SOURCE: Bligh, John. “The Mind of Coriolanus.” English Studies in Canada 13, no. 3 (September 1987): 256-70.

[In the following essay, Bligh highlights Coriolanus's unswerving devotion to a set of aristocratic ideals that eventually contribute to his undoing.]

Coriolanus is no philosopher, but in his life he tests out two distinctive ways of thinking and acting, which later philosophers have systematized into philosophies. His mother initiates him in both, first in an aristocratic (Platonic) idealism, and later in an amoral (Machiavellian) realism. In both cases he betters her instruction, puts it to the test of experience, and finds it wanting. The first brings him to the brink of the Tarpeian rock; the second makes his corpse the footstool of his enemy.

Many people in the play (and quite a few modern critics¹), think that Marcius is by nature a proud, irascible, unsociable person, and that his professed patriotism is false. “I say unto you,” says the First Citizen, “what he hath done famously he did it to that end; though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue” (I.i.36-40).² This is a misconstruction. The secret of Marcius' conduct in the first three Acts is to be found neither in his natural disposition, nor in his acquired character, but in his mind—in the inner vision of an ideal city of Rome which he has fashioned for himself on the basis of his mother's instruction.³ He pursues her ideals to their logical conclusions and lives them out in an extreme form, in defiance of the realities of human nature in himself and in others. When he angrily denounces the creation of the plebian tribunate (I.i.212-13), and when later he risks his life in demanding its abolition (III.i.164-74), he is revealing not just “pride” but his patriotic desire to save the Rome in which he believes. When he turns his back on the city in disgust, he is repudiating a Rome that has lost its soul and is no longer worth saving. When he cries “I banish you,” it is not mere bravado; he feels that he, alone, is the last of the Romans; he speaks for the true Rome, rejecting the cankered Rome of the tribunes (III.iii.124).⁴

The tribunes are quite incapable of understanding Marcius' nobility and patriotism. That is the point of the dialogue in which they try to explain to themselves why a proud man like Marcius is willing to serve under such a general as Cominius; they can make sense of it only by assuming that he is as crafty and self-seeking as they are (I.i.262-78). It does not cross their minds that in time of national need his nobility obliges him to serve under any consul, even one too old and too gentle for campaigning.⁵ That he has given a promise to Cominius is not the essential consideration (I.i.240); he would not dream of voluptuously surfeiting at home (with Volumnia!) while Aufidius is in the field.⁶

He reveals the nature of his patriotism in the prayer which he makes for Rome as he goes to the forum to answer the tribunes' charges—a prayer which has rarely been quoted in discussions of his “character.”

                                                                      Th' honored gods
Keep Rome in safety, and the chairs of justice
Supplied with worthy men! Plant love among's!
Throng our large temples with the shows of peace,
And not our streets with war!

(III.iii.33-37)

The First Senator replies “Amen, amen,” and Menenius praises “A noble wish.” Marcius is as sincere in this prayer as in the other one which he makes for his son (V.iii.70-74).⁷ He wants Rome to have worthy rulers, but he does not believe that such are to be found among the plebians. And he prays for peace. Unlike the cowardly servants of Aufidius who leave fighting to others, and unlike his own mother, he does not prefer war to peace; he knows the cost of war, as he reveals in his gentle words to his wife (II.i.179-83). Any interpretation of Coriolanus that has to turn a blind eye to the content of this prayer must be defective. On stage, prayer is the sincerest form of soliloquy.

Marcius' ideal Rome is an aristocratic city-state ruled by consuls who are also generals. The Rome which has his loyalty and devotion is much like Plato's ideal republic, in which the rulers are a small warrior aristocracy (a sort of Samurai), who have their own education, their own code of conduct, and an arcane understanding of statecraft to which the common workmen may not aspire and cannot attain. The workers are kept in comparative poverty, because leisure would corrupt them, and they take no part in the management of the city's affairs. Justice consists in each one's doing his own proper work: the ruler rules, and the craftsman literally minds his own business, working with his hands. The rulers are the embodiment of wisdom, while the uneducated workers remain creatures of irrational passion who must be controlled by the rulers, often by the use of anger (a passion auxiliary to wisdom), to keep them in their proper place.⁸

All this is exemplified in the Rome that Coriolanus admires and upholds: government is in the hands of patricians who have distinguished themselves in the wars (II.ii.40-41); it is to the patricians' advantage to keep the plebeians poor (I.i.20-22); nobles like Marcius tongue-lash the plebeians into submission when they become restless (I.i.169-86); it is presumptuous of them to want to know what is done in the Capitol (I.i.192-98). Under the gods, the noble senate is charged to keep them in awe, which else would feed on one another (I.i.186-90).

Marcius has been brought up to regard this regime as inevitable (I.i.68-73) and to take his place in it as a soldier-ruler. It is a system with built-in mechanisms to perpetuate it and to justify it in the eyes of its own members. So long as the workmen remain poor, uneducated, half-starved, unorganized and powerless, the well-fed and well-educated aristocrats have reason to look down on them as inferior specimens, covetous, material-minded, improvident, and incapable of rule. Marcius, a successful product of the aristocratic education, is indeed a superior type of man and has reason to be proud of his worth. His mother exaggerates only a little when she says that he exceeds the plebeians “As far as doth the Capitol exceed / The meanest house in Rome” (IV.ii.39-40). Small wonder that he has grown up believing in the system and wishing to perpetuate it.⁹

Because he believes in the superior wisdom, courage and prudence of his own class, Coriolanus does not wish to see the aristocratic constitution overthrown by discontented plebeians in a year of bad harvests. To keep them quiet, the senate has given them the right to appoint magistrates of their own, the tribunes, with power to veto the actions of the senate and to pass judgment on individual senators. To Coriolanus, this astounding concession spells the ruin of the régime in which he believes and to which his life is dedicated. He absolutely refuses to reconcile himself to the existence of the plebeian tribunes; he opposes the institution from the start, and he declares it to be a blunder which should be rectified by the abolition of the office at the earliest opportunity.¹⁰

When he first appears on stage, he is in a foul temper. The speech beginning “What's the matter, you dissentious rogues” (I.i.166) is not just an expression of habitual arrogance; we soon learn that he is furious over the appointment of tribunes, a concession “To break the heart of generosity / And make bold power look pale” (I.i.213-14). He explains his objection to the concession in a noisy speech in III.i. which again is not simply the ranting of an angry man.¹¹ It sounds like thunder, but there is reasoned argument in the thunder: the tribunes' veto undermines the power of the consuls and creates a divided city with two unrelated and antagonistic authorities.

                                        They choose their magistrate;
And such a one as he, who puts his “shall,”
His popular “shall,” against a graver bench
Than ever frowned in Greece. By Jove himself,
It makes the consuls base; and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both and take
The one by th' other.

(III.i.104-12)¹²

He therefore calls upon his fellow senators to abolish this concession; he appeals to those

                                                                                          that prefer
A noble life before a long, and wish
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
That's sure of death without it—at once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison. Your dishonor
Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state
Of that integrity which should become 't;
Not having the power to do the good it would,
For th'ill which doth control 't.

(III.i.152-61)¹³

Many of the senators later regret not having responded to this appeal (IV.iii.20-25). They too prefer the aristocratic constitution which he tries to uphold, but their half-hearted support is a matter of instinct and tradition rather than of intellectual conviction; the Romans have had no Plato to articulate a philosophy for them. Marcius, by contrast, is able to give some reason for his faith; he alone has courage to proclaim his conviction with his mouth and defend it with his sword. Whereupon the tribunes accuse him of treason—not without cause, since the tribunate is now part of the Roman constitution.

As often happens in Shakespearian tragedy, the hero is imperfectly understood by the people surrounding him; our perception of the tragedy as tragedy depends on our understanding him better. No one in the play appreciates the purity and intensity of Marcius' devotion to the aristocratic ideal. Since he discloses little in soliloquy, we can best come near to an understanding of him by noting where the other characters fall short of the truth about him.

It is commonly said that the character of Marcius has been formed by his mother, who has taught him to be contemptuous of the plebeians, fearless in battle, and a lover of war. There is some truth in this: she has loaded him with maxims by which to live (IV.i.3-11); she has taught him to look down on the plebeians with contempt (III.ii.7-13); she has tried to instil the view that the excitements of war are better than the joys of marriage (I.iii.15-17, 40-43).¹⁴ But he has outgrown her training and has established standards of his own, which she cannot comprehend. She still takes a childish delight in war-wounds that can be displayed to the people to win their votes; he loathes the custom and will not condescend to follow it. She joins in the exaggerations of hero-worship; these offend him, as he believes that a nobleman should speak the truth.¹⁵ She thinks that in politics as in war deception is legitimate; he hates the idea of duping the plebeians into giving him power. When she forces him to go to the forum to profess a humility he does not feel and to repent what he has spoken (i.e., to repudiate the argument he developed in III.i. and to confess to the tribunes that he was wrong), he replies, outraged, “I cannot do it to the gods, / Must I then do 't to them?” (III.ii.38-39). But she insists: he must go to the market-place and acknowledge the jurisdiction that his soul rejects—and he does it (III.iii.43-47). Without understanding him, she is forcing him to be untrue to his inner vision and to damage his conscience. She thinks his reluctance is due to a moral fault, which she calls pride; what she does not see is the set of intellectual convictions that sustain his pride. He has formed those for himself.

It is the same with Menenius. He talks of “my son Coriolanus,” (V.ii.63), and Coriolanus says that he “Loved me above the measure of a father” (V.iii.10), but this surrogate father has not had much more influence over him than Falstaff has over Prince Hal. Though Menenius too despises the plebeians and would prefer a pure aristocracy, he is a conciliatory person, a political realist. His comic distortion of the allegory of the body politic shows at least that he accepts the plebeians as citizens: if he represents the laughing belly of the state, the hungry First Citizen is at least the big toe.¹⁶ Though he does not like it, he sees the inevitability of constitutional change, but he has not imparted any of his moderation to Marcius. In the opening scene we see him establishing a friendly relationship with the plebeians while he mocks them, but Marcius, far from following his example, heaps insults on them, seeks their hatred rather than their love, and treats them as smelly animals rather than as citizens. Again, after the appointment of tribunes, Menenius takes the trouble to establish a working relationship with them: he wittily mocks himself before mocking them,¹⁷ and he ends with a delightfully courteous insult which, in a left-handed way, is a compliment to them: “Good-e'en to your worships. More of your conversation would infect my brain” (II.i.96-98).¹⁸ Coriolanus, on the other hand, regards the appointment of tribunes as an unmitigated disaster and will have no truck with them.

In III.i. when Coriolanus demands the abolition of the tribunate and calls for volunteers from the patricians, crying “Stand fast; / We have as many friends as enemies” (230-31), Menenius sees that they are on the brink of civil war and cries, “Shall it be put to that?” (232) to which the First Senator replies “The gods forbid!” But later Menenius and the other senators are ashamed that they did not support Coriolanus in this crisis (V.iv.33-34). The expulsion of Marcius by the tribunes reveals to them what Marcius could see from the start, the truly revolutionary powers they have handed over to the plebeians.¹⁹ They incline, too late, to the policy he advocated (IV.iii.20-24).

Like Volumnia, Menenius does not appreciate Coriolanus' devotion to the truth. When he goes to intercede with him at the end, he thinks that his exaggerated eulogies have placed Coriolanus under an obligation to him, but he finds it is not so. Like Falstaff, he suffers a painful awakening.²⁰ Though he is the closest friend of the family, he does not understand their characters well enough to be able to predict how they will act in changing circumstances. When he coarsely says of Marcius, “he no more remembers his mother now than an eight-year-old horse,” he could not be further from the truth (V.iv.16-17).²¹

The consul Cominius, no great soldier himself, fully appreciates the battle-winning prowess of Coriolanus. After suffering an initial reverse, he courteously tells his soldiers that they must expect to be attacked again; then he prays to the Roman gods to give Marcius speedy success so that he will come quickly to help—which is hardly the way to win a war (I.vi.1-9). Fortunately for him, Coriolanus does not arrive too late; he is able to pull the consul's chestnuts out of the fire with a mere fraction of his soldiers, who are all eager to follow a leader who comes from battle covered with blood. What Cominius does not appreciate is the purity or chastity of Marcius' military idealism: he fights for honour and for Rome and will not prostitute his soldiership like a mercenary to gain rich booty or hyperbolical praises. Cominius' indecent haste in offering him booty shows that he fails to appreciate the fineness of his spirit. He has the trumpets and drums, which ought to animate his men for battle, play a fanfare of hero-worship—which moves Marcius to an indignant protest (I.ix.41-53).

Cominius then makes amends by offering decorations such as a warrior can accept without danger of corrupting his motives, namely, a warhorse not taken from the enemy, and a title. These Marcius accepts with a good grace. “I will go wash” (I.ix.68) is not said disdainfully; it is the first half of a wry joke: “With all this blood on my face, you can't see how you are making me blush!” His extreme sense of honour makes him difficult to handle, like a ripe mulberry.²²

Back in Rome, when Cominius is called upon to speak his encomium, Coriolanus rises to go. He knows that the vice of that literary form is hyperbole and refuses to hear his “nothings monstered” (II.ii.77).²³ He prefers the truth, and he did not receive his battle scars for the hire of anyone's breath (149-50). When Cominius gives the encomium, he tells the truth but not the whole truth: he says no words of praise for Titus Lartius or for the common soldier, gives all the credit to Marcius, and skilfully covers over his own inadequacy by suggesting, without actually saying, that Marcius came to his assistance while he was engaged in battle (118-20). At the end, he reports Marcius' refusal of the booty in terms which show that he does not appreciate his motive:

                                                  Our spoils he kicked at,
And looked upon things precious as they were
The common muck of the world.

(II.ii.124-26)

He does not understand the chastity of a soldier who will not consent to take a bribe, however precious, to pay his sword.

Aufidius, like Volumnia, sees Marcius as the Roman Hector (I.viii.11; cf. I.iii.40-43), and no doubt he sees himself as the Volscian Achilles. Paradoxically, he turns out to be the sort of warrior that Volumnia would like her son to be. It is he, not Marcius, who professes to prefer the excitements of war to the joys of love (IV.v.117-22), and when he cannot prevail by force, he is willing to gain his ends by deception (I.x.17-27). Later in the play, he tries but fails to understand what caused Marcius' expulsion from Rome. He wonders if it was a moral fault, or defect of judgment, or lack of adaptability (IV.vii), but he misses the essential thing, Coriolanus' vision of an ideal Republic and single-minded resolve to live by its rules and make no concessions to the corrupt Rome of the tribunes. As his honour is corrupted by failure and defeat, Aufidius becomes more and more like Shakespeare's perfidious Achilles and finally murders Coriolanus in the same way as Achilles murders Hector in Troilus and Cressida. He then shocks us by standing on the corpse—an emblem of baseness triumphing over a nobility beyond its ken.

The explanation of Marcius' curious attitude to Aufidius is to be found in the necessities of the aristocratic sytem: the soldier-rulers must constantly demonstrate their superiority over the rest of men. Marcius swears that he will kill Aufidius at their next encounter (I.ii.35), but he never does it. He thwacks him, he scotches and notches him (IV.v.185-96), and then lets him go, like his son wantonly chasing a gilded butterfly (I.iii.60-65). The little boy no doubt prefers the chase to the kill, but his father knows that he needs an opponent like Aufidius to make him indispensable to Rome and to give him opportunities to demonstrate his superior soldiership.²⁴

The secret source of all Marcius' extremism is his awareness that the aristocratic system rests on the supposition that the rulers are better men than the ruled, with greater courage, nobler motives, steadier purpose, longer foresight, and greater concern for the common good. Understanding much more clearly than his mother or Menenius or Aufidius that noblesse oblige, he is constantly anxious to impress upon the plebeians the superiority of his class. That is why war is a necessity to him in spite of its costliness.²⁵ It is the testing-ground on which the aristocrat proves his superiority. One thing on which the patricians and plebeians of Rome are in agreement is that men who acquit themselves well in battle should receive office in the city. On this principle, the half-starved plebeians are willing to give their voice to Coriolanus (II.iii.4-13), and on the same principle he judges them unworthy to have any say in the government of the city (II.iii.51-56).

In the attack on Corioli, because the plebeian soldiers are cowardly, Marcius pushes courage to the point of foolhardiness; because they fight for booty, he will take no bribe to pay his sword (I.ix.37-38); because they fall to looting before the fighting is over, he rushes unwashed to the aid of his fellow officers (I.v.17-20).²⁶ In Rome, because they and their tribunes can do nothing alone (II.i.35-38), he would like to do everything alone. Because the tribunes flatter them, he prefers to provoke their hatred (II.ii.18-21). Because the tribunes say one thing and mean another (II.ii.54-57; iii.236-56), he becomes fanatical about truth and says what he believes to be true however offensive it may be (III.iii.28-29).²⁷ Volumnia tells him what she thinks of his extremism when she says that he might have been enough the man he is with striving less to be so (III.ii.19-20).

What he believes to be the truth is highly selective. According to the system, there should be no good in the plebeians either as citizens or as soldiers, and therefore he does not allow himself to see any good in them. Collectively they are fickle and short-sighted; individually they show good sense, humour and kindness;²⁸ therefore he never allows himself to know them individually by name (I.ix.79-94);²⁹ they are always the “herd,” the “rank-scented many,” and the like (III.i.33, 66). His constant use of animal imagery to describe them is not merely a manifestation of pride and contempt; it is also a way of preventing himself from seeing them as they are. The animal imagery is like the arras through which Hamlet stabs Polonius, crying “A rat”: he can do it only because he tells himself that his victim is not human. Marcius, by calling the plebeians rats, geese, hares, mice, curs, and the like, conceals from himself their essential humanity and their worth as fighters. In the Volscian campaign of Act I, it is the plebeian soldiers under Lartius who fetch Marcius off when he fights his way out of Corioli, and it is they who then join him in attacking and taking the city. Yet after the capture he has no word of commendation for their valour but only a speech of condemnation for their looting.³⁰ Shortly afterwards, when he joins Cominius, he forgets their valuable assistance and reports only their initial retreat:

The common file—a plague! tribunes for them!—
The mouse ne'er shunned the cat as they did budge
From rascals worse than they.

(I.vi.43-45)

He seems to be saying that all the fighting was done by himself and Lartius. Cominius, puzzled, asks, “But how prevailed you?” Whereupon Marcius suddenly decides that this is no time for a chat: “Will the time serve to tell? I do not think. / Where is the enemy?” He is impatient with Cominius' inactivity, but he is also unwilling to give the plebeian soldiers the credit they deserve—which would have political consequences at home: “tribunes for them.” He can preserve his vision of aristocratic Rome only by refusing to see the truth about the plebeians, by constantly telling himself that they are subhuman.³¹

The same necessity of wilful ignorance may also contribute to his extreme aversion to the custom of asking the plebeians for their voices, which requires him to encounter plebeians as individuals: “He's to make his requests by particulars; wherein every one of us has a single honor, in giving him our own voices with our own tongues” (II.iii.45-47). The custom gives the First Citizen an opportunity to teach Marcius a much-needed lesson: the price of the consulship “is, to ask it kindly” (II.iii.77). But Marcius deliberately misunderstands—as if it were merely a matter of using the right word: ‘Kindly sir, I pray let me ha't.”

From the start, then, Marcius' idealism contains an inner contradiction and is bound to break down. On the one hand, he professes to be a devotee of truth, and on the other hand he cannot afford to face the truth about either the plebeians or the patricians. The plebeians have much good in them, and the patricians fall short of his own exacting standards. In the long run his idealism is not viable; he is heading for a time of reappraisal when the truth will force itself upon his mind.

His first shock comes from the patricians. When Marcius calls upon them to “Stand fast” with him against the plebeians, they disappoint him (III.i.230-32). They are not willing to fight a civil war to defend the patrician state. Later he remembers them as “dastard nobles” (IV.v.79).

A worse shock comes in the following scene. His mother, who does not understand him, without realizing what she is doing compels him to an agonizing abandonment of his ideals. She makes him promise to acknowledge the new constitution, the Rome of the tribunes. She forces him to go to the “marketplace” to prostitute himself, to sell his soul for political office, to buy the consulship with flattery (III.ii.131-37).³² In the next scene, he tries to fulfil his promise, but he finds he cannot do it. Provoked by the word “traitor” (III.iii.66), he becomes his aristocratic self again and roars out: “The fires i' th' lowest hell fold in the people!” (III.iii.68).³³ At the time, this blaze of rage feels like the salvation of his soul, the expulsion of the harlot's spirit put into him by his mother (III.ii.112). Again he is Coriolanus, facing alone a hostile mob. But the price is banishment.

As he leaves Rome, he is unexpectedly cheerful. He is able to remind his mother of a family joke—which still makes audiences laugh (IV.i.16-19). He has recovered his self-respect. If he must start his life again, it is better to go elsewhere to do so. He cheerfully promises his mother and wife and friends:

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

(IV.i.51-53)

But after he has left Rome, some great change takes place in his thinking, an upheaval which Shakespeare has left us to infer.³⁴ Marcius does not write home (IV.vi.18-19), and what is heard of him is partly like his former history and partly quite unlike it (IV.vi.91-99; V.iv.9-12). We gradually learn that he has resolved to start his life entirely anew, even to the extent of renouncing his family. It is the old extremism taking a new form. He will “stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (V.iii.35-37). So far as is possible, he will make the Volscian world his own and live by a different, less idealistic code. He will practise upon the Volscians the Machiavellian arts his mother wanted him to practise on Rome; he will seek power among them by false humility, deception and flattery as well as by military success. When he presents himself at the house of Aufidius, he is a changed man, as even his dress shows.³⁵ Of his own accord now, he has put on garments of humility to attain his private end. Ingratitude has filled him with revenge, and revenge has turned him into a Machiavellian politician. By destroying Rome he will win power in Antium, and by outdoing Aufidius he will become his captain's captain.

When he first reveals himself to Aufidius, he cleverly and perhaps cunningly disarms his opponent by placing himself at his mercy. It is an old trick, but it works.³⁶ Aufidius divides his command with Marcius, so that even at the beginning of the campaign Marcius does not serve under him as he served under Cominius. In a short time he has won a degree of popularity with the Volscian soldiers that he never tried to win with the Romans (IV.vii.2-6),³⁷ and if we can believe Aufidius,

He watered his new plants with dews of flattery,
Seducing so my friends; and, to this end,
He bowed his nature, never known before
But to be rough, unswayable, and free.

(V.vi.22-25)

During the campaign, he does not disclose his plans to his colleague; they are more ambitious than Aufidius imagines. In his conversation with his lieutenant, Aufidius has to conjecture Marcius' intentions; he guesses that Rome will simply capitulate to Marcius without fighting: the city is so divided that it will offer no opposition, and he will take it by sovereignty of nature (IV.vii.28-35). But this is not at all what Marcius has in mind. He demands of the Romans impossible terms, which he knows they cannot accept, so that he will have an excuse to send Rome up in flames. Aufidius, it seems, would have been satisfied with much less, and so would the Volscian senate. But Marcius is again the extremist. He will not just tip the balance of power towards the Volscians; he will reduce Rome to rubble, even though his family and friends are destroyed in the general ruin.³⁸ When Cominius reminds him of this, Marcius screens himself from what he intends to do by means of another metaphor:

He could not stay to pick them in a pile
Of noisome musty chaff. He said 'twas folly,
For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt
And still to nose th' offense.

(V.i.25-28)

But when he is confronted by Volumnia, Virgilia, Valeria and the young Marcius in person and sees their eloquent gestures of humility and intercession, his extremism again collapses.³⁹ His nobler self prevails. He would like to restore the bond with his family while still breaking all bonds with his country, but he finds this is not possible (V.iii.81-86). His wife and mother are ready to do the exact opposite if necessary. Volumnia is his mother, and Rome is his mother; if he tramples on the one, he must trample on the other.

Since Volumnia is only urging him to make the kind of settlement that would have satisfied the Volscian senate, she can hardly realize how dangerous will be her son's capitulation. Again she does not understand what she is asking of him. He, however, is now a politician. He knows that Aufidius is watching him, for a chance to destroy him, and this capitulation will give him his chance. As he yields, he tries to make her understand:

                                                            O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son—believe it, O, believe it!—
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(V.iii.185-89)

Shakespeare designed the whole play to lead up to this wonderful moment, in which the spiritual suffering of the hero is transformed into great beauty. We are awed at the strength of the bond of blood. Shakespeare does not tell us in what mood Volumnia returns to Rome. If in triumph, her joy will soon be turned to anguish.⁴⁰

When Marcius returns to the Volscian senate, he again plays the Volscian politician. His carefully worded report on the campaign tells the truth but not the whole truth: “We have made peace / With no less honor to the Antiates / Than shame to th' Romans” (V.vi.78-80). What he does not say is that he could have destroyed Rome once and for all but spared it for his family's sake.⁴¹

At the very last moment, provoked by the baseness of Aufidius, he regains his Roman self and relives an occasion when he did the Roman state some service:⁴²

                                                                                                    “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.111-15)

He is cut to pieces, and a moment later a man who believed that revenge should have no bounds (I.x.19-29) treads upon one who found that he could not press vengeance to the limit. Love finally drove out revenge. For this we honour him; in our minds it expiates all his faults. The man was noble, and with his last attempt he did not wipe out his nobility but reaffirmed it. We can be proud of our humanity as we contemplate his end.

Notes

1. E.g., Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (1950; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal. Press, 1963), p. 207: “The tragic flaw of Coriolanus is pride.” G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (1931; rpt. London: Methuen, 1951; rpt. 1968), p. 166: “He does no real service for Rome, but rather wars for war's sake, gathers honour for honour's sake.” John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (1945; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 265, says much the same; on p. 297 he describes Marcius as “essentially the splendid oaf who has never come to maturity.”

2. All quotations from Shakespeare are from Sylvan Barnet, ed., The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972).

3. According to the first of Dryden's two definitions in his Preface to Troilus and Cressida (Arthur C. Kirsch, Literary Criticism of John Dryden, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Neb. Press, 1966, p. 135), character is “that which distinguishes one man from another.” One thing that distinguishes Coriolanus from his peers is his uncompromising dedication to the aristocratic ideal. This belongs to Aristotle's dianoia rather than to êthos (Poetics, 1449b36-38).

4. Menenius calls it “Your Rome” when he is talking to the tribunes in IV.vi.100. Una Ellis-Fermor, Shakespeare the Dramatist (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 74, is right in saying that “what has all along looked like pride in Coriolanus is but rebellion against standards and concessions that repel him.”

5. That Cominius is consul is not made explicit until II.ii.43.

6. Marcius is not in the predicament of Hector in Troilus and Cressida, II.ii.163-94, where Hector's reason tells him that the Trojans should let Helen go and stop the war yet he feels honour-bound by promises to fight on.

7. Another passage in which it is hard to doubt the sincerity of his patriotism is I.vi.71-72, where he appeals for volunteers: “If any think brave death outweighs bad life, / And that his country's dearer than himself. …” In I.ix.15-17, he says to Titus Lartius, who has just rushed to his aid (I.vii): “I have done / As you have done, that's what I can; induced / As you have been, that's for my country.” Wilson Knight, Imperial Theme, p. 169, comments: “Here he jerks out platitudes again. They are not sincere.”

8. Cf. Plato, Republic, IV.434C.439, and passim.

9. Patricia K. Meszaros, “‘There is a world elsewhere’: Tragedy and History in Coriolanus,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 16 (1976) 277, recognizes that Marcius believes in and stands for “a remote and outmoded ideal,” which she describes as “a system in which human nature is an integral part of a Great Nature encompassing both polis and cosmos”; Marcius represents the Elizabethan world picture; his mother is a Machiavellian; he never renounces his obsolete philosophy; at V.iii.182, he finally sees it as obsolete but chooses to remain true to it.

10. To say that in III.i.166-70 he is paltering with the plebeians over the tribunate (as they with him over the consulship) is not altogether fair, since he opposed the creation of the tribunate from the start. He is, however, recommending the senate to play a trick on them not unlike the dishonourable strategem of Prince John in 2 Henry IV, IV.ii. To preserve aristocratic Rome, he has to compromise with his passion for truthfulness.

11. Joyce van Dyke, “Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in ‘Coriolanus,’” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), 140, has a good comment here. “Ironically, when for once he wants his words and his logic to register, the gestural aspect of his speech predominates; what he is doing is so much more significant to his audience than what he is saying, that his most eloquent, emotionally charged statements fall on deaf ears.”

12. In the Volscian campaign against Rome in Act V, “two authorities are up, / Neither supreme,” and the arrangement does not work. The shrewdness of Coriolanus' judgment on the division of authority is noted by Brian Vickers, Shakespeare: Coriolanus (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 29-30.

13. The words used in lines 152-53 are similar to those used in his appeal for volunteers on the battlefield in I.vi.67-75.

14. Marcius' speech to Cominius in I.vi.29-32 does not prove that he has accepted this lesson. He is telling Cominius, not that he enjoys killing as much as he enjoys sex, but that in spite of his bloody appearance he is as vigorous and high spirited as he was on his wedding day.

15. Virgilia shares his feelings on this point (II.i.145). One reason why she is unwilling to leave the house in I.iii may be that she does not wish to become a substitute idol for the hero-worshippers. (But Shakespeare is also showing that she has a will of her own—and therefore takes part in the intercession scene, V.iii, of her own accord.)

16. On the comic aspect of this gourmet's “Belly Fable” see John Ingledew, ed., Shakespeare's Coriolanus (London: Longman, 1975), p. xviii.

17. Cf. Richard III, III.i.133-34: “To mitigate the scorn he gives his uncle / He prettily and aptly taunts himself.”

18. The value of this working relationship is seen in III.i.310-32, where Menenius and Sicinius collaborate to quell the riot.

19. Centuries later, when Augustus founded the Principate, he used the tribunician power as the basis of his position.

20. Cf. 2 Henry IV, V.v.6-72.

21. On this occasion, Sicinius shows more insight and foresight than Menenius.

22. There is a difference between accepting an honour as a mark of the esteem in which one is generally held and the acceptance of a reward for a particular exploit; the distinction is fairly subtle but has its application in the training of children. See John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” (The Works of John Locke, London, 1823; rpt. 1963, Vol. IX, pp. 34-40). In Volumnia's use of the mulberry metaphor in III.ii.79-80, there is a delicate irony. She tells her son to pretend that his heart is “as the ripest mulberry / That will not hold the handling,” without apparently realizing that on some important matters his conscience really is hypersensitive.

23. Over-praise makes him over-react here, as in III.iii.51, where Menenius compares his wounds to “graves i' th' holy churchyard,” and he replies “Scratches with briers.”

24. John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” pp. 112-13, believes that the cruelty of children to birds and butterflies is the result of bad education; the honour bestowed on conquerors, “the great butchers of mankind,” makes them think that slaughter is the laudable business of mankind. On the other hand, A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1966), p. 187, thinks that the boy who tortures a frog enjoys the frog's pain as “unmistakable proof of his own power over his victim.”

25. The one speech of any substance that he makes during his triumphal entry into Rome (II.i.181-84) is addressed to his wife, who constantly reacts against the attitude of her bloodthirsty mother-in-law; in it Marcius recognizes what women suffer in war. Una Ellis-Fermor, Shakespeare the Dramatist, p. 74, draws attention to this speech as revealing things elsewhere deeply hidden in the mind of Coriolanus.

26. Lartius acts in the same way. That is the point of the brief scene, I.vii. As Marcius rushes to the aid of Cominius, so Lartius rushes to the support of Marcius. In war, men need one another (IV.v.242-45).

27. In his excessive candour, he resembles Moliere's Alceste, as is pointed out by P. G. Zolbrod, “Coriolanus and Alceste: A Study in Misanthropy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972), 51-62. Alceste too is eventually forced to recognize that there are limits.

28. Cf. A. C. Bradley, A Miscellany (1929; rpt. New York, 1969), pp. 82-85.

29. By contrast, in V.iii.67, he is able to remember the name of Valeria, who is a patrician.

30. There is a similar incident in I.viii where Aufidius is rescued by the Volscian rank and file. He ungratefully turns on them and says, “Officious, and not valiant, you have shamed me / In your condemn'd seconds.” Neither champion wants to be beholden to others.

31. Plato implicitly recognizes that the constitution of his Republic does not square with the realities of human nature; he is forced to introduce the fiction or lie (pseudos) that some men have gold in their souls, others silver, and others brass (cf. Republic, III, 415AB).

32. Richard of Gloucester too has to win the people's voices. Being a stage Machiavel, he takes a positive delight in deceiving them with lies (Richard III, III.v.72-100, and III.vii).

33. Here for the first time he entertains the vision of Rome going up in flames. The sentence, which has the form of an imprecation, stands in contrast to the prayer of III.iii.33-37.

34. Cf. King Lear, I.i.187, where exiled Kent says “He'll shape his old course in a country new.” When a person moves into a new country, it is easy for him or her to abandon established patterns of behaviour. (This is exemplified in Cressida and perhaps to some extent in Desdemona.) J. R. Mulryne, “Coriolanus at Stratford-upon-Avon: Three Actors' Remarks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978), 324-25, observes that one of the play's puzzles is “why Coriolanus, who can never be a popular figure in Rome, becomes so popular when he gets to Antium that Aufidius, even, is envious of him.”

35. Meszaros, in SEL 16 (1976), 281, sees “no reason … to posit a change of heart before he appears at the gate of Antium.” But van Dyke, in Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), 143, very reasonably says: “Surely this voluntary assumption of a beggar-like disguise is a potent visual suggestion that something in the man himself, not just in his circumstances, has changed.” In his soliloquy (IV.iv.12-26), Marcius marvels at himself. Michael Goldman, “Characterizing Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981), 81, finds his description of his banishment etc. as “a dissension of a doit” nearly incredible. But what is meant is that the whole upheaval started from the trivial business of asking for voices. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961), p. 250, finds the soliloquy strangely reminiscent of that arch-politician Henry IV, meditating at midnight on the frailty of political alliances (2 Henry IV, III.i.45-79).

36. The same ploy is used by Richard of Gloucester in Richard III, I.ii.174-85, and by Cassius in Julius Caesar, IV.iii.99-112.

37. Marcius thinks of the plebeian soldiers as Rome's “musty superfluity” (I.i.228). Compare 1 Henry IV, IV.ii.65-67, and contrast Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part I, I.ii.85-86: “Not all the gold in India's wealthy arms / Shall buy the meanest soldier in my train.” According to C. M. Sicherman, “Coriolanus: the Failure of Words,” ELH 39 (1972), 203, Aufidius is lying in the passage quoted.

38. The rulers in Plato's Republic do not go to such extremes in warfare; they fight in the expectation of being one day reconciled to their enemies. Cf. Republic, V, 470-71.

39. This is the counterpart of the scene in the Iliad, VI, 404-90, where Hector says goodbye to Andromache, and their little son Astyanax is frightened by his father's helmet. Here too the touch of humour enhances the pathos of the scene.

40. The stage direction before V.v merely says that the ladies pass over the stage. The First Senator still thinks there is a chance of recalling the banished Marcius (4). Much liberty is left to directors here. In the RSC production of 1979 at the Aldwych, directed by Terry Hands, the ladies entered processionally with expressionless faces. Volumnia led young Marcius to the front of the stage wearing a black cape, which she removed, revealing the boy dressed and armed exactly as his father had been at the beginning of the play.

41. Joyce van Dyke, in Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), 146, calls this speech “political rhetoric.”

42. Cf. Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), p. 356. James L. Calderwood, “Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words,” in J. L. Calderwood and H. E. Toliver, eds., Essays in Shakespearean Criticism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 559, thinks otherwise: “it is not an image of himself as Rome's soldier that Coriolanus capitalizes upon.”