[In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Barton emphasizes the historical and political themes of Coriolanus and considers the influence of Livy and Machiavelli on Shakespeare's dramatization of republican Rome.]

In book 7 of his great history of Rome, from her foundation to the time of Augustus, Titus Livius recounts, with a certain admixture of scepticism, the story of Marcus Curtius. In the year 362 b.c. a chasm suddenly opened in the middle of the Forum. The soothsayers, when consulted, declared that only a ritual sacrifice of the thing “wherein the most puissance and greatness of the people of Rome consisted” could close the fissure and “make the state of Rome to remain sure forever.” Much discussion followed, but no one could determine what that precious thing might be. Then Marcus Curtius, described in Philemon Holland's Elizabethan translation of Livy as “a right hardie knight and martiall yong gentleman,” “rebuked them therefore, because they doubted whether the Romanes had any earthly thing better than armour and valor.” Armed at all points, he mounted a horse “as richly trapped and set out as possible he could devise,” and—like Hotspur at Shrewsbury—“leapt into destruction” (2 Henry IV, 1.3.33). The gulf closed.

In the Rome of Marcus Curtius, a century after the time of Coriolanus, it is by no means obvious that valour is “the chiefest virtue,” the one to which the city still owes her greatness. Times have changed. The Romans need to be reminded, by the gods and by the heroic action of one “martiall yong gentleman,” that formerly, as Plutarch asserts in his “Life of Coriolanus,” “valliantnes was honoured in Rome above all other vertues: which they called Virtus, by the name of vertue selfe, as including in the generall name, all other speciall vertues besides. So that Virtus in the Latin, was asmuche as valliantnes.” This passage, in North's translation, caught Shakespeare's eye. But the version of it that he introduced into act 2, scene 2 of Coriolanus is qualified and uncertain. “It is held,” Cominius says as he begins his formal oration in the Capitol in praise of Coriolanus,

That valour is the chiefest virtue and
Most dignifies the haver: if it be,
The man I speak of cannot in the world
Be singly counter-pois'd.

(2.2.83-87)

“If,” as Touchstone points out in As You Like It, is a word with curious properties and powers: “Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If” (5.4.102-3). Cominius's “If,” like Touchstone's, is a kind of peacemaker. Set off by the cautious appeal to an opinion in “it is held,” it introduces a slight but significant tremor of doubt into what in Plutarch had been fact, rock-hard and incontrovertible. Cominius goes on to celebrate Coriolanus in battle as a huge, irresistible force—a ship in full sail, bearing down and cleaving the aquatic vegetation of the shallows, a planet, the sea itself—but “If” continues to mediate between martial prowess as a traditional all-sufficing good and the possible claims of other human ideals. It is as though Shakespeare's Cominius already had an intimation of that later Rome in which Marcus Curtius would be obliged to demonstrate to a forgetful city that valour was indeed her “chiefest virtue.”

In writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare depended primarily upon Plutarch, as he had for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Once again, North's translation provided him with the dramatic skeleton, and even some of the actual words, of his play. But this time, he also had recourse to Livy, the chronicler of Coriolanus, Marcus Curtius, and the fortunes of republican Rome. It has long been recognized that lines 134 to 139 in Menenius's fable of the belly, those concerned with the distribution of nourishment through the blood, derive from Livy's, not Plutarch's, version of the tale. Those six lines are important in that they provide tangible evidence that Livy's Ab Urbe Condita was in Shakespeare's mind when he was meditating Coriolanus. But they matter far less than a series of overall attitudes, attitudes peculiar to this play, which I believe Shakespeare owed not to any one particular passage in Livy, but to his history as a whole—in itself, and also as it had been interpreted by another, celebrated Renaissance reader.

As an author, Livy is likely to have impinged upon Shakespeare's consciousness at a relatively early age. Selections from his work were often read in the upper forms of Elizabethan grammar schools, ranking in popularity only behind Sallust and Caesar. As a young man, Shakespeare drew material from book 1 in composing his “graver labour,” The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, six years before Philemon Holland's translation made the whole of Livy available in English. Shakespeare customarily consulted more than one historical source. He had never, before Coriolanus, written a play set in republican Rome, in a mixed state of the kind that, for various reasons, was attracting considerable attention in Jacobean England. Livy was the acknowledged, great repository of information about this republic, as well as its fervent champion. It was almost inevitable that Shakespeare should return to Ab Urbe Condita, now handsomely “Englished” by Holland, in order to remind himself of what was happening in Rome at the beginning of the fifth century b.c. What he found there was an account of Caius Martius which, although the same in its essentials as that of Plutarch in his “Life of Coriolanus,” was different in emphasis, and radically altered by a context from which it could not be disentangled.

Unlike Plutarch, the biographer of great men, author of Lives carefully paired for moral and didactic purposes, Livy was preeminently the historian of a city. Throughout the thirty-five extant books of his history, he never breaks faith with the intention expressed in his very first sentence: to record the res populi Romani, the achievements of the people of Rome. By “populi,” Livy does not just mean plebeians. He means everyone, all classes, the rulers and the ruled, the leaders and the led. In Livy's eyes, no man, no matter how great, should regard himself as superior to the state, or even coequal. Plutarch consistently plays down the political concerns of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, one of his main sources of information as to the nature of Rome's past. Livy, by contrast, is far less interested in individual destiny than he is in the changing character of Rome's institutions, her expansion through the Mediterranean, and the increasingly complex social and economic equilibrium worked out within the city over a long period of time. So, characteristically, he does not find it especially important to determine whether Coriolanus himself was, in fact, killed by his Volscian allies after he turned back from the gates of Rome, or whether he survived, eating the bitter bread of exile, into old age. Either ending is possible. What really matters to Livy in the Coriolanus story is, first, that thanks to the intervention of the women, Rome herself escaped destruction and even acquired a fine new temple dedicated to Fortuna Muliebris. Secondly, that a new stage was reached in the protracted but necessary struggle between patricians and plebeians—a struggle in which there was right on both sides.

Although Collingwood perversely tried to deny it, Livy is essentially a developmental historian. As T. J. Luce writes in his recent study of the composition of Livy's history, “the central theme of his narrative is that the growth of Rome and the genesis of her institutions was a gradual, piecemeal process that took many centuries.” Book 2, in which the story of Caius Martius is told, addresses itself specifically to the question of how libertas was achieved, actually, and in men's minds. It begins with threats from without: Lars Porsinna of Clusium and the attempt of the exiled Tarquins to regain control of the city. It ends with the overcoming of threats from within, represented by Spurius Cassius, and by Coriolanus. In describing the arrogance of Coriolanus, his stubborn refusal to countenance the tribunate, Livy writes with the Tarquin kings and their tyranny in mind, and also in full awareness of what (historically) was to come: an increase in the number of tribunes to ten, publication of the laws, permission for plebeian/patrician intermarriage, and the opening of the highest civic offices, including the consulship itself, to plebeians. Livy himself went on to chronicle these changes, leaving Coriolanus almost entirely forgotten in the past, except as the focus (intermittently remembered) of a cautionary tale. However useful in time of war, men like Coriolanus are a threat to the balance of the state, to an evolving republic which must try to take them with it but, if it cannot, has no option but to discard them by the way.

Although the populace in Julius Caesar includes one witty shoemaker, and there are—temporarily—two sceptics among the followers of Jack Cade, it would be hard to claim that Shakespeare displays much sympathy for urban crowds in the plays he wrote before Coriolanus. In depicting the fickle and destructive mob roused so skilfully by Mark Antony, the ignorant and brutal rebels of 2 Henry VI, even those xenophobic Londoners rioting over food prices in the scene he contributed to Sir Thomas More, he is savagely funny, but also almost wholly denigratory. That is no reason for assuming, as critics tend to do, that his attitude in Coriolanus must be similar. In fact, this play is unique in the canon for the tolerance and respect it accords an urban citizenry. The very first scene of the tragedy presents plebeians who arrest their own armed rebellion in mid-course, not because of outside intervention by a social superior—the persuasive tactics of a Flavius and Marullus, a Lord Clifford or a Sir Thomas More—but freely, of their own volition, because it is important to them to inquire exactly what they are doing, and why. The Roman people here are not distinguished by personal names. They speak, nonetheless, as individuals, not as a mob. They care about motivation, their own and that of their oppressors, and they are by no means imperceptive. Even the belligerent First Citizen thinks it important to establish that hunger has forced him into violence, not a “thirst for revenge” (1.1.24). Not one of the citizens attempts to deny that Caius Martius has served Rome nobly, whatever his attitude towards them, nor do they make the mistake of thinking that he stands out against a distribution of surplus corn to the commons because he is personally covetous. The First Citizen contents himself with suggesting that this man's valorous deeds have been performed for suspect reasons: out of pride, and a desire to please his mother, rather than from disinterested love of his country. This is not very far from the truth. The Second Citizen has already cautioned the First against speaking “maliciously” (l. 34), and yet the events of the play will, to a large extent, justify the latter's analysis.

The Roman people in this play are politically unsophisticated and, sometimes, confused and naive. Like Williams and Bates confronting the disguised Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, they can be blinded by rhetoric, even though theirs is in fact the stronger case. The English common soldiers allowed themselves to be diverted from the crucial issue of whether or not Henry's cause in France was “good.” The citizens of Rome are so impressed by the fable of the belly that they fail to detect the logical flaw in its application: the fact that in the present famine the senators are indeed selfishly “cupboarding the viand” (1.1.99) of last year's harvest in their storehouses, that the belly, by withholding nourishment from the rest of the body politic, has ceased to perform its proper social function. They also allow themselves to be manipulated by their tribunes. And yet it matters that, unlike the crowd in Julius Caesar, a crowd which has no opinions of its own, merely those which are suggested to it, first by Brutus and then by Mark Antony, the citizens of the republic can think for themselves. They draw their own conclusions, quite unaided, about the behaviour of Coriolanus when he stands in the marketplace and insultingly demands their voices. If, as the First Citizen says in that scene, the price of the consulship is “to ask it kindly” (2.3.75), Coriolanus at the end of it has been given something for nothing. The people sense this, although even here a dissenting voice is raised: “No, 'tis his kind of speech; he did not mock us” (2.3.159). “Almost all” the citizens, we are told—not all, because there are other, independent opinions—“repent in their election” (ll. 252-53). The tribunes deliberately inflame the commons against Coriolanus, finally transforming them from angry but rational individuals into “a rabble of Plebeians” (3.1.178). They are right, however, when they claim that they have a mandate from the people, that the sudden reaction against Coriolanus is “partly … their own” (2.3.260).

The worst thing the plebeians ever do is something for which Coriolanus himself never berates them. He is not present in Rome to witness their panic-stricken reaction to the news of his league with Aufidius, or the irrational fury they unleash upon Junius Brutus, their own tribune. This is almost the only occasion on which their behaviour can be said to approximate to that of Shakespeare's earlier crowds. In this play, it is exceptional rather than characteristic. It is true that, when cunningly prompted to do so by the tribunes in act 3, the plebeians claim that they alone embody Rome: “the people,” they shout, “are the city” (3.1.198). This is patently false, as they themselves know in their calmer moods. Rome cannot be identified solely with her commons. But then, the assumption with which Menenius begins the play is equally false, when he tells the citizens that, however great their sufferings in the present dearth, they cannot strike 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.

(1.1.68-71)

The Roman state, according to this formulation, is not only exclusively patrician, excluding the proletariat, it resembles Coriolanus himself on the field of battle: a titanic machine, its motion timed with dying cries, mowing down every human obstacle in its path. Of course the city is not the exclusive property of the people, but neither does it belong solely to the upper class.

In the course of the play, Menenius, Cominius, their colleagues in the Senate, even Volumnia, will be forced to recognize that this is so. Although a few young hotheads among the patricians may flatter Coriolanus that he does the “nobler” to tell the mutable, rank-scented meinie just what he thinks of them, how unworthy they are to possess any voice in the government of Rome, although a few may toy with the idea, after his banishment, of abolishing the newly established institution of tribunes, these are not serious or consequential responses. Brutus and Sicinius are scarcely lovable men. There is a world of unsavoury implication in Brutus's reaction to the news of Coriolanus's alliance with the Volscians in act 4: “Would half my wealth / Would buy this for a lie” (4.6.160-61). But they are clearly right in their belief that, once established as consul, Coriolanus would wish to strip from the people the hard-won concessions they have just gained. Such a course of action could only be disastrous. The tribunate, however selfish or inadequate their own performance in the office, is now a political fact. Once granted, however reluctantly, the right of the Roman people not just to rubber-stamp a consular election by exercising their ancient and vulgar prerogative of examining patrician scars in the marketplace, but to make their own needs and wishes felt through their representatives, cannot be withdrawn.

Significantly, in the crisis of act 3, Menenius stops talking about a patrician juggernaut flattening dissenting plebeians like so many weeds. He asks rather that there be “On both sides more respect” (3.1.179), begins to refer to “the whole state” (3.2.34), appeals to “good Sicinius” (3.1.190), “worthy tribunes” (3.1.263), and admits that the division which has cleft the city “must be patch'd / With cloth of any colour” (ll. 250-51). The tribunes, he admits, are the “people's magistrates,” and likely to remain so (3.1.200-201). When Sicinius says to him, “Noble Menenius, / Be you then as the people's officer” (3.1.326-27), he accepts the designation without demur, and goes off to plead with Coriolanus to submit himself to judgment. Of course Menenius, like the other patricians, is trying to be tactful and conciliatory in what has suddenly become a desperate situation. Although it amuses him to observe the ebb and flow of popular life in the market, Menenius's basic contempt for the “beastly plebeians,” Rome's “rats,” her “multiplying spawn,” is deep-rooted. Attitudes like these are not changed overnight. Yet he recognizes, like all the patricians except Caius Martius, that a change in the structure of government has become inevitable. Not one of them welcomes the innovation, but they also see that if civil strife is not to “unbuild the city and to lay all flat” (1.196), to “sack great Rome with Romans” (1.313), they have no alternative but to move with the times.

Only Coriolanus refuses to accept that a new stage has been reached in the evolution of Rome. In act 1, he affirmed bluntly that he would rather “the rabble … unroof'd the city” (1.1.217) than that any concessions to them should be made. He never relinquishes this opinion. For him, the patrician compromise of act 3, the refusal of the nobles to entertain the prospect of such destruction, take his advice, and try to trample the new power of the tribunes in the dust, constitutes a betrayal both of himself, personally, and of an older Rome to which, in his eyes, only he now remains true. This is why, despite the manifest loyalty and grief of Cominius, Menenius, and the young nobility of Rome, those “friends of noble touch” (4.1.49)—Cominius even tries to accompany him into exile—he can tell Aufidius later that “our dastard nobles” have “all forsook me” (4.5.76-77). Menenius, in act 1, made the mistake of reducing the Roman state to her patrician members. The plebeians, briefly, were persuaded to identify the city with themselves. But only Coriolanus ever deludes himself that he, a single individual, constitutes Rome's best and only self. It is a delusion which manifests itself in the magnificent absurdity of his response to the tribunes' sentence of banishment in act 3—“I banish you!” (3.3.123)—where he effectively tries to exile most of Rome's population, that plebeian majority he detests. Because he thinks in this way, it is possible for him to betray his country without ever admitting to himself that he is, like the petty spy Nicanor, introduced (significantly) just before Coriolanus's arrival at the house of Aufidius in act 4, a Roman traitor.

In a sense, the possibility of such a betrayal has been present throughout Coriolanus's adult life. It is bound up with his essential and crippling solitariness, and also with his failure ever to consider how much his heroism has truly been dedicated to Rome as a city, and how much to his own self-realization and personal fame. Never, it seems, has it occurred to him that the two motives, the public and the private, might under certain circumstances conflict, or that the one might require adjustments and concessions from the other. Of course, he did not mean to be taken literally when he declared of Tullus Aufidius in act 1 that,

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

(1.1. 232-34)

The lines are revealing, nonetheless, in the way they elevate a purely personal competition above the claims of a country or a cause. Rome will always need great soldiers, dedicated generals and strong defenders. Livy makes this quite clear. Nonetheless, it is an urban republic, not the plains of Troy, a society which no longer, whatever may have been the case in the past, is based exclusively, or even primarily, upon an ethos of war. One of the great themes running through and unifying Livy's history of Rome is that of the gradual adjustment over the centuries of the claims of peace and war. Numa Pompilius, as the tribune Brutus reminds us in Shakespeare's play (2.3.235-38), was one of Coriolanus's ancestors, that legendary king of Rome who decided in the eighth century b.c. that it was time steps were taken to civilize his people. Accordingly, as Livy writes (in Holland's translation), he began

by good orders, lawes, and customes, to reedifie as it were that cittie, which before time had been new built by force and armes. Whereunto, he seeing that they might not be brought and framed in time of warre, whose hearts were alreadie by continuall warfare growne wild and savage: and supposing that this fierce people might be made more gentle and tractable through disuse of armes, he therefore built the temple of Janus in the nether end of the street of Argilentum, in token both of warre and peace.

Shakespeare could have read about Numa, the great lawgiver and architect of a social and religious order, in Plutarch. There, Numa has a “Life” of his own, paired with that of the Spartan ruler Lycurgus. He is also mentioned in the “Life of Coriolanus.” But it is only Livy who patiently teases out the intimate connection, unfolding over a vast stretch of years, between Rome's need to cultivate the arts of peace as well as war, and the internal struggle between her patricians and plebeians. Over and over in the days of the republic, as Livy makes plain, the patricians depended upon war as a way of stifling civic dissension, busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels in order to keep them distracted from injustices and inequalities at home. Sometimes, this strategy worked, uniting Rome temporarily against a foreign foe. But increasingly, over the years, it did not. Rome could not wage war without the help of common soldiers, could not (indeed) even protect her own frontiers. And so, unhappy and mistreated plebeians either declined to enlist or, if impressed, refused once they arrived on the battlefield to fight. It was virtually the only weapon they possessed in their attempt to wrest some rights and privileges from the ruling class.

In Shakespeare's play, Caius Martius appears, significantly, to be the only patrician who still believes that the internal difficulties of the city can be resolved by a Volscian war. The fact that the people are starving need not oblige the patricians to diminish their own stores: “The Volsces have much corn: take these rats thither, / To gnaw their garners” (1.1.248-49). Plutarch, in his “Life of Coriolanus,” describes how at this time the patricians as a group hoped to rid the city of its difficult and seditious elements by way of a military campaign. But, in Shakespeare, it is only Caius Martius who welcomes war with the Volscians, for its own sake, but also because enforced national service may annihilate “Our musty superfluity” (1.1.225), by which he means the commons, not the stored-up corn. Moreover, Shakespeare altered the order of events as they occur in both Plutarch and Livy. It is plain in Coriolanus that only after tribunes have been granted them do the citizens stop stirring up strife in the city and agree to provide soldiers for the Volscian campaign.

In that campaign, although Coriolanus—not to mention many of the play's critics—later chooses to forget this fact, the plebeians acquit themselves with credit. Cominius is forced initially into an honourable retreat, but he judges that the field has been “well fought” (1.6.1). When, beyond all hope or probability, Coriolanus reappears through those gates of Corioli which he entered by himself, the soldiers are galvanized into action: they not only rescue him but take the city. Coriolanus could not have done this alone—even though later, just before his death, he seems to think that he did. A thing of blood, looking, as Cominius says, “as he were flay'd” (1.6.22), Caius Martius then becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of common soldiers who, because they possess him, like a living icon of War, become for a crucial moment heroes too. And so the Roman victory is assured.

This is the one instance of real communion and understanding between Coriolanus and the Roman plebeians in the tragedy, but it is ephemeral and special. Upon it, nothing can be built. Later, back in Rome, he will remember only that “being press'd to the war, / Even when the navel of the state was touch'd, / They would not thread the gates” (3.1.121-23). He neglects to remember—even as he neglects to remember the name of the poor citizen of Corioli who once used him “kindly” (1.9.81)—that the common soldiers did in fact enter the gates of Corioli, at the second opportunity, if not, in response to his threats and insults, at the first. Or how men who seemed to him at the time each worth “four Volsces” (1.6.78) caught him up in their arms and cast up their caps in their eagerness for action. The only memory that sticks with Coriolanus is the initial prudence (for him, cowardice) of these soldiers, and the contemptible concern of poor men, after the battle is over, for plunder, in the pitiable form of cushions and leaden spoons. A biased, an unfairly selective representation of the campaign, it does nonetheless point to something that is true about the Roman plebeians.

From an early age, as Volumnia tells us, Caius Martius has been dedicated to war, and to achieving excellence in it. It is his metier, his life's work. But the attitude of the Roman people—even, to a large extent, of his fellow patricians—is different. Although the commons can, under exceptional circumstances, be fired with martial enthusiasm, they would really prefer, in Sicinius's words, to be “singing in their shops and going / About their functions friendly” (4.6.8-9). For these small shopkeepers and traders, orange sellers, makers of taps for broaching wine-barrels, military service is something they are obliged to undertake from time to time, when the necessities of the state require it. But they had far rather pursue their normal, peacetime occupations than be out slitting Volscian throats. For Coriolanus, such a preference is contemptible. His view, however, is not endorsed by the play as a whole. The fact is that in an increasingly complex and finely balanced society, one in which even Cominius can hint that valour may not any longer be the chiefest virtue, Volumnia's son is something of an anachronism, out of line even with the other members of his class. Like that dragon to which he likens himself in act 4, and to which Menenius and Aufidius also compare him, he is an archaic, semimythical creature, armour-plated, gigantic, corporeally invincible, a bulwark for the city in war, but something of an embarrassment in peace, because given then to blundering about the market in a bellicose fashion, breathing fire not on Rome's enemies but on the members of her own lower class.

In the second scene of act 3, after Coriolanus has been forced to take refuge from the crowd in his home, Volumnia (who is in large part responsible for her son's scorn of the people, “woollen vassals,” as she has taught him to call them, “things created / To buy and sell with groats” (ll. 9-10), and who also recognizes that, as consul, he would quickly show them how he is really “dispos'd” (l. 22), nonetheless begs him now to speak to them not “by th'matter which your heart prompts you,” but falsely, in “syllables / Of no allowance to your bosom's truth” (ll. 54-57). The only hypocrisy that Coriolanus manages to utter, before anger and his bosom's truth overtake him, is this:

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

(3.3.33-37)

His sarcasm is barely concealed, but the First Senator responds enthusiastically, “Amen, Amen,” and Menenius, “A noble wish” (ll. 37-38). Both of them, unlike Coriolanus, mean what they say. The Rome they want is the one set on its course by Numa: vigilant, strong in its own defence, but also a citadel of justice and religion, and paying equal honour, as befits worshippers in the temple of Janus, to the claims of war and peace. What Coriolanus disdainfully fabricates has become for the rest of the city, including the patricians, a genuine political and social ideal, even if tribunes are now required to help achieve it.

I have been trying to argue that, although Shakespeare is unlikely, while actually writing Coriolanus, to have kept a copy of Livy open beside him, as he apparently did with Plutarch, nonetheless the attitudes and interests of Ab Urbe Condita, as we understand that work now, live to a striking extent in this last of his Roman plays. But, it might be asked, is it reasonable to assume that Shakespeare in 1607-8 would have read Livy in at all the manner we read him today? As a man of his time, would Shakespeare not have been more likely to value the book for the individual stories embedded in it, for what it had to say about the lives of great men, than for an overall historical view of the kind I have been concerned to stress? Not, I think, necessarily. Here, it seems important to point out that Shakespeare's understanding, in Coriolanus, of the development and strengths of the Roman republic, as outlined by Livy, is markedly similar in many ways to that of his great Italian contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli.

Machiavelli's Discorsi, his commentary on the first ten books of Livy, was not published in English until 1636. It circulated widely, however, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England in Italian (a language which, on the evidence of his use of Cinthio for Othello, Shakespeare could read) and also in various manuscript translations, three of which survive. The notion that Machiavelli reached sixteenth-century England only as a stock stage villain, a caricature agent of hell, has long since been exploded. Among Shakespeare's contemporaries, Sidney, Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Nashe, Kyd, Marston, Bacon, Fulke Greville, Ralegh, and Ben Jonson, to name only a few, were clearly familiar not only with the devilish practices and opinions popularly attributed to Machiavelli, but with what he had actually written. Neither then nor, indeed, at any time is a firsthand knowledge of Machiavelli tantamount to approval of what he has to say. The commentary on Livy is morally less outrageous than Il Principe, yet even Edward Dacres, its seventeenth-century translator, felt constrained to announce on his title page that he was presenting this work, designed to instruct its dedicatee James, Duke of Lennox in how best to cope with the perils of the political world, fenced round “with some marginall animadversions noting and taxing [the author's] errours.” It seems to have been relatively common in Elizabethan and Jacobean England for writers to allude to Machiavelli as a caricature bogeyman or as a serious thinker, according to the needs of any specific occasion. The case of Spenser is especially interesting. In one work, Mother Hubberds Tale, it suited him to present the stereotype Machiavel—irreligious, perjured, self-seeking, hypocritical and cruel. But later, in his View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser could, without a flicker of irony, offer Elizabeth's government detailed counsel as to the best way of pacifying that unhappy colony which he took straight out of The Prince and, to a lesser extent, the Discourses.

I think myself that it would be more surprising if it could be proved that Shakespeare had managed to avoid reading Machiavelli than if concrete evidence were to turn up that he had. Certainly, the example of Spenser ought to caution one against believing that York's reference in 1 Henry VI to Alanson as “that notorious Machevile” (5.4.74), or the intention of the future Richard III to “set the murtherous Machevil to school” (3 Henry VI, 3.3.193), in any way precludes the demonstration of genuine understanding elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon. (Significantly, when the Host in The Merry Wives of Windsor asks the rhetorical question, “Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machivel?” (3.1.101), he has just rendered a signal service to the community, using deceit—the end justifying the means—in order to prevent Windsor's parson and her physician from trying to kill each other in a foolish cause.) There is, however, no real need to make an issue of Shakespeare's actual acquaintance with the Discourses. What matters is the way Machiavelli's interpretation of Livy bears upon Coriolanus, however the parallels between the two works arose.

Even critics fundamentally unsympathetic to Coriolanus as a character have a way of applauding the supposed political wisdom of his tirade in the first scene of act 3:

                                                                                          when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by th'other,

(ll. 108-11)

his attack upon what he scorns as “this double worship … where gentry, title, wisdom, / Cannot conclude but by the yea and no / Of general ignorance” (ll. 141, 143-45). But what Coriolanus is repudiating here is in fact precisely the equilibrium in which, for Machiavelli, Livy had located the strength of the Roman republic. It is one of the central themes of the Discourses that the struggle between patricians and plebeians was positive, not negative, that indeed, as the heading of chapter 4 in the first book announces, “the disagreement of the People and the Senate of Rome made the Commonwealth both free and mighty.”

Machiavelli is careful to distinguish dissension from faction. Faction finally destroyed the republic, in the time of the Gracchi, when the attempt to enforce the old agrarian laws split the city into two warring camps between whom communication and compromise became impossible. The result was a bloodbath, of just the kind that senators and tribunes alike, in Coriolanus, fear and make concessions to avoid, “Unless by not so doing, our good city / Cleave in the midst, and perish” (3.2.27-28). But between the expulsion of the Tarquins in the sixth century b.c. and the end of the second century b.c.—over three hundred years—dissension between patricians and plebeians was not only relatively bloodless, compromises made on both sides ensured a balance of aristocratic and popular interests in which each individual, however humble, while subordinating his private interests to those of the state, was nonetheless able to cultivate his own virtu. It was a balance brought to perfection when, at just the right moment, tribunes of the people were added to the preexisting political institutions of consuls and senate. Then, for a while, Rome had almost within her grasp that ideal condition of which Machiavelli dreamed, even if he was sadly aware that it was never likely to be realized in his own Italy: that of a free and stable state, the potential insolence and disorder of its people restrained by the power of the nobles, aristocratic ambition and arrogance checked by the people, a state so strong that it could afford to live at peace, with no need to expand, and no neighbour so foolhardy as to molest it.

Although he recognizes that Livy grumbles from time to time about the inconstancy of the multitude, their inadequacies and failings, for Machiavelli the merits of the Roman people are vindicated in the great sweep of Livy's history as a whole. They were, to an extent which perhaps Livy himself never consciously recognized, essential to what the republic achieved. As Machiavelli writes at the end of book 1: “the Cittie that imployes not their people in any glorious action, may treate them after their owne manner, as otherwise it was argued. But that, which will take the same course Rome tooke, must make this distinction.” Even the humblest citizen of the Roman republic was given his chance to achieve “glory,” whether military or civic. As for the desire of the commons to conclude military campaigns as speedily as possible and return to their peacetime occupations, Machiavelli regards it as entirely proper. In his eyes, a man who is a professional fighter, a soldier and nothing else, is valueless to the state and may even endanger it. In the Roman republic, although every able-bodied man was expected to help fight her wars, war was nobody's occupation. And there were so many brave and victorious commanders all serving at one time (as do Cominius, Titus Lartius and Coriolanus), that the people did not need to worry about one of them making himself preeminent and so possibly tyrannical.

Machiavelli believed that no human being was either wholly good or wholly bad. An individual's natural qualities, his bent, shape themselves early and cannot thereafter be changed. People also, as they mature, learn certain ways of proceeding, accustom themselves to particular patterns of behaviour. States do this too. But around both, times and circumstances change. It is extremely difficult for individuals, and also for political institutions, to vary at need, to accommodate themselves to the demands of new situations. And yet their failure or success depends, ultimately, upon their ability to do so. A republic, Machiavelli suggests in the Discourses, is likely to fare better in this respect than a monarchy,

because shee can better fit her selfe for severall accidents, by reason of the variety of her subjects, that are in her, then can a Prince: for a man that is accustomed to proceed in one manner, never alters, as it is sayd, and must of necessitie, when the times disagree with his waye, goe to wracke.

In effect, once again, the pluralism, the contentious but firmly shared responsibility of the mixed state, work to its advantage.

As might be expected, Machiavelli's view of Coriolanus himself is harsher than Livy's, and much more dismissive than that of Shakespeare. Machiavelli deals with Caius Martius in book 1 of the Discourses, in chapter 7, entitled “How useful accusations are in a Republike for the maintenance of liberty.” For him, the story of Caius Martius was interesting simply because it displayed the triumph of democratic law. Coriolanus aroused the indignation of a famished populace by declaring in the Senate that corn ought not to be distributed gratis until the people agreed to subject themselves to the nobles and relinquish the tribunate. But the very tribunes Coriolanus wanted to abolish saved his life. If they had not intervened, accused him formally, and summoned him to appear before them and defend himself, he would have been slain in what Machiavelli's seventeenth-century translator calls “a tumult,” as he left the Senate. This episode, Machiavelli declares, shows “how fit and useful it is that the commonwealths with their laws give meanes to vent the choler which the universalitie hath conceiv'd against any one citizen. For when they have not these ordinarie meanes, they have recourse to extraordinarie; and out of question these are of worse effect than those.” In exiling Coriolanus, and never permitting him to return, the Roman state was guilty of no error or ingratitude, “because he alwayes continued his malicious mind against the people.”

It is true in general that “contempt and contumely begets a hatred against those that use it, without any returne of advantage to them.” But in a republic, above all, the man who is proud and uses insulting language, who openly displays his contempt for the commons, is intolerable: “for nothing is more odious to the people, especially those that injoy their liberty.” There is only one further reference to Coriolanus in the Discourses, a passing mention of how his mother persuaded him to turn back from the gates of Rome, used to introduce a debate on the relative merits of a good army or an able commander. Machiavelli does not bother to comment directly on Coriolanus's league with the Volscians. What he thought about it, however, can fairly be deduced from the heading to chapter 47 near the end of book 3: “That a good Citizen for the love of his country ought to forget all private wrongs.”

Although Machiavelli took no interest in the nature of Coriolanus's life in exile, Shakespeare did. Caius Martius cannot possibly “banish” the people who have driven him out of the city, restoring Rome to the condition of an ancient, warrior state. On the other hand, I believe, contrary to most critics, that he does find “a world elsewhere” (3.3.135). Historically, the Volscians were a semi-nomadic, cattle-raiding people, hill-dwellers to the south, who envied the rich lands of the Latin campagna. From Livy, Shakespeare would have learned that Rome was at odds with them, off and on, for some two hundred years. She crushed them in the end, but the struggle was long and hard. What seems to have mattered most to Shakespeare, working on hints provided by both Livy and Plutarch, was that in the time of Caius Martius, Volscian society was clearly different and far simpler than that of Rome. According to Plutarch, Corioles was the “principall cittie and of most fame”—modern archaeologists, by the way, still cannot discover where it was—but it clearly had nothing like the centrality and importance for this nation that the seven-hilled city on the Tiber had for the Romans. Antium, indeed, where Tullus Aufidius presides as a kind of feudal lord, seems equally prominent. This is why Shakespeare can so blithely confuse the two places in the final scene. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus was killed in Antium. That is where Shakespeare's scene begins. But by line 90, Antium has turned into Corioli: “Dost thou think,” Aufidius exclaims, “I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name / Coriolanus, in Corioles?” (5.6.88-90). Shakespeare is being careless, but it is a carelessness made possible by the fact that whereas Rome is unique, one Volscian town looks much like another.

Neither in Antium nor Corioli are there tribunes or aediles. There most certainly is an upper class, designated almost invariably in speech prefixes and in the text as “lords.” (Only once, from Aufidius, do we hear the term “senators,” 4.5.133.) There are also “people.” If there is the slightest friction between the two, we are never told about it. Moreover, in this society, everyone seems to regard war as a natural and even desirable condition of existence. In Shakespeare's play, the Volscians are always the aggressors, never the Romans. According to Plutarch, the Volscian lords were in fact reluctant after the sack of Corioli to break the truce agreed so recently with Rome. They had to be tricked, by Aufidius and Coriolanus, into renewing hostilities. In Livy, it is the Volscian commons, broken and dispirited by plague and by the loss of so many young men in the last war, who need to be deceived into resuming arms. Shakespeare ignored both accounts. When Coriolanus arrives, in act 4, at the house of Aufidius, the Volscian lords have already assembled there to plan a new campaign. While the plebeians, represented here by the servingmen, are overjoyed to hear that there is like to be “a stirring world again” (4.5.225-26). War, they declare, “exceeds peace as far as day does night … Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men” (ll. 228-32). Moreover, as the First Servingman maintains, “it makes men hate one another.” The Third Servingman knows the answer to this apparent paradox: “Reason: because they then less need one another. The wars for my money” (ll. 236-38). In effect, the Volscian plebeians freely accept what in Rome has become a desperate and doubtfully successful patrician strategy: that you can hold a society together, create a bond more important than any social, political or economic inequalities by involving the whole nation in war.

As representatives of the Volscian commons, the three servingmen at Antium do not emerge well from a comparison with their equivalents in Rome. Their behaviour, in fact, on a smaller scale, resembles that of Shakespeare's earlier crowds. Some of the Roman citizens in this play (the Second Citizen in the third scene of act 2, for instance) are slower-witted than others, and likely to be teased about it by their companions. But they are consistently shown as capable of holding an intelligent discussion, and they do not all think alike. The Volscian servingmen, by contrast, constitute a miniature herd. All three of them treat the meanly dressed stranger who has invaded the house with the same high-handed contempt—giving Coriolanus his first taste of what it is like to be thought poor and unimportant. When they discover who he is and how highly their master and the other lords regard him, they swing immediately, and in unison, to the opposite extreme:

SECOND Servant:
Nay, I knew by his face that there was something in him. He had, sir, a kind of face, methought—I cannot tell how to term it.
FIRST Servant:
He had so, looking as it were—would I were hanged, but I thought there was more in him than I could think.

(4.5.157-62)

The general drift is plain enough, but these men are not very successful at putting their considered opinion of Coriolanus into words. Not, at least, by comparison with the Roman citizens of the first scene, or the two anonymous officers laying cushions in the Capitol in act 2 who can discern both that Caius Martius “hath deserved worthily of his country” and that “to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as that which he dislikes, to flatter them for their love” (2.2.21-24). When the third Volscian servant tries to impress his companions with a big word, he immediately gets it wrong: “Directitude!,” the First Servant asks, “What's that?” (1.215). “Discreditude” seems to have been what his friend was trying to say. Mistaking of words is a common enough lower-class phenomenon in Shakespeare. It does not, however, seem to afflict the citizens of Rome.

Among the Volscians, Coriolanus is universally admired. The common soldiers “use him as the grace 'fore meat, / Their talk at table and their thanks at end” (4.7.3-4). They flock to him, “He is their god,” following him

                                        with no less confidence
Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,
Or butchers killing flies.

(4.6.91, 94-96)

This is not the kind of special, momentary blaze of admiration that Coriolanus was able to strike out of Roman soldiers in an extremity, in the heat of battle. In this less complicated, archaic warrior state, it surrounds him every day and it is bestowed by nobles and commons alike. Only Tullus Aufidius resists. A man significantly out of touch with the simplicities of his society, even as Caius Martius was with the comparative sophistication of his, this Volscian lord is reflective and intelligent as his rival is not. Ironically, Aufidius would have found it perfectly easy to be politic in Rome, to “mountebank” the loves of her people, and do all those compromising, diplomatic things at which Coriolanus rebelled. What he cannot do is overcome the Roman hero in a fair fight, and he has apparently tried no fewer than twelve times. His own retainers know this: “here's he that was wont to thwack our general, Caius Martius” (4.5.182-83). Among the Volscians, such physical supremacy counts for much more than it does in Rome. It means that Coriolanus, for the first time in his life, becomes genuinely “popular.” It also means that Aufidius, who stumbles on a real truth when he says, “I would I were a Roman, for I cannot, / Being a Volsce, be that I am” (1.10.4-5), who decided after his defeat in act 1 that he could maintain the heroic reputation so important in his society only through guile (“I'll potch at him some way, / Or wrath or craft may get him,” ll. 15-16), becomes desperate to destroy his new colleague: a man now worshipped by a nation savagely widowed and unchilded at his hands as he never was in his own country.

“Bring me word thither / How the world goes, that to the pace of it / I may spur on my journey” (1.10.31-33). Those seemingly casual words which Aufidius addresses to a soldier at the end of act 1 are telling. Aufidius is adaptable. Like Machiavelli, he understands the importance of accommodating one's behaviour to the times. He has also divined (as, for that matter, did the Second Citizen in the opening scene) that his rival is fatally inflexible, that he cannot move “from th'casque to th'cushion,” cannot “be other than one thing” (4.7.43, 42). In this judgement, Aufidius is almost, if not entirely, right. Coriolanus in exile is a man haunted by what seems to him the enormity of mutability and change. This is the burden of his soliloquy outside Aufidius's house: “O world, thy slippery turns” (4.4.12-26). The commonplaces upon which he broods—dear friends can become foes, former foes, dear friends; it is actually possible to hate what one once loved, love what one hated—have just struck him, as the result of his recent experiences in Rome, with the force of revelation. But fundamentally, nothing has altered in his own nature. Menenius may be puzzled when Coriolanus does not keep his parting promise to write to his family and friends—“Nay, I hear nothing. His mother and his wife / Hear nothing from him” (4.6.18-19)—and initially incredulous that he could have joined with Aufidius. But the Coriolanus who has found a home and adulation among the Volscians remains, in this other country, the man he always was.

Only the embassy of the women can shatter his convictions, force him into a new way of seeing. The scene with the women, outside Rome, when Coriolanus holds his mother by the hand “silent,” when he recognizes that he is not, after all, “of stronger earth than others” (5.3.29), has been written about often and well. It is, of course, the moment when Coriolanus finally recognizes his common humanity, the strength of love and family ties. But the victory won here is not, I think, as so often is assumed, that of a private over a public world. Shakespeare is at pains to assert that, in republican Rome, the two are really inseparable. Hence the mute, but important presence of the lady Coriolanus greets as

The noble sister of Publicola,
The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle
That's curdied by the frost from purest snow
And hangs on Dian's temple.

(5.3.64-67)

Valeria is a character many critics have felt Shakespeare would have done well to jettison, most especially here. (I have even seen it suggested that the only excuse for her existence in the play is to show us the sort of strong-willed woman Coriolanus ought to have married, if only jealous Volumnia had let him.) But, surely, Valeria accompanies Coriolanus's wife and mother on their mission—even though she is not allowed, as in Plutarch, to initiate it—because Shakespeare meant it to be clear that this is by no means a strictly family affair. Valeria, “greatly honoured and reverenced amonge all the Romaines,” as Plutarch puts it, is there to represent all the other women of Rome, those “neighbours” among whom Volumnia, when she believes her plea has been rejected, is prepared (along with Virgilia and the little Caius Martius) to die.

In the triumphal honours accorded the women on their return to Rome, Valeria has her place, reminding us that although the family of Coriolanus have figured as the crucial agents of persuasion, succeeding where Cominius and Menenius failed, ultimately the victory belongs to the city they have placed above family ties, the Rome for which they spoke. Patricians and plebeians, senators and tribunes have already joined together to pray for the success of this embassy. Now, in celebrating that success, Rome is united as never before in the play. Not even Sicinius thinks of anything but of meeting Volumnia, Valeria and Virgilia to “help the joy” (5.4.63). That scene of welcome, with its flower-strewn streets, its sackbuts, psalteries, tabors and fifes, contrasts sharply with its equivalent in Antium/Corioli: the parallel entry of Coriolanus bearing the terms of peace.

We are surprised, surely, to learn from Aufidius that Coriolanus means “t'appear before the people, hoping / To purge himself with words” (5.6.7-8), that there is (as the Third Conspirator fears) some danger that he may “move the people / With what he would say” (ll. 55-56). The Folio stage direction following line 70 of this final scene indicates that Coriolanus enters “with drum and colours, the Commoners being with him.” Coriolanus has found it easier to get on with the Volscian commons than with their more pacific but demanding equivalents in Rome. It is striking, nonetheless, that he is prepared now to explain himself and his actions to lords and people alike, that he presents himself initially not as an heroic individual, but as the servant of a common cause: “I am return'd your soldier” (5.6.71). Although he has not been able to make “true wars,” he has at least framed a “convenient peace” (5.3.190-91). The attempt fails. Coriolanus tries here to do something which is new to him, but (as Machiavelli knew) the habits of a lifetime cannot be transformed overnight. Aufidius has only to produce that old, inflammatory word “traitor,” so effective before on the lips of the tribunes, and Coriolanus is lost. He reacts just as he had done in Rome. And, at last, all the Volscian people remember what, in their adoration of this man, they had been able for a time to forget: the sons and daughters, the fathers and friends he once slaughtered. Here, as Machiavelli would have noted, there are no tribunes to put a brake on their violence as they demand that Coriolanus be torn to pieces, no intervention of law or legal process to thwart the conspirators and enforce a compromise verdict. Coriolanus is simply slain, in “a tumult,” while the Volscian lords look helplessly on.

There is a sense in which the characteristically shrewd perception of Aufidius—“So our virtues / Lie in th'interpretation of the time” (4.7.49-50)—might stand as the epigraph for this play as a whole. Whatever the case in the past, or among the Volscians of the present, valour in this Rome is no longer “the chiefest virtue,” overriding all the rest. It must, as Coriolanus himself finally discovers, learn to coexist with the values of peace and, even in war, modify its antique, epic character. There is something both touching and full of promise in the prayer Coriolanus offers up in act 5 at his last meeting with his son. He asks that little Martius, the soldier of the next generation, should

                                                                                                              prove
To shame unvulnerable, and stick i'th'wars
Like a great sea-mark standing every flaw
And saving those that eye thee.

(5.3.72-75)

Shame here is more than a strictly military consideration. Coriolanus is thinking of his own, complicated misfortunes, of what may befall a man in peace as well as war. But while the great sea-mark, the lighthouse beacon standing firm in the storm, remains extrahuman, its prime function is not to destroy but heroically preserve. It is an image closer to the one old Nestor finds for Hector on the battlefield in Troilus and Cressida—a god “dealing life” (4.5.191)—or to Marcus Curtius dedicating himself to death in the chasm that all of Rome might live, than it is to that of the juggernaut, the mechanical harvester, the Caius Martius who was a savage and undiscriminating agent of death.

Coriolanus is a tragedy in that its protagonist does finally learn certain necessary truths about the world in which he exists, but dies before he has any chance to rebuild his life in accordance with them. Paradoxically, it is only in his belated recognition and acceptance of historical change, of that right of the commons to be taken seriously which the other members of his class in Rome have already conceded, that he achieves genuinely tragic individuality. The play is predominantly a history—indeed, Shakespeare's most political play, the only one specifically about the polis. I believe that Livy's account of an evolving republic and also, in all probability, Machiavelli's commentary on Ab Urbe Condita, helped to shape it, that although it is certainly a better play than Jonson's Catiline, or even his Sejanus, it is perhaps more like them in its focus upon Rome herself at a moment of historical transition than is usually thought.

To the question of why Shakespeare should have felt impelled to write such a play at this particular moment, there can be no confident answer. The corn riots in the Midlands and, more especially, the anti-enclosure riots of 1607 which affected his native Warwickshire may well have had something to do with it. It is clear too that there was considerable interest in Jacobean England at this time in classical republicanism, in theories of the mixed state. In his book Coriolanus in Context [Bucknell University Press, 1972], C. C. Huffman assembles an impressive amount of evidence to show that as James's absolutism declared itself more and more plainly, an educated minority came to believe that the king was trying to tamper with the fundamental nature of English government. England, they argued, was a tripartite state, composed of king, nobles and commons. In it, each element had its rights, with parliament standing as the safeguard against tyranny. James was entirely aware of this line of thought, and of its roots in republican Rome. In 1606, he was fulminating against what he called “tribunes of the people whose mouths could not be stopped”—by which he meant his antagonists in parliament. His concern, and the terms he chose to express it, were prophetic. In the great clash that was to come between king and parliament (“the injustest judgment seate that may be,” as James protested) the theory of mixed government was to become a deadly weapon in the hands of the opposition.

Unfortunately, Huffman uses all this historical material to introduce a reading of Coriolanus as Shakespeare's apology for Jacobean absolutism, even going so far as to suggest that the dramatist believed Rome would have been better off in ashes, with Volumnia, Virgilia and little Martius dead, than left at the mercy of an institution so wicked as the tribunate. As so often, the settled conviction that Shakespeare's view of history was orthodox, conservative, rooted in the political theories expounded in the Homilies, has blinded the critic to what is actually there on the page. But why should we assume that, in the words of a well-known essay on Coriolanus and the Midlands insurrection, “Whether or not Shakespeare had been shocked or alarmed by the 1607 rising is anyone's guess; but it is fairly certain that he must have been hardened and confirmed in what had always been his consistent attitude to the mob”? Assertions like these encouraged Edward Bond to interpret the extremely ambiguous documents relating to the Welcombe enclosures of 1614 entirely to Shakespeare's discredit. One may dislike Bond's Bingo, with its portrait of a “corrupt seer,” a brutal and reactionary property-owner victimizing the rural poor, but there is a sense in which it simply spells out and exaggerates the received notion about Shakespeare's political attitudes. There is no reason why such a view should persist. Although he remained as fascinated by history as a process in 1607 as he had been in the early 1590s, when he was writing the Henry VI plays, the man who conceived Coriolanus gives every indication of being more tolerant of the commons than before. He looked attentively at the young Roman republic delineated by Plutarch and by Livy, and chose to emphasize what was hopeful, communal and progressive in it, when writing his interpretation of the time.