That Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most political play—perhaps his "only great political play"⁵—has become a commonplace of Shakespeare studies. For many commentators, a political play must necessarily be partisan. Thus our century has seen an extended critical debate over whether the patricians (and thus Coriolanus) are "right" and the plebeians "wrong," or vice versa. Eugene Waith, for example, sees Coriolanus and the class he represents as the embodiment of everything truly noble, and he argues that Shakespeare "makes it impossible to respect" the "many-voiced, ceaselessly shifting people."⁶ And C. C. Huffman argues that "of all the available possibilities of presenting [the] political situation [dramatized in Coriolanus], Shakespeare chooses one consonant with King James's royalist view of it as a rivalry between absolute monarchy and democracy, between rule and misrule, between order and chaos."⁷ In contrast, Kenneth Muir sees Shakespeare reworking his source materials to give us "a more favorable idea of the citizens" by emphasizing their "genuine grievances" and their willingness to "forgive Coriolanus' deplorable rudeness to them."⁸ This debate goes on—as recently as 1989, for example, Annabel Patterson offered an eloquent defense of the "populist" reading of the play.⁹

But another tradition of political interpretation has emphasized the ways in which Coriolanus, rather than choosing sides in the class struggle, dramatizes the very nature of the political itself. This tradition finds its first major spokesperson in A. P. Rossiter, who sees the play as concerned "with the workings of men's wills in the practical management of affairs; with the making (by some), the manipulation (by others) of 'scenes,' emotional eruptions of individual or group will; with all that unstable, shifting, trustless, feckless, foolish-shrewd, canny, short-sighted, self-seeking, high-minded, confused, confusing matter which makes up a State's state of mind."¹⁰ Robert S. Miola argues that in Coriolanus Shakespeare "exposes the paradoxes inherent in the civilized community, especially those deriving from the differences between private virtue and the public good, or as Aristotle put it, between the good man and the good citizen."¹¹ And Stanley Cavell has proposed that Coriolanus "is not a play about politics, if this means about political authority and conflict, say about questions of legitimate succession or divided loyalties. It is about the formation of the political, the founding of the city, about what it is that makes a rational animal fit for conversation, for civility."¹² Like some other recent commentators¹³ I will here attempt to follow up on Cavell's suggestion that Coriolanus is about the "creation of the political." But I want to go beyond Cavell and his heirs in one respect, by linking the "creation of the political" to my two key issues, identity and shame.

The political, I will argue, makes possible personal identity: for human beings there is no "self outside of or prior to the political order. Yet this order also necessarily denies the autonomy of that self to which it gives birth. There is here a fundamental and irreducible contradiction, so fundamental that the political represents not so much a stable "order" as an ongoing dialectical process.¹⁴ In Coriolanus the issue of identity is posed first of all as a debate over the question of what it means to be a Roman. Coriolanus, born in Rome of a Roman mother, a soldier in the service of the Roman state, finds himself defined by circumstances of birth and profession as a Roman. But what is a Roman? At the beginning of the play, we see signs of increasing conflict between the two principal social classes in the city, the patricians and the plebeians. Does "Rome" embody itself in one of these social classes or the other? Or is the social conflict itself in some sense constitutive of Rome? Is "Romanness" equally present in each Roman, regardless of social position? Or are some Romans more Roman than others? Conversely, is it possible for some "Romans" to be "un-Roman," as a certain Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives once defined some Americans, or the actions of certain Americans, as "Un-American"?¹⁵

At the beginning of the play Coriolanus sees himself and is seen by others not only as a Roman, but as the very embodiment of romanitas. Unflinching courage, absolute devotion to the state, and by implication disdain for a "Greek" predilection for reflection over action—these are the attributes that define the ideal Roman. And these are the values that Volumnia has instilled in her son, as she reveals in her opening exchange with Virgilia:

Vol. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence
he returned, his brows bound with oak. I
tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy
on first hearing he was a man-child than
now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.
Vir. But had he died in the business, madam, how then?
Vol Then his good report should have been
my son. . . . [H]ad I a dozen sons, each in
  my love alike and none less dear than thine
and my good Marcius, I had rather had
eleven die nobly for their country than one
voluptuously surfeit out of action.

(1.3.13-25)

After the battle of Corioles, Coriolanus himself sums up this Roman credo to the two Roman generals, Cominius and Titus Lartius: "I have done / As you have done—that's what I can; / Induced as you have been—that's for my country" (1.9.15-17). And Cominius in reply sees Coriolanus as, in effect, the perfect "product" of Rome: "Rome must know / The value of her own" (1.9.20-21).

Yet, paradoxically, Coriolanus' very conception of himself as the quintessence of romanitas ends by placing him in opposition to Rome as a concrete historical and social reality. This split within Coriolanus' self-image occurs at the moment when the Roman army retreats before the Volscians, triggering this tirade from Coriolanus:

All the contagion of the south light on you,
You shames of Rome! You herd of—Boils and plagues
  Plaster you o'er, that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese,
  That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
  From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!

(1.4.31-37)

The language here suggests that what we today call "losers" are not only un-Roman but subhuman—a disease, an excrescence on the face of the earth. And significantly, one of our key words, "shame," figures prominently in this speech: if people like this are Romans, Coriolanus declares, then he is ashamed to think of himself as a Roman. For insofar as he shares an identity with creatures such as these, then his own identity is infected, plastered over with boils and plagues.

Because Coriolanus' identity as a Roman implicates him with all other Romans, including the common people that he despises, he finds himself in an intolerable situation.¹⁶ His dilemma is most fully dramatized for us in Act 2, scenes 2 and 3, and again in Act 3, scenes 2 and 3. In both these extended episodes Coriolanus struggles with the legal requirement that he present himself before the Roman people and ask for their "voices" before he can assume the office of consul. As a soldier he can—or so he believes—stand alone, but as a politician he is dependent upon the good will of his fellow Romans. The requirement that he appear before the people in a "gown of humility" is only pro forma: if he will go through the motions, the office of consul is his. Twice he overcomes his revulsion and agrees to go through this ritual. And twice at the decisive moment he balks and begins to berate the very people whose votes he needs.

In the first of these incidents, Coriolanus makes it clear that the issue is shame:

I do beseech you,
Let me o'erleap that custom, for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them
  For my wounds' sake to give their suffrage

It is a part
That I shall blush in acting

To brag unto them, "Thus I did, and thus!"
Show them th' unaching scars which I should hide,
  As if I had received them for the hire
  Of their breath only!

(2.2.136-52)

Coriolanus' shame arises in part from a sense that he will be acting a false role: he doesn't feel humble, so to put on the "gown of humility" seems hypocritical. But it is also clear that he is ashamed to expose himself, to "stand naked."¹⁷ He wants to hide his scars, not display them. Here we have a simpler, more universal kind of shame. And what is it he fears, if not the revelation that he too is human, a creature of flesh and blood, sharing a common destiny with the ordinary people that he so disdains? And that his actions belong, not to himself, but to the city that has given him his identity?¹⁸

Our protagonist's self-identification with Rome and his contempt for Rome as an actual historical polity reach a climax in Act 3, scene 3, where the tribunes banish Coriolanus from Rome, and he replies,

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
  That do corrupt my air, I banish you!

(130-33)

Again we hear Coriolanus' usual note of abuse: these supposed Romans are subhuman creatures, curs, and their very breath breeds infection. He claims ownership not only of the ideal of romanitas but of the very air itself. And indeed, if he embodies the quintessence of Rome, then wherever he is, there Rome is: thus his famous bravura gesture, "I banish you!" Yet at this moment—the end of Act 3, traditionally the climax of a five-act play, the point of reversal and the beginning of the falling action—the absurdity of Coriolanus' posture also becomes inescapable. He cannot in fact "be Rome" all by himself. To identify oneself as a Roman means to be part of something larger than oneself. But Coriolanus refuses any longer to see himself as a part of Rome, and what will happen now to his identity?¹⁹

Coriolanus' final curse upon the city of his birth defines the problem: "Despising / For you the city, thus I turn my back. / There is a world elsewhere" (3.3.142-44). Is there indeed a "world elsewhere"? This is the question that the last two acts of the play will address. And the answer, I believe, is "No. Or at any rate, not the kind of world that Coriolanus wants."²⁰ The problem is that any "world elsewhere" remains just that: a world. And any world claims rights—absolute rights, rights of life and death—over any person who seeks to define an identity in terms of that world. For Coriolanus does not simply go off to live alone, in the splendid isolation of his untarnished ego. Rather he goes off to join forces with his erstwhile enemies, the Volscians. But can the conqueror of Corioles find a new identity as a citizen of that city? The answer is, clearly, "No."

In the last act of the play Coriolanus leads a Volscian army to the gates of Rome and threatens to conquer the city. He does so, however, not as a Volscian, but simply as a hired gun: and in the space between the city of his birth and his new allies, he is in limbo, "a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forged himself a name o' the fire / Of burning Rome" (5.1.13). By defeating Rome, that is, Coriolanus hopes to regain the identity he lost when he left the city of his birth in search of a world elsewhere. Yet as soon as we conceptualize this possibility, we must recognize that such an identity would be a contradiction in terms. No one can, in fact, "conquer" an identity. If he conquers Rome, as his mother tells him, he will destroy once and for all any possibility that Rome will offer him a functional identity:

if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name
Whose repetition will be dogged with curses,
Whose chronicle thus writ: "The man was noble,
  But with his last attempt he wiped it out,
Destroyed his country, and his name remains
To th' ensuing age abhorred."

(5.3.142-48)

The referent of the "it" in "wiped it out" is ambiguous. But this ambiguity itself is the most telling detail here, for to destroy "your" country, the very basis of your self, is to annihilate everything, including the self.²¹

When Coriolanus recognizes that he can never recover his Romanness by conquering Rome and accedes to his mother's pleas, his identity simply collapses. Why does he return to Corioles with Aufidius? Surely he knows that the Volscians have never accepted him as one of themselves—that they have simply tolerated him as a mercenary as long as he agrees to do their will? And since he has now decided not to do what they want, surely he must realize that the Volscians will now discard him. He suggests as much to his mother:

O my Mother, Mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son—believe it, 0, believe it!—
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
  If not most mortal to him.

(5.3.185-89)

In the circumstances, Coriolanus' decision to return to Corioles seems tantamount to suicide. With no possibility of finding an identity either in Rome or among the Volscians, he is now condemned to remain "a kind of nothing" forever. Thus it should not surprise us that he surrenders to death without a struggle. Of all Shakespeare's tragic protagonists, Coriolanus is surely the most "heroic," a cool and invincible soldier. Yet in his death he is the most passive—even Lear seizes a sword to kill the slave that was hanging Cordelia. Coriolanus gives himself to the conspirators' swords as if he were already dead—as indeed he is, from the moment when, outside the gates of Rome, his struggle toward an identity collapses under its internal contradictions.