SOURCE: Givan, Christopher. “Shakespeare's Coriolanus: The Premature Epitaph and the Butterfly.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 143-58.

[In the following essay, Givan traces the sources of Coriolanus's self-destructive behavior.]

The question of who Coriolanus is has become a critical stumbling block to understanding the play.¹ The prevailing critical opinion chooses to deal with the hero's enigmatic character by oversimplifying him. G. Wilson Knight's view is still typical: “He is rather like a finely modelled motor-cycle, flashing in bright paint and steel, every line suggesting power and speed, standing among a row of pedal-bicycles.”² Operating here is what might be called the tendency towards reification, whereby the hero is regarded as a thing, an instrument, or as Knight calls him later on a “fighting machine.” Eugene Waith's³ treatment of the play ascribes to the hero more vitality but finally acquiesces in the dehumanizing tendency by considering him as a species of Herculean hero. Oscar Campbell⁴ notes the odd tone of mockery and bitterness in this play and like an able taxidermist tags it “satiric tragedy.” No doubt there is an important degree of truth in these views of the hero as something other than human, but Shakespeare, at the height of his powers, has managed not to divest himself of his psychological insight but rather to portray his hero in a more indirect objective manner. It may also appear that Knight's tendency to reify the hero is shared by Coriolanus' own associates and that this play is as much concerned with an indirect portrayal of a personality as it is with the mechanics of dehumanization which a society resorts to as a means of dealing with its heroes.

The play is constructed to portray the hero externally through his relationship primarily to the Roman mob. Two questions seem to me most useful in considering the hero's identity and the nature of his society. Why does Coriolanus hate the mob? Is Coriolanus a self-destructive character?

Coriolanus hates the mob for at least four reasons. (1) He considers them “children”; (2) he despises their fickleness; (3) he regards them as nonhuman, as beasts or “fragments”; (4) he thinks of them as mere “numbers.” These four motivations are expressed in various verbal and dramatic patterns in the play. The reason behind all of Coriolanus' fierce scorn for the mob lies in the way the mob represents precisely those aspects which Coriolanus fears in himself. He dies fighting against being called “boy”; (2) he repeatedly rages at being called a “traitor”; (3) he is treated as a “thing,” a blunt instrument; and (4) as the mob is valued by him merely for its “numbers” in war and votes in peacetime, so Coriolanus himself is esteemed for the number of wounds he has won. In the mob Coriolanus sees a reflection of himself and sees an image of all the things he most despises and most fears he might become. With society's help, he does become many of these nightmare versions of himself, and his life is finally determined by being his mother's boy, by being inconstant first to Rome and then to the Volsces, by being regarded only as a thing, only by being merely a chief number among many numbers whose own identity has been eclipsed in his public name.

Coriolanus' consistent hatred and scorn for the general populace of Rome gives his character essential coloration. He defines himself by his loathing of everything he takes the mob to be:

He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs,
That like nor peace nor war?
                                                                                                                        Your virtues is
To make him worthy whose offense subdues him
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate.

(I.i.168-70, 175-78)⁵

Coriolanus' idea of selfhood and integrity depends on understanding himself to be different from the mob and from the qualities he associates with them. That he considers the multitude to be childish becomes clear from his political opposition to their being given any voice in the government. “Have I had the children's voices?” (III.i.30) he sneers at one point. Compelled by his mother to speak softly to the mob whom he has offended Coriolanus fears that such meekness will mean that “schoolboys' tears take up / The glasses of my sight!” (III.ii.116-17). Coriolanus despises the citizens for presenting a version of the child in himself. In his last moments he strikes out at Aufidius because he is twice called “boy.”

But the mob is fickle as well as childish and Aufidius' second epithet which so provokes the hero is “traitor.” Coriolanus' first speech, quoted above, attacks the people for being “no surer, no, / Than is the coal of fire upon the ice” (I.i.173-74); yet he himself deserts his city and mounts an army against it. In attacking Rome he is violating his own constancy and oath-keeping, an obsession which is underscored by these warlike words to Aufidius: “I'll fight with none but thee, for I do hate thee / Worse than a promise-breaker” (I.viii.1-2).

While the mob's childish fickleness represents much of what the hero fears in himself, the greatest fear of the death of his self is betrayed in the nonhuman attributes he projects onto the mob. Maurice Charney⁶ has noted the prevalence of animal imagery in the play, and many of these references to hares, dogs, wolves, and so forth come from Coriolanus as he rails against the nonhuman aspect of the populace. Lower still than animals in the chain of being are inanimate objects, and Coriolanus calls the mob “fragments”: “Go, get you home, you fragments!” (I.i.223); or he labels them as “Woolen vassals, things created / To buy and sell with groats” (III.ii.9). The play gives ample evidence that the people who surround Marcius call him a “thing” even more often than he names the people with nonhuman epithets.

This dehumanizing tendency continues when Cominius praises Marcius in battle: “He was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries” (II.ii.110-11). He is later called “a creeping thing” (V.iv.14), and “a thing made by some other Deity than nature” (IV.vi.91). Aufidius in welcoming Marcius to the Volscian side cries: “thou noble thing!” (IV.v.120).

The tendency for other characters to consider the hero as a “thing,” above or beneath humanity, may well be the most important factor in determining our perception of the hero. This undercurrent of dehumanization which flows through the play and, as noted above, is swelled by Coriolanus' own dehumanized view of the mob is all the more intriguing because it is linked to society's desire to praise and reward the hero. One passage in particular, from the first act, epitomizes this dialectical tendency to praise and to dehumanize the hero.

                                                                                                    O noble fellow!
Who sensibly outdares his senseless sword
And when it bows stand'st up! Thou art [lost](7)
Marcius! A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art,
Were not so rich a jewel. Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish, not fierce and terrible
Only in strokes, but with thy grim looks and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds
Thou mad'st thine enemies shake, as if the world
Were feverous and did tremble.

(I.v.53-62)

This premature epitaph shows a genuine admiration for Marcius even as it praises him in a manner that dehumanizes him. He does sound something like G. Wilson Knight's motorcycle. He is “noble” and “outdares” his unthinking and unfeeling sword but then he is described as being a sword. (In battle Marcius cries out: “Make you a sword of me” [I.vi.76], confirming this view others take of him.) Lartius wishes to signal Marcius' great worth as a soldier by asserting his value in quite material terms. A carbuncle, a red gem as big as Marcius, would not be worth as much. Although the passage begins by seeing Marcius as a person, it ends by viewing him as a collection of sound effects. There is a sleight-of-hand here since “not fierce and terrible / Only in strokes” (I.iv.58-59) prepares us to hear about his nonphysical attributes, but instead his grim looks and thunderlike sounds are celebrated.

Yet Coriolanus hates the mob not just because they represent the child's role, fickleness, the nonhuman identity of animal or thing; finally he hates them for being mere “numbers.” “'Tis odds beyond arithmetic” (III.i.244), cries Cominius when he urges the angered Marcius not to try to stand up against the citizenry. In one form or another Marcius' real struggle is not simply against numbers but against becoming a number himself. The mob dehumanized by Marcius to mere “voices” counts in a battle or in an election time for its numbers. In the war against Corioli, Marcius urges Titus to “take Convenient numbers to make good the city” (I.v.11-12). In the next scene he says he will choose “A certain number” (I.vii.80) to lead into battle. Sicinius explains that the aristocrats would rather see “dissentious numbers” (IV.vi.7) hungry in the streets than happy tradesmen. The description of the citizens as mere numbers gives the play part of its hardnosed plain texture. This mercantile sense also stems from the actual numbers used, and here it is Aufidius, recalling Shylock and Octavius Caesar, who seems best at counting. Antony, it will be remembered, felt there was beggary in the love that could be reckoned, whereas Octavius, always conscious of order and measurement, once begrudgingly gave orders for a victory party: “Feast the army; … they have earned the waste.” The contrast between an extravagant intemperate hero and his calculating moderate enemy which propelled much of the drama in Antony and Cleopatra also charges the dynamic here.

Volumnia, the hero's powerful mother, whose values are strikingly unmaternal, expresses herself constantly in the language of comparison and measurement. Her preference for public honor rather than private life seems in keeping with her curious belief that the spirit and its worth can be measured and stated in terms of proportion. In the scene where she and her daughter-in-law are sewing, this mental reckoning shows us that there is a beggary in her love.

I pray you daughter, sing or express yourself in a more comfortable sort. If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. When he was yet but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way; when, for a day of kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding; I, considering how honor would become such a person—that it was no better than picture-like to hang by th'wall, if renown made it not stir—was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.

(I.iii.1-18)

Values in this society can be expressed only in terms of proportionality. The Romans are troubled by their inability to measure accurately the worth of their hero or to order their own factional rivalries. The recurring words “weigh,” “esteem,” “worth” emphasize this preoccupation with measurement. Coriolanus himself attacks the mob for falsely valuing their time and being unable to appraise something according to its true worth. In the fifth scene of the play he scorns his soldiers for wasting their time gathering worthless loot from the fallen enemy instead of engaging in more combat:

See here these movers that do prize their hours
At a cracked drachma! Cushions, leaden spoons,
Irons of a croit, doublets that hangmen would
Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves,
Ere yet the fight be done, pack up. Down with them!

(I.v.1-5)

While Coriolanus finds in military activity an answer to the crisis of values which afflicts his society, others need to measure and reckon the spirit in terms as bald as those in Lartius' premature epitaph. Just as Marcius finds the mob to be less than human because they undervalue their hours, so, ironically, Lartius makes the hero he prizes inhuman by measuring his worth in such material terms.

Coriolanus is frequently so “esteemed” and his worth so measured. His mother especially practices a severe arithmetic of honor: “had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action” (I.iii.23-27). An actual counting of the hero's worth occurs when Menenius asks Volumnia where her son was 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 his last expedition twenty-five wounds upon him.
MENENIUS.
Now it's twenty-seven: every gash was an enemy's grave.

(II.i.152-61)

The ghoulish delight which Volumnia in particular takes in her son's numbered wounds emphasizes her impersonal preference for honor and public acclaim over private security. Coriolanus seems to resent the wound-counting, especially the notion that his wounds were won for political effect in a campaign. To his voters he sarcastically declares:

                                                                                Here come moe 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. …

(II.iii.130-35)

His last implication that for all the citizens know he may only be describing what he has heard of goes to the heart of his distrust for words and his preference for deeds that are not counted and measured. The citizens he addresses truly are numbers and have no names in the play, being called “First,” “Second,” and “Third” citizens. “Coriolanus,” however, is only the name society's leaders have given the hero when he refused to be paid in arithmetic and calculable goods.

After the battle of Corioli, Cominius wishes to signify society's debt to the hero by paying him.

                                                                                                                                  Of all the horses
Whereof we have ta'en good, and good store—of all
The treasure in this field achieved and city,
We render you the tenth. …

(I.ix.31-34)

Marcius firmly resists this offer:

                                                                                I thank you, general;
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword.

(I.ix.36-38)

Cominius persists, even asserting that to refuse a reward is the self-destructive act of a madman.

                                                                                                                                  By your patience,
If 'gainst yourself you be incensed, we'll put you
Like one that means his proper harm in manacles,
Then reason safely with you.

(I.ix.55-58)

Shakespeare wants Marcius to be seen as partly responsible for the death he goes to.

Marcius then is given his new public identity and loses his private name and along with it his ability to act as a private man. His reaction to this baptism is incongruously appropriate:

OMNES.
Caius Marcius Coriolanus!
CORIOLANUS.
I will go wash.

(I.ix.67-68)

The premature epitaph which so succinctly illustrated the society's need to dehumanize Marcius did not as successfully transform him into a public thing as did this rite of renaming. The thematic importance of this naming is immediately underscored by the brief scene which follows. Coriolanus, now a public figure, wishes to perform a private favor.

I sometime lay here in Corioles
At a poor man's house. He sued me kindly.
He cried to me; I saw him prisoner,
But Aufidius was within my view,
I request you
To give my poor host freedom.

(I.ix.82-87)

Although Cominius speedily grants the request, the act of private charity which sought to go beyond the public hostilities cannot be performed. Cominius asks, “Marcius, his name?” (I.ix.90). And Coriolanus, addressed by his former private name but functioning as the public self, replies, “By Jupiter, forgot!” (I.ix.90). Public men in Shakespeare often have to forfeit their private selves or must choose between the two, but it is peculiar to this play to see the same motif in such a low key. Coriolanus must present himself to Aufidius using the public name that he knows his ally will hate. Menenius repeatedly tries to use his own name as a password to gain access to the vengeful hero. To the watch he declares: “My name hath touched your ears: it is Menenius.” (V.ii.11); and “Prithee, fellow, remember my name is Menenius” (V.ii.29-30). Menenius' attempts to move Coriolanus by evoking their private love (“O my son, my son!” [V.ii.72]) fail and the watch mocks this failure of private bonds as a failure of his name. “Now, sir, is your name Menenius?” (V.ii.96).

The significant events of Coriolanus are partly determined by the hero's new name and by his attempts to fend off names which he dislikes and feels threatened by. Although society must bear much of the blame for bringing about the hero's transformation into a thing, a “noble thing” and finally into “a noble corse,” the text provocatively invites us to see within Coriolanus himself certain self-destructive tendencies.

Although Coriolanus instinctively resists accepting a bribe for his military exploits—a resistance which one general calls self-destructive—he allows the loss of self, which he fears, to take place. He struggles to preserve his identity but, as evidenced by his new name, he allows others to formulate its terms. Thus the struggle to preserve his new identity, his public name, leads to the death of his individual self. In the great scene with his mother (V.iii) she manipulates him both in terms of his public name and in terms of the continued existence of his pre-Coriolanus self. The fact that the first can exist only if he spares Rome seems small consolation since the second, his identity as boy and son, can be taken away from him if his mother withdraws it:

                                                                      but this certain,
If thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name
Whose repetition will be dogged with curses.

(V.iii.141-44)

She controls his public identity and can speak for history, and she also controls the pre-Coriolanus self by embracing her grandson and moving to return to Rome without Marcius, indeed denying that Marcius as a private person, her son, ever existed.

This boy, that cannot tell what he would have,
But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship,
Does reason our petition with more strength
Than thou hast to deny't. Come, let us go.
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioles, and his child
Like him by chance.

(V.iii.174-80)

Because he has allowed others, especially his mother, to define his identity, his struggle to maintain the integrity he values so highly can only run into defeat. Having become dependent on the labels uttered by others, he is fatally provoked when Aufidius calls him child and traitor.

In addition to the surrender of his name and the related power of self-definition, Coriolanus' self-destructive side is manifested in his self-fulfilling prophecies and perhaps in his unrelieved isolation. He initially declares that he hates the mob and would like to fight them, and this wish comes true. He admires Aufidius enormously and in part manipulates events so that he fights with and not against the Volscian leader.

                                                                                They have a leader,
Tullus Aufidius, that will put you to't.
I sin in envying his nobility;
And were I anything but what I am,
I would wish me only he.

(I.i.229-33)

Both the mob and Aufidius seem to be similar versions of a self Coriolanus hates and loves. The choreography of the play makes this clear; he begins hating the mob, but the Roman people are his ally and Aufidius the enemy. It then occurs that a less contradictory arrangement comes about so that he can fight the mob, whom he loathes, and join the Volscian leader, whom he admires. But the impossibility of a true alliance with Aufidius is enforced and made almost poignant by the homo-erotic terms in which such a friendship is envisioned. Aufidius welcomes Marcius to the Volsces:

                                                                                Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

(IV.v.117-22)

Coriolanus' isolation in the play seems particularly unrelieved since the friendship with Aufidius, expressed in such sexual terms here, soon leads to jealousy and betrayal. Once before in the play male friendship was expressed in similar terms; when Marcius joins Cominius on the battlefield he declares to him:

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

(I.vi.29-32)

The nature of male friendship and its attendant betrayals often occupied Shakespeare, but the theme here seems muted except that the hero's self-destructive tendencies seem reinforced by his failure to achieve a durable bond with any person or party. One effect of the two passages which conceive of friendship among generals in the private intimate terms of a wedding night is to juxtapose the public and private realms once again and to show the failure of private affection. But the play refuses to center itself on this theme alone and teasingly gives us the outline of a self-destructive hero who resembles in kind the previous Shakespearean heroes but who is a member of a society that is in large part responsible for his downfall.

The hero's cultivation of his own doom is partly offset by the hostile forces which surround him. The envy or, as H. D. F. Kitto calls it in Poiesis, the harmartia of the tribunes and of Aufidius are sufficiently evil forces to cause the hero's downfall. A recognition, then, of the society's obsessive and deadening need to measure the spirit suggests that the hero, in part at least, comes to his end as a victim of his society. This view recognizes the kinship between the hero and the mob, both of whom are treated in dehumanized ways by the organizing members of the society. According to this perspective the play portrays a society unable to order itself, resorting to labeling its hero for the sake of having a clear, simple, materialistically measurable category and finally, in a rather bloodthirsty manner, needing to bury its hero so it can praise him. A Coriolanus spent is a Coriolanus urned, whether in Corioli or in Rome: in Aufidius' words “he shall have a noble memory” (V.vi.154).

His sense of identity precariously wavers between winning and losing, words and deeds, and ultimately between destroying others or destroying himself. In Coriolanus the thrice-repeated motif of the butterfly epitomizes the hero's ambivalence towards his sense of himself and presents in microcosm the essential rhythm of the play.

O' my word, the father's son! I'll swear tis a very pretty boy. O' my troth, I looked upon him o' wednesday half an hour together; has such a confirmed countenance! I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and up again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his teeth, and tear it. O, I warrant, how he mammocked it!

(I.iii.60-69)

The applicability of the son's engagement with the butterflies to the father's entire life style seems compelling. Marcius senior gets into trouble several times by losing his temper, becoming “enraged” and destroying something quite fragile, such as his election to the consulship. More intriguing, however, is the rhythm of loss and recovery which the first passage about the butterfly presents. Marcius junior plays a game in which the sport consists of capturing the butterfly, releasing it, and catching it again. Such is the rhythm of Coriolanus' own deeds and actions. In I.iv Marcius loses his horse in a wager to Lartius but gets the horse back because Lartius gallantly refuses to take it and says he will lend him to Marcius “For half a hundred years” (I.iv.7). In battle Coriolanus undergoes a rhythm of winning and losing, of first repelling the enemy, then being enclosed inside the city of Corioli, then emerging in control again. Reuben Brower in his introduction to the Signet edition of the play mentions in passing the “curious deja vu” effect of the repeated actions in Coriolanus' life, but the meaning of this pattern remains to be analyzed. Coriolanus offends the citizens in III.ii, meets with his mother and is persuaded to swallow his anger and be as “humble as the ripest mulberry” (III.ii.79), and once again loses his temper and offends them. Banished to a new life, he makes for Corioli, forms a pact with Aufidius, but again is persuaded by his mother to be kind to the Roman people. Finally, he is again speaking softly to the mob, the Volsces, and he again loses his temper, provoked by the same epithets of “traitor” and “boy.” Coriolanus is caught in a rhythm of winning and losing to which the only final release appears to be definitive destruction.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes the basis of the repetition compulsion in terms that bear a striking resemblance to the description of young Marcius' activity with the butterfly. As a houseguest Freud observed a child of one and a half who was very attached to his mother and yet did not seem to mind her absence. Some explanations for this acceptance of loss occurred to Freud while observing the boy playing.

This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. … What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtain cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o’ (gone). He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ (there). This then was the complete game—disappearance and return. … The child cannot possibly have felt his mother's departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? … At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.⁸

Shakespeare does not investigate in detail the character of young Marcius, but the passage concerning his game with the butterfly provides an emblem for the father's compulsion to repeat a painful situation. The hero, however, seems doomed not to escape the rhythm of winning and losing, of making peace with the mob he hates and then destroying this peace; rather, he seems tied to a course in which the cycle, Sysiphus-like, seems endless.⁹

In Valeria's account of young Marcius destroying the butterfly it seems important to recognize that Coriolanus is both the irascible little boy and also the butterfly who is destroyed.

He is their god; he leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than Nature,
That shapes man better; and they follow him
Against us brats with no less confidence
Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,
Or butchers killing flies.

(IV.vi.91-96)

In this second instance Coriolanus is momentarily a secure adult leading a pack of little boys off to war to kill the “summer butterflies.” However, in a third instance Menenius images Coriolanus as a butterfly which, for us at least, associates him with the role of victim even though Menenius means to suggest only his changed nature and hostility to Rome.

There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This Marcius is grown from man to dragon: he has wings; He's more than a creeping thing.

(V.iv.11-14)

Menenius' description is rich in ironies: “your butterfly was a grub” invokes an idea of growth and maturity which cannot truly apply to the hero since his struggle to divorce himself from the childish mob, from the label of “boy” is never successful. Menenius then asserts that “This Marcius is grown from man to dragon”; like a Shavian America sliding from barbarism to decadence and missing civilization, Marcius seems to have passed from infancy into dragonhood without stopping at manhood. Menenius uses terms that remind us of Coriolanus' inability to attain manhood even while he insists on the hero's transformation. Menenius says:

He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.

(V.iv.22-25)

If “thing” refers to Coriolanus rather than to his state, it may be that a man can be called a “thing” and a “god” in the same breath; both effect the same dehumanization. As feminists recovering from centuries of Petrarchanism are now affirming, to deify is to reify.

Coriolanus' escape route from a world in which he must constantly undergo a rhythm of winning and losing can profitably be contrasted to responses to similar visions of repetition and variability in Lear, Macbeth, Antony, and The Tempest. After he and Cordelia have been captured, Lear expresses a new wisdom all the more remarkable for containing the same wish he held in the first scene, to be allowed to live with Cordelia. As he expresses in his “let's away to prison” speech, the difference is in his disdain for the “gilded butterflies” who are too reliant on the ebbs and flows of court fortune (V.iii.8-19). Lear's scorn for these butterflies anticipates Coriolanus' own struggle against imperceptive materialists. But Lear can more easily imagine the acceptance of an endless cycle and does not need to seek his own death as a means of putting an end to repetitions. By imagining himself and Cordelia as outside the ebb and flow of shifting events, Lear envisions another kind of cyclical existence, a timeless rhythm in which she asks him for blessing and he responds by kneeling and asking for her forgiveness. It is a vision of a kind of union with a woman which is not possible for Coriolanus who deliberately chooses to put an end to the cycle of repetition by fatally provoking the Volsces to kill him.

As Shakespeare moves from Lear to the subsequent plays his preoccupation with men trapped in patterns of repetition grows increasingly darker. Macbeth's sense of self-imposed isolation and meaninglessness becomes poignantly expressed in his “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech in which the alternations of time sentence men to a rhythm from which there is no release except death. The theme is monumental in Antony and Cleopatra, a play in which men's experience is always contradictory; Antony weeps for Fulvia but desired her death at the outset of the play just as Caesar strove to kill Antony but weeps at his passing at the conclusion. More poetically put, experience is described as a “vagabond flag [which does] rot itself with motion” (I.iv.45-47), and all Antony's dealings with Cleopatra show him to be a prisoner of a rhythm not unlike the catching and releasing of the butterfly toyed with by young Marcius. Antony alternates first between Rome and Egypt and then at a more psychological level between hope and despair until finally he incompetently stabs himself and eventually dies. Cleopatra explains that to be Caesar is merely to be subject to fortune, and she glorifies her suicide by declaring it to be the only way out of an inconstant world, for her death “shackles accidents and bolts up change” (V.ii.6). Coriolanus strides forth as the mute heir to all of these eloquent tortured people who confront the sense of endless cycles and alterations. After Coriolanus Shakespeare develops different ways of immersing the audience in repeated situations as Pericles journeys from place to place or, more significantly, as one generation in The Winter's Tale survives to see its fault repeated and forgiven in another.

In light of Coriolanus' habit of repeating his pattern of winning and losing, Prospero's elaborate dramaturgy seems to be a more life-oriented response to the same sense of being trapped in one's own history which is fated to repeat itself. Harry Berger¹⁰ describes in great and insightful detail how Prospero recreates on the island the kind of conspiracy-usurpation plot that had been employed against him. But in The Tempest Prospero possesses the intelligence and the raw materials to stage such a psychological replay of his past life, and he can assert his own maturity and release himself from the compulsion of repetition by releasing his daughter and forgiving his enemies. Coriolanus would like to release his mother so that he can be free of her, but in returning to Corioli he merely enacts once again his basic hostility to the people whose leader knowingly calls him a “boy of tears” (V.vi.101).

While some wish to see Coriolanus as having gained a degree of diplomacy and maturity earlier lacking and to regard his murder by the Volsces as therefore especially ironic, the text continues to show his inherent self-destructiveness, motivated by a desire to repudiate the labels of “traitor” and “boy.” The concluding lines also accentuate the culpability of the society which, like Coriolanus' mother, requires a dead hero rather than a live person.

Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. “Boy”! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, tis there,
That like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. “Boy”?

(V.vi.111-17)

It is all here. His desire to end the rhythm of winning and losing by asking to be cut to pieces. His uneasy awareness of the distinction between “men and lads,” his rage at being called a boy. More striking, are the nonhuman epithets that signify the way it is possible to become what you hate most: Aufidius is a “false hound,” not a treacherous man, and Marcius uses a grand simile to describe himself as “an eagle,” which is still not the same as being a person. Most telling in terms of his loss of private self is the way he can assert who he is only by declaring himself to be Coriolanus, the victor of Corioli, and in the Volsces citadel this is fatal.

Notes

1. H. D. F. Kitto, “Shakespeare: Coriolanus,” Poiesis (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 355-403. This chapter in Professor Kitto's book on Greek tragedy reviews much of the criticism on the play and deals with the dilemma of interpreting the hero's character by placing the play in a non-Aristotelean context. See also Derek Traversi, “Coriolanus,” Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 207.

2. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 155-65.

3. Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962).

4. Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 198-216.

5. All citations are to the Signet edition of Coriolanus, ed. Reuben Brower, (New York: New American Library, 1960).

6. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 163-69.

7. I accept Singer's emendation of “lost” for “left.”

8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, rev. ed. (New York: Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), pp. 8-10.

9. It may be more than coincidence that the particular instance of pain which Freud's observed child seeks to avoid is the loss of his mother. Coriolanus may be retreating from an oedipal anxiety for which the resolution is a tidy if destructive one: i.e., he yields to his mother's wishes not to destroy his native city, but in so doing he avoids uniting with his mother by being killed at the hands of his male rival Aufidius. Volumnia makes it clear that for Coriolanus to march on Rome would be to trample on her womb, and this seems likely to arouse in Coriolanus the fear of union with his mother. “Thou shalt no sooner / March to assault thy country than to tread (Trust to't, thou shalt not) on thy mother's womb (V.iii.122-24). For other treatments of the oedipal aspect of the play, see Charles K. Hofling, “An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus”; Gordon Ross Smith, “Authoritarian Patterns in Shakespeare's Coriolanus”; and Robert J. Stoller, “Shakespearean Tragedy: Coriolanus”; all three appear in M. D. Faber, ed., The Design Within, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare (New York: Science House, 1970).

10. Harry Berger, Jr., “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 253-83.