Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in Coriolanus
Last Updated August 15, 2024.
[In the following essay, Van Dyke explores Shakespeare's characterization of Coriolanus through his non-verbal self-expression and use of language.]
It has often been noticed that North's Plutarch describes Coriolanus as ‘eloquent’1 whereas Shakespeare has often represented him as inarticulate or at a loss for words, and has Menenius remark several times that Coriolanus is not a good speaker. Coriolanus's critics tend to agree with Menenius's judgement: ‘Lacking the verbal resources and the confidence in language required for effective argument, he remains taciturn whenever possible … [He is] insensitive to the tone or connotative qualities of words … there is very little of the lyric in his speech … Nor does he engage in word-play’.2 All of these statements are partially true, or true in certain circumstances, but taken together they are an inadequate description of Coriolanus as a speaker. His peculiarity is not an insensitivity to words; rather, he is uncommonly sensitive to them. For Coriolanus, words have virtually a material existence:
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay …
(III, i, 76-8)3
and they can register with physical impact upon him:
I have some wounds upon me, and they smart
To hear themselves rememb'red.
(I, ix, 28-9)
To say that words are virtual things for Coriolanus perhaps does not differ much from saying he is unresponsive to ‘tone or connotative qualities’, to the variable nature of language, but hypersensitivity explains more about the ways he responds in linguistic situations than insensitivity does. If Aristotle's dictum that ‘He that is incapable of living in a society is a god or a beast’ is applicable to Coriolanus, as G. K. Hunter suggests,4 then the linguistic implications of this statement may be applied as well. God is the figure of ultimate articulateness, whose word is (for the Christian God) materially realized, whose desires and commands are immediately enacted. (Coriolanus sometimes has this power: ‘What he bids be done is finish'd with his bidding’ (V, iv, 23). The beast is, at the other extreme, ultimately inarticulate, a creature whose expressive capacities are not verbal but physical, instinctual, gestural. Coriolanus, it seems to me, unites both tendencies.
The scenes which Coriolanus makes reveal his fundamentally gestural habits of response; for whether speech is god-like in its articulateness, or inarticulate, it tends to the condition of gesture, it becomes an act of pure self-expression. Coriolanus first appears in the play just after Menenius's narration of the Belly fable, and particularly after such a jocular and pacific speech our first impression of Coriolanus is shocking. Hereafter we are prepared for the temperament revealed in his rejection of Cominius's praises, in the corn speech, and in his response to banishment.
For the moment, it may be noted that all of these explosions occur in a context of civil, legally or ceremoniously controlled discourse, not in military action. This is not to say that Coriolanus does not express rage and impatience on the battlefield; he does, but there it is functional, not a wasted discharge. On the battlefield, Coriolanus is immensely efficient, even mechanically so. Whether or not we regard this as more horrific than ordinary human violence, Coriolanus has no bloodlust, at least, none of the sort which motivates the warriors in Troilus and Cressida to perform their deeds of extraordinary violence in battle. Coriolanus has no lines like Aufidius's graphic threat to
Wash my fierce hand in's heart.
(I, x, 27)
When Coriolanus extols to his troops
this painting
Wherein you see me smear'd
(I, vi, 68-9)
the blood is appreciated for its symbolic value.
In keeping with his lack of bloodlust, he is a remarkably chaste warrior, and values the idea of chastity highly, as his apostrophe to Valeria in act V suggests. In fact he demonstrates no physical appetites, unlike Timon with his material luxuries and feasts, unlike Antony, unlike Menenius in this play, with his gustatory preoccupations. It is notable that, except for his weary call for wine after battle, in a play which concerns the problem of hunger, we never see or even hear of Coriolanus eating. All this is meant simply to suggest that if we talk of Coriolanus's violence, bestiality, passion, it ought to be recognized as a peculiarly rarefied, intellectually or idealistically determined passionateness. Or, to put it another way, he is animalistic to the degree that he is physically and instinctually responsive, but not to the point of being controlled by bestial appetites.
His first outburst reveals him as an angry man, but one whose violence of feelings finds its outlet in abstract, tightly controlled speech. His very first words perhaps tell us more about him than we consciously assimilate in the shock of their occurrence. As he enters, Menenius greets him:
MENENIUS.
Hail, noble Marcius!
MARCIUS.
Thanks. What's the matter, you dissentious rogues
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourself scabs?
(I, i, 161-4)
In retrospect, it is the disjunction between the courtesy to Menenius and the insult to the people which is more shocking than the insult itself. The man who could without apparent strain accommodate those opposed feelings simultaneously, making a clean about face, yet expressing himself succinctly, is not a man who lacks verbal resources. In grammatical terms, he is a man who omits conjunctions, but this syntactical characteristic penetrates his habits of feeling and perception as well. It is not merely a soldier's taciturnity which prevents Coriolanus from introducing transitions into his speech; his habits of perception seem inherently disjunctive, and he makes this sort of abrupt reversal repeatedly.
then we shall ha' means to vent
Our musty superfluity. See, our best elders.
(I, i, 223-4)
these base slaves
Ere yet the fight be done, pack up. Down with them!
And hark, what noise the general makes! To him!
(I, v, 7-9)
Such speeches suggest Coriolanus's ‘pseudo-precise, black or white view of things’;5 they also suggest, in the violence of their shifts from one mood to an antithetical one, a mind which will be capable of Coriolanus's apostacy.
But his language, however pseudo-precise or reductive or disjunctive it may be, is not illogical in the way that Leontes's passionate rants are. It is in fact strongly marked by parallel constructions and antitheses:
What would you have, you curs,
That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you,
The other makes you proud. He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese; you are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun.
(I, i, 166-72)
Even in the fury of his final speech to the Romans, parallelisms abound. In contrast to Menenius's narrative powers, it is clear that Coriolanus's language depends for its force on a principle of elemental repetition and accretion. R. P. Blackmur has suggested that ‘any word or congeries of words can be pushed to the condition of gesture … by simple repetition.’6 In such a case language loses its normal meaning and social function and tends to become more simply self-expression.
It is true that although Coriolanus seems able to articulate his thoughts in general, the logic, the communicative capacity of what he is saying, is often dissipated. For all his passionately reasonable speech about why corn should not be given gratis, the general significance of what he is saying is wasted.
Tell me of corn!
This was my speech, and I will speak't again—
(III, i, 61-2)
The entire repeated speech functions as an extravagant gesture, a repeated assertion of himself and the truth that he stands for.
It is when Coriolanus is compelled to use language as a purely symbolic form rather than a literal or gestural one that we see him inarticulate or at a loss for words:
VOLUMNIA.
I have heard you say
Honour and policy, like unsever'd friends,
I' th' war do grow together; grant that, and tell me
In peace what each of them by th' other lose
That they combine not there.
CORIOLANUS.
Tush, tush!
MENENIUS.
A good demand.
(III, ii, 41-5)
But if in this instance his inadequacy is glaring, why should he have admirable verbal resources and confidence in language in other situations? (i.e., insofar as he is able to express himself well: he may be frustrated when cursing the people, but his language is not.) How could such a man deliver the stunning speech banishing the Romans, or the biting rejoinder to the citizen who accuses him of not loving the common people? The problem is not that he lacks verbal resources, but that for him language, as a symbolic medium, seems useless for purposes of argument, which after all is intended to issue in action. Coriolanus's tendency is always to convert verbal altercations into physical ones; if words seem impotent to effect change, gestures or acts have an immediate and significant effect.
One of the reasons then that Volumnia is always victorious is that Coriolanus is literally not able to argue with her. At the start of their final interview, he begs of her (and it seems an admission of just this vulnerability):
Do not bid me
Dismiss my soldiers, or capitulate
Again with Rome's mechanics. Tell me not
Wherein I seem unnatural; desire not
T'allay my rages and revenges with
Your colder reasons.
(V, iii, 81-6)
Do not argue with me for I will not be able to refute you.
Coriolanus's answer in the first scene to the people's charge finally proves to be inexpressible in language.
They say there's grain enough!
Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword.
(I, i, 194-6)
Action is eloquence, Coriolanus could say, appropriating his mother's phrase. Gesture is the only truly satisfactory mode of expression because it is both literal and symbolic; bodily movements are actual in themselves and they have significance, for they express the inner man. And gesture is a sufficient mode of communication if, as Coriolanus believes, that which it is important to express consists of a number of simple, stable truths. If gesture is the essential mode of expression, if physical posture and movement are the outward signs of an inward state, as is the case for the soldier whose swordblows are the expression of his patriotism, then it is no surprise that the corruption of gesture, the ‘body's action’, involves corruption of the mind and can teach it a ‘most inherent baseness’ (III, ii, 122-3).
There are two more features of Coriolanus's language which recur when he makes scenes and these are cursing and trigger response. Cursing and its analogue, praying (which Coriolanus also does frequently7), are the verbal expressions of a desired action which it is beyond the power of the speaker to accomplish. Both thus can be seen as a use of language as a substitute for action or gesture. It is only the gods who have the superhuman power to fulfil curses and prayers. Coriolanus curses the Romans when he is banished, but he could only realize the verbal gesture of his curse, as he nearly does, by denying his own humanity.
When talking to Menenius about the people in the first scene, his repetitive curses punctuate his speech like a tic, expressing a consistent emotion which is an undercurrent to the momentary discourse riding above it. There is a difference between this frustrated, abbreviated, apparently inadvertent cursing and the full-blown imaginative cursing he does when directly addressing the object of his anger. This difference in fluency can perhaps be explained by the fact that in the first case, discursive language keeps collapsing into the more natural mode of gesture, whereas in the second case, language is gesture, the two are fused as completely as is possible.
When he is not exploding into periodic curses under the constraints of ordinary discourse, Coriolanus often treats language as gesture in another way. Certain words seem to have such an impact on him that he cannot assimilate them, and he throws them back at the speaker as if he were returning a hurled weapon. Such an instance occurs in the first scene when Menenius voices the people's desire:
MENENIUS.
For corn at their own rates, whereof they say
The city is well stor'd.
MARCIUS.
Hang 'em! They say!
They'll sit by th' fire and presume to know
What's done i' th' Capitol,
… They say there's grain enough!
(I, i, 187-90, 194)
This sort of harping upon a word or phrase seems to have, or attempt, a curative, purgative function, especially if we recollect Coriolanus's own equation of words and wounds. For all the words which thus provoke him are words that threaten to wound either him or the state. The whole of his final speech to the Romans is simply an elaboration of this sort of habitual response. To their ‘banished’ he retorts in kind, and then rephrases it in terms of a symbolic gesture:
Despising
For you the city, thus I turn my back;
(III, iii, 135-6).
Such responses are utterly predictable, and indeed it has often been noticed that there is a virtual automatism in the way he responds. Michael Goldman, for example, says that ‘As Antony is the most unpredictable, Coriolanus is the most predictable of men’ like a ‘mechanical toy’.8 There seems to us something petty and childlike in such automatism, but I think it is a distortion of Coriolanus to see him strictly in these terms. He is a man of deeply ingrained habits of thinking and feeling, and his automatism is not a senseless mechanical response. It is closer to the automatic (in other words, the instinctual) response which an animal makes to a provocation which touches it at the profoundest levels of life.
I have been trying to suggest some of the ways in which Coriolanus typically expresses himself; part of the way we perceive him is also via the responses from his immediate audiences. We receive a number of reports which suggest that the effect of his looks, tone of voice, and posture is potent: there is language in his very gesture. Brutus and Sicinius remember ‘his lip and eyes’ (I, i, 253) when they were chosen tribunes; Lartius commends the fear created in his enemies by ‘thy grim looks’ and the ‘thunder-like percussion of thy sounds’ (I, iv, 59-60); Brutus says of the triumphant Coriolanus that it is
As if that whatsoever god who leads him
Were slily crept into his human powers,
And gave him graceful posture.
(II, i, 209-11)
After Coriolanus receives the vote of the people, Sicinius says,
He has it now; and by his looks methinks
'Tis warm at's heart.
(II, iii, 148-9)
Menenius later says of Coriolanus:
Yet to bite his lip
And hum at good Cominius much unhearts me.
(V, i, 48-9)
And Cominius tells how he was dismissed ‘Thus with his speechless hand.’ (V, i, 67). The climax of these descriptions of Coriolanus (and this list is by no means exhaustive) comes in Menenius's grotesque catalogue in act V, scene iv. It seems clear that if, as Menenius says, ‘What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (III, i, 258), his facial and body movements must vent his feelings as well.
In the scenes Coriolanus makes, we see an interaction between himself and the crowd which involves the wavelike systolic-diastolic rhythm Goldman describes.9 The action of wave and repulse does not concern bodies only though: it is also created by verbal assaults and repudiations. People are always impinging upon Coriolanus, literally and figuratively, and he is always pushing them away. In act I, scene ix, Cominius begins by conjuring up the Roman audience which will hear him report Coriolanus's deeds. Then Lartius enters with a real audience, and begins to swell the praise. Coriolanus repeatedly tries to silence all of them, but by accident he himself enlarges the encomiastic audience. He protests,
[I] stand upon my common part with those
That have beheld the doing.
(I, ix, 39-40)
The commons, responding to this as an appeal to themselves, create a commotion, throwing up their caps. This is the limit of pressure; Coriolanus explodes, and he does so into the oaths, curses, the gestural language which we have seen as typical.
Coriolanus has just made his appearance as consul in act III, scene i when the tribunes block his path, and their opposition sets him off again. This time the brakes are applied by his auditors: Menenius, Cominius, the Senators, even the tribunes once they think Coriolanus has said enough to damn himself, try repeatedly to silence him. But his vehemence is aroused by verbal pinpricks as we have seen earlier, and from each attempted interruption he gains new impetus. Shakespeare found most of his text for the corn speech in Plutarch, where it occurs as a single, apparently uninterrupted speech. But his rendering of it in this scene makes it much more than a position statement by Coriolanus. What Coriolanus is speaking about is what he considers to be the abrogation of order within the state, fomented by the people and the tribunes, condoned by the patricians—caused in fact by everyone. But to his audience, it is Coriolanus who is disrupting order, making a scene when the appropriate thing to do would be to go on to the marketplace and ‘answer by a lawful form’, (III, i, 325) as Menenius says. 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:
CORIOLANUS.
… 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.
COMINIUS.
Well, on to th' market-place.
(III, i, 108-12)
We can say that Coriolanus has no sense of timing, that it would be impolitic for Cominius to encourage him in the presence of the tribunes. But the problem is that Coriolanus takes the threat of disorder and ruin of the state personally. Menenius may tell the fable of the Belly, illustrating that the life of the body politic must imitate the life of the human body, but it is Coriolanus who says ‘my soul aches’ when he perceives a threat to the life of the state. There is a peculiarly vulnerable tone to these lines, almost a revelation of nakedness, and A. P. Rossiter picks them out as ‘heart-felt’ but somehow felt by Shakespeare, who puts them ‘in Marcius’ mouth'.10 I see no reason not to credit Coriolanus with all the feeling that lies behind them. If we see him as a man for whom the sense of ordered and stable relationships, in the state and in the family, is supremely important, then it is perfectly in character for him to make such a statement and such a scene. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that while the verbal substance of this speech defends the life of the state, the gesture that it makes in the act of delivery defends the identity of the man. For Coriolanus defines his identity by Rome and Rome's ideals, as he conceives them. Antony's character may be called unpredictable or large or magnanimous—the words suggest that he carries resources within himself, and for Antony, to be Antony is primarily a personal matter involving his own will and his relationship with Cleopatra. But for Coriolanus, to be Coriolanus requires the existence and co-operation of a viable Roman state; it is only bravado which declares that there is a world elsewhere.
Coriolanus is not the only person who makes scenes in the play. Virgilia too makes a scene, without any show of temper, yet one which shows how closely attuned her nature is to her husband's. Act I, scene iii begins with Volumnia's energetic speeches about Coriolanus in battle, rising to a rather grotesque pitch in this quiet domestic context. But then Valeria enters and the conversation descends to small talk, marked only by Virgilia's strange obstinacy in refusing to go out with the other women. Strange, because the request seems normal, and because Virgilia gives no reasons:
VALERIA.
Fie, you confine yourself most unreasonably; come, you must go visit the good lady that lies in.
VIRGILIA.
I will wish her speedy strength, and visit her with my prayers; but I cannot go thither.
VOLUMNIA.
Why, I pray you?
VIRGILIA.
'Tis not to save labour, nor that I want love.
(I, iii, 76-81)
When Virgilia says I cannot go (and she refuses six times), it sounds to the other women like an absurd exaggeration. What she really means, it seems to them, is that she doesn't want to go, and Valeria even accuses her of being a duplicitous Penelope. But Virgilia means it literally. Valeria has commanded,
Come, lay aside your stitchery; I must have you play the idle huswife with me this afternoon.
(I, iii, 69-70)
But Virgilia is solemn, as both the others complain; she is concerned about her husband, a concern which must have been recently aggravated by Volumnia's bloody imaginings, and she cannot ‘play the idle huswife’ at anyone's request. Valeria tries to bribe her with the promise of news, but Virgilia has made a vow and will not budge. In her own fashion, she proves herself as stubborn as her husband, but the significance of her refusal of the ladies is that she will sacrifice their opinion to her own integrity. She will not ‘play’ the woman she is not, even though to refuse is a disagreeably disobedient act for her. Coriolanus, of course, exhibits the same character to an even more marked extent.
II
Coriolanus does not have much of a sense of play. We have very few glimpses of him when he is not in the thick of very serious matters, but we do get one early in the play which warns us of his habitual earnestness. Coriolanus and Lartius are with the troops before Corioli, watching a messenger arrive. They wager their horses on what the news will be, and Coriolanus loses.
LARTIUS.
So, the good horse is mine.
MARCIUS.
I'll buy him of you.
LARTIUS.
No, I'll nor sell nor give him; lend you him I will
For half a hundred years.
(I, iv, 5-7)
Even a wager made to pass time before battle Coriolanus takes completely seriously; for him, the wager is literal, a bond with material consequences, whereas Lartius's banter emphasizes its insubstantial nature. Coriolanus only engages in wordplay when he is in disguise, wearing the gown of humility or the ‘mean apparel’ he appears in at Aufidius's house. In both cases he begins to speak ironically, mocking himself and his audience, making plays on words, all in all behaving most uncharacteristically. This wittiness is an indication of his own discomfort; and its apparently compulsory nature suggests, to adapt Coriolanus's phrase, that the body's action is teaching the mind a most inherent ironic attitude. Under the constraint of unnatural appearance and action, his language assumes strange disguises and facetious appearances as well.
Coriolanus, under ordinary circumstances, is playing the man he is (III, ii, 15-6), by which I think he means that he is behaving naturally, being true to himself, but also that he is quite conscious that this is what he is doing. We have noted how responsive the public is to Coriolanus's appearance. He too seems frequently aware of the impression he is making, especially when he thinks that that impression might be misleading. He draws attention to any divergence between his being and seeming, and attempts to reconcile them: though I seem to be thus, I am really thus and so. There are numerous examples of this situation. When Coriolanus meets Aufidius at Corioli, battle-weary and covered with blood, he hastens to represent himself as a threatening opponent:
Within these three hours, Tullus,
Alone I fought in your Corioli walls,
And made what work I pleas'd. 'Tis not my blood
Wherein thou seest me mask'd.
(I, viii, 7-10)
He tells the citizens, when they ask why he is standing for their voices, that his ‘desert’ not, as they may suppose, his ‘desire’ has brought him there (II, iii, 64-6). In his farewell to his mother, he assures her that he is still her son: she will hear nothing ‘But what is like me formerly’ (IV, i, 53),
—though I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen
Makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen—
(IV, i, 29-31).
Conscious of the mean disguise in which he seeks Aufidius's hospitality, he says,
A goodly house, The feast smells well, but I
Appear not like a guest.
(IV, v, 5-6)
And as he is about to name himself, to assume his true form, he prompts Aufidius to make a consistent response: ‘Prepare thy brow to frown’ (IV, v, 63). Coriolanus reports to the Volscians that for Menenius's
old love I have—
Though I show'd sourly to him—once more offer'd
The first conditions.
(V, iii, 12-14)
The same discomfiture which provokes such remarks is in little that which provokes his violent outbursts at being called traitor or boy. He is enraged at the possibility that he could seem to be a boy when in fact (even in the annals) he is a hero; he insists upon seeming what he is.
It is not surprising then that some of the most notable scenes Coriolanus makes concern just this situation. Menenius asks him, just as Valeria requested Virgilia, to perform a normal, customary act, and Coriolanus responds just as his wife had responded:
I do beseech you
Let me o'erleap that custom; for I cannot
Put on the gown.
(II, ii, 133-5).
To Menenius, the protest is nonsense or petulance, but to Coriolanus it is an occasion on which he fully expects that to the people he will seem what he is not; he will show them his scars which they will perceive
As if I had received them for the hire
Of their breath only!
(II, ii, 147-8).
He not only anticipates the event as playing a part, he anticipates gesture, words, and audience response, all the trappings of a role. When the approach of the citizens is imminent, he stands in the gown of humility ‘rehearsing’ what he must perform:
What must I say?
‘I pray, sir’—Plague upon't! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace. ‘Look, sir, my wounds!
I got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of your brethren roar'd, and ran
From the noise of our own drums.’
(II, iii, 48-53)
The rehearsal quickly modulates from prescription to an ironic undercutting of his ‘lines’, and the tone he achieves here is sustained during his encounter with the people.
Throughout, Coriolanus attempts to withdraw as far as possible from the part he is constrained to play. His language sophistically suggests to the people that he is playing up to them when he is clearly demonstrating his disdain, ‘I have here the customary gown’ (II, iii, 84), he says, as though he were holding it at arm's length. He holds the people at arm's length too; instead of performing his ritual obligations and instead of ingratiating himself, he says he will do so, conjuring up a degraded future image of himself: ‘since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practise the insinuating nod and be off to them most counterfeitly’ (II, iii, 95-6). As one of the citizens says, ‘But this is something odd’ (II, iii, 80). Quite probably, as Coriolanus is promising to take his hat off to them in this ingratiating fashion, the citizens are perceiving that what he is actually doing is waving it in scorn, as one complains later on.
The ritual act of wearing the gown of humility dictates what Coriolanus must do here, and he is not inherently opposed to custom and ceremony; he is proud to wear the oaken garland, and to receive the name Coriolanus. But his next role is harder to accept, and it is dictated only by policy. The mutiny in the marketplace which he aroused in part by playing the man he is, is now to be appeased by his assumption of an artificial role. Everyone recognizes the ‘lawful form’ Menenius has requested as an occasion for acting. Volumnia, backed up by Menenius and Cominius, becomes a prompter and director.
Volumnia's argument is essentially that performing a part is not difficult or perverted but easy and quite natural. We have just heard Menenius say ‘His heart's his mouth’ (III, i, 257) but Volumnia strives to separate the two. His heart is what ‘prompts’ his tongue; Coriolanus normally speaks ‘by [his] own instruction’ (III, ii, 54-4). Even natural speech thus is described as a response to prompting, to rehearsal, as opposed to Coriolanus's automatic responses. It is not much different in operation then from false-speaking, in which the tongue is also instructed, but by another agent.
Volumnia's rhetoric dismembers heart and mouth, but when Coriolanus decides to take the part, he views it as a total fracturing of identity, the destruction of ‘This mould of Marcius’ (III, ii, 103). Just as before, he anticipates himself in the role, and responding to his mother's gestural directions, anticipates or rehearses what he must do. (Volumnia's directions call for a gesticulating, flattering, puppet-like Coriolanus perilously like the one he conjured up to mock the citizens.)
Well, I must do't.
Away, my disposition, and possess me
Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turn'd,
Which quier'd with my drum, into a pipe
Small as an eunuch or the virgin voice
That babies lulls asleep! The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glasses of my sight! A beggar's tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees,
Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath receiv'd an alms!
(III, ii, 110-20)
This catalogue of disjunct entities—harlot, eunuch, virgin, knaves, schoolboys, beggar—demonstrates the complete confusion of identity which acting entails for him. (The confusion of identity is no longer even human when Coriolanus next assumes disguise: like an asocial animal, he dwells under the canopy in the country of kites and crows.) It is a grotesque vision, and so eloquently grotesque that in speaking it, Coriolanus persuades himself that he cannot go through with the part. The speech is virtually a string of curses, and by the end of it he indeed realizes that to accept such a role would be to accomplish his own damnation.
If we have seen in these scenes that Coriolanus considers acting and disguise to be fearful and self-destructive, what then must be the effect of his entry in act IV, scene iv ‘in mean apparel, disguis'd and muffled’ (IV, iv)? (The disguise is in Plutarch, but the prior emphasis on Coriolanus's attitude to disguise is not.) 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. His own explanation that the disguise is expedient is rather remarkable in light of the fact that we have just watched him allow himself to be banished, rather than speak one expedient fair word. And the irony is that here there is no need to be expedient. There is a comic pathos in the very idea of the hero making allowance for the ‘wives with spits and boys with stones’ (IV, iv, 5) who would try to slay him, and in his certainty that disguise is necessary to avoid recognition, since it becomes absurdly clear from his treatment by the servants and Aufidius that no one has the faintest idea who he is. If hitherto Coriolanus insisted he could not perform a part without destroying or degrading himself, are we to understand that now he can assume a disguise because he has been destroyed?
Part of the difficulty in assessing Coriolanus's response to banishment is that he offers such scant assessment of the situation himself. When Antony flees at Actium, he recognizes that his dishonourable act has in some sense destroyed him, and although he rallies, as he does from the actual suicide blow, he repeatedly returns to the realization of the present difficulty or impossibility of being Antony. Now the great hero must
To the young man send humble treaties, dodge
And palter in the shifts of lowness,
(Ant. & Cleo., III, xi, 62-3).
This is exactly what we see Coriolanus doing and yet his own verbal responses seem grossly inadequate to his circumstances. Look at his analysis of what has happened. In soliloquy he discusses the revolutions of fortune: inseparable friends ‘On a dissension of a doit’ become enemies, while enemies ‘by some chance, / Some trick not worth an egg’ (IV, iv, 17-21) become allied. The generalization clearly refers to his own situation, yet there is a curious depreciation or suppression of the cause of change, as if there were no real connection between one state and another. Here we see again Coriolanus's disjunctive habit of perception, but in this case the transition he deprecates happens to be the most violent and earth-shaking experience of his life. His lack of response seems to reveal a deadness of feeling which is not mitigated by the violence of his statement to Aufidius when he has unmuffled, for he offers to fight against Rome or to present his throat to Aufidius's knife as equal alternatives (and it is one of the ironies fulfilled by the play that in fact they are identical choices). His banishment from Rome, his loss of the political and familial orders which defined him, have mortally stricken Coriolanus, and though he may not speak of his wounds, his altered behaviour reveals them.
This incident is not his only voluntary assumption of a disguise or role subsequent to banishment. He also deliberately ‘shows sourly’ to Menenius: he pretends to be divorced from his family, though he fails ‘Like a dull actor’ (V, iii, 40); he enters Corioli greeting the lords of the city as a triumphant hero even though he has confessed to Aufidius that he has been forced to compromise. Laurence Kitchin's very interesting review of a Memorial Theatre production with Laurence Olivier suggests that Coriolanus can very plausibly be played along the lines that his beggarly disguise initially suggests, and that this scene shows us the beginning of his disintegration.11
The behaviour of Aufidius's servants to him recapitulates Coriolanus's banishment from Rome; as he notices,
I have deserv'd no better entertainment
In being Coriolanus.
(IV, v, 9-10)
The servants keep trying to rid the house of a nuisance, while he echoes their words and gestures of banishment, once pushing and once beating them away. Subsequent to his banishment from Rome, we can see Coriolanus's behaviour as one long reactive series, pushing away the servants, dismissing Cominius, saying ‘Away!’ (V, ii, 76) to Menenius as well, physically turning away from his family, and again turning away from Rome even as he had first turned his back.
In their last confrontation, Coriolanus attempts to face Volumnia
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.
(V, iii, 36-7)
He is performing a part, in other words, and this time it is Volumnia's task to persuade him to be a natural man again, to be Coriolanus, her son, a Roman. He is also, however, in performing this part, being true to himself, to the vow he has made and his sworn loyalty to the Volscians. He is hopelessly divided against himself: witness the fact that now it is not play-acting which he thinks would make him effeminate and childlike, but natural behaviour, obedience to instinct, which would make him a ‘gosling’ (V, iii, 35) or ‘of a woman's tenderness’ (V, iii, 129).
Previously, Coriolanus has proved himself a most unable actor, particularly in the matter of gesticulation, since gesture is for him the mode of expression least susceptible to corruption by the will or intellect. Volumnia (and her party), arguing for the natural man, has all the influence of this potent form of expression on her side, while Coriolanus has only his verbal and intellectual resolve to counter it with. It is their physical presence and gestures which move him; Coriolanus melts, in fact, before a word has been exchanged, at the sight of Virgilia, his mother's bow, his son's ‘aspect of intercession’ (V, iii, 32). The instinct he swears he will not obey has been throughout the overriding motive for all his conduct, including his turn against Rome, and it cannot now be wilfully ignored.
The scene begins with a series of ceremonially heightened gestures: Coriolanus's embrace of Virgilia; his salute to his mother by kneeling; Volumnia's reciprocation of that gesture; Coriolanus's lyric apostrophe to Valeria; his benediction of his son; and the boy's genuflection in response. Once Coriolanus has turned to her, it is Volumnia who orchestrates these exchanges, confirming relationships. Her first long plea is full of bodily and gestural images of the sort which must impress themselves on Coriolanus's imagination: she offers him the alternative images of himself led manacled through Rome or treading triumphantly on his mother's womb. Then, when she finds she must yet intensify her plea, she does so by emphasizing the immediate, their physical presence, their actions as pleaders, and finally by acting, directing and interpreting dramatic gesture for Coriolanus who is the unwilling audience:
He turns away.
Down, ladies; let us shame him with our knees.
To his surname Coriolanus' longs more pride
Than pity to our prayers. Down. An end;
This is the last. So we will home to Rome,
And die among our neighbours. Nay, behold's!
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.
(V, iii, 168-77)
The impact of such a reversal must be breathtaking to Coriolanus. After insisting by word and gesture during the entire course of the scene on the physical and emotional bonds between him and themselves, and at this climactic moment of unified gestural appeal, Volumnia rises, snaps the bond, and denies the existence of any relationship whatsoever:
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioli, and his child
Like him by chance.
(V, iii, 178-80)
It is that denial and withdrawal which finally provokes Coriolanus's instinctive response; his hand binds her to him.
Though we see Coriolanus fail ‘like a dull actor’ in the face of his family's appeal, his inability to act is no longer the converse, as it once was, of the absolute integrity of his character. If there is no longer such a strain between playing a role and playing the man he is, it is because the man he is is no longer a clearly definable entity. Certainly he is no longer the singular incomparable hero, for after he has conceded to Volumnia, he asks,
Were you in my stead, would you have heard
A mother less, or granted less, Aufidius?
(V, iii, 192-3)
With its appeal for emotional support, and its implication that he is behaving as any other man would have behaved, such a question is startlingly new for Coriolanus.
His failure to act the solitary hero has led to an admission of his common humanity. As an ordinary man, no longer exalted by a proud idealistic integrity, he is groping towards the ordinary man's refuge: the capacity to pose, to act, to be politic. After his banishment Coriolanus can no longer play the man he is, but because of this very loss of integrity he can play a role; and the role he plays upon re-entering Corioli is that of the man he once was.
He enters Corioli with fanfare and the public adulation which previously had been repugnant to him. Here, he offers no such response; the stage direction reads that ‘the Commoners [are] with him’. Coriolanus's speech to the lords of the city rings unbearably hollow: it poses as a tale of the triumphs Coriolanus used to tell, or rather which he heard told of him. But there is no triumph involved; there is instead political rhetoric:
You are to know
That prosperously I have attempted, and
With bloody passage led your wars even to
The gates of Rome. Our spoils we have brought home
Doth more than counterpoise a full third part
The charges of the action. We have made peace
With no less honour to the Antiates
Than shame to th' Romans;
(V, vi, 74-81)
His real glory and real triumph lie in the past, when he was Coriolanus, and it is to this he reverts when he is insulted. The oaths, exclamations, acts, all of the last scene which Coriolanus makes, must be seen as the shadow of his earlier scenes, for his furious indignation is no longer pure self-defense or pure self-expression. At the last, crying out to use his sword, it is what is written in the annals, the historically recorded Coriolanus, which his gesture would defend.
Notes
-
Coriolanus, ed. Reuben Brower (New York, 1966), p. 247.
-
James L. Calderwood, ‘Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words’, Studies in English Literature VI (1966), 214-15.
-
Quotations from Shakespeare are made from The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951).
-
G. K. Hunter, ‘The Last Tragic Heroes’, Later Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 8, (New York, 1967), p. 20.
-
Calderwood, ‘Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words’, p. 216.
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R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York, 1935), p. 13.
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e.g., I, iv, 10-12; III, ii, 33-7; V, iii, 70-4.
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Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, 1972), p. 118.
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Ibid., pp. 112-16.
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A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns, (New York, 1961), p. 243.
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Laurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama (1960), p. 144: ‘There was no doubt at all where the play's climax comes. It is on the sealing of their pact, or so I shall always believe after Olivier's extraordinary handshake. He had been very quiet during the scene. There was a deathly, premonitory misgiving in the way he eventually shook hands; and his eyes were glazed. Whatever integration the character of Marcius had possessed fell apart at that moment. The rest was crumble, detonation and collapse, with part of him fatalistically detached.’
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