreign object. But Martius is the opposite of a cancer, which feeds on the body and gives nothing in return. Instead, he serves the body but will ask nothing from it. His stance, as Stanley Cavell puts it, is to be “perfectly deserving”;¹¹ he believes that his desires and deserts are identical, so that his deeds will always speak for themselves and produce the result that he desires.

Cavell sees this as the posture of a god, and proceeds to explore Martius' sacrificial role in the Christian context. But Martius' usefulness as a sacrificial victim can be understood more directly. By denying the possibility of a gap between desire and desert, Martius denies the importance of linear time, the dimension where deserts and desires are negotiated and deployed. If desert and desire are the same, then everything one does is completely self-sufficient, independent of necessary causes or expected effects. In this sense Martius embodies as an ongoing condition the singular event to which the mutinous citizens of the first scene aspire, a pure moment of violence in which cause and effect, motive and act, desert and desire are collapsed into a single term. Martius lives frozen at (or as) the instant of transcendental violence that sacrifice creates. He seeks to live time as though it were a single event.

Terry Eagleton suggests that Martius is “nothing but his actions.”¹² In a sense this is true: the generals cannot get him out of battle because as long as the fighting lasts, he is the fighting. But his “actions” must be understood in a reciprocal, atemporal sense. It is hard to separate the things he does from the things that are done to him. He is, as Zvi Jagendorf puts it, “a verb with no object, a model of intransitive action.”¹³ Janet Adelman sees the key to his character in Volumnia's famous comparison of violence and feeding:

                                                  … The breasts of Hecuba
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword contemning.

(1.3.40-43)

As Adelman describes this image, “feeding, incorporating, is transformed into spitting out, an aggressive expelling.”¹⁴ Volumnia has taught her son to reject all forms of nourishment, as we see when he is subjected to Cominius' praise:

May these same instruments, which you profane,
Never sound more! When drums and trumpets shall
I'th'field prove flatterers, let courts and cities be
Made all of false-fac'd soothing!
… No more, I say!

(1.9.41-46)

Martius finds no essential difference between Cominius' praise and the tribunes' condemnation; though he may endure the praise longer, both kinds of input must finally be treated as lies. Ultimately, he does not distinguish between being nourished and being wounded. Both are kinds of incorporation, and in both cases he responds by “spitting back” at the world in an automatic reciprocal action, a compulsive denial of receptiveness. This perspective allows us to see his “actions” less as discrete events and more as an ongoing condition; each action in time is an expression of the transcendent activeness whereby he defines himself. His dominant mode of action is violence because his primary motive is to reject his own receptivity.

This motive is most obvious in the rhetoric surrounding his wounds. The official line in Rome is that wounds are the surest signs of heroic action. This view implies the potential reversibility of action and reception; being wounded implies having acted, but acting—if it is to be properly remembered—also implies being wounded. Martius accepts only the first half of this equation. Thus he is willing to speak of his wounds, converting them into evidence of action; but he refuses to show them, lest they be too obviously what they are: evidence of having been acted upon. This strategy reveals another aspect of Martius' goals: his need to transform particulars into abstractions. The word “wounds” can stand as a symbol of his transcendent activeness, but the actual damaged flesh is too obviously the sign of a weapon that came at a particular angle at a particular moment. This particularity threatens to reinscribe him in the extended time from which he is constantly fleeing.

Martius' anti-temporal and anti-particular stance is especially apparent in his striking avoidance of narration. When he must describe something that has occurred, he tends to suppress its temporal dimension, reducing a sequence of events to a single essential event: “Within these three hours, Tullus, / Alone I fought in your Corioles walls / And made what work I pleas'd” (1.8.7-9). Until the fourth act, the most lengthy temporally ordered story he tells about himself is five lines:

I sometime lay here in Corioles,
At a poor man's house: he us'd me kindly.
He cried to me. I saw him prisoner.
But then Aufidius was within my view,
And wrath o'erwhelm'd my pity.

(1.9.80-84)

Even in this short speech, Martius resists the idea that these events occurred in sequence. The story is pressed into two static scenes, one in the man's house and one presumably in the field. What links the two, however, is not a temporal conjunction like “then” but a strange phenomenal scrap, “He cried to me.” This sentence seems at first to continue the scene in the house; only when we hear “I saw him prisoner” can it be recognized as having marked a temporal shift to the battlefield. The next line gives us the long-awaited “then,” but does Martius mean “then when I saw him prisoner” or “I saw him prisoner, but then”? The latter sense would imply sequentiality in Martius' perceptions (he saw the man, then saw Aufidius), while the former sense might suggest that it takes time for wrath to overwhelm Martius' pity. By implying both senses at once, Martius prevents us from deciding where in the story the succession occurs. So it is throughout this speech: logically there must be succession, but we are never allowed to locate it firmly among the story's events.

In the fourth act, when his banishment forces him to Aufidius, Martius must tell a much longer story. To do this, he wraps the event in the constancy of his name, as though by comparison to show the vileness of anyone who would precipitate an event in time and force mutability upon him.

My name is Caius Martius, who hath done
To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief: thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus.
                                                            … Only that name remains.
The cruelty and envy of the people,
Permitted by our dastard nobles, who
Have all forsook me, hath devour'd the rest;
And suffer'd me by th' voice of slaves to be
Whoop'd out of Rome.

(4.5.66-79)

Again he is vague about who has done what. The people and the patricians are collapsed into a compound villain that both devoured and permitted the devouring. “The cruelty … of the people … hath … suffer'd me by th' voice of slaves to be / Whoop'd out of Rome.”¹⁵ Set against the constancy of his name, this compound oppressor is the source of all change, all time. It is not the constant enemy that he imagines Aufidius to be, because it has acted in time to produce a single event, one that cannot be reversed or repeated. It is rather an aspect of what Martius calls “Hydra.” The monster of plurality is more generally the monster of contingency, of events and conditions randomly deployed in time and space, defying assimilation into a unified meaning.

Martius' circular interpretation of his banishment reveals the specific problem of identity that his view of time creates. He lives time as a single transcendent event, as though unconscious of time as a continuum. In one sense this is the posture of the body as animal, living in the present as though it were all time. Animals can do this because they have no concept of “all time” to set against their phenomenal experience of the present. For Martius, who does have such a concept, uniting the present with all time requires a certain effort. He must impose the condition of “all time” on the present, purging the memory of historical contingency, so that all moments are essentially alike. If this effort fails, the present will contaminate “all time.” Martius says that to act insincerely would be to “teach my mind / A most inherent baseness” (3.2.122-23), thus suggesting that any contingency that cannot be purged will become part of his identity, since he can assimilate it only as a universal.

One way to manage contingency is to reduce it to stable alternation. As a man who seeks to embody a transcendent moment of violence, Martius must accommodate the fact that there are times when no fighting is called for, that there must be a contingent alternation of fighting and not fighting. This alternation is acceptable to him because each extreme is clearly personified in his world. Fighting and not fighting—like the identities friend and enemy—are embodied in the two characters who occupy all of his erotic attention. He has, in effect, two marriages. At the core of his life of not fighting is his “gracious silence,” Virgilia. His life of fighting revolves around a comparably erotic bond with Aufidius, the only person whom he admits to envying: “I sin in envying his nobility; / And were I anything but what I am, / I would wish me only he” (1.1.229-31). Martius explicitly describes his envy as a desire to merge identities, a desire to be the Other. He requires Aufidius as a part of himself, the stable, symbolic Other who will sustain his stance of permanent opposition. The person of Aufidius is a reason to fight that transcends any loyalty to Rome or hatred for the Volscians: “Were half to half the world by th'ears, and he / Upon my party, I'd revolt to make / Only my wars with him” (ll. 232-34). His hatred of Aufidius is a mirror image of Romeo's love for Juliet, in that both pairings evoke a realm of personal devotion transcending all political allegiance. Through the first three acts of the play, Martius and Aufidius speak of each other in such obsessive terms that we need only read love for hate and sexual intercourse for battle to see theirs as an erotic bond.

This bond invites comparison to Martius' other marriage. Amid all the turbulence and bluster of this play, Martius and Virgilia have an apparently stable and unproblematic bond within and about which nothing need ever be said. Martius greets her as “my gracious silence” (2.1.174), suggesting that Virgilia embodies the silence that is at the heart of Martius' instrumental speech. Pure silence, like pure violence, is outside of time, an expression of the constancy by which Martius defines himself.¹⁶

We can think of these marriages as the poles of Martius' identity, but the emphasis is as much on the unity of the poles as on the space of their separation. Violence and silence are so perfectly unified in Martius that we are invited to think not just of the conflict between them but also of the respects in which they contain each other, the sense in which they are two articulable concepts revolving around the same essence. Aufidius and Virgilia—violence and silence—jointly form a stable structure, so that, for Martius, alternation between them does not really constitute change.

This stability underlies Martius' response to his banishment. Denied the chance to fight Aufidius, Martius can continue only by reversing the polarity of his marriages, making Aufidius the friend and thus, by necessity, Virgilia part of the enemy. He makes the move without any sense of inner turbulence. The transition is marked by a soliloquy, but it is one of the most abstract in Shakespeare:

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
                                                  … shall within this hour,
On a dissention of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity: so fellest foes,
                                                  … by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues. So with me:
My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
This enemy town.

(4.4.12-24)

To minimize the apparent contingency in his own reversal, he must make reversibility itself into a cosmic absolute, and then firmly subsume his particularity under that universal. The echoing conjunction “so” binds his action to the world with the same glue that binds the world together: friends can become enemies, “so” enemies can become friends, “so” I am going to Aufidius. For him his reversal expresses natural law, but we see it as the law of his own mind: so long as friend and enemy are kept apart, they are always interchangeable.

If friend and enemy are not kept apart, the whole system of his identity is at risk. Such a crisis occurs at the gates of Rome (5.3), where, for the first and only time, Virgilia and Aufidius are present together. If we take Martius' perspective, then Virgilia's entrance into this scene, with Aufidius already there, has the same vertiginous potential as the revelation of doubles in Twelfth Night or The Comedy of Errors. But here language is not available to describe the recognition. Both marriages exist only outside of speech, so their confrontation can occur only in silence.

Our record of this scene is necessarily one of speech, primarily that of Volumnia, but at the crisis itself, where Martius recognizes that his oppositions have collapsed, all speech and all action are denied as Martius “Holds her by the hand silent” (5.3.182 SD).¹⁷ In the entire First Folio this is the only stage direction that specifically demands a total stop to both speech and action. The length of the stop is profoundly arbitrary. We could project some psychological process onto it and thus judge how long it should take, but the specificity of this direction invites us rather to experience the silence as absolute, as a violation of normal Shakespearean time. After all, at any other point in the Folio, there is always something, either a speech or an action, that happens next. Only here does the Folio insist that nothing happens at all—and for an indefinite time.

When Martius finally speaks, the question he asks is indeed the question: “What have you done?” In the context of the apparent laws of Shakespearean stage action, the stop has been a singular event, a miracle. During the silence, Martius' position has changed. But how? Because of what? Or can we even speak of cause and effect in such a circumstance?

On one level the crisis lies in the presence together onstage of his two erotic objects. This triggers a conflict that lies, as such conflicts must, totally outside of speech and outside of the linear time that speech articulates. To clarify this conflict, we must first return to Volumnia and consider the process of speech against which these silences are defined.

Volumnia is the one person whom Martius cannot place in his system of static oppositions. Like the people, she is free sometimes to praise and sometimes to criticize him, but she alone has the power to force him to listen, or at least to make him be still while she talks. He can never confront the source of her authority. His birth and upbringing, after all, are events in time, and time is a dimension whose significance he denies. Martius and his mother live in different metaphysical realms—Martius in a timeless realm of pure action and pure silence, Volumnia in a temporal realm of speech and narrative. They cannot really communicate, but it is precisely this failing that allows them to coexist.

If Martius lives to fight, Volumnia lives to narrate. Her idea of value is “good report,” a kind of ongoing narrative speech extending into the future.

VIRGILIA
But had he died in the business, madam, how then?
VOLUMNIA
Then his good report should have been my son, I therein would have found issue.

(1.3.19-21)

Actresses often shade this response with subtextual doubt, but there is nothing in the play to suggest that we should not take it literally. For Volumnia, Martius' existence in flesh and blood is an interim substance to be converted into narrative. Volumnia thus announces herself not only as the play's narrator but as the embodiment of a principle whereby speech, not action, is the highest good. Martius' violent public speech—speech as brute force—is a way of using words to generate action. For Volumnia, it seems, the purpose of action is to generate words.

But in the final moments of her appeal before the gates of Rome, any sense of cause and effect collapses:

                                                            … Thou hast never in thy life
Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy,
When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,
Has cluck'd thee to the wars, and safely home,
Loaden with honour.

(5.3.160-64)

Volumnia's narrative has not merely responded to Martius' action or inspired it; in its own mode it has been his action. His departure to war, his safe return, his resulting honor have all been simultaneously narrated by Volumnia, and all with such precision that it is as though, in her own realm, she has done all of his deeds herself. This in turn suggests that he has merely done, in his own realm, what she has narrated, that his identity as a bodily doer of deeds is really a word that she has spoken.

As Brockbank and others note, “cluck'd” (l. 163) may be a pun on “clocked,” meaning “timed.”¹⁸ Volumnia, as narrator, accepts and employs the awareness of time that Martius denies. The equivalent of his strident atemporality is her temporally extended “good report.” We could say that Volumnia's realm of speech thus supplements Martius' realm of transcendent bodily action, providing the dimension of time. But the relationship is not so peaceful, or rather it is peaceful only in the absence of communication. Martius and Volumnia threaten each other with mutual reduction, each converting the other's activity into alien terms. The bodiliness of Martius' life, centered on his stable erotic bonds of violence and silence, is utterly unrelated to Volumnia's life of speech, yet each can claim to be the foundation of the other.

What happens, then, before the gates of Rome? As I have suggested, the simultaneous presence of Virgilia and Aufidius threatens the very structure of Martius' identity. In this constant, atemporal conflict beneath the scene, we see the collapse of the separation on which Martius has relied. It is the speech of Volumnia that creates the temporal extent of the scene, but even she is aware that something else is happening as she speaks, a direct interaction between human presences.

The women enter in silence, Virgilia first. They have said nothing, but Martius is immediately moved and struggles to recollect himself: “… I'll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (ll. 34-37). This famous claim of self-origination is aimed at steeling himself to resist Volumnia, who he can safely assume is about to speak. But it is Virgilia who speaks. Her call “My lord and husband!” establishes the claim that she will maintain with her presence throughout the scene. Again Martius is moved, but as the greetings proceed, he regains his confidence; thus when Volumnia finally turns to the appeal they bring, he breaks in, demanding that they not seek to sway him with words: “Desire not / T'allay my rages and revenges with / Your colder reasons” (ll. 84-86). And indeed, it is not with their colder reasons that they will sway him. Volumnia begins her long rhetorical assault by acknowledging that speech itself is superfluous: “Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment / And state of bodies would bewray what life / We have led since thy exile” (ll. 94-96). Having invited us to imagine her not speaking, Volumnia now begins to speak. Her speech is thus haunted by the acknowledged possibility of her silence. She has, in effect, slightly separated her body from her voice, inviting us to perceive the body as silent and thus, by implication, the voice as disembodied. As she speaks, her possible silence joins with the actual silences of the other characters onstage to complete the static, symmetrical complex of bodily presences. Whatever is being said, Martius, his mother and son, and, above all, his two “spouses” are all simply there, their bodies in static conflict as words drift over them.

When Martius finally responds, he suggests he has been moved by their presences alone, not by anything that has been said: “Not of a woman's tenderness to be, / Requires nor child nor woman's face to see. / I have sat too long” (ll. 129-31). He rises but Volumnia commands him to stay, and he does. She continues speaking, but her argument deteriorates; the units of thought grow progressively shorter, marked with increasing desperation. She repeatedly begs him to speak, but he remains silent, forcing her to continue out of sheer terror of finishing. When she can talk no more, she forces the question. She announces that she will neither speak nor move until her son responds: “Yet give us our dispatch: / I am husht until our city be afire, / And then I'll speak a little” (ll. 179-81). Volumnia, the embodiment of speech, falls silent. When the silence is past, Martius' mind is changed.

Or is it? To speak of a change of mind is to tell only Volumnia's half of the story, the half that belongs to the realm of speech and time. Focusing on this half brings us to the critical commonplace that Martius has now become human and will die as a result. Volumnia, it may seem, has triumphed, returning her son to a consciousness of his own origin, his own temporality, and thus of his own death.

Clearly, something else is operating in this scene, a parallel conflict on the level of the body. Speech gives the scene its necessary extension in time, but the content of the speech has no evident effect. None of Martius' words or actions in this scene requires us to believe that he has heard anything Volumnia has said, with the possible exception of her desperate command, “Nay, go not from us thus” (l. 131).

What moves Martius throughout the scene is the ongoing perception of sheer presence. We see this in discrete events, moments when he responds in speech to what he is seeing, but these are only peripheral manifestations of what is happening, points where the atemporal bodily interaction emerges into the temporal dimension of the scene. Closer to the essence of the atemporal level is the simultaneous presence of Virgilia and Aufidius, the two bodies in which Martius has unconsciously invested his identity.

Virgilia's entrance reveals the doubling on which Martius has relied, but this revelation operates on a bodily level where it can cause nothing directly. As a theatrical phenomenon, the force of bodily presence lies in constancy, in its resistance to the mutability of speech. If we factor out the temporal dimension of the scene, what remains is a complex of constant presences—the two spouses, facing each other for the first time, along with the mother and son. These presences frame the scene, but they do nothing to articulate the events within it; they remain, to a great extent, outside of time.

The central paradox of the scene might seem to be that an atemporal condition is the primary cause of a temporal event, the change of mind. Of course, this is to speak in exclusively temporal terms. But the total silence at the moment of choice does seem to partake of both temporal and atemporal levels, of both speech and presence. It is an event in time, but its indeterminate length and total stillness give it an aspect of infinity, of time itself having stopped. It contains nothing but presence, but it is created out of speech, by the speaker's decision to fall silent.

In the silence the two parallel realms of speech and the body, of Volumnia and Martius, intersect. Volumnia has maintained in narrative the sense of time that Martius has denied in action. Volumnia's narrative and Martius' action have taken on a haunting equivalence, each reducing the other to its own terms. In this context the central silence is framed by a pair of sacrifices: Volumnia, who has maintained time, brings it to a halt. Martius, who has denied time, is forced to begin it. Volumnia has sustained Martius by her simultaneous generative narration of his deeds; now she can destroy him by falling silent. At the same time, her silence is her own defeat. She now needs her son to perform a truly original action, but this is one action that narration cannot generate.

In the absolute stillness, then, speech and presence reveal their need for each other. But we cannot say that there has been communication or interchange. The silence finally ends, but the radical isolation of voice and body in this scene has not been neutralized or forgotten.

If the end of the silence constituted a reconciliation, we might expect to see a transformed Martius afterward, one more prepared to live in time and interact through speech. But in the final scene, Martius shows little sign of having changed. Entering with the Volscian people, for the moment on his side, he is challenged by Aufidius, who immediately hurls the same fighting word that the Roman tribunes used, “traitor.” For good measure, Aufidius adds two other epithets, “boy” and the family name “Martius,” both of which refer to natality and thus attack Martius' atemporal self-image. Martius can almost bear these taunts, but what pushes him over the edge is the First Lord's attempt to calm him.

FIRST Lord
Peace, both, and hear me speak.
CORIOLANUS
Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!

(5.6.110-12)

Martius reminds Aufidius of his triumph at Corioles, giving Aufidius the means he needs to turn the people against him:

If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. Boy!
AUFIDIUS
                                                                                Why, noble lords,
Will you be put in mind of his blind fortune,
Which was your shame, by this unholy braggart,
'Fore your own eyes and ears?

(ll. 113-19)

The conspirators echo him, and the people fly into a rage, demanding Martius' death. The old Martius is in his element, intensifying all the hostility directed at him by responding in the extreme. Again, it is as though his real enemy is not the people or Aufidius but those who would dare try to create calm. Once more, a lord's effort to prevent violence (“Peace, ho! no outrage, peace! [l. 123]) triggers Martius' rage:

CORIOLANUS
                                                                                                    O that I had him,
With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe,
To use my lawful sword.
AUFIDIUS
Insolent villain!
ALL Conspirators
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!

(ll. 127-30)

Martius dies not as a result of being changed but as a result of his old behavior, a precise replay of the responses that triggered his banishment.

Martius' choice in the central silence has not changed who he is. The silence is not so much a transformation as a rupture, a singular violation of an otherwise constant character. It is the same for Volumnia, the narrator who, at this moment only, willfully refuses to narrate. And since Martius and Volumnia embody polar opposites—constancy and change, singularity and plurality—we can say that it is the same for Coriolanus itself. Everyone in this play is trapped in the body/voice polarity. The characters' efforts to resolve it inevitably consist in subordinating the voice to the body (as in Martius' use of speech as a purely physical force) or subordinating the body to speech (as in the reduction of heroic action to narrative by Volumnia, Cominius, and others). These moves only reinforce the fact that in the world of this play, body and voice are inescapable as categories and yet impossible to transcend or combine. There is one moment when the gap seems to be bridged, when the hero seems to drop his claim to atemporality and allow his mind to change, but this moment can only be represented as nothing, a hole in the play's fabric. No vocabulary is available—either in the rhetoric of the characters or the semiotics of performance—to present a real communication between body and voice, because all forms of expression are on one side or the other. We cannot even name the hero without taking sides.

The celebrated bleakness of Coriolanus may lie simply in this: that the play impedes the instinct by which we combine the image of a body and the sound of a voice into the idea of another human being. The characters are so preoccupied with body and voice as categories, and so unable to integrate them, that we are constantly reminded of the phenomenal level on which body and voice are ontologically different—as different as sight and sound. By discouraging the instinct to interpret and reconcile, the play evokes a world where there are only phenomena—bodies seen and voices heard—all struggling in vain to become persons.

Notes

1. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 56.

2. Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard II (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 29.

3. “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 299-316, esp. p. 299.

4. Quotations from Shakespeare refer to the Arden Shakespeare Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank (London: Methuen, 1976).

5. Coriolanus, Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (Boston: Twayne, 1988), p. 28.

6. Elaine Scarry makes the same observation about the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and goes on to note that body and voice “are among the most elementary and least metaphorical categories we have. Compared to them, the rush of analytic categories we ordinarily use to enter and accommodate human experience—hierarchical and dialectical, form and content, authoritarian and egalitarian, reason and emotion, for-itself and in-itself … and so forth—are (however solid, legitimate, and fruitful) remote and fantastical elaborations of distinctions that are only apprehensible once we are already moving about in a richly fictionalized world” (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985], p. 182). Like Scarry, I use the categories of body and voice to refer to phenomena, prior to their assimilation into a perceived world or even their assimilation as metaphors. Thus, unlike Zvi Jagendorf's political reading (“Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” SQ, 41 [1990], 455-69), my focus is not on interpreting the many metaphors of the body and its parts that occur in the play, except to note how they contribute to a relentless current of references that keep us focused on the body as a category of experience.

7. The vivid and meticulous stage directions that appear throughout this play are believed by many to come from Shakespeare's original manuscript. Such was suggested by W. W. Greg, who wrote that Coriolanus shows evidence of “a carefully prepared author's copy” (The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951], p. 148). More recently, it has been suggested that the text of Coriolanus derives from a scribal transcript. (See Paul Werstine, “Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem,” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 8 [1984], 73-125, esp. p. 97.) In Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells's William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), John Jowett seems to agree that the text is based on a scribal transcript, but he also argues that “certainly there is an authorial basis to the stage directions, which are often remarkably full and ‘literary’” (p. 593).

8. p. 95.

9. Bertolt Brecht, “Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's ‘Coriolanus’,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 249-50.

10. Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 4.

11. “‘Who does the wolf love?’: Coriolanus and the interpretations of politics” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 245-72, esp. p. 250.

12. William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 73.

13. p. 462.

14. “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 129-49, esp. p. 131.

15. As often, Shakespeare has added confusion where his source is clear. This speech follows North's Plutarch especially closely; in North, however, it is clearly the people who devour, the nobles who suffer it. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), Vol. 5, pp. 453-563, esp. pp. 527-28.

16. Of course, unlike violence, silence can draw focus onstage only if others point to it. We first see Virgilia in the company of two highly talkative women, both focused on influencing her, and it is this context that immediately marks her as a silence. Significantly, we never see her outside of this context. For Martius, Virgilia is a stable object; but for the audience she is never fully separable from the women who surround her. Accordingly, when I refer to Virgilia as a presence onstage, it is with the understanding that Volumnia and Valeria are essential to draw our attention to that presence and are thus, in phenomenal terms, inseparable from it.

17. The holding of the hand is directly out of North: “And holding her hard by the right hande, oh mother, sayed he, you have wonne a happy victorie for your countrie …” (Bullough, p. 541). This fact argues for Shakespeare's authorship of at least this stage direction, especially since the relationship between this direction and North's text is characteristic of Shakespeare's manipulations of North elsewhere in the play. Where North's description is active and flowing, this stage direction is arresting and static, disrupting our sense of cause and effect. In this it is much like Shakespeare's transformation of Martius' address to Aufidius, discussed above, where North's clear and direct narrative has been rendered confusing and grammatically circular.

18. Brockbank, note to 5.3.163, p. 295.