The "Noble Thing" and the "Boy of Tears": Coriolanus and the Embarrassments of Identity

Burton Hatlen, University of Maine at Orono

Tonally, Coriolanus is Shakespeare's coolest tragedy. The protagonist does not invite audience identification—if anything, he spurns our sympathy. But the play treats his antagonists no less coolly. As a consequence, audiences and critics have often seen the play as working not so much upon our passions as upon our analytic faculties.¹ But what questions does the play address? In our century, many critics have seen the play as turning on political issues. For some of these critics, the key issue is the struggle, whether in ancient Rome or in Jacobean England, between opposing social classes, noble and plebeian, or the relationship of the "great man" to the people, while other critics have argued that the play problematizes the very concept of the "political." But a second tradition of interpretation has built on psychoanalytic theory to explore Coriolanus' problematic relationship with his mother. And yet a third school of critics has focused on the way the play selfreflexively examines issues of language, especially naming. In this paper, I want to build some bridges among these three schools of interpretation, by focusing on two interrelated issues that seem to me central to Coriolanus: the issues of identity and shame.²

Identity is born at the interface between the public and the private realms. But because it is ambiguously both personal and social, identity is inherently flawed, vulnerable, and shame represents the (always reluctant) acknowledgment of the problematic status of individual identity. Coriolanus, I will argue, demonstrates that identity is not only problematic but "impossible," simply because any form of selfhood is always already implicated in otherness. The play demonstrates the impossibility of identity in at least three ways. On the social level, Coriolanus attempts to define himself as an autonomous individual, only to discover that the self is always dependent upon the social ground on which it stands. Psychologically, Coriolanus struggles to separate himself from his mother, but finally fails. And on the linguistic level, he sets out to name himself, only to fail once again. On all three levels, furthermore, the concrete sign of Coriolanus' failure to become the "author of himself" (5.3.36)³ is a flood of shame, which thus serves to define the limit of personal identity, the moment when identity dissolves into contradiction. Around the issues of identity and shame, then, all the great themes of Coriolanus—political, psychological, linguistic—converge.⁴