As several recent critics have noted, issues of language are also central to Coriolanus, along with issues of political power and psychological integrity. Coriolanus himself seems deeply suspicious of language. Unlike virtually all of Shakespeare's other tragic protagonists, he never uses language to explore inward emotional states: he has only one true soliloquy (4.4),³⁷ and it is primarily about the instability of human social relationships, rather than about Coriolanus' feelings. Coriolanus, Lawrence Danson asserts, demands "wholeness of being," and this demand leads to a "distrust of words, and indeed of all the conventional symbolic means (verbal and gestural) that men have for expressing themselves."³⁸ Similarly, Leonard Tennenhouse argues that Coriolanus' "abhorrence of public speech and his distrust of words are functions of his obsessive quest for a personal integrity which can only be concretely realized in physical action."³⁹ This disjunction between words and actions emanates from Coriolanus himself to affect everything that happens in the play. As James L. Calderwood has proposed, words here tend to become meaningless, while meanings become wordless.⁴⁰ Both Tennenhouse and Calderwood see this opposition between words and meanings as pointing toward a political crisis⁴¹: in the absence of a stable relationship between words and things, how do we assess the possibility of truth? But the opposition also becomes constitutive of Shakespeare's dramaturgy in the play, as scene after scene turns on the opposition, as Joyce Van Dyke suggests,⁴² between language and gesture—or, as Jarrett Walker, invoking a currently more fashionable critical vocabulary, proposes, between the body and speech.⁴³

In a brilliant essay first published in 1964, D. J. Gordon anticipates most of the major themes explored by later linguistically oriented commentators.⁴⁴ Gordon recognizes the ways in which, in the vortex that surrounds Coriolanus, words and deeds are divorced, so that "civil life" is defined "in terms of empty, perverted, destructive relationships between speaker and utterance, word and subject, which is between man and man and man and himself." More particularly, Gordon emphasizes the ways in which the semantic crisis in Coriolanus becomes a crisis of naming. Coriolanus' deeds, he argues, "must be named" if they are to take on public meaning. Ideally, the "deed, being named, passes into its opposite: voice." But if neither Coriolanus nor we trust the "voices" of the people to name his deeds accurately, then "the relationship between name and thing is disrupted." "In seeking the voices Coriolanus is a subject looking for his name: it is his name that will be uttered. But the search leads him into the gravest danger. He must ask" (p. 213). Naming is crucial to the issue of identity, and in this final section I will follow the clues adumbrated by Gordon and explore the ambiguities that emerge around the names of the protagonist of Coriolanus: ambiguities that direct us once again toward the impossibility of identity itself.

Coriolanus is not the only Shakespearean character to experience a change of name in the course of a play. In Richard II, for example, Bolingbroke becomes King Henry in the last act.⁴⁵ But in no other play does a change of name receive such emphasis within the text, as a crucial transition in the protagonist's life history. In 1.10 the character heretofore identified as Marcius is renamed Coriolanus before our eyes, by his general Cominius:

Therefore be it known,
As to us, to all the world, that Caius Marcius
Wears this war's garland, in token of the which
  My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him,
  With all his trim belonging; and from this time,
  For what he did before Corioles, call him,
With all th' applause and clamor of the host,
Caius Marcius Coriolanus! Bear
  Th' addition nobly ever!

(57-65)

This new name immediately receives public approval, as "All" shout "Caius Marcius Coriolanus!" (66).

I see no evidence to support Lisa Lowe's suggestion that Coriolanus "refuses to accept" this new, "socially conferred name, position, and role."⁴⁶ However, he does apparently "blush" at this moment, even as he explicitly accepts the new name:

I will go wash,
And when my face is fair you shall perceive
Whether I blush or no. Howbeit, I thank you.
I mean to stride your steed, and at all times
To undercrest your good addition
  To th' fairness of my power.

(1.9.67-72)

Coriolanus must wash because he is covered with blood: the blood that, in effect, "baptizes" him into this new identity. But his (possible) blush attests to a certain sense of shame that the new identity is external, an "addition," as he himself calls it. The fact that Coriolanus receives and accepts simultaneously a new name and a new horse might also remind us that the new name is external to the self, a kind of "thing" that Coriolanus owns, rather than the name of his "true self." And Lowe is certainly correct when she suggests that this name is "socially conferred." All names are socially conferred, and we have already seen abundant evidence that Coriolanus finds dependence on any kind of Other acutely embarrassing.

Given the problematic status of his new name, should we perhaps adopt the suggestion of Constance Relihan and think of him as "really" Marcius (or Martius, as some editions would have it)?⁴⁷ Relihan sets out to "locate the internal nature" of our protagonist's character and suggests that "the best way to begin that search is to return to his given name."⁴⁸ But in fact Coriolanus himself prefers his new name to his old one: in the final scene, when Aufidius denies him the name "Coriolanus" and addresses him instead as "Marcius," he is outraged. And the reason he prefers "Coriolanus" is clear: he believes that he has won this name by his own actions. To his mind, Cominius and the soldiers do not "give" him this name. Rather they acknowledge that his feats in battle have made it his "true" name. "Caius Marcius," on the other hand, is not his "true" name but simply his first "given name"—given to him by others (presumably his mother, since he has no apparent father), when he was a helpless child. Furthermore, Relihan's argument assumes that if we work hard enough we will discover our protagonist's "right" name. But I think that Shakespeare's point is quite different. The change of name one act into the play reminds us that all names are "given"—and thus problematic. Names name not identities but relationships.⁴⁹ "Caius Marcius" names this man in terms of his relationship to a family system. "Coriolanus" names him in terms of his relationship to a city he has conquered. The first kind of relationship may seem unproblematic to us, but it does not seem so to Coriolanus. The second kind of relationship does not seem initially problematic to our protagonist, but it becomes increasingly so in the course of the play.

"Coriolanus," we must first recognize, derives from the name of a city that our protagonist has conquered. Coriolanus is "of Corioles" in the sense that he has captured the city in battle.⁵⁰ (Other successful generals, we might note, have taken their names from battles they have won. Thus Field Marshal Montgomery became Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.) But our protagonist's new name is, as Aufidius cruelly declares in the last scene of the play, stolen: "Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius. Dost thou think / I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name / Coriolanus, in Corioles?" (5.6.92-94). No citizen of Corioles will recognize Coriolanus as being "of Corioles." Thus, ironically, Coriolanus can be "Coriolanus" only in Rome. He is named for "a world elsewhere," but this name is efficacious only when he is at home. When he leaves Rome, his name immediately becomes a serious problem. Arriving at the house of Aufidius, he is scorned by the servants and mutters to himself, "I have deserved no better entertainment / In being Coriolanus" (4.5.10-11). Meeting Aufidius, Coriolanus refuses to give his name. He apparently wants Aufidius to perceive some sort of identity inherent in his face itself, an identity beyond all names. But Aufidius does not recognize the visitor, demanding six times to know his name (4.5.57-69). Coriolanus does finally name himself "Caius Marcius," and then after considerable hesitation he adds "my surname, Coriolanus" (4.5.73). He also acknowledges that among the Volscians that name has become a "witness of the malice and displeasure / Which thou shouldst bear me" (77-78). And in the long speech that follows Coriolanus twice links his own name to the shame that he has inflicted on Aufidius and his people.

When he allies himself with Aufidius, it might seem that the name "Coriolanus" takes on a new meaning: no longer "the conqueror of Corioles," but rather "the servant of Corioles." Yet Coriolanus never entertains this possibility, for he cannot imagine a "true" name won in any other way than through conquest. Thus when he arrives with the Volscian army outside the gates of Rome, he has—to return to some lines that I have quoted previously—become nameless. Interestingly, it is Cominius, the very man who first gave our new protagonist his new name, who now defines his nameless condition:

"Coriolanus"
He would not answer to; forbade all names.
He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
  Till he had forged himself a name o' the fire
Of burning Rome.

(5.1.11-15)

The new name that Coriolanus hopes to forge for himself could only be, as Kenneth Burke brilliantly suggests, "Romanus": if the conqueror of Corioles became "Coriolanus," then the conqueror of Rome must become "Romanus."⁵¹ With this new name, it might seem, our protagonist would at last have the identity he needs. He would be "of Rome" in a new and total way. He would be Rome, and Rome would be him. That, we can now recognize clearly, is what he wants. Yet as I have shown, it is logically impossible for a part to be co-extensive with the whole. And this project is humanly impossible too. You cannot become one with your homeland by destroying it. You cannot become your own father by raping your mother. "Coriolanus" can never be "Romanus." And that, precisely, is his and everyone else's—for we have here a uniquely pure example of the identity problem we all must live through—tragedy.⁵²

When we recognize that it is impossible for Coriolanus to win a new identity by defeating Rome, we can also begin to see why the new identity that he won within the gates of Corioles can only be deeply problematic. Coriolanus believes that he owes this new identity solely to his own heroic actions. "Alone I did it" (5.6.122), he proudly tells the Volscians in the last scene. Yet while he achieves this new identity without the aid of other Romans, he could not have done so if the Volscians had not been there to be conquered. We are here in the territory of Hegel's master/slave dialectic: the slave "needs" the master to tell him who he is, but ironically the master is also dependent on the slave for his very identity as "master."⁵³ Thus long before he offers his services to the Volscian army, Coriolanus is "of Corioles," belongs to that city in a way that he does not anticipate: he owes his name to Corioles. In accepting that name, he also accepts a dangerous illusion, that the master can rest easy in his identity, without worrying about any lingering resentments on the part of the slave. In its extreme forms this illusion can even beguile the master into thinking that the slave loves his own enslavement. But in fact to accept an identity from the enemy you have defeated is to invite the Trojan horse into the city, as Coriolanus will finally be forced to recognize in the last scene of the play.

In the final scene Aufidius, the mirror in which Coriolanus has hoped to find a true image of his identity, abruptly turns against him. There is a moral here: mirrors often turn out to have agendas of their own. All along, Aufidius has been planning to "potch at" Coriolanus in any way he can, to create a space in which he can expand his own ego, and Coriolanus' failure to carry through the conquest of Rome gives Aufidius his chance. Significantly, Aufidius begins the attack by systematically renaming the man we have become accustomed to call "Coriolanus." Coriolanus comes before the Volscian lords to claim victory in the war, which has, he says, brought "shame to th' Romans" (5.6.82). But when he presents to the lords the peace treaty he has signed with Rome, Aufidius responds with scorn:

Auf. Read it not, noble lords,But tell the traitor, in the highest degreeHe hath abused your powers.Cor. "Traitor"? How now?Auf. Ay, traitor, Marcius.Cor. "Marcius"?

(5.6.86-91)

The quotation marks here suggest how problematic all labels of identity have suddenly become. The word "traitor" denies Coriolanus any possibility of a home or homeland, any identity defined in terms of place. And in the next few lines Aufidius denies our protagonist the only name he himself has found even marginally acceptable, the name of the conqueror of Corioles. That name, says Aufidius, was "stol'n." Further, Aufidius declares that Coriolanus has shamed himself and all the Volscians by acceding to his mother's pleas: at this sight, says Aufidius, the "pages blushed at him and men of heart / Looked wondering at each other" (5.6.103-04). And this accusation is immediately followed by the final insult, as Coriolanus appeals to the only god he recognizes ("Hear'st thou, Mars?"), and Aufidius renames our protagonist one last time: "Name not the god, thou boy of tears" (5.6.104-05).

This new name affixes Coriolanus firmly back in a position of dependency. He will be eternally, it seems, the child of his mother, for the boy of tears can never be the author of himself. Thus renamed, Coriolanus can only bluster incoherently, frantically attempting to reclaim an identity that will be acceptable to him. But the best he can do is to place quotation marks around this new label too: "Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me. 'Boy'? False hound!" (5.6.117-18).⁵⁴ Paralyzed with rage and shame, Coriolanus offers no effective resistance as the assassins strike him down. But this new label should also serve to remind us how problematic all the other names that Coriolanus has assumed in the course of the play have also been. Coriolanus has set out to become the "author of himself." His linguistic absolutism has persuaded him that there must be a "true" name for each thing: his explicit contempt for politicians and his implicit hatred of poets stem from a sense that such people play with language and thereby separate word from thing. But he has also claimed the right to name himself—how else could he become the author of himself? Immediately we encounter a contradiction. If you can change your name, as Coriolanus does, then all names become relative to the circumstances in which you find yourself. How can we be sure that "Coriolanus" is the "right" name for this man? That he will not go on to conquer another city and take a new name such as "Romanus"?

There are, then, two problems here. First, it turns out that all names are in fact "given." Even if you name yourself, that name becomes real only in the mouths of others. As Gordon points out, Coriolanus must ask the plebeians to speak the word that will name him aright, and thus he is always already dependent on them in a way that is intolerable to him. But even if he could name himself, that act would immediately relativize any name he gave himself. Anyone who has had more than one name must acknowledge that all names are relative, a function of circumstances; and as Aufidius runs through all the names that he has had, both we and Coriolanus must acknowledge the quotation marks around all of these names. The "true" name, of the sort that Coriolanus demands, is thus impossible. And what does the human being become without a "true" name? When Aufidius greets Coriolanus with love in 4.5, he salutes him, as we have seen, as a "noble thing" (121). At the time, this label seems like an accolade: a celebration of one hero by another. But "noble thing"? This word, as it reduces our protagonist to the status of an object, can serve to remind us how the names that enmesh us in a web of relationships alone serve to make us human. Freed from this web, we become simply "things." Is that perhaps what Coriolanus wants? If so, he gets his wish in the last scene, as Aufidius stands on what has become a lump of meat, to deliver the last speech of the play.⁵⁵