SOURCE: Poole, Adrian, ed. “You Shames of Rome!” In Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: Coriolanus, pp. 1-22. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988.

[In the following essay, Poole argues that the compelling power of shame is one of the thematic touchstones of Coriolanus.]

Coriolanus begins with a rush. The stage is instantly filled with physical tumult. There is a menace in the start of many Shakespeare plays, but nowhere is it as overt and palpable as this. These people are intent on violence, ready to die and ready to kill.

It is a well-known fact that like all good citizens Shakespeare hated mobs. Most literary critics are good citizens and therefore disposed to bring the following agreed truths to bear on this play: ‘We know that Shakespeare detested the city mob’;¹ ‘The populace is consistently presented as unstable, fickle, anarchical, deficient in vision’;² ‘Shakespeare portrays the unreasoning violence of mob action’.³ But surprising as it may be, we know nothing for certain of Shakespeare's feelings about city mobs, the populace in this play is not consistently presented as anarchical, and their violence is not unreasoning.⁴

‘Reasoning’ is exactly what these people engage in, albeit abrupt, nervous, precipitate. ‘Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt!’ remarks one of the speakers in Brecht's study of the play's first scene.⁵ To call them a ‘mob’ is already to solve a problem which will be one of the play's main subjects. Does what you call people make them what they are? In fact we never hear the word ‘mob’ in Shakespeare or anywhere else until the mobile vulgus is vernacularised later in the seventeenth century. The play's opening stage-direction describes them as ‘a Company of Mutinous Citizens’, and a later one will call for a ‘rabble’ (III.i.179, 261). In its small way this calls attention to the difficulty of choosing a word to describe such congregations of men in the mass. We will hear many attempts to concert agreement about this human multitude. In the first scene alone we hear them addressed or referred to as ‘good citizens’, ‘mine honest neighbours’, ‘mutinous members’, ‘rats’, ‘dissentious rogues’, ‘curs’, ‘the rabble’, ‘fragments’, ‘worshipful mutiners’ and ‘the people’. As the play progresses the tribunes will relentlessly trumpet the call of ‘the people’, while their chief enemy will snarl with ingenious ferocity at ‘Hydra here’, ‘this bosom multiplied’, and ‘the beast with many heads’.

Before these mutinous citizens can confront their chief enemy, they are checked by a patrician who represents one aspect of what they are up against in the power of words. They find it difficult utterly to mistrust Menenius Agrippa. How resolved are they? Nothing could be as resolved as the image of passionless implacability with which Menenius seeks to cow them in his first extended speech:

                                                  you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves, as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment.

(I.i.66-71)

In the face of this image of undeviating, unstoppable motion, the citizens' own attempts at ‘proceeding’ seem puny and hesitant indeed. Menenius may well be invoking the prophetic vision of an imperial destiny of which he himself cannot be conscious.⁶ But the syntax through which his own words move is no less important than the image. The power of this massive motion can be measured by the ten thousand curbs which the Roman state will leave devastated in its wake, as signs of its own invincible progress. Menenius's sentence enacts this relentless movement by the links or curbs across which it propels itself, gathering power as it leaves them behind—‘as … as … whose … cracking … more … than …’.

Menenius employs two particular tactics typical of the language of power in the play as a whole. One is the use of a relative clause that propels the scene forward, as if by virtue of a second or afterthought that occurs as the sentence itself is in motion. The other is a comparative construction of crushing elaboration, which deprecates the possibility of comparison even as it makes it.⁷ Cominius will provide a memorable example when he heralds Martius's approach on the battlefield:

The shepherd knows not thunder from a tabor,
More than I know the sound of Martius' tongue
From every meaner man.

(I.vi.25-7)

Cominius's genuine joy does not obscure the derision intrinsic to this figure. Martius will eventually hear the laughter of the gods at the humiliating difference between Olympus and a molehill.

The First Citizen was ready with several explanations of Martius's motives: safety in numbers. Menenius has more than one ploy for putting the plebeians in their place. The most memorable of these is his ‘pretty tale’ of the belly and its mutinous members. This steadies and generalises the opening scene's concerns with hunger and anger and language, the ways in which words moderate or exacerbate the violences of physical need, and the violence to which it gives rise. How far does Menenius convince his immediate auditors onstage? How far do we suppose that he convinced a theatre audience in 1608 or a reader in 1623? How far do we suppose that he was supposed to?

Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived with the permanent threat of dearth, the memory and fear of hunger as a widespread human and social fact. The social historians Walter and Wrightson provide some helpful perspectives on Menenius's fable.

It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which people in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were conscious of the threat of dearth. Periodic harvest disaster and food shortage were the spectre which haunted early modern Europe, one of the principal factors contributing to the profound insecurity of the age.⁸

Walter and Wrightson advance evidence for a deep-seated reluctance to resort to force both on the part of the victims of dearth and on the part of civil authorities faced with its social consequences. They argue that the very permanence and magnitude of the threat posed by dearth created the need for a corresponding weight of explanation to control it. This complex body of explanation was compounded of various elements:

ways of accounting for dearth which, having their origins in the experiences of different sections of society, blended together into a coherent explanation which was potentially satisfactory to all and informed both administrative and popular responses to such crises.⁹

They conclude, ‘What is significant is less that dearth in England provoked occasional outbreaks of disorder than that it led to so few’.¹⁰

Menenius does not concert all the specific explanations described by Walter and Wrightson, but there is a correspondence to be found in the form and method of his tactics. In fact he does refer in passing to the most familiar of explanations that ‘For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it’ (I.i.71-2). This makes a nominal gesture towards the ‘doctrine of judgements’, the idea that the three great judgements (dearth, plague and the sword) were punishment for sin, a doctrine so familiar to Shakespeare's audience that it requires no more than a nod to activate it. How far Menenius's listeners are convinced by it is another matter.

But the main weight of his explanations is thrown into the parable of the belly. Shakespeare's audience would be familiar from a variety of sources with the image of the body politic. Indeed the overfamiliarity of the fable's components is precisely what makes its interpretation difficult. It is a question of how seriously Menenius offers his interpretation to the plebeians and to us, and how seriously they and we take it. There are many more ways of playing this scene than Reuben Brower acknowledges when he makes the following confident interpretation of its tone:

The good-natured insolence and sturdy candor, the tough repartee of the exchanges, belong to a game played between patrician and people. The ‘Belly-smile’ of the patrician, and the ‘great toe’ of the plebeian, both help to impart the feeling of healthy relatedness in a civil society.¹¹

Such a good-natured attitude surely ought to wither in the face of Menenius's forthcoming reference to his auditors as ‘rats’. Nevertheless, it is impossible to dispel the sense that this is indeed a kind of ‘game’ played not only between patrician and people, but also between playwright and audience.

If Menenius's fable is taken seriously it is difficult not to notice its fallacies. The patrician belly is actually supposed to be worse off than the plebeian members (‘that all / From me do back receive the flour of all, / And leave me but the bran’)? This defies belief as a general statement of the relative diet of the patricians and the people, but it doubly defies belief that this is what is happening in the present dearth. Fabling apart, what has happened to the distribution of food in Rome here and now? Are ‘the store-houses crammed with grain’, as the First Citizen claimed, or are they not?

In any case the polity of the body which Menenius proposes is in its own terms rather suspicious, as M. J. B. Allen notes:

Every thinking member of Shakespeare's audience would have been struck by the fact that Menenius' version, though speciously persuasive and internally consistent, was nevertheless the incorrect, the heretical, the dangerously heretical version. For any allegory that elevated the stomach over the heart or head was obviously portraying a topsy-turvy, chaotic vision of things where the great chain of correspondences had been swept aside by the wolf of appetite.¹²

This seems convincing, but even a thinking member can suffer a moment of weakness, and it is still possible for a thinking member of a modern audience to be swayed by Menenius and his fable. Bradley thought Menenius ‘a pleasant and wise old gentleman’, whom the play regarded with ‘unmingled approval’.¹³ And Kitto is not alone in attributing to the idea of the body politic a transcendent reality informing the play as a whole.

Even the uninstructed reader of Shakespeare apprehends easily enough that to Shakespeare, and presumably to his audiences also, the idea of a divinely appointed Order is basic: that ‘the body politic’ was not a tired metaphor, that ‘the deputy elected by the Lord’ was at least a poetic reality. For reassurance the layman can turn to the experts, to Professor L. C. Knights's British Academy Lecture for instance, and learn that it is indeed true; that in Shakespeare there is a living connexion between concepts like Order, Nature, Providence, the peaceful State, the anointed King, Goodness, Fruitfulness, Love.¹⁴

It would be easy to scoff at Kitto's gullibility. There are other experts who will tell us that a tired metaphor was exactly what ‘the body politic’ was by 1607-8, indeed that it was so tired as to be actually dead. ‘The Death of a Political Metaphor’ is the title of one relevant essay.¹⁵ But Kitto's innocence is a useful reminder that the question of belief, political or otherwise, is not something which can be decisively regulated by an intellectual élite or thinking members of professional Shakespearian experts. We may take it that neither in Shakespeare's time nor our own is it only the supposedly unthinking members of the audience who are disposed to trust Menenius.

In fact, Menenius's fable is not quite as easy to see through as Allen suggests. After all, it is not absolutely clear that Menenius's ‘dangerously heretical’ model of the body does elevate the stomach over the heart or head. It is true that the head and heart play no role at all in the first part of his speech, but one might understand this to be a purely tactical and even tactful omission: this squalid quarrel between the belly and the body's members is obviously beneath them. The Citizen introduces them when he refers, albeit ironically, to ‘the kingly crown'd head’ and the ‘counsellor heart’, and this could be understood as an implicit restatement of a more orthodox polity of the body and a rebuke to Menenius's heretical version. But it is not necessary to see the two models in opposition to each other. In the version preserved in Camden's Remaines, the mutinous members only seek the advice of the heart after they have begun to feel the effect of three days' starvation.¹⁶ And Menenius does in due course make reference to ‘the heart’, if not exactly to ‘the head’, in his description of the belly's redistribution of food ‘through the rivers of your blood / Even to the court, the heart, to th'seat o'th'brain (I.i. 134-5). This is a splendidly mysterious place, evidently the residence of the body's highest authority, whether this is called the heart or the brain. Brockbank notes, ‘The mysterious relationship between brain and heart often perplexes Shakespeare's language’.¹⁷ And the mysterious relationship of this mumbo-jumbo to any actual political reality would certainly perplex Menenius's hearers, both on stage and in the audience, if they are thinking enough to ask such awkward questions. Where exactly in republican Rome can you find ‘the Court’—in the Senate? But Menenius is going to identify the senators with the belly. Martius believes in what he calls ‘the heart of generosity’ (I.i. 210), but where does this figure find a material, political reality? And who exactly in the constitution of Jacobean England, however it is described, would correspond to Menenius's selflessly executive belly? These are the questions to which Menenius's mystifications give rise even as they are supposed to mask them.

It is impossible to be certain what effect Menenius's fable has on the plebeians. His closing words suggest that he knows that he has made little real impression on them, though a little later he will say that they are ‘almost thoroughly persuaded’. Does he intend them to hear and understand that he is now calling those same people ‘rats’ whom he began by addressing as ‘mine honest neighbours’? If the ‘rats’ feel a surge of renewed vigour at the prospect of violent strife, they are instantly confronted by a new antagonist, who wears no masks and scorns verbal calculation.

No major Shakespearian character is as instantly voluble as Caius Martius. In the theatre it is difficult to attend to what he is saying, because we are given so little chance to size the actor up before he launches into torrential speech. The eye has a chance to dwell on Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth on their first appearances; other people do most of the talking. Nobody makes an audience flinch as instantly and instinctively as Martius does. Martius asks the plebeians a question (‘What's the matter … ?’), but he does not get an answer to it. This is not surprising. The way he uses words does not show much interest in the possibility of dialogue.

When we look at the shape of his speech on the page we can see that it possesses exactly that quality of ‘resolution’ which the citizens were in search of. That is to say, a kind of ‘certainty’ that depends on the manipulation of sharp antitheses, of absolute oppositions and self-destroying comparisons. Just as the citizens tried to characterise their sense of themselves by characterising Martius as their ‘chief enemy’, so Martius—but with how much greater confidence and precision—confirms and expresses his sense of himself by characterising them. There is something terrifying but also exhilarating in the very impact of such certainty, something that cuts athwart whatever feelings we may have about the content of what he is saying. The content itself is simple enough: the absolute unreliability of the people whom he is addressing. Yet the very zest with which his speech engages with the objects of its contempt ensures that his speech is not itself predictable.¹⁸ Though he says one and the same thing over and over again, we are continually surprised by the ways in which he says it: ‘you are no surer, no, / Than …’—than what?—‘Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, / Or hailstone in the sun’ (I.i. 171-3). Fire and ice: the conjunction of these extremes serves to characterise Martius himself as much as the people to whom he refers. The images of fire and water and melting so casually invoked here will return in the latter stages of the play with increasingly explicit significance.

There is a derisive wit at work throughout his summoning of contraries: lions and hares, foxes and geese, fire and ice. It is a wit that sounds as if it were drawing on proverbial wisdom,¹⁹ like the image of the ludicrous creature who tries to swim with ‘fins of lead’ (I.i. 178-9). Might not his auditors find some humour, however ruefully, in this sort of violent banter?²⁰ Is Martius entirely in earnest, or is he—as the tribunes will later say of Menenius—known well enough? There is a lot of comedy in the play that depends on characters taking themselves more seriously than we do. But around Martius himself, the nervous, flickering comedy has something to do with our knowing how dangerous it would be to fail to take him at his word.

The news of imminent war is as welcome to Martius as the news of the granting of tribunes should be to the people. The ‘business’ of the plebeians has been, for Martius, a risible distraction from the real business of the city. Now he is back in the limelight. This is the way the tribunes think of him, but it is sharply at odds with the impression we have ourselves received. Left alone on stage, they start working out the implications of Martius's accepting the post of second-in-command with all the avidity of born political commentators, mongering their political projections, speculating about the percentage points that Martius is likely to gain by accepting a place below the first. Yet the uncalculating ease with which Martius accepts his commission makes us feel that he takes little interest in the kind of fame about which they are so bustlingly curious. So far from there being any friction between Cominius and Martius and Titus Lartius, the divided command in fact serves to show how thoroughly amiable are the working relations between the three men.

In Plutarch, Aufidius is not mentioned until Martius decides to desert to the Volsces. Shakespeare introduces him into the play early on to establish and sustain the idea of what North calls the ‘marvelous private hate’ between them.²¹ And perhaps something more and other than hate. Aufidius confirms and enlarges our impression that Rome has real business in the outside world. The Romans and Volscians are customary, even natural antagonists, and the wars between them are a regular business. No particular motive is required to justify this war: here the contrast with the English history plays is marked. It is just what men and states naturally do, to battle for survival. Aufidius helps to naturalise this view of men's business when he says that ‘'Tis sworn’ between Martius and himself (I.ii. 35). We do not pause to wonder how literally he means this; it simply confirms that he relishes the prospect of doing business with Rome's star performer as much as we know Martius does with him—like two prize-fighters whose reputations so far precede them that they have no need of any personal knowledge to feel an intimate bond.

The contrasts with which we have been impressed are becoming clearer—the contrasts between two kinds of opposition or confrontation: the enmity between Martius and the masses, the enmity between Martius and Aufidius: and related to these personalised enmities, the different aspects of the city, its internal and external antagonisms.

The next scene, however, sketches for the first time in the play quite different images of relationship. It is dominated by women. It is the only scene in the first half of the play that obviously takes place indoors or inside. (Act 3 Scene 2 is probably set in Martius's house, but this fact is not stressed). In this respect it will be balanced by the scene in the second half in which Martius is received by Aufidius in his house. It also looks forward to the two other occasions on which we will see this trio of women together, Volumnia, Virgilia and Valeria. On both occasions they will greet Martius on his triumphal returns to Rome, first as the conqueror of Corioles, and then as he stands poised to become the conqueror of Rome itself. At these great public moments they will represent the concerted claims of the family life which the women uphold in their men's absence.

Shakespeare got some clues for Martius's mother from North's Plutarch, but he turned them to astonishing effect. Plutarch says that Martius ‘being left an orphan by his father, was brought up under his mother a widowe’.²² It is not explicitly stated that this lack of a father was responsible for his ‘lacke of education’,²³ but Shakespeare's imagination went vigorously to work on the mother's part in bringing up Martius and on her responsibility for his ‘education’, or the lack of it. He got another clue to the grip of their relationship in Plutarch's account of the source and goal of Martius's valour in battle: ‘the only thing that made him to love honour, was the joye he sawe his mother dyd take of him’.²⁴ Apart from these hints this mother plays no part in Plutarch's narrative until her son is ready to conquer Rome and she is persuaded to make a last appeal to him. Shakespeare entirely excises the religious aura surrounding this appeal, the vision which moves Valeria to suggest the women's deputation to Martius, and the subsequently pious thanksgiving in which the women get a temple and an image of Fortune built to thank them for their trouble. Shakespeare makes the characters in his play frequently appeal to the gods, but he is more interested in the awe that they feel towards and inspire in each other—interested, that is, in human godding, to adapt Martius's own extraordinary coinage (V.iii. 11). He makes Martius's mother the prime author of these visions of divinity that accumulate around the figure of her son.

So far we have seen and imagined Martius face to face with others. It seems his natural attitude: he is happy to live by the preposition ‘against’. Now for the first time we see the women at his back, his mother and his wife. They are different kinds of women, and they stand in different relations to him. But they are both the women from whom he sets out to work, and the women who await his return. In the course of the play, we shall see him return to them twice and depart from them twice.

It is the question of his leaving and returning that dominates their thoughts. There are soft-conscienced readers who shrink with horror from Volumnia's pride and joy in her son. But how easily does this pride and joy come to her? The difficulty in organising our thoughts and feelings about her centres on this doubt. From her first speech, she makes it clear that she knows that she has renounced something:

When yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way; when for a day of kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding; I, considering how honour would become such a person—that it was no better than picture-like to hang by th'wall, if renown made it not stir—was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him. …

(I.iii. 5-14)

She has cast him out or sent him forth before his time. Picking up a clue from the image she uses of Hecuba's ‘breasts’, we might say that she has ripped him untimely, not from his mother's womb but from his mother's breast. Like Lady Macbeth she is made to use an image which overtly disparages the mother's nurturing power.²⁵ Later on we may hear a strangely inverted echo of the woman behind Macbeth, when the woman behind Martius rebukes him with the words, ‘You might have been enough the man you are, / With striving less to be so’ (III.ii. 19-20). Lady Macbeth had to screw up her husband to the sticking place of his manhood:

When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.

(Macbeth, I.vii. 49-51)

But Volumnia's son has long since reached a sticking place, and her task will be to try to unscrew him from it. Is there any milk left in Martius? Menenius will mutter in despair that there is ‘no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger’ (V.iv. 28-9). Volumnia is at the source of the many images projected onto her son, of a being entirely composed of ‘blood’—a ‘thing of blood’, as Cominius will call him (II.ii. 109).

Volumnia's role is not just one in which nature has cast her. This scene invites us to observe the means by which she has made it her own, and to wonder at the pains and pleasures it has brought her. Take her response to Virgilia's inquiry as to what she would do if Martius were killed: ‘Then his good report should have been my son’ (I.iii. 20). It is easy to read this as callousness, rolling glibly off the tongue. But to read it as such would itself be glib, before entertaining the thought that women whose men run the constant risk of death may do well to forefeel their bereavement. Nor would one easily say to such a woman's face that she had no right to her pride in that good report. There might be a momentary pause before she gives this answer. But even if she answers without hesitation, we could not conclude that she has never felt any pain in knowing that this would always be her answer to such a question.

One open element in our sense of this scene is the extent to which Volumnia's words are directed at Virgilia. This is partly a question of the tension between the two women. Whose house is this? Plutarch tells us that after his marriage Martius continued to live in his mother's house, but in performance there is no means of being sure to whom this space belongs. Volumnia initiates and dominates the speech, but it is Virgilia who quietly asserts her authority over the space. One can read into Volumnia's merciless recitation of the ethos by which she has lived a hostility to the woman whose pacific temperament constitutes an implicit critique of her whole way of life. Virgilia's stubborn refusal to play the part which Volumnia imagines for her—singing, and expressing herself ‘in a more comfortable sort’ (I.iii. 1-2)—constitutes an implied rebuke to Volumnia's triumph over fear. One might even entertain a mischievous possibility that would run sharply counter to the traditional idealisation of Virgilia, by supposing that she deliberately exaggerates her real fearfulness in order to tease her mother-in-law (‘O Jupiter, no blood!’—knowing that this is exactly what will most irritate Volumnia). They fight over Virgilia's solemness, they fight over the little boy, they fight over going out to visit their neighbours: it might as well be Ibsen.

But one could also read a kind of goodwill into Volumnia's attitude to Virgilia—a desire that for her own sake the younger woman should conquer her fear as she herself has done.²⁶ Virgilia's agony of apprehension is precisely the state from which Volumnia has freed herself by an act of pure will. Has she succeeded in freeing herself entirely? Volumnia's words may be directed at herself rather than (or as well as) at Virgilia. The image of Volumnia fluctuates between two extremes, the abruptly self-righteous guardian of an ethos, and the rapt, ecstatic visionary. Through the repetitions of her litany, she confirms her countenance against the memory of her child's tender body. The syntax of the sentence that begins, ‘When yet he was but tender-bodied …’, requires both from Volumnia and the actress playing her a breathtaking stamina such as only long training can produce.

And Virgilia? Valeria mockingly compares her to Penelope, the model of the patient wife awaiting the return of her wandering warrior husband, a single man in the vast world. Volumnia had invoked, albeit invidiously, another mighty image of womanhood in the figure of Hecuba. Virgilia resists the likenesses and roles which are thrust at her by the other women, confining herself to the simplest of statements: ‘No, at a word’. She rejects the invitation to ‘go visit the good lady that lies in’; she will ‘not over the threshold’ till her lord returns from the wars. Virgilia gently but firmly disparages a women's collective domain centering on the processes of childbirth in which men have no necessary role. She forgoes the pleasure of the women's ‘mirth’ that we glimpse in Valeria's sociable chatter, in favour of an anxious, tenacious loyalty to the memory of her husband and the promise of his return. Yet this scene does plant in our minds the image of concerted female suffering and action such as will re-emerge to massive effect at the climax of the play. The third and last occasion on which we see these women together is in the great supplication scene (V.iii.). There we will feel the force of Virgilia's crossing a threshold to align herself with the other women and with the claims of childbirth.

The juxtaposition of scenes throws Virgilia's renunciation of ‘mirth’ into quietly pathetic relief when we see how much mirth her husband finds in his work and can share with his colleagues. The echoes of her ‘solemness’ overlap with the buoyant pleasure that her husband takes in the little exchange with Titus Lartius before they get down to business (I.iv. 1-7). This man is happy at his work; perhaps only happy when he is at work.

The mirth is strictly temporary. ‘Enter Martius, cursing’ (I.iv. 30): this was the attitude in which he made his first appearance in the play, and now it is repeated. It is one of the several ‘postures’ in which we will remember him. ‘You shames of Rome!’ There is something in the very smell of other people's fear that inspires him to exult in his own fearlessness. In the market-place his revulsion from the smell of the common people may seem merely like a personal fastidiousness. But in the teeth of death he smells something more than skin-deep in their shrinking, and it is the smell of physical corruption that in return he wishes on them. This note of visceral loathing will return at a climactic moment, when he speaks of ‘the reek o'th'rotten fens’ (III.iii. 121). ‘Reek’ and ‘rotten’ recur elsewhere: Cominius will turn Martius into a figure for the god of war himself, when he imagines him, unforgettably, ‘Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if / 'Twere a perpetual spoil’ (II.ii. 119-20).

By then the legend has taken root. What exactly happens at the siege of Corioles, when Martius performs his reckless, heroic feat? We know what people later suppose to have happened, in the official myth that envelopes him, that he captured the city single-handed. But to do this literally he would indeed have to be a superman or a demi-god. In Plutarch, Martius follows the fleeing Volsces into the city ‘with very fewe men to helpe him’, and ‘with a wonderfull courage and valliantness’ makes a ‘lane’ through the midst of the enemy, which gives Lartius time to bring up the rest of the troops.²⁷ There is no mention of the gates being shut behind him. Shakespeare could have chosen to represent all this in narrative, but instead he chose the more difficult option of showing—or half-showing—what Martius did. He makes Martius enter the city entirely alone, just as later he makes him leave the city of Rome entirely alone, unaccompanied by the friends that Plutarch gives him. This creates the opportunity for Lartius's obituary notice, but it also creates a massive problem in the nature of Martius's re-entrance. The Folio's stage-direction here reads, ‘Enter Martius bleeding, assaulted by the Enemy’. How do the gates open? Do we suppose that Martius opened them himself, or that they somehow give way, being pinned still only with ‘rushes’, as the Volscian senator had said? Obviously the effect on stage is that it is astounding to find that he is still alive, fighting for his life, against impossible odds.

William Empson seizes on the problem with a wonderful glee in the course of examining the resources of the Globe theatre.²⁸ He uses Lartius's call for the siege-ladders to construct an ingenious scenario that has Martius fighting his way backwards up the stairs inside the gates, to re-emerge on the upper-stage that represents the city walls. His reappearance would enable the others to get the siege-ladders up and it would, Empson argues, more plausibly support the illusion that Martius has somehow captured the city single-handed than the horribly awkward business with the gates. Empson explains this latter as a second-best option provided for a touring version of the play in theatres that lacked the Globe's balcony. So that what we have is a conflated text of the two different versions, one of them distinctly more plausible.

This is not much ado about nothing, though it may not be quite as important as Empson thinks. However it is done, the important effect must be that Martius makes an inroad into the city, which against all the odds he succeeds in holding long enough for the others to turn it to maximum advantage. Of course he does not literally capture the city single-handed, but he does ‘alone’ make all the difference. What is useful about Empson's theory is that it helps him to stress the gap between what an audience sees for itself and what the characters subsequently make of the events.

What the play keeps on saying is that he must be a demi-god, because no human being could capture a walled city single-handed. We do not know whether he believes it himself, because his rule of politeness keeps him silent, but he appears to accept it when he destroys himself by telling the Volscians, ‘Alone I did it’, in Corioli. But we of the Globe audience saw what really happened, so we know that it wasn't superhuman after all, though of course splendidly brave, vigorous, and resourceful, like a coup by Biggles. It is rather shocking that such a good first Act could become forgotten.²⁹

This scepticism is invaluably bracing. Too much exposure to dutiful expositions of the play's imagery and what it tells us about the central figure can dull the reader's interest in exactly how and why and by whom and to what effect these images are produced. A theatre audience is naturally inclined to be at once more involved and more sceptical in exercising its feelings and wits on the palpable difference between what the characters on stage do and what they say. The members of a theatre audience can recall what they saw for themselves (whatever the details of the staging), when they listen to the grandiloquent terms that Cominius finds to describe these events in his formal oration to the Senate. They may wonder exactly what his figure of speech means, when he says that Martius entered

The mortal gate of th'city, which he painted
With shunless destiny.

(II.ii. 111-12)

They may remember the bleeding assaulted figure whom Lartius felt the need to ‘fetch off’, when they hear Cominius go on to say that Martius

          aidless came off,
And with a sudden reinforcement struck
Corioles like a planet.

(II.ii. 112-14)

They may even remember that Cominius did not see all this for himself.

Empson exaggerates the extent to which Martius's feat at Corioles transforms the way people think of him, when he says that Shakespeare was ‘very specific about Coriolanus, making him a man to whom the tragic story would be unlikely to happen, were it not for this initial event’.³⁰ On the contrary, both before and after ‘this initial event’ we are given clear indications that Martius was bound to do something extraordinary sooner or later. In the speech that seals the legend, Cominius tells us that after his startling debut against Tarquin, Martius ‘lurch'd all swords of the garland’ in no less than seventeen subsequent battles (II.ii. 100-1). It cannot come as a complete surprise that—to use the sporting metaphors that Martius nowadays seems bound to provoke in readers, including Empson—such a consistently high scorer should at some point break a world record. Empson underplays Martius's sheer readiness for conversion into legend, but he does focus very acutely on the decisiveness of what happens at Corioles for Martius's subsequent career, and above all, on the gap that separates his actions from the subsequent myth: ‘the buildings of fancy’, to adapt a phrase of his mother's.

Martius will turn into a legend, but the legend is not built on thin air. This is why it is essential for an audience to be physically impressed by the actor playing Martius, to feel his impact, so that we can understand how the other characters come to think of him as superhuman, and how he may come to think this himself. It is not just a matter of physical strength, but of mind over matter, or ‘spirit’ over the body.³¹ Cominius says that ‘his doubled spirit / Requicken'd what in flesh was fatigate’ (II.ii. 116-17): the Latinism of ‘fatigate’ itself distances the weariness of the flesh. When he chooses the soldiers to take against the Antiates' men of trust, Martius says that the ones he wants are simply those ‘that are most willing’ (I.vi. 67) and ‘so minded’ (I.vi. 73). That there is nothing in truth superhuman about him is proved by the exhaustion that understandably comes over him after the battle, and he confesses that his ‘memory is tired’.

Conquering a city virtually single-handed might be enough for most heroes, but what Martius is really interested in is having a round with Aufidius, face to face. He is ready for him now that his own face is covered in blood, now that he looks ‘as he were flay'd’ (I.vi. 22). That's Martius all right, says Cominius, as this terrifying apparition approaches: ‘He has the stamp of Martius’ (I.vi. 23). A stamp guarantees authenticity, and this is the appearance in which Martius feels at home. We may remember this later, when the blood has had time to dry and his body has settled into an object that can be inspected by others, when he is no longer an apparition to inspire terror and wonder, but an object to be read and judged and approved.

The speech which Martius addresses to Cominius's troops is staggeringly different from the one he addressed to the ‘shames of Rome’ who were beaten to their trenches a little earlier. Where Martius had rounded on his men with withering scorn, Cominius has treated his with respect and maintained their morale (‘Breathe you, my friends; well fought’). There is no means of knowing whether the soldiers who were ‘beat back to their trenches’ at Corioles behaved worse than the soldiers whom Cominius rallies ‘as it were in retire’. It is true that Martius's example does in the end have some effect on his soldiers, in that they follow him (and Lartius) back into Corioles. But it is not obvious that Martius's way of treating them gets better results than Cominius's, and one of the reasons that Martius can now address such a rousingly patriotic speech to these men is that he can appeal to a sense of fellowship which Cominius's comradely treatment of them has kept alive. After Martius's heroic speech, it is Cominius who more quietly and pragmatically bolsters their resolution by addressing them as ‘my fellows’, and promising that they shall ‘Divide in all with us’ (I.vi. 85-7).

‘Oh me alone, make you a sword of me’—the Folio text makes Martius himself shout this line, as he is taken up in the soldiers' arms. The punctuation and hence intonation of the line are disputed: is it a question or an exclamation? Some editors suppose the words to be shouted not by Martius but by the soldiers in response to Martius's call to arms. Brockbank gives it to All in his Arden edition: ‘O me alone! Make you a sword of me!’ (I.vi. 76). It is a reasonable supposition, but one may weigh the significance that such a doubt should occur at all. The fact is that this is the one moment in the play at which Martius is at one with the many, his voice rousing and blending with theirs. For the first and last time in the play, we see and hear him at the head of a mass of people, literally taken up in their arms. Whether he speaks the line himself or whether the soldiers speak it together, he has achieved a pinnacle of desire. He is the sword of his people. His words are transformed into the gesture of pure intent, in which he and a great mass of people are at one. He has concluded his rallying speech by referring to himself in the third person for the first time in the play, as he and they all together do as he says:

Wave thus to express his disposition,
And follow Martius.

(I.vi. 74-5)³²

After this the scene in which he comes face to face with Aufidius is bound to come as an anti-climax. The taunts and vaunts that they throw at each other must strike us as perfunctory (I.viii. 1-13). Wrenching up their power to the highest is what they really want to do, and they can do that best without words. The loyalty of the ‘condemned seconds’ who come to Aufidius's aid stands in ironic contrast to the ‘seconds’ who failed to materialise when Martius careered into Corioles. This sort of combat is different, and the enmity between the two men can only be settled by death. In fact the anti-climax of this scene has been subtly prepared for by the tiny glimpse of Titus Lartius that precedes the renewal of the field-battle (I.vii.). It prepares us for the knowledge that war has a massive aftermath in which gains have to be held on to, losses explained, rewards and punishments dispensed. Martius has escaped with alacrity from the administration—it is hardly his forte. But soon he will be faced with a more protracted and painful aftermath. He will have to live with his new-found name and fame: they are public property. And eventually he will have to count the cost of the shame he inflicts on others, a shame that will especially fester in the enemy he loves to hate, Aufidius.

Notes

1. J. Middleton Murry, ‘A Neglected Heroine of Shakespeare’, Countries of the Mind (London: Collins, 1922), p. 54.

2. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 122.

3. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 166.

4. For sympathetic and perceptive accounts of the ‘mob's’ behaviour, see Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), pp. 117-18; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 222-4; and Wilbur Sanders in Wilbur Sanders and Howard Jacobson, Shakespeare's Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), pp. 138-40.

5. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and tr. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 252.

6. John W. Velz, ‘The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect’, Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978), p. 12. See also Velz, ‘Cracking Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in Coriolanus’, English Literary Renaissance 13 (1983), pp. 58-69.

7. Michael Goldman makes some excellent points about the characteristic syntactical effects created by Martius's ‘pursuit of the delayed idea’, in Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 150-4. Madeleine Doran notes the importance to the play of disabling comparisons which simultaneously augment and diminish, in Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Madison, Wisc., and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 192.

8. John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 108.

9. Ibid., p. 114.

10. Ibid., p. 128.

11. Reuben Brower, introduction to Coriolanus, Signet Shakespeare edition (New York and Toronto: New American Library; London: New English Library, 1966), pp. xxxv-vi.

12. M. J. B. Allen, ‘Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeare's Tragic Openings’, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 20: Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), p. 16.

13. A. C. Bradley, Coriolanus, Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy (1911-12), p. 469.

14. H. D. F. Kitto, Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 377-8.

15. David G. Hale, ‘Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor’, Shakespeare Quarterly 22 (1971), pp. 197-202.

16. Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), vol. 5, p. 552. All references in the text to ‘Plutarch’ refer to ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’ in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (1579), as reprinted by Bullough.

17. Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 105.

18. See Doran, pp. 189-91.

19. Carol M. Sicherman makes some good points about the play's use of proverbs, and Martius's ‘preceptive habit of mind’, in ‘Coriolanus: The Failure of Words’, English Literary History 39 (June 1972), p. 197.

20. See Sanders in Sanders and Jacobson, pp. 141-2.

21. Bullough, p. 527.

22. Ibid., p. 505.

23. Ibid., p. 506.

24. Ibid., p. 508.

25. See Janet Adelman's interesting psychoanalytic account, ‘“Anger's My Meat”: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108-24; also, for the specific connection of Macbeth and Coriolanus, Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 151-92, and Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 91-107.

26. This line of thought was suggested by Irene Worth's wonderful Volumnia in Elijah Moshinsky's 1983 BBC television production of the play.

27. Bullough, p. 512.

28. William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 177-83.

29. Ibid., p. 178.

30. Ibid., p. 177.

31. Paul A. Cantor develops an interesting argument about the importance of ‘spiritedness’ to the ethos of Rome, the word being intended to stand for the Greek thumos, in Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 37ff, and note 17, p. 213.

32. The only other occasion on which he does so is at III.ii.103, when he refers to ‘This mould of Martius’.