The system of homologies that I have here described defines all the names that our protagonist assumes, all the identities that he tries to create or that others create for him, as fundamentally contradictory—"impossible." An individual human being cannot become coterminous with the polity into which he is born, or separate himself entirely from it: no man can become his own father, and no man can name himself. "Coriolanus" has no "self that stands prior to the social and familial and linguistic systems which define his possibilities of existence. Moreover, the plurality of such systems within the play suggests that the issue here is not the state or the family or even language, but relationship itself. The self exists only as a shifting point within a network of relationships. Yet the sole ambition of our protagonist is to become an autonomous being, the author of himself, standing apart from and uncontaminated by any relationship. As it brings into focus this paradoxical, irresolvable dilemma, Shakespeare's final tragedy exposes, with a merciless lucidity, the contradictions of a particular historical moment. As Catherine Belsey has argued, "in the fifteenth century the representative human being has no unifying essence. . . . Disunited, discontinuous, the hero of the moralities is not the origin of action; he has no single subjectivity which could constitute such an origin; he is not a subject."⁵⁶ In contrast, "the scenic stage of the Restoration period addressed a unified and unifying spectacle to a series of unified spectator-subjects who, as guardians of the liberties of the people of England, each possessed a degree of sovereignty in the new regime" (p. 26). Belsey argues that Elizabethan drama becomes a site of contestation between the dispersed or discontinuous subject of the medieval period and the unified subject of modernity. And Coriolanus offers considerable support to this hypothesis, as it dramatizes the irresolvable conflict between a man who would be author of himself (the "selfmade man" of the bourgeois epoch) and an older ethos that defines human existence as inescapably relational.

The contradiction between the protagonist's demand for absolute autonomy and the relational character of the world he inhabits can explain both the coldness that repels so many readers of Coriolanus and its peculiar power over other readers. As I have tried to demonstrate here, this play systematically works through an essentially logical issue. We are invited to contemplate the contradictions of the protagonist's situation, not his inner life. We may see him as caught up in contradictions that affect all of us—or at least all of us who live in the bourgeois epoch. But it is hard to think of him as a person we might know and love. The perspective that I have here sketched out may also help account for the bleak and abrupt conclusion of the play. At the end of Coriolanus, unlike the finales of Hamlet or King Lear, the stage is not littered with corpses. We are left with only one corpse, Coriolanus'. But we are also left with a sense that nothing has survived the catastrophe: certainly we don't look to Aufidius, as we look to Fortinbras or Edgar, to re-establish a functioning civic order. And indeed we may ask if the civic order has ever really stopped functioning. Does the death of Coriolanus really mean anything to Rome except the disappearance of a threat? The logic of the play has thus carried us not through the death of the protagonist to a revitalization of the community, but simply to an impasse. Selfhood, the creation of an autonomous subjectivity—this is the project of modernity itself. But this project is, Shakespeare coolly demonstrates, impossible. And what then?

Notes

¹ Thus D. J. Enright sees the play as less a tragedy than a debate. See his "Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate," Essays in Criticism 4 (1954), 1-19. For Michael McCanles the movement of the play is "as inexorably logical as anything in Shakespeare" ("The Dialectic of Transcendence in Shakespeare's Coriolanus," PMLA 82 [1967], 44). And Nicholas Grene describes Coriolanus as "the most austere and stringently analytic embodiment of tragic action" in Shakespeare's oeuvre (Shakespeare 's Tragic Imagination [New York, 1992], p. 250).

² My thinking on the question of identity has been influenced by Heidegger, who argues that identity can be conceptualized only as a function of difference. See Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, 1974). On the relationship between shame and identity, see especially Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York, 1958). For a philosophic exploration of the place of shame in human life, see Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993), esp. pp. 75-102. Williams argues that shame, by "giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one hopes to be, . . . mediates between act, character, and consequence, and also between ethical demands and the rest of life. Whatever it is working on, [shame] requires an internalised other . . . whose reactions the agent can respect" (p. 102). For a comprehensive examination of shame in Renaissance culture, and especially in the drama of the period, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993).

³ All quotations from Coriolanus are from the Harper Collins text (New York, 1992), ed. David Bevington.

⁴ Several recent critics have pointed to issues of identity as central to Coriolanus, and some have also called attention to the homologies between the social and the psychological strata of the play. Thus Brian Vickers sees the play as "Shakespeare's most detailed analysis of politics, an analysis carried out both at the public level—the formal political manoeuvering between the patricians and the plebeians .. . ; and, at the personal level, within the family, in the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother, Volumnia" (Shakespeare: Coriolanus [London, 1976], p. 7). At one point Vickers verges upon a view of the play similar to the one I shall develop here, arguing that Coriolanus "is a character, and his is a situation, which are fully tragic because they exist in a context in which a profound conflict of values renders individual action, and finally existence itself, impossible and pointless" (p. 8). But Vickers does not pursue this insight, choosing instead to defend Coriolanus as the one example of individual integrity in an otherwise degraded world. Christopher Givan, in "Shakespeare's Coriolanus: The Premature Epitaph and the Butterfly," Shakespeare Studies 12 (1981), clearly recognizes the problematic status of Coriolanus' identity: "His sense of identity precariously wavers between winning and losing, words and deeds, and ultimately between destroying others or destroying himself (p. 152); but like most critics, Givan assumes that Coriolanus has a "private self which he "loses" in the course of the play (p. 157). Michael Platt, in Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare rev. ed. (Lanham, MD, 1983), pp. 52-184, anticipates some parts of my argument, in emphasizing Coriolanus' attempts "to make himself his own author" (p. 104). Because Coriolanus' life project is the pursuit of honor, says Platt, "he cannot be his own author, since the thing which he aims at is outside himself (p. 105). Specifically, "the project of Coriolanus to become his own origin, the only condition which would allow him to live free of the city, founders upon the body" (p. 110)—both the body politic (i.e., Rome itself) and the body of his mother. Piatt's exploration of the problematics of identity within the polis is full and subtle. However, he discusses the psychological and linguistic dimensions of this theme only in passing, and I do not share his conviction that Shakespeare addresses the contradictions of identity within the polis only to demonstrate the need for a natural or divine law that will lift us beyond these contradictions (pp. 160-79). Robert N. Watson, in Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 142-221, develops a subtle and searching reading of Coriolanus; but while he calls attention to the contradictions that undermine Coriolanus' quest for an autonomous identity, he does not foreground this issue in the way that I shall do here, and he does not discuss the relationship between identity and shame within the play. Alexander Leggatt's analysis of Coriolanus arrives at a conclusion very similar to mine: "The contradictions of Coriolanus simply tear apart the image of the character the play has created, cancelling each other out and leaving us with nothing" (Shakespeare's Political Drama; The History Plays and the Roman Plays [London and New York, 1988], pp. 212-13). And Leggati argues at length that Coriolanus' attempts to establish "a new, asocial identity" (p. 203) apart from Rome are unsuccessful. However, Leggatt also refers to Coriolanus' "authentic self (p. 193), in a way that I would reject. Nicholas Grene sees "the issue of identity" as central to all Shakespeare's tragedies, but especially to Coriolanus: "Caius Marcius Coriolanus is someone made by his mother, by his city, by his 'deed-achieving honour'; the very process of this making is laid bare. Yet he is also the hero who resists the forces that shape and validate his being in the extremity of his commitment to an absolute idea of selfhood" (p. 269). Grene also notes that "in so far as his identity is not self-created but dependent upon a mixed community of others, it is always vulnerable, always liable to instability" (p. 270). However, Grene does not fully develop this insight in relation to the political, psychological, and linguistic strata of the play. Lars Engle, in Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago, 1993), offers a description of the political, psychological, and linguistic strata of the play similar to mine (pp. 172-74). Engle is not primarily concerned with issues of identity, but his argument parallels mine in showing how within this play the operation of a market economy relativizes traditional aristocratic models of heroic identity. In his conclusion Engle declares that "Coriolanus offers a key instance of the forced acceptance, by its hero, of both his city and his own identity as economies rather than fixed systems" (p. 194); and this statement suggests how an "economic" reading of the play can arrive at conclusions very similar to mine.

⁵ A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (London, 1989), p. 251.

⁶The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York, 1962), p. 16.

⁷ Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg, 1971), p. 180.

⁸Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (New York, 1979), pp. 172-73.

⁹Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120-53. For additional examples of the assumption that Coriolanus expresses a contempt for the common people and popular government, see E.G. Petit, "Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607," Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950), 34-42; W. Gordon Zeeveld, "Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics," Modern Language Review 57 (1962), 321-34; Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier; The World of His Final Tragedies (Berkeley, 1963), esp. pp. 227ff; Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford, 1979), esp. pp. 312ff; and Michael D. Bristol, "Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London, 1987), pp. 207-24. For the belief that the play opens up alternatives to absolutism, see Clifford Davidson, "Coriolanus: A Study in Political Dislocation," Shakespeare Studies 4 (1973), 263-74; Anne Barton, "Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus,"Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 115-29; R. B. Parker, "Coriolanus and 'th' Interpretation of the Time,'" in Mirror up to Shakespeare; Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto, 1984), pp. 261-76; Thomas Sorge, "The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare Reproduced, pp. 225-41; Shannon Miller, "Topicality and Subversion in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus," Studies in English Literature 32 (1992), 287-310; and Marilyn L. Williamson, "Violence and Gender Ideology in Coriolanus and Macbeth," in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York, 1991), pp. 147-66. Vickers (esp. pp. 12-18) sees the play as expressing a blistering contempt both for the patricians and for the plebeians. Richard Wilson neatly finesses this issue by arguing that Coriolanus "reflects contemporary confusion about representative government." See his "Against the Grain: Representing the Market in Coriolanus," The Seventeenth Century 6 (1991), 127. Similarly, Vivian Thomas, in Shakespeare's Roman Worlds (London, 1989) argues that "it is a mistake to see the most detached and impartial of writers giving expression to his political sympathies in this play. The energy, vitality and intense conflicts which animate the play create an immediate awareness of class antagonisms and quickly trigger individual prejudice, but only the most bigoted member of the audience can remain impervious to the distortions or excesses of 'their' side" (p. 181). And Virgil Nemoianu, in A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress, and Reaction (Baltimore, 1989), contends that Shakespeare deliberately seeks to build our sympathy for Coriolanus, even as he also recognizes that the archaic virtues represented by the protagonist must inevitably give way to the more complex and ambiguous political awareness represented not only by the tribunes but also by Volumnia and Meninius: "Progress is unfolding and explicitation. Progress is a movement towards a contractual and disintegrated condition. . . . Coriolanus is thus a tragedy of regret and remembrance. Coriolanus is doomed to defeat, but this defeat ought to be perceived by the audience as a genuine loss" (p. 41).

¹⁰ Rossiter, p. 240. Rossiter's arguments are, however, anticipated in part by F. N. Lees, who argued in 1950 that the play is grounded in Aristotle's conception of man as a political animal. See "Coriolanus, Aristotle, and Bacon," Review of English Studies N.S. 1 (1950), 114-25.

¹¹Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), p. 165.

¹² "'Who Does the Wolf Love?': Coriolanus and the Interpretations of Politics," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London, 1985), p. 262.

¹³ See James Holstun, "Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus," ELH 50 (1983), 485-507; and Arthur Riis, "The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language," ELH 59 (1992), 53-75.

¹⁴ My argument that Coriolanus sees the relationship of self and society as irresolvably problematical has been anticipated by several critics. See, e.g., Ruth Nevo, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton, 1972), pp. 356-404; Philip Brockbank, "Introduction," in Coriolanus, the New Arden Edition, ed. Brockbank (London, 1976), p. 50ff.; and Richard S. Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, 1980), pp. 168-97. Terence Eagleton sees Coriolanus as "about the conflict of authentic life and social responsibility" (Shakespeare and Society [New York, 1967], p. 113). Norman Rabkin argues that Coriolanus, "having accepted his identity and his name as Rome's defender, . . . must . . . reject that identity until nothing is left but his ever more intense sense of personal honor" (Shakespeare and the Common Understanding [New York, 1967], pp. 135-36). But once again I would argue that the problem in the play is not so much the hero's "loss of identity" as the inherently contradictory character of identity itself. In "The Other Coriolanus" (PMLA 85 [1970], 228-36), Katherine Stockholder recognizes the ways in which Coriolanus' assertion of his ego makes him dependent on others. Leonard Barkan (Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World [New Haven, 1975], pp. 95-109) explores the ways in which the play is built around "the multiple commonwealth made single" and "the single individual made multiple" (p. 104). And in Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), Paul A. Cantor discusses the ways in which Coriolanus' sense of himself is bound up with Rome (pp. 105-06). However, Cantor seems to assume that if our protagonist had been a bit more self-aware he could have become the "author of himself (pp. 107-16). Hans-Jürgen Weckermann has argued that "the main antagonism in the play is . . . between Coriolanus' self-reliant individualism and the demands of the commonweal" ("Coriolanus: The Failure of the Autonomous Individual," in Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism: Essays in Honour of Marvin Spevack, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador [Hildesheim, 1987], p. 336); but Weckermann does not discuss the way this conflict calls into question the concept of personal identity. In his essay Wilson suggests that the protagonist's mistake is his failure to realize that "far from being essential, identity is created by exchange" (p. 124-25).

¹⁵ In "To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus" (Shakespeare Studies 9 [1978], 123-44), Gail Kern Paster notes that the word "Rome" appears eighty-eight times in Coriolanus, as opposed to only thirty-eight times in Julius Caesar and thirty times in Antony and Cleopatra (p. 127). I am indebted to Paster's essay, which brilliantly dissects the ways in which "Rome, the symbol of human community, is at once the source of life and the instrument of death, the agent of immortality and the exactor of a sacrifice which diminishes the city's existence in preserving it" (p. 124).

¹⁶ I. R. Browning suggests that the major question this play raises is why Coriolanus "should depend so heavily on public approbation and why he should strive so vigorously to conceal that dependence from others, and possibly from himself too" ("Coriolanus: Boy of Tears," Essays in Criticism 5 [1955], 25).

¹⁷ Williams points out that "the basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition. It is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual connections" (p. 78).

¹⁸ Cf. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York, 1992), p. 155. See also Zvi Jagendorf, "Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 455-69. Jagendorf sees Coriolanus as "embarrassed by his wounds because, paradoxically, they mark his dependence on the people. Wounds are signs not of what he is but of what he has done. They tell stories and are interpretable. They are currency in a political economic exchange that breeds votes in return for a certain amount of nakedness and verbal display in the marketplace" (p. 465). Una Ellis-Fermor usefully links Coriolanus' shame at this moment to a sense that he is acting a role ("It is a part that I shall blush in acting" [2.2.149-50]) and has thereby lost contact with his "true" self (Shakespeare the Dramatist [New York, 1961], pp. 70ff). Paster argues that Coriolanus feels shame at this moment because the display of his scars places him on the same plane as a woman (The Body Embarrassed, p. 97). On Coriolanus' struggle to deny the woman within him, see also Jane Carducci, "Shakespeare's Coriolanus: 'Could I find out / The Woman's part in me,'" Literature and Psychology 33 (1987), 11-20; and Coppélia Kahn, "Mother of Battles: Volumnia and Her Son in Shakespeare's Coriolanus" Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (1992), 154-70.

¹⁹ On the ways in which "I banish you!" sums up Coriolanus's paradoxical relationship with Rome, see Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1976), pp. 76-78. In "Coriolanus—A Tragedy of Love" (English 40 [1991], 117-34), Paul Dean notes that at this point in the play Coriolanus' identity becomes problematic: "what Acts 4 and 5 show is the searing irony that, whilst Coriolanus' habits of speech and bearing remain what they were, he has changed without knowing it: that, without Rome, he almost ceases to exist; that it was only in Rome, soured and sordid though it was, that he could be fully himself (p. 124).

²⁰ "This scene is the decisive test of [Coriolanus'] character and of the binding character of the body politic; Coriolanus cannot leave Rome behind; he cannot banish Rome; there is no world elsewhere; when a man leaves the city of his birth behind he leaves his human nature, too" (Platt, p. 96). On this issue, see also Jonathan Dollimore: "when Coriolanus is exiled from Rome he declares confidently 'There is a world elsewhere.' But it is the world being left which he needs, because it is there that his identity is located" (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries [Chicago, 1984], p. 220). Vickers makes a similar point: "Rejected by Rome Coriolanus resolves to live outside society, a drastic transformation for any man. Yet he fails to do so, since he finds that he is not a dragon, that he needs human society and human action" (p. 37). See also Stanley Fish: "The truth is that there is no world elsewhere, at least not in the sense Coriolanus intends, a world where it is possible to stand freely, unencumbered by obligations and dependencies. There are only other speech-act communities, and every one of them exacts as the price of membership acceptance of its values and meanings" (Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Cambridge, Mass., 1980], p. 218).

²¹ Miola points out that in this situation "Coriolanus finds himself in an impossible dilemma: To be Roman is to act and not to act, to conquer and to surrender" (p. 201).

²² Adelman's analysis of Coriolanus has been published in several different versions starting in 1978. I will here cite her most recent revision and elaboration of this analysis, as included in Suffocating Mothers, pp. 147-64. Some earlier psychoanalytic readings of the play tried to define the character type represented by Coriolanus, whether "phallic-narcissistic" (Charles K. Hofling, "An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus," in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M. D. Faber [New York, 1970] pp. 290-305) or "authoritarian" (Gordon Ross Smith, "Authoritarian Patterns in Shakespeare's Coriolanus" in Faber, pp. 310-26); other psychoanalytically inclined critics have seen Coriolanus as the instrument of Volumnia's own phallic aspirations (Robert J. Stoller, "Shakespearean Tragedy: Coriolanus," in Faber, pp. 329-39, and—although he avoids a Freudian vocabulary—D. W. Harding, "Women's Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearian Theme," Shakespeare Quarterly 20 [1969], 252-53), or have seen Coriolanus as in rebellion against the castrating threat of the phallic mother (Emmett Wilson, Jr., "Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom," American Imago 25 [1968], 224-41). Adelman shifts away from the static character typologies and symbolic equations of earlier psychoanalytic critics, to focus on the dynamics of the mother/son relationship. In this respect she both synthesizes and moves beyond earlier psychoanalytic readings. David B. Barron, in "Coriolanus: Portrait of the Artist as Infant," American Imago 19 (1962), 171-93, anticipates some of Adelman's insights, but attempts to psychoanalyze Shakespeare. Shuli Barzilai supports my argument, suggesting that Coriolanus' behavior reveals an active death-wish that is "silently pressing for dissolution of the self." See "Coriolanus and the Compulsion to Repeat," Hebrew University Studies in Literature 19 [1991], p. 131).

²³ Lisa Lowe, "'Say I Play the Man I Am': Gender and Politics in Coriolanus" Kenyon Review 8 (1986), 86-95.

²⁴ See Page duBois, "A Disturbance of Syntax at the Gates of Rome," Stanford Literature Review 2 (1985), 185-208. duBois sees Coriolanus as caught within double binds imposed by his mother: "First, she has said to him, in word or deed: 'Be a man like me, or I will not love you.' Second, in the course of the tragedy, she says 'Disguise who you are, while you expose yourself.' Finally, she threatens, 'Do as I say or I will die'" (p. 191).

²⁵ Adelman, p. 152; see also Wilson, 227-29; Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 160-61; and Watson, pp. 168-72.

²⁶ After his triumph within the gates Coriolanus summons the Roman army to follow him back into the battle, and the soldiers "shout and wave their swords" and then lift Coriolanus onto their shoulders to signal their enthusiastic obedience. At this point in the Folio text, Coriolanus says, "O me alone! Make you a sword of me:" (1.6.76). This puzzling line has been variously emended by editors. For me, the line makes most sense if spoken by Coriolanus and punctuated with an exclamation point, so that Coriolanus is here shouting exultantly to the soldiers, who have just picked him up and are in effect waving him aloft, "Make me your sword!" When so read, the line graphically confirms the transformation of the protagonist into a hard, invulnerable, murderous "thing." On the implications of this line, see Givan, p. 145.

²⁷ In "Caius Marcus Coriolanus: The Self as Art" (Shakespeare Bulletin 5 and 6 [1987], 5-8) Michael Quinn argues that Coriolanus here achieves a transformation into "the fundamentally Homeric martial image of the heroic self (p. 6). I see this presumed transformation as far more problematical than Quinn's comment would suggest.

²⁸ For a full discussion of this issue, see Madelon Sprengnether, "Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus," in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 89ff.

²⁹ Robert Stoller, "Facts and Fancies: An Examination of Freud's Concept of Bisexuality," in Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse (New York, 1974), p. 358. Quoted by Sprengnether, p. 91.

³⁰ Watson offers (pp. 206-21) a full and subtle analysis of the "mirror" relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. See also Maurice Hunt, "'Violent'st' Complementarity: The Double Warriors of Coriolanus," Studies in English Literature 31 (1991), 309-25. Platt notes that Coriolanus is "in need of an Other' to validate his own existence," and believes he has found such an "other" in Aufidius (p. 101).

³¹ See Adelman, pp. 156-57. Stoller ("Shakespearean Tragedy," pp. 335ff), Michael Long (pp. 67-68) and Ralph Berry ("Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus," Studies in English Literature 13 [1973], 309) all detect homosexual overtones in the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. Leggati suggests that "what Aufidius offers is not an alternative" to marriage "but a parody of it." As a result, "the intense excitement of this moment does not last; it is doubtful if Coriolanus himself even feels it" (p. 205).

³² Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 1-7. For Lacan, "the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development" (p. 4).

³³ Stoller describes Coriolanus as a "play that centers about phalluses and castration. The references to swords, pikes, lances, staves, darts, war, Mars, charge, beat, wrath, hate, hard, advance, pierce, fight are beyond count. We feel the great social stiffness, the muscular and psychological hardness of this man, who can scarcely help himself from penetrating everyone he meets either with his explosive words or with his weapons" ("Shakespearean Tragedy," p. 330).

³⁴ Compare Watson, pp. 220-21.

³⁵ Some years before Adelman's essay, Ralph Berry suggested that "Coriolanus' tragedy is that he cannot forge a new identity without destroying his mother" (p. 301). See also Watson, pp. 174-75, and Riss, pp. 68-69.

³⁶ Platt comments at length on the absence of any "green world" in this play (pp. 62-67). "Nature" is represented primarily by the butterfly that young Marcius brutally "mammocked."

³⁷ In 2.2.112-24, Coriolanus speaks some lines while alone on stage; but in these lines he is anticipating what he will say when the plebeians return to speak with him, so the lines are only technically a soliloquy.

³⁸Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven, 1974), p. 149. Elizabeth Story Donno also sees Coriolanus as differing from the other characters primarily in his willingness to speak from the heart, in a world where everyone else is guilty of varying degrees of duplicity ("Coriolanus and a Shakespearean Motif," in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S.F. Johnson, ed. W.R. Elton and William B. Long [Newark, 1984], pp. 47-68).

³⁹"Coriolanus: History and the Crisis of Semantic Order," Comparative Drama 10 (1976), 334.

⁴⁰"Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words," Studies in English Literature 6 (1966), 211-24.

⁴¹ See also Carol M. Sicherman, "Coriolanus: The Failure of Words," ELH 39 (1972), 189-207.

⁴² "Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), 135-46.

⁴³ "Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 170-85. Stanley Fish also sees Coriolanus as an examination of the conflict between the claim to self-authorship and the claims of the speech-act community, a conflict that comes to a climax in the scene before the gates of Rome: "since it has been his claim and his desire to stand apart from human ties, he cannot now acknowledge them without paying the penalty demanded by the abstraction—the totally autonomous self—he has set up in their place. Yet at the very moment that he pays the penalty, Coriolanus exposes that abstraction as a fiction. The speech-act community reclaims him as inescapably its own when he provides the strongest possible evidence that he is neither a God nor a machine. He dies" (p. 219).

⁴⁴ "Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus"' in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures, ed. Stephen Orgel (1962, Berkeley, 1975), pp. 203-19.

⁴⁵ Macbeth becomes Cawdor but continues to be called "Macbeth."

⁴⁶ Lowe, p. 93. Givan also suggests that "'Coriolanus' .. . is only the name that society's leaders have given the hero" (p. 148), and he argues that Coriolanus' acceptance of this new name leads to "the loss of self. .. . He struggles to preserve his identity but, as evidenced by his new name, he allows others to formulate its terms," and the result is "the death of his individual self (p. 150). For a view closer to mine, see Leggati (p. 191). See also Grene, who says that the new name "seems acceptable as it defines him by the purest moment of action he has ever achieved, a deed both purely action and purely his own" (p. 270).

⁴⁷ "Appropriation of the 'Thing of Blood': Absence of Self and the Struggle for Ownership in Coriolanus," Iowa State Journal of Research 62 (1988), 407-20.

⁴⁸ Relihan, p. 418, fn. 1. Relihan sees Coriolanus as having "very little sense of identity" (p. 408). As a consequence of this lack, she argues, other characters in the play seek to impose on him their conceptions of what he should be.

⁴⁹ Cf. Danson: "the bestowing of a name, especially one so intrinsically related to its bearer as 'Coriolanus,' is a social act, defining relationships, going outside of whatever purely inner integrity we can conceive" (p. 151).

⁵⁰ My colleague Prof. Tina Passman tells me that the grammatical form of our hero's new name normally implies "the adopted son of." So the enemy city here becomes, paradoxically, Coriolanus' "father," as Rome is his "mother."

⁵¹ "Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction," in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, 1966), p. 91n.

⁵² As Grene notes, "the Caius Marcius Romanus which he aims to become is ultimately an impossible projection of the self (p. 271).

⁵³ For Hegel's own exposition of this dialectic, see The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie (New York, 1967), pp. 228-40. McCanles' "dialectical" reading of Coriolanus brings into sharp focus the operation of the master/slave dialectic within the play.

⁵⁴ Coriolanus goes on to remind the Volscians of his victory over them at Corioles, and ends "Alone I did it. 'Boy'?" Reuben A. Brower, in Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Gracco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971), offers a perceptive analysis of this line: "'Alone' and ' "Boy"?' carry the weight of Coriolanus' whole dramatic career. In 'Alone' we recognize his cult of independence, his integrity, his insistence on being 'Coriolanus.' But we hear also the opposite theme, in a play in which the wholeness of the state is the public ideal, in which metaphors of the body politic keep reminding us that the great natural order is realized in a whole of which the single man is only a part. This is his final denial of nature's bond, only making clearer his real dependence on Rome, his mother, Menenius, and now on the Volscians" (p. 371).

⁵⁵ Brockbank suggests that in the play "the dominant dehumanizing word is . . . 'thing,'" and he comments at some length on how this word defines Coriolanus' transformation into "the god, the machine, and the butcher" (p. 51). See also Givan, pp. 145ff.

⁵⁶The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985), p. 18.

Source: "The 'Noble Thing' and the 'Boy of Tears': Coriolanus and the Embarrassments of Identity," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 27, No. 3, Autumn, 1997, pp. 393-420.