[In the following essay, Jagendorf relates the play's rhetoric of war to the fractured nature of the political body in Coriolanus, showing that the aristocratic class is associated with wholeness and fullness, compared to the fragmentation and emptiness which characterizes references to the Roman citizenry.]

Political thinking and, consequently, writing about politics have traditionally made use of certain master tropes that remain constant in principle even when the nature and content of political discourse change. At the foundation of Western political thought, for instance, is the trope of the dialectical relationship between man in the state of nature (that is, man fending for himself and caring for the propagation of his species) and man in the domain of culture (that is, man in the embrace of community, of polis, of an organism that, ideally, is himself writ large, but that also dominates him, subjecting him to a necessity beyond the easily graspable one of his own needs and instincts).

Among the archetypal scenes of politics are those that reveal the reverberation between these poles of unity and fragmentation, wholeness and separation. Achilles sulking in his tent, the tribes of Israel retreating after the death of Solomon, the Roman plebs leaving the city for the Mons Sacra in the time of Coriolanus, the secession to the tennis court in prerevolutionary France: we recognize in such historical and fictional scenes ur-configurations of political intercourse. An organism purporting to be a whole (a kingdom, a republic, a military expedition, an assembly) splits into parts, revealing itself to be an uneasy association of warlords, a hierarchy of classes, or a tenuous alliance of tribes. Politics is about division more than it is about unity. But the discourse of politics (as opposed to the history of political action), a discourse that occupies a rhetorical space between the opposing poles of fragmentation and wholeness, exploits the resources of both extremes, deriving as much energy from images of wholeness and totality as it does from the language of dismemberment and fission.

Political writings that attempt to analyze and describe the phenomena of the great wealth-creating and labor-exploiting industrial cities of the nineteenth century inevitably grapple with a spectacle of pervasive division. The city (London, Manchester, Paris) is a mass of people living in close proximity, but the people are separated from each other by great barriers of money and class. In Capital Marx quotes a London newspaper that describes not a riot or a rebellion but quotidian urban life during a severe economic depression in 1867:

A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis. … Next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw, cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people.¹

The property-respecting, bourgeois newspaper that Marx quotes uses figures of proximity (“next door,” “cheek by jowl”) to convey the shame aroused in even the most passive observer by such glaring inequity. Marx himself uses the syntax of opposition to lay bare the workings of an industrial economy that accumulates wealth for the capitalist at the expense of the worker:

The object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working-day during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist.

(p. 321)

“Shorten” is here paired with “lengthen” to mark the assertion that the increased effort of the laborer produces only the increased profit of the owner. Both Marx and the anonymous journalist who describes the London slums imagine a social space (city, factory) in which economic laws divide the hungry from the sated with the finality of God the Father separating the saved from the damned on the Day of Judgment. But whereas in the divine order Heaven and Hell are separate and independent, in the economic order the heaven of one class is made out of the hell suffered by the other. Plenty is then a function of dearth, and Marx's keen, quantifying intellect exposes the engineering of a fragmented society in which the division of the laborer's time into part for his wage and part for the owner's profit deepens the worker's poverty as it increases the owner's wealth.

Most political writing has imagined society simultaneously as whole, a complete organism, and as divided, fragmented. Even when the analysis emphasizes division, as Marx's does, the analysis could not function without the enabling metaphor or framing idea of a complete body: division is meaningless without a grounding in wholeness. The concept of “the whole” may be quasi-scientific when it uses a measure such as “the market,” but the discourse of totality in politics tends to be neither scientific nor pragmatic. When articulated in energetic, ambitious ways, it tends to be utopian, looking forward (or backward) to an ideal state of affairs such as the Rule of the Saints or communism, ideal states in which contradictions disappear and society, cured of division, becomes a whole body, a perfect community.

In Act 2 of The Tempest, Gonzalo's dream of a paradisal commonwealth envisions the disappearance of all distinction and division:

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none.

(2.1.156-58)²

Even work would disappear, its place filled by the mellifluous music of laziness: “… all men idle, all” (l. 160).

Gonzalo's commonwealth is a version of a utopian state made possible by the discovery of the New World; he imagines European man beginning again. But Shakespeare's aristocrat/warrior of the history plays, rooted in the feudal relations of an old world undergoing drastic change, also has his dream of wholeness. John of Gaunt on his deathbed in Richard II magisterially summons up the memory of a self-enclosed world within a world: “This earth of majesty … / This happy breed of men, this little world …” (2.1.41, 45). Gaunt's authoritative “This,” like Gonzalo's confident “all,” points to a political entity understood to be a perfect symbiosis between a motherland and a ruling caste. “This England” (l. 50), apparently such a confident, defining phrase, derives its strength, but also its weakness, from what it leaves out. For Gaunt the integrity of the ruling caste means the integrity of the kingdom. But already the monarch is busy “farm[ing] out” the “royal realm” (1.4.44), and the future holds out a spectacle of “these Englands” that is the fragmentation of the English into warring parties, pressed soldiers, bands of robbers—in other words, mortal men competing for a name or wealth or power or whatever goal they might use to justify their aggressions.

I

The opposing discourses of wholeness and fragmentation are present throughout Shakespeare's political theatre, both English and Roman. Rome is Shakespeare's well-equipped, sharply lit laboratory for research into the nature of politics. Not being England, the Roman political system lends itself to the kind of cold, unsentimental analysis that could not be practiced on one's own system. Rome is no demi-paradise. It boasts no hereditary monarchs; indeed, its founding acts include rebellion and regicide. Most important of all, Rome's land bears no mystery; metaphors of wholeness and sanctity are not “natural” here as they are in England. Rome is a city of men and women, a cultural construct suggesting a lucid, often geometric architecture of forum, street, villa, gate, and battlefield. In this setting a political drama is played out subordinating all other interests to itself. Its major features are oratory, debate, parades, public assemblies, and scenes of persuasion. In Coriolanus the factor that outweighs the others is the hatred between ruling class and common people in a city at war.

Although Coriolanus may be one of Shakespeare's most politically naive characters, he is the protagonist of a play that is hugely, indeed grotesquely, political. It starts in Rome with a riot over bread and ends in Antium with the assassination of a general in the middle of a parade. The action gains much of its driving force from the twin motives of class hatred and war. Indeed, war in this play may be seen as Rome's only non-political activity. War, for Rome, is a kind of relief, in the form of fighting others, from the obsessive rigors of internal strife.

My question of the play is not what makes Coriolanus run (or, electorally speaking, what makes it so hard for him to run)—although this is a fascinating question and one put by Plutarch when he draws attention to Coriolanus' lack of a father and therefore of a model of reason and restraint.³ However, as psycho-history it is only tangentially related to my major question, which is “Why is the presence of the body and the impression of the body's language so prominent in this play?” The physical is inescapable in this most unerotic of plays; everywhere we encounter legs, arms, tongues, scabs, scratches, wounds, mouths, teeth, voices, bellies, and toes together with such actions as eating, vomiting, starving, beating, scratching, wrestling, piercing, and undressing.

One answer would be: War. The body language of battle is the language of body counts, the description of wounds, and the naming of limbs. Ever since the Iliad, the poetry of war has included catalogues of the physique and the wounds of the dying and of the victors. But the body language of Coriolanus is so insistent, especially in scenes of political controversy, that an argument for this language as merely another example of this poetic convention is insufficient. More is going on than the natural flow of language from blows on the field to insults in the forum. Indeed, the language of body is so vivid in the play that one might be drawn to understand it in the terms of a carnivalesque kind of physicality emanating from the people. That grotesque richness of expression was certainly available to Shakespeare. Bakhtin finds it in Rabelais and describes memorably the grotesque body as a body

never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world.⁴

In Bakhtin's drama of the grotesque body, lines that normally divide are blurred; sex and mouth, anus and belly exist in a fluid continuum. This is an optimistic, populist body that makes even insult serve abundance. Dismemberment is here a means of multiplication.

In Coriolanus a low language of cursing, insult, and scorn also obsessively dismembers the body, separating arms, legs, mouths, eyes, and belly in a recurring synecdochal pattern. But the political economy of this play is characterized by hunger and dearth rather than by Rabelaisian abundance. The tropes of dismemberment (synecdoche) in a context of class hatred and of competition for power based on a shortage of food speak of a body politic at war with itself. The play's rhetoric makes us see the body politic as chopped up into grotesquely independent limbs and organs that refuse to become a complete body even though political orthodoxy says that this is what they must do. In the light of the insistent synecdoche, or naming of parts, the foundations of the traditional trope of the whole, healthy body appear shaky. The trope may be seen in this play to be a rhetorical construct promoted by the rulers to keep the hungry plebs subservient and to persuade them to accept the inevitability of their hunger and powerlessness.⁵

The play is unique in Shakespeare's oeuvre in opening with a violent crowd scene, a bread riot that historical research has shown would not have been unfamiliar to Shakespeare's audience. But I do not want to make an issue of context; rather I want to show how the language of the rebellious citizen in the first long speech of the play sets out the terms of the dialectic by means of which the topic of the fragmented body may be interpreted:

SECOND Citizen
One word, good citizens.
FIRST Citizen
We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. 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 particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes. …

(1.1.13-22)

Division—the division of food and that of class—controls this surprisingly articulate, even elegant speech. As is common in highly politicized argument, the most familiar and conventional phrases become charged with the polarities of controversy. “Good citizens” is thus unsayable because the facts of hunger have redistributed the conventional adjectives. The First Citizen's speech sets out, both in its imagery of fat and thin bodies and in its antithetical syntax, the quite horrifying economics of the famine. As in Marx's analysis of the workshop, the abundance enjoyed by one class is measured by the hunger of the other (if not directly created by it). So at the very start of the play, the First Citizen makes clear the reality underlying the body-politic trope. The fat and the thin are indeed interdependent, but they are tied to each other by the cruelty of the market and not by bonds of community. The body trope is therefore closer to cannibalism (“If the wars eat us not up, they will” [ll. 83-84]) than it is to the mystique of a healthy, natural system.

A traditionalist critic of the play would have it that 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.”⁶ This is wishful thinking, for there is no place for the “great natural order” in the politically circumscribed cultural order of this play, in which the metaphor of the body politic becomes a trope of fragmentation. The body images are grotesque (pace Bakhtin) precisely because they lack any foundation in a valid concept of wholeness and are therefore split into unruly shapes and forms.

Menenius' well-known parable of the limbs' rebellion against the belly for holding the food and doing no work (ll. 93-153) could be read as a test case. Here an aristocrat who has the common touch argues for the absurdity of rebellion and for the interdependence of the several members of the body politic. Parable is a form of speech that can seduce an audience with a set of figures and tropes that entertain yet lead to a predetermined conclusion. Menenius' parable has a strange fate: it invites skepticism both because of its obvious parti-pris and because of its clear failure to achieve its goal of convincing a hungry crowd to go home. There is nothing so naked as failed rhetoric, and Menenius' picture of the altruistically digesting belly sending out nourishment to the carnal economy, leaving itself only the bran, verges on the grotesque, as detailed body tropes tend to do. The aristocrat wants to have it both ways—to talk a gross, popular language and to make his audience accept his view of the body as a map of benevolently authoritarian politics.⁷

The citizen who answers Menenius has his own gravely phrased lexicon of politico-corporeal metaphors—“… the arm our soldier, / Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter” (ll. 114-15)—and they lay claim to a different interpretation of the body, an interpretation that stresses function rather than subservience, action rather than dependence, and, instead of Menenius' horizontal topography of storehouses, rivers, and offices centered on the belly, it posits a vertical model in which head, eye, heart, tongue, and leg cooperate in a common enterprise, restrained only by the guts at the bottom “Who is the sink o'th' body” (l. 119).

Each side in this argument makes metaphors out of limbs, and the result is a foregrounding of the fragment at the expense of the whole. But the aristocrat does this most aggressively: “What do you think, / You, the great toe of this assembly?” (ll. 152-53) asks Menenius of the First Citizen, setting the keynote for the body tropes in the whole play. The organic metaphor of body, reduced to the small change of this grotesque and demeaning synecdoche, cannot retain its cohesive force. If we could, because of the humor, entertain the fable of the smiling and negotiating belly, we cannot take seriously a thinking toe. The figure has become quickly cancerous, proliferating, and out of control. Too many signifiers are chasing too few signifieds, and that is a sure sign of economic trouble.

St. Paul's classic deployment of the body/member topos in 1 Corinthians 11 and 12 is instructive as a comparison of how the tropes of division are handled when the community is called ecclesia rather than polis.⁸ The question of hierarchy is settled in the first several verses of Chapter 11—“But I would have you knowe, that the head of euery man is Christ: and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God”—yet there are certain things in common between the state of Shakespeare's Rome and Paul's Corinth. “Schism” and “division” are recurring words in Paul's letter. The community is an unruly one: “For first of all when yee come together in the Church, I heare that there be diuisions among you” (11:18). Strangely enough, this division is marked most strongly in the ritual of the Lord's Supper. Instead of a decorous ceremony, there is pushing and shoving: “For in eating, euery one taketh before other, his owne supper: and one is hungry, and an other is drunken” (11:21). But unlike the real hunger of Shakespeare's crowd, there is no famine in Corinth. Hunger can be satisfied at home. Eat at home, says Paul, so that the Lord's Supper may be an orderly ceremony. Yet that benign solution cannot do away with the underlying cause of division among the faithful. The subtext of these chapters is the question of equality in the community. Not all are equal; some have spiritual gifts, others do not. Some prophesy, speak in tongues, work miracles; others do not. So Paul marshals the body trope in Chapter 12, making use of all its grotesque power to put jealousy and envy in their place:

For the body is not one member, but many. … And if the eare shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body: If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing: If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling. …

(14, 16-17)

Christian commentators have pointed out that, unlike Menenius' fable in Rome, this is not about food. There is no belly in Paul's rhetoric. But the nutritional basis of his argument is still undeniable. The logic for the believer's acceptance of inequality in the division of gifts is set out in Chapter 11:

… the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, tooke bread: And when he had giuen thanks, he brake it, and sayd, Take, eate, this is my body, which is broken for you.

(23-24)

The original division then is of Christ's body, a body that provides a store of never-depleted nourishment. On the basis of this division, which is the source of an infinite treasure of gifts, Paul can confidently risk the polemic of fragments.⁹ Eye, foot, hand, and ear are ultimately restrained not by the logic and need of the human organism but, paradoxically, by the broken soma Christou.

Yet while inequality of distribution is not glossed over, and Paul maintains that the body's lower (sexual?) parts be given due honor, this remains the weak link in his argument. He writes that

… those members of the bodie, which seeme to bee more feeble, are necessary. And those members of the bodie, which wee thinke to bee lesse honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour, and our uncomely parts haue more abundant comelinesse. For our comely parts haue no need: but God hath tempered the bodie together, hauing giuen more abundant honour to that part which lacked.

(12:22-24)

But how has God given honor to those parts of the body that lack it? Is such compensation visible in how we treat and dress the body? Do our “uncomely parts” have “more abundant comeliness?” The answer may well lie in the primitive Christianity of pagan Lear when he contemplates the shelter offered him by the Fool: “The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious” (3.2.70-71). But Paul, writing to the young church of Corinth, was more interested in organization than in revolution; order was more important to him than the exaltation of humility.

II

To continue my argument: I would like to distinguish between two focuses on the body in Coriolanus. One is the body of the people, the other the body of the hero. Much depends on how we interpret their interaction. Both are prominent features of the play's spectacle. The crowd—the citizens in the street and marketplace, the common soldiers on the battlefield—is a constant feature of the action. We hear their shouts on and offstage. We are encouraged to imagine them jostling for space in the victory parades, and we both see and hear them in the mob scenes of the expulsion and the assassination. Their rhythmic shouting, both in Rome and in Antium (“It shall be so, it shall be so,” “He killed my son! My daughter!”) accompanies the violent action like the heavily accented rhythms of the people at the climactic moments of the Bach Passions. They are the many-headed multitude, a babble of voices, a mass of limbs, monstrous in their multiplication.

Ranged against this common body in the economy of the play is the single, isolated, discrete body of the man who stands alone, the man who would claim to be all of one piece and even author of himself; Coriolanus. Wholeness is an aristocratic, not just a royal, fantasy. The absolute monarch says “L'état c'est moi,” making the wholeness of his body the ground for the totality and health of the state. But absoluteness is not only for kings. The aristocrat, as the observed of all observers, moves in an orbit of perfection, whether it is perfection of beauty, manners, military prowess, or dress. Distinction and excellence are truly aristocratic traits insofar as they are innate, coming with the blood rather than with individual effort. The aristocrat is a narcissist by class, although, unlike Narcissus, he imagines himself complete and self-sufficient. Coriolanus is positioned between an aristocratic fantasy of wholeness and the despised, fragmented carnality of the mass. The people are, in his words, shreds, fragments, scabs. Their breath stinks and they gather junk on the battlefield: “Cushions, leaden spoons, / Irons of a doit” (1.6.5-6). Metonymy and synecdoche are employed in his rhetoric to express an aristocratic contempt for contingency and dependence, indeed for desire, be it desire for food, for spoils, for a voice, or for a vote.

Set opposite the base ranks of those who want things is the man whose fantasy it is to be dependent on nothing, to be simply a sign of what he is, a kind of tautology.¹⁰ Cominius knows this, and so addresses him before the victorious Roman army: “Therefore, I beseech you—/ In sign of what you are, not to reward / What you have done—before our army hear me” (1.10.25-27). Ideally he is a verb with no object, a model of intransitive action. The emblem of this self-sufficiency is Coriolanus fighting alone in the enemy city with its gates shut behind him and his own army outside. As a trope this is the opposite of plebeian synecdoche. The kind of synecdoche we have seen foregrounds a grotesquely isolated part of the body; here, the solitary hero makes the entire enemy city a part of himself. He takes its name (Corioli), he engages it in a language of blows—“He is himself alone / To answer all the city” (1.5.22-23)—and he can presumably say, when it is all over, “La ville c'est moi.”

The people are empty while Coriolanus is full. This is both a statement about stomachs at the beginning of the play and a generalization about the difference between aristocrat and plebs. Because they are empty, they act in order to appease their hunger for food, for spoils, for a voice. Because he is full or, in more speculative language, because he is created essentially by means of a rhetoric of self-sufficiency and self-sustainment, his actions, military and civil, call for scrutiny. What are they for? What makes him work? Looked at from an economic point of view, the language of labor and its reward gives us contradictory answers. On the one hand, Coriolanus' labor, his military prowess, is self-rewarding. As the First Citizen says of him in the first scene, “he pays himself with being proud” (l. 31). This evokes an economic absurdity, though perfect for an aristocrat. It suggests a form of self-employment, a self-supporting activity in which pride is an inexhaustible form of wealth, both capital and wages. On the other hand, in Volumnia's eyes Coriolanus' work is far from self-rewarding. For her, in a shocking image, the intrepid soldier becomes the lowest kind of agricultural laborer, a wage slave. She imagines Coriolanus on the battlefield:

                                                                                          His bloody brow
With his mailed hand then wiping, forth he goes,
Like to a harvest-man that's tasked to mow
Or all or lose his hire.

(1.3.36-39)

This soldier-mower is employed by a very hard taskmaster, and he is subjected to the cruelest of wage conditions, which reduce the heroic challenge of all or nothing (victory or death) to a slave's choice between exhaustion and hunger. Volumnia cannot entertain the possibility that her son may fail. The hero's birthright is to take all. But the possibility of “nothing” may not be ignored, especially when that absurdity, the aristocrat-laborer, must receive his hire and salary from that political oddity, the plebeian employer.

Two kinds of metaphor are used to describe Coriolanus in the play. Often he is imagined in a symbolism of wholeness (“A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art, / Were not so rich a jewel” [l.5.26-27]); at other times he is imagined as an instrument. At a key moment in the play, for example, he is likened to a sword (l.7.76¹¹). Remembering the prevalence of synecdoche, we might take this as a demeaning image, another “part” in a play overloaded with fragments and lacking a body. But the killing instrument, stiff, sharp, and bearing no burden of consciousness, is appropriate as a figure for that aspect of Coriolanus' labor in which heroic action is its own end and contingent on nothing. “O' me alone, make you a sword of me?” (l. 76) is Coriolanus' cry to the massed soldiers, following the Folio stage direction “They … take him vp in their Armes and cast vp their Caps.” Because metamorphosis into sword serves the impossible ideal of an absolute instrumentality that is innocent of consciousness, it makes possible the kind of activity that is its own end. As Cominius, the man who knows him best, says about Coriolanus the soldier, he “rewards / His deeds with doing them, and is content / To spend the time to end it” (2.2.127-29). Other soldiers pick up spoils on the field of battle; Coriolanus, disdaining any reward outside the deed itself, is the hero of a one-man economy that boldly distinguishes itself from the market and the getting, spending, exchanging of ordinary men.

But the political pressures of this play will not allow Coriolanus to avoid the market.¹² Doing is not per se in a world of rewards, honors, and contests for office. The aristocrat may desire to be simply a sign of what he is, but the logic of action in the world subjects him to the hated commercial practice of tit for tat or reward for what you have done rather than for what you are.

Coriolanus is surprisingly like the narcissistic young man addressed in the first group of Shakespeare's sonnets. “You shall not be / The grave of your deserving” (l.10.19-20), says Cominius, echoing the experienced voice in the sonnets that advises the young man to exploit his aristocratic gifts and invest in offspring instead of consuming himself in miserly isolation. To follow this advice, the young man in the sonnets must take a wife and accept the fact of his carnality as a shared nakedness; he must subject himself to the laws of economic and sexual exchange. Coriolanus, too, is urged toward subjection and investment. His hatred of politics, and of the common people who make it clear that politics is a form of exchange, is related to the play's fixation on the body. The weak link in Coriolanus' fantasy of separateness is a physical one, his body marked and scarred in battle for Rome.

Wounds are counters in the play in a grotesque way that mirrors the fragment imagery of Menenius' body metaphor. Coriolanus' wounds, like the belly and the limbs in the opening fable, have life in them: “they smart / To hear themselves remembered” (ll. 28-29); they might “fester 'gainst ingratitude” (l. 30); they are active and decorate the hero's body like some tribal tattoo. Above all, they are numbered counters of exchange in the political market:

MENENIUS
Where is he wounded?
VOLUMNIA
I'th' shoulder and i'th' left arm. There will be large cicatrices to show the people when he shall stand for his place. He received in the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i'th' body.
MENENIUS
One i'th' neck and two i'th' thigh—there's nine that I know.
VOLUMNIA
He had before this last expedition twenty-five wounds upon him.
MENENIUS
Now it's twenty-seven. Every gash was an enemy's grave.

(2.1.143-53)

Again like the young man of the sonnets, Coriolanus is a pre-economic man. He fears and hates the market. Just as the young man prefers to hoard his blood instead of investing it in “seed capital,” so Coriolanus is disgusted by the system of exchange that would convert his deeds in battle into rewards, praise, and, worst of all, votes/voices of the common people. As an aristocrat whose motto is “Alone” and who will share neither corn nor power with the people, he is embarrassed by his wounds because, paradoxically, they mark his dependence on the people. Wounds are signs not of what he is but of what he has done. They tell stories and are interpretable. They are currency in a political/economic exchange that breeds votes in return for a certain amount of nakedness and verbal display in the marketplace. The Third Citizen puts the carnality of this exchange bluntly: “… if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (2.3.5-7). Coriolanus clearly cannot undergo the mouth-to-wound intimacy of such an exchange. He cannot bring himself to trade bits of his body (“Of wounds two dozen odd” [l. 128]) for bits of commoners' bodies, their voices.

In a memorable article D. J. Gordon has clarified both the Elizabethan relevance and intellectual significance of the term “voice.”¹³ In Elizabethan parliamentary politics electors meeting at the county court were asked to shout for their man; voting was indeed giving voice to one's choice. But Gordon goes on to show that in the classical literature about fame and glory there is unease about the way heroic reputation is dependent on the fickle opinions and voices of men. The appearance in 2 Henry IV of Rumour “painted full of tongues” underlines the connection between fame and the irresponsible, undiscriminating noise made by “the still-discordant wav'ring multitude” (Induction, l. 19). Vox, then, is both a responsible political act, a vote, and air blown ignorantly through the people's pipe. Coriolanus, standing in the forum to undergo the ritual of candidacy, speaks in a savage parody of market language when he proposes the exchange of heroic deeds for despised voices:

Here come more voices.
Your voices! For your voices I have fought,
Watched for your voices, for your voices bear
Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
I have seen and heard of for your voices, have
Done many things, some less, some more. Your voices!
Indeed I would be consul!

(2.3.125-31)

In this play, shouts, flourishes, and soldiers' cries are characteristic of the triumph scenes. This is indistinct noise and Coriolanus can live with it. But to the hero who would be a guarantor of his own worth and whose military language is self-explanatory, the political voice by means of which you individually speak for me is intolerable. The play does not allow us to hear “voice” simply as “vote.” It is inextricably entangled in body, in the common mouth and throat, in animal howling (“You common cry of curs” [3.3.124]), in teeth and tongues. Yet this stinking breath is, in Rome, capable of being counted and is decisive in conferring or revoking titles. Voice is thus both absurd and powerful. As a synecdoche of the common body, it is nothing when placed in relation to a wound signifying heroic deeds. But as a metaphor for a political act, it not only counts, it is counted. As fame it is a traditional goal for heroic endeavor. Coriolanus, refusing his assent to the metaphor, stays with the demeaning synecdoche.

By talking sarcastically of himself as a beggar troubling the poor (2.3.67-70), Coriolanus would like to see the transaction in the forum as a kind of absurd charity, as anything but trade, which is what the citizens understand it to be:

THIRD Citizen
You must think if we give you anything we hope to gain by you.
CORIOLANUS
Well then, I pray, your price o'th' consulship?

(ll. 71-73)

The hated ritual of showing wounds and asking for votes is simultaneously public and intimate. Every citizen may exercise his right to speak to the hero directly and to question him in return for the citizen's vote. The physicality of the encounter is insisted on by the language of tongue, mouth, teeth, and scar, and by the spectacle of the hero dressed in the toga humilis, subjecting himself to the crowd's gaze. But this “nakedness” leads to no consummation. The display of wounds is promised, but they are never actually shown. Coriolanus' “strip” is a “tease,” and the customers have a right to feel cheated because they were tricked into committing their voices in return for the promise of a show of wounds.

The aristocrat, then, brought to the edge of the market to exchange wounds for voices, balks and saves his nakedness from becoming currency. He would rather starve, he says, “Than crave the hire which first we do deserve” (l. 114). Strange language, because both starvation and hire are features of plebeian rather than aristocratic life. But as Volumnia's simile of the farm laborer-hero has already suggested, labor and its reward or the denial of reward is a problem for this representative of the ruling class, who will serve Rome only as a form of self-service. Coriolanus, as the man alone, can only pay himself with his own pride or consume his own actions in an economy of one, an economy that denies exchange. The kind of exchange he can contemplate is primitive and pre-commercial, the kind that allows for a magical transformation of one whole self into another. So he says of Aufidius, the enemy, though his equal and mirror: “I sin in envying his nobility, / And were I anything but what I am, / I would wish me only he” (1.1.230-32). In this exchange, which the plot proceeds to carry out, there is no surrender of parts, no tit for tat. Instead “I am I” becomes “I am he” because he and I are of a kind.

Coriolanus is imaginable only by means of a discourse of the whole. Indeed, he is a criticism of such a rhetoric. To his solipsism, number itself is anathema because it is more than one, and the only number he can tolerate is the replication of himself in his class. His inability to exist outside this discourse of the whole underlies his horror of playing a part (the part of a politic or “pleasant” man) in front of the people in the marketplace. The self-fragmentation of acting, like the making of commodities out of wounds, goes against the very grain of his nature: “To th' market-place. / You have put me now to such a part which never / I shall discharge to th' life” (3.2.104-6). Unlike a whole gallery of Shakespeare's two-faced politicians, this soldier cannot teach his body deceiving gestures because (like the anti-theatrical Plato) he is afraid that the false action will infect the mind:

                                                                      I will not do't,
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
And by my body's action teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.

(ll. 120-23)

The primacy of body in this formulation of the body/mind relation should not be unexpected in this play. It is a version of the body-politic analogy of the first scene. In Menenius' fable the body is by nature politic, being a system built around a belly. But in the marketplace Coriolanus' body resists becoming politic because that would mean possession by a lie and the surrender by each organ of its true nature:

Away, my disposition; and possess me
Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turned,
Which choired with my drum, into a pipe
Small as an eunuch or the virgin voice
That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glasses of my sight!

(ll. 111-17)

If Menenius' political body flourishes by way of a fake ideology of give and take between the belly and the other limbs and organs, Coriolanus' unpolitic body cannot tolerate any division into parts. As Aufidius says, “Not to be other than one thing” (4.7.42) is his fate. It is also the fantasy of an unpolitical ruler. His enemy, Sicinius, the people's tribune, puts it well: “Where is this viper / That would depopulate the city and / Be every man himself?” (3.1.263-65). The logic of being only one thing is totalitarian but absurdly so, for it makes rule possible only in a city made a desert.

Our impossible hero dies, so the text tells us, in the “market-place” (5.6.3) of a city that mirrors his own, but it is a flat mirror uncharacterized by detail of politics or class. The marketplace in which he dies is the twin of the arena in Rome where he failed to trade his wounds for voices and turn his reputation into liquid assets. What is more, the man so characterized by his effort to be “not … other than one thing” is stabbed to death as the people shout “Tear him to pieces!” (l. 121). In the economy of the play, pieces are the base currency that makes exchange possible. The shout of the Volscians, “Tear him to pieces!” is not just a cry of revenge; it represents the triumph of number over singularity, of the limbs over the belly, of the spread of power over its concentration.

Unable to accept the laws of exchange, Coriolanus chooses change, and that is what the closing action of the play examines. The change of exile and the choice of Antium are not as drastic as they seem. Rome and Antium are not opposites like Rome and Egypt. Aufidius is no Cleopatra. By “servanting” himself to the Volscians, who apparently have no plebeians with stinking breaths, and no trade unions, Coriolanus can make a paradoxical and absurd gesture of autonomy. Servant to his mirror/opposite, Aufidius, he can create the illusion of another self even more alone than the first because denuded of all customary, natural ties. Here is a man with no past, no family, no country, no name. “He was a kind of nothing, titleless” (5.1.13), says Cominius after seeing him in the enemy camp. Shakespeare recalls the terrible music of Tamburlaine's inhuman consistency when Coriolanus' former commander describes the hero's immobility and his statuesque, locked-in power as he sits in wait for the fall of Rome: “I tell you, he does sit in gold, his eye / Red as 'twould burn Rome, and his injury / The jailer to his pity” (ll. 63-65). But Tamburlaine had no mother to deal with. He was more truly than Coriolanus a self-made man, more convincingly an author of himself. Tamburlaine kills his son and surely would have killed his mother had she stood in the way of his consistency. But the thematics of that play are not political.

Any attempt at a politically weighted analysis of Coriolanus must admit its limits when asked to contemplate the spectacle of a son claiming to be author of himself and denying instinct as his mother bows down before him. Coriolanus, we know, was made not by himself, not by his class or economic laws, but was framed in a womb. The claim that his body has changed since he left his home—“These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome” (5.3.38)—is revealed, in a telling metaphor, as false: “Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part, and I am out / Even to a full disgrace” (ll. 40-42). In Rome's market he could not force his body to act a part; part itself was anathema. Here in the camp outside the city, he cannot maintain the part of the self-authored man. To admit that the self-authored man is “a part” is an absurdity. He must be a whole; both maker and made, writer and thing written, seamless. The play is an enactment of the failure of this ideology as the hubris of a class and the nemesis of a man.

III

This essay began with a consideration of division in the body politic, of the rending of the cloak of society and its tearing into fragments. It ends with the spectacle of an absurdly unpolitical man inviting the crowd of his former victims and present masters to destroy him, saying, “Cut me to pieces” (5.6.112). The drama of the fragmented body haunts this play in ways that clarify the difference between the concerns of tragedy and those of political theatre. The torn body of the hero is a powerful tragic emblem. It is a violent yet therapeutic spectacle, like sacrifice. In the rituals of sacrifice, the animal is often split into pieces before the offering, as Abram in Genesis 15 tears apart the heifer, goat, and ram before composing himself to await God's sign in the darkness. I take the sacrificial tearing, both of the tragic hero and the animal, to be a successful working through of violence, both our own and that we attribute to the gods. The torn victim's body spread out before God or the gods is, in real or symbolic terms, food that will nourish the society that makes this ritual part of its history. Hippolytus becomes the source of a cult; the God who ordered Abram to prepare the sacrifice promises his seed a land to inherit. Thus the bloody fragments of sacrifice are transformed into a comforting whole, a coherent tradition of cult or community.

In Coriolanus the thematics of politics overshadow those of tragedy, and the body cut to pieces remains an obstinately secular final image. No nourishment can issue from these fragments, and no promise of any coherence that outlives the body is inscribed in them. The hunger of the people for bread, which was so blatantly the opening motif of the play, may have been sated in terms of plot, but it has been replaced by the protagonist's unappeased hunger for revenge, which, in turn, is finally transmuted into a hunger for self-destruction. That such a hunger is satisfied at the end affords the spectator no comfort, only food for thought.

Notes

1. Capital, ed. F. Engels, 3 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957-1960), Vol. 1, 670.

2. All citations from Shakespeare are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).

3. Plutarch's Lives, 10 vols., trans. Bernadette Perrin (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1914), Vol. 4. Plutarch writes of the dangers of a lack of discipline to a generous and noble nature and compares the results to a “rich soil deprived of the husbandman's culture” (p. 119).

4. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 317.

5. In “Lenten butchery: legitimation crisis in Coriolanus” (Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. [New York and London: Methuen, 1987], pp. 207-24) Michael D. Bristol argues for a plebs-centered reading of the play's dominant trope. Criticizing views that, mesmerized by Coriolanus, focus narrowly on his strengths or weaknesses as a leader and thus ignore the people's political culture, Bristol suggests that the body's language is a major vehicle for expressing the people's politics. The crowd and its speech are taken to represent an authentic political and social tradition that exists independently of the autocratic, martial model embodied in Coriolanus and refuses to be marginalized by it. Certainly the plebeians have a politics going back to the origins of republican Rome and are not the childish, malleable rabble shown so often on the stage. However, the major significance of the body trope, I would say, is less to characterize the plebeian political and social alternative than to generalize the state of social fragmentation enacted in a specific case on the stage and to isolate the lonely figure whose withheld body is the subject of so much attention (and would be so, I think, even in the most determinedly Brechtian production).

6. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 371.

7. Marx cites Menenius' fable as a prophecy of the fractionalization of work in the machine shop that turns the worker into a fragment of his own body (p. 360). He sees Menenius' rhetoric of fragments not as an argument for hierarchy but as an indication of how specific limbs become isolated and exploited in the interests of efficient production (cf. Chaplin's hands in the assembly-line sequences of Modern Times).

8. All biblical quotations refer to the King James Bible (London: Imprinted by Robert Barker, 1611).

9. Bristol cites Paul as an example of propaganda for an organic view of society (p. 213), but his concern is not with the vitality of the fragments in this rhetoric or with how it is kept in check in political or religious discourse.

10. See Janet Adelman, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, eds. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 129-49. I am indebted to Adelman's analysis of Coriolanus' horror of dependence. My attempt here is to look at that pattern of behavior in the light of economics and politics rather than that of gender and psychoanalysis.

11. In most editions the reference is 1.6.76.

12. Jean-Christophe Agnew's remarkable study of relations between the threatre and the market, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), traces the connections between new forms of liquidity in monetary transactions and the secular theatre with its emphasis on the transitory nature of personality and its delight in shifting shapes (pp. 11-12). Agnew contrasts the medieval marketplace, an actual location where goods were displayed and exchanged, with the seventeenth-century model, less a location than an expression of the fluidity of the cash economy. Coriolanus, I would add, is odd man out in all markets, the later one for reasons that I give in my essay, the earlier one because even the simpler forms of exchange are incompatible with his more primitive need to live in an economy of one. For other comments on Coriolanus and the market, see Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 72-74. Eagleton sees a conflict between Coriolanus' ideology of self and the framework of exchange that dominates the culture of Shakespeare's audience. For Eagleton, Coriolanus, the type of the bourgeois individualist par excellence, is ahead of rather than behind the times. I see him more as a dinosaur than a Henry Ford prototype.

13. “Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 203-19.