[In the following essay, Michael concentrates on Coriolanus as an isolated, tragic figure whose failure involves an inability to assert his own humanity.]

Much of the criticism of Shakespeare's Coriolanus tends to consider the struggle between the patricians and the plebians as the principal issue of the play, with Caius Marcius Coriolanus, the central character, acting as chief representative and spokesman for patrician elitism and the right to rule.¹ Coriolanus' words and actions prove him no true representative or spokesman for any group. Because Coriolanus is a man apart from the group—plebian or patrician—the play is not primarily concerned with political factions within a social order, however much the Roman plebians and patricians contend for power. Neither is it primarily concerned with the war between separate societies, however much the Romans and Volscians fight for dominion. Rather, Coriolanus is a play which examines one man's attempt to stand for himself alone and therefore against all others, friends and foes alike. As a result of his isolated stance, Coriolanus, the Roman patrician and martial savior of his people, becomes the potential destroyer of his city, his countrymen, and his family.

Shakespeare's groupings of characters on stage, his stage directions, and the images of god, machine, and dragon associated with Coriolanus, emphasize for his audience Coriolanus' tragic isolation. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus is in every way the central character of the play. He is the focus of attention whether he is on stage or off. On stage he dominates the action with his aggressive, often belligerent, presence. Those few times when he is absent from the stage, the talk is of him or concerns him directly. Center of attention that he is, a circle of separateness spreads about him which is gradually perceived by characters and audience alike. His singularity and isolation are paralleled in the dialogue through Shakespeare's incremental use of god, machine, and dragon images which document Coriolanus' metamorphosis from man to monster.

The denunciation of Coriolanus by the plebians which begins the play and the adversary positions of the actors on stage demanded by the dialogue throughout the scene established at once for the audience Coriolanus' dangerous singularity among men. The play opens with a quarreling plebian mob, carried to the brink of riot by their grievances against the patricians. Several plebians in the crowd condemn in particular the “chief enemy to the people,” the haughty, unyielding patrician, Gaius Marcius, soon to be proclaimed “Coriolanus.” Menenius, the smooth-tongued, aging patrician and friend to Marcius, has just succeeded in calming the riot-bent plebians when Marcius enters, alone and openly hostile to the gathering. His first words immediately alienate and antagonize the angry plebians:²

                    What's the matter, you dissentious rogues
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?

[I. i. 163-65]

In his diatribe against them, Marcius flings abusive comparisons at them with a fierce contempt that puts uncompromising distance between himself and the plebians:

He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring. 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. Your virtue is
To make him worthy whose offence subdues him
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate.

[I. i. 166-76]

The bitter exchange between Marcius and the plebians indicates the positions of the characters on stage with the virtual authority of a stage direction; in order to give emblematic form to the hostile insularity of Marcius, the plebians and Marcius must stand on opposite sides of the stage, or, if Marcius addresses them from an upstage position, the plebians must stand downstage and away from him.

In the first half of the play, which concerns Coriolanus' victory over the Volscians, his unsuccessful bid for consul, and his expulsion from Rome, several important scenes emphasize Coriolanus' manifest isolation in the company of others: his lone entrance within the gates of Corioli (I. iv), his rejection of praise for his valor at Corioli by his fellow generals and the Roman troops (I. ix), his arch solicitation of the voices of the plebians to become consul (II. iii), and his banishment from Rome (III. iii). In the second half of the play, which concerns the consequences of Coriolanus' banishment, scenes displaying Coriolanus' solitariness include his disguised appearance at the house of Tullus Aufidius (IV. iv-v), his enthroned presence in the Volscian encampment outside Rome where Menenius and Coriolanus' family come to solicit his pity (V. ii-iii), and, finally, his solitary death by assassination as he stands within the Volscian senate house (V. vi). Thus, although Coriolanus is on stage with numerous other characters in each of these scenes, his actions consistently set him off from each assembled group.

In addition, Shakespeare reinforces visually his stage image of the isolated, antagonistic Coriolanus through stage props and costuming. When, for instance, the generals and soldiers assemble to praise him after the victory at Corioli, Coriolanus comes before them looking “a thing of blood.” When he must ask the plebians for their “voices” to elect him consul, he wears, according to custom, the gown of humility. When, after his banishment, he comes to Aufidius to offer his traitorous services to the Volscians, he is muffled in a cloak.

Stage directions, taken from the 1623 folio, further illustrate Coriolanus' dramatized isolation. Of the 160-odd stage directions in the play, most are taken up with the rudimentary stage business of entrances, exits, physical gestures, and the like. The remaining eleven demonstrate Shakespeare's deliberate and careful presentation of Coriolanus as a man apart, whether alienated from or honored above other men and, therefore, different from them. For example, two stage directions, placed before and after the battle of Corioli, stress Marcius' aloneness even at the height of his career as a soldier and defender of Rome. Before the gates of Corioli, Marcius urges his soldiers forward for the assault on the city, but none follows his lead. The action on stage is made explicit by the stage direction: Another Alarum, Martius followes them [the Volscian soldiers] to gates, and is shut in (I. iv. 42f.).³ Later, after his almost single-handed defeat of Corioli, the triumphant Romans reconvene: Flourish. Alarum. A retreat is sounded. Enter at one Door, Cominius, with the Romanes: At another Doore Martius, with his Arme in a Scarfe (I. ix). Even after a victory in which all the Roman soldiers share following Marcius' initial breaching of Corioli, he enters alone and stands apart from the rest, a visual symbol to the audience of his independence. The Romans need him; he does not need them. The audience has seen that Marcius needed no man during the battle; neither will he allow the Roman soldiers to praise him immediately after the battle, preferring to tend his wounds rather than receive their plaudits.

Two more stage directions which demonstrate visually Coriolanus' separateness present him as a hero honored beyond all men. Following the victory at Corioli, Marcius alone is honored for valor and for the victory: A long flourish. They all cry “Martius, Martius,” cast up their Caps and Launces: Cominius and Lartius stand bare (I. ix. 40f.). An audience can hardly fail to apprehend Marcius' singularity at a time when he is honored by all men. Yet he will accept no honor from them except his unique title, “Coriolanus.” Another visual example of Coriolanus as the military hero honored above all other men takes place after the victorious army returns to Rome: A sennet. Trumpets sound. Enter Cominius the Generall, and Titus Lartius: betweene them, Coriolanus, crown'd with an Oaken Garland, with Captaines and Souldiers, and a Herauld (II. i. 76f.). The martial sounds of the trumpets, the solemn military procession led by the generals, Coriolanus' central position in the procession, and his hero's wreath of oak provide aural and visual confirmation of Coriolanus' isolated supremacy.

All in the play are aware of Coriolanus' superiority. It is a superiority the plebians hate, the tribunes envy, the patricians admire, and Volumnia loves—and no one believes in it more strongly than Coriolanus himself. The relentless references to “I” that punctuate Coriolanus' speeches throughout the play reveal his obsession with himself as a distinct and separate entity. Coriolanus' pride in who he is and what he stands for is at once his greatest strength and his greatest weakness, for such an unqualified belief in himself means that Coriolanus' true allegiance is to himself alone. Coriolanus' betrayal of Rome is, therefore, inevitable and is foreshadowed in Act I when Marcius tells Cominius that his desire to overcome Aufidius in single combat is paramount, even above his allegiance to Rome:

Were half to half the world by th' ears, and he [Aufidius]
Upon my party, I'd revolt, to make
Only my wars with him.

[I. i. 232-34]

In pledging allegiance to himself, Coriolanus makes it credible that the man who cares for personal aggrandizement above all else should immediately, upon being banished from Rome, turn on her and join her enemies, the Volscians, for the sole purpose of destroying her.⁴ Caius Marcius' title, “Coriolanus,” given him as defender of Rome after the victory over Corioli, is an empty title. He was at Corioli for himself. Accordingly, Coriolanus exults to Aufidius at the end of the play, referring to the Roman victory at Corioli, “Alone I did it” (V. vi. 117). He is not far wrong. Yet we hear his note of self-allegiance sounded above the literal meaning of the statement. What makes this self-serving tragic and dooms Coriolanus is that his pride, regardless of whether it is admirable or evil, is absolute and narrow. Coriolanus' constant affirmation of himself alone robs him of any breadth of humanity. By his denial of others, the price of affirming himself, Coriolanus becomes increasingly solipsistic and dangerously aberrant.

Coriolanus sees himself as a man so superior to and therefore independent of all men that finally he thinks of himself as a self-made creation. Sicinius, out of hatred and fear, calls Coriolanus

                                                                      … this viper
That would depopulate the city and
Be every man himself.

[III. i. 262-64]

Later, when the citizens banish Coriolanus, he replies to them in turn, “I banish you,” and makes his first physical move into his own separate world: “Despising / For you the city, thus I turn my back: / There is a world elsewhere” (III. iii. 123, 133-35). The world to which he turns to help him take revenge on Rome is the Volscian world. Coriolanus utterly resents being called a traitor by the tribunes, but he becomes, ironically, a traitor to Rome in joining her enemies and marching against the city of his birth. He excuses his traitorous conduct by declaring himself not a pariah but an antonomous creation:

                                                                                Let the Volsces
Plough Rome, and harrow Italy: I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.

[V. iii. 33-37]

These words, spoken late in the play, affirm Coriolanus' deliberate and virtually successful attempt to become unique in his condition and unanswerable for his conduct.

Ironically, however, Coriolanus is quick to label the plebians, whom he despises utterly and feels are totally alien to himself, as the anomalies. Repeatedly, he characterizes the plebians as monsters, calling them “Hydra,” whose tribunes act as “The horn and noise o' th' monster's” (III. i. 95). He says of his banishment that the plebians, “The beast / With many heads butts me away” (IV. i. 1-2). By associating the plebians with the hydra, an imaginary animal or monster, Coriolanus suggests that he thinks their faces are indistinguishable from one another and their natures bestial. Yet Coriolanus becomes a monster of another sort: “something extraordinary or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel.”⁵ In denying the plebians their humanity, Coriolanus contradicts his own. He alone is the anomaly.

Coriolanus' metamorphosis from man to monster is represented by three dominant images associated with him throughout the play: Coriolanus as god, as machine, and as dragon. Critics dealing with the imagery in Coriolanus find that most images in the play concern food, disease, and animals.⁶ But the imagery associated with Coriolanus himself concerns his gradual transformation from a man into a god of detachment, a machine of war, and a dragon of solitariness. These images, used by others in speaking to or about Coriolanus and by Coriolanus in referring to himself, reinforce his separation and isolation from his fellow beings throughout the play until, shortly before he gives in to Volumnia, Coriolanus reaches his remotest point of detachment, a point only Volumnia can reach to topple him.

The images of Coriolanus as god, machine, and dragon express the growing idea which others have of Coriolanus and he has of himself: that he is more than extraordinary, that he is something other than human. The first comparisons of Coriolanus to a god refer to his pride. Early in the play he is said to be a man willing to go against even the gods if thwarted. The tribune Brutus says of his anger, “Being moved, he will not spare to gird the gods” (I. i. 255). Two acts later Coriolanus is said to be a man who thinks of himself as a god. Brutus remarks on Coriolanus' superior tone with the plebians, saying,

                                                            You speak o' th' people,
As if you were a god, to punish; not
A man of their infirmity.

[III. i. 80-82]

Volscian Aufidius, who also hates Coriolanus, implies that Coriolanus' defeat of Rome will be the solitary act of a naturally supreme individual more than the combined effort of a matchless Roman soldier and a determined Volscian army:

All places yield to him ere he sits down,
And the nobility of Rome are his;
The senators and the patricians love him too.
The tribunes are no soldiers, and their people
Will be as rash in the repeal, as hasty
To expel him thence. I think he'll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature.

[IV. vii. 28-35]

In describing the reaction of the Volscian army to their new commander, Coriolanus, Menenius, who loves Coriolanus as thoroughly as Brutus and Aufidius hate him, speaks of Coriolanus' virtual deification:

He is their god; he leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than Nature,
That shapes men better. …

[IV. vi. 91-93]

In spite of Menenius' unabashed praise of Coriolanus, Menenius' words nevertheless suggest to the audience that Coriolanus, the superior product of a shaping deity “other … than Nature,” is necessarily an unnatural, nonhuman thing.

Like the god imagery, the machine imagery is associated with Coriolanus' predominance over all men. The machine images define the kind of thing he is. Because Coriolanus exhibits at Corioli that he is the perfect instrument of war, the patricians celebrate his victorious return to Rome and praise Coriolanus as a gloriously nonhuman whose armor encases a metallic man of war.⁷ Volumnia, who gave birth to this Roman Talus, is the first to associate Marcius with an engine of war:

Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus:
“Come on, you cowards! you were got in fear,
Though you were born in Rome.” His bloody brow
With his mailed hand then wiping, forth he goes,
Like to a harvest-man that's tasked to mow
Or all or lose his hire.

[I. iii. 33-38]

At Corioli Titus Lartius remembers Coriolanus, whom he thinks slain, as

                                                                                                    … 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. iv. 57-62]

On hearing the trumpets announce her son's arrival in Rome, Volumnia exults:

These [the trumpets] are the ushers of Marcius. Before
him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears:
Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,
Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die.

[II. i. 156-59]

In recounting Coriolanus' defeat of the Volscians, Cominius compares Coriolanus to an engine of destruction, relentless in his inevitability:

                                                                                … as weeds before
A vessel under sail, so men obeyed,
And fell below his stem. His sword, death's stamp,
Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was timed with dying cries.

[II. ii. 103-12]

Coriolanus' awesome disposition at Corioli, however admiringly reported by his fellow patricians, foreshadows Coriolanus' gradual transformation into something other than a man.

After his banishment, dragon imagery appears, which suggests Coriolanus' outcast and dangerous state. It is Coriolanus who first refers to himself as a dragon, emphasizing in the image his aloofness as well as the loneliness of his banishment:

                                                                                … I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon that his fen
Makes feared and talked of more than seen.

[IV. i. 29-31]

Later in Act IV, Aufidius says that Coriolanus “Fights dragon-like” for the Volscian state (IV. vi. 24).

The god, machine, and dragon imagery in the play are applied solely to Coriolanus and indicate that his superiority has resulted in a dangerous separation from his fellow mortals. Menenius gives the final description of Coriolanus transformed from man to monster in which the fusion of god, machine, and dragon images reveals Coriolanus at his furtherest remove from humanity:

SICINIUS:
Is't possible that so short a time can alter the condition of a man?
MENENIUS:
There is 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.
SICINIUS:
He loved his mother dearly.
MENENIUS:
So did he me: and he no more remembers his mother now than an eight-year-old horse. The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes; when he walks, he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery. 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. 9-24]

In choosing to stand alone and for himself, Coriolanus stands for nothing; he stands only against. Yet this man who strives to stand “as if a man were author of himself” is finally destroyed through his true human author, Volumnia. Unknown to Menenius when he describes to Sicinius Coriolanus' metamorphosis, the “god” has already yielded to his mother.

Even as Coriolanus is about to complete his transformation from man to self-authored being by destroying Rome, he gives way to Volumnia, the living symbol of his humanity and mortality. Although her appeal to Coriolanus' sense of mercy, forgiveness, and love are moving enough in human terms, they have no effect on her prodigious son. Only when he sees her turn from him and hears her deny him as her son does Coriolanus relent:

                                                                                Come let us go:
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioli, and his child
Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch.
I am hushed until our city be a-fire,
And then I'll speak a little.

[V. iii. 177-82]

Yet this is all she needs to say. Coriolanus' promised destruction of Rome, the act that would have given physical embodiment to his essential separateness, has been countermanded by the threat of a mother's curse. In giving into Volumnia and thereby reestablishing his humanity, Coriolanus also destroys himself.

Even though Coriolanus' sparing of Rome might have been the first selfless act of a noble man, it is, by his own words, the capitulation of a blame-placing child:

                                                                                          O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. 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.

[V. iii. 182-89]

Instead of taking full responsibility for his decision to spare Rome, Coriolanus fails to act the part of a man. This failure costs him his life, for his mortal enemy Aufidius hears Coriolanus' irresponsible and emotional words to his mother and soon turns them against him.

Speaking in the Volscian senate, where Coriolanus has come to defend his decision to spare Rome, Aufidius stings Coriolanus into a frenzy by cannily reminding Coriolanus of his unmanly behavior with a singularly adroit epithet: “… thou boy of tears!” (V. vi. 101). Coriolanus in a rage at the insult begs for his own death: “Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me. ‘Boy!’ False hound!” (V. vi. 112-13). Once again, Tullus Aufidius becomes the self-absorbed object of Coriolanus' hatred, as his last words betray:

                                                                                                              O that I had him,
With six Aufidiuses or more—his tribe,
To use my lawful sword!

[V. vi. 128-30]

Coriolanus' doomed attempt to achieve the extra-human state of a god, a machine, and a fabulous beast results in his ironic reversion to the uncontrolled tears and anger of a child and ends when the assassins of Aufidius stab Coriolanus to death. The tragedy of Coriolanus, then, is that in striving to be apart from men and other than a man, Coriolanus succeeds, becoming all things above, outside, and, finally, below the natural state and stature of a man.

Although most critics deal with Coriolanus as a political play in which the Roman patricians and plebians represent irreconcilable political opposites, Coriolanus, the arch-patrician and military hero of Rome, is too solitary a figure to represent or speak for the patrician side. Shakespeare uses the placement of characters on stage and stage directions to give emblematic form to Coriolanus' tragic separateness. To give impetus to what otherwise would be a static presentation of individual isolation among men, Shakespeare uses incremental images of Coriolanus as a god, machine, and dragon. These images delineate Coriolanus' metamorphosis into a being who upholds his own integrity with such increasing intensity that he comes to believe himself a self-made creation. His metamorphosis into god, machine, and dragon transforms Coriolanus from a man into a self-authored prodigy bent on confirming his autonomy in the destruction of Rome, the city of his human origin. Even in yielding finally to his true human author, Volumnia, Coriolanus' submission is not the act of a man; it is the act of a child. In reverting to his own humanity at the end of the play, Coriolanus fails to achieve the one state that was most within his power to achieve, manhood.

Notes

1. Major studies of the political overtones in Coriolanus are: William Hazlitt, Hazlitt on Theatre, ed. William Archer and Robert Lowe (1895; rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, 1957); George Brandes, William Shakespeare (London: Heineman, 1920); and M. W. McCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (1910; rpt., London: Russell and Russell, 1967). More recent studies include James Emerson Phillips, Jr., The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (1940; rpt., New York: Octagon Books, 1972); O. J. Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943); Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949); D. J. Enright, “Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate?” Essays in Criticism, 4 (1954), 1-19; L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare's Politics: With Some Reflections on the Nature of Tradition,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 43 (1957), 115-32; Gordon Ross Smith, “Authoritarian Patterns in Shakespeare's Coriolanus,” Literature and Psychology, 9 (1959), 45-51; Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961); A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961); Norman Rabkin, “Coriolanus: The Tragedy of Politics,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 17 (1966), 195-212; J. L. Simmons, “‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ Shakespeare's Heroic Tragedies: A Jacobean Adjustment,” Shakespeare Survey, 26 (1973), 95-101; see also the chapter on Coriolanus in Simmons' Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1973), pp. 18-64.

2. Textual citations are taken from Coriolanus, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Eng.: University Press, 1958).

3. The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp. 617-46.

4. In his famous lecture, Coriolanus (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), A. C. Bradley explains Coriolanus' defection to the Volscians as a “change of mind” brought about by the long and lonely days he spent contemplating revenge following his banishment. Bradley's assumption is, perhaps, incorrect, for although the audience is told that days have elapsed between Coriolanus' banishment and his arrival at Antium, as Bradley says, “Shakespeare does not exhibit Coriolanus' change of mind which issues this frightful purpose [to destroy Rome]” (p. 12). Clearly, Shakespeare does not exhibit Coriolanus' “change of mind” because no change takes place. His remark to Cominius concerning Aufidius (quoted above) marks him early in the play as a potential traitor. Coriolanus simply realizes this potential when he seeks out Aufidius at Antium.

5. According to the OED, this definition of monster, now obsolete, was current between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. The last recorded example occurred in 1710.

6. Important studies of the food, disease, and animal imagery in Coriolanus are: Maurice Charney, “The Image of Food and Eating in Coriolanus,” in Essays in Literary History, ed. Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 37-55; W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (1951; rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, n. d.); J. C. Maxwell, “Animal Imagery in Coriolanus,” Modern Language Review, 42 (1947), 417-21; and Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935; rpt., Boston: Beacon Hill, 1958).

7. Two excellent studies of metallic imagery in the play are by G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 155-63, and Derek Traversi, “Coriolanus,” Scrutiny, 6 (1937-38), 43-58.