SOURCE: Luckyj, Christina. “Volumnia's Silence.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 31, no. 2 (spring 1991): 327-42.

[In the following essay, Luckyj asserts that Volumnia's speechlessness in Act V, scene v of Coriolanus represents not triumph but despair, for she understands that her son will die because he yielded to her supplication. The critic emphasizes the Roman matron's vulnerability as well as her vitality, describing various ways she has been represented in performance.]

Volumnia's last appearance in Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a brief and silent one. She has just pleaded successfully with her son to spare his native city from intended destruction; her plea, we know, must result in his death at the hands of the Volscians, whose cause he has betrayed. She passes wordlessly over the stage in the company of Virgilia and Valeria as a Roman senator hails her as “our patroness, the life of Rome” (V.v.1).¹ Academic critics take the senator's word for it; they usually see her as “the one triumphant figure that survives the play, the savior of Rome,”² and insist that she is not “given a moment of reflection or of recognition that [she has] caused Martius' death. … Coriolanus' new acknowledgement of the power of tenderness and family bonds does not change the grim world of the play; it does not even change Volumnia.”³ While some directors do show us Volumnia's fierce delight at her son's capitulation (often—as in the 1978 and 1990 RSC productions—departing from the text to present young Martius as her next exalted victim), others have conceived of her quite differently. Following a venerable modern tradition (which includes, by my count, at least five major productions since 1954),⁴ Irene Worth rendered Volumnia's silence in the 1984 National Theatre production as mute devastation. Francis King records what he called “her finest moment”: “Small, twitching smiles acknowledge the plaudits, but the eyes express a terrible desolation, since she already realises that he must die.”⁵ This much-praised interpretation, integral to what was hailed as “the best Shakespeare production to emerge from the National in its 21 years,”⁶ presented a “deeply thoughtful” Coriolanus who, in the supplication scene, “grows up as we watch, and becomes human, and so has to be killed.”⁷ In this production, Volumnia's desolation seemed to measure her son's emotional achievement. Indeed, if Volumnia crumbles during the silent procession—as a reviewer of the 1972 RSC production put it, “her ravaged face showing no glimmer of joy, hardly of life”⁸—we are forced to re-evaluate not only her character but her relation to Coriolanus and to the play as a whole.

Women's silences in Renaissance plays often contradict their stage interpreters. Accusing the silent Bianca of Cassio's murder, Iago claims that “guiltiness will speak, / Though tongues were out of use” (Othello V.i.109-10); we know that her silence conveys, not guilt, but grief. In Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, Pheroras remonstrates with his gentle lover Graphina, “Silence is a sign of discontent” (line 587); she tells him it shows her wonder. In Middleton and Rowley's Changeling DeFlores tells Beatrice-Joanna before he rapes her, “Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts” (III.iv.169); she is clearly terrified. The silence maintained initially by Cressida in the Greek camp (IV.v) may be the wanton solicitation Ulysses claims it is, or it may be desperate resistance. And the openness of women's silences in response to a proposal of marriage is notorious—from Marlowe's Zenocrate in 1 Tamburlaine to Isabella in Measure for Measure and Paulina at the end of The Winter's Tale. That Shakespeare knew and exploited the ambiguities of feminine silence should make critics wary of too hastily judging Volumnia's.

Critical concensus on Volumnia in the play as a whole is reflected in Harold Bloom's recent statement that “Volumnia hardly bears discussion, once we have seen that she would be at home wearing armor in The Iliad.”⁹ Yet discussion there has been, particularly among feminist and psychoanalytic critics, who usually find in her the chief cause of both Coriolanus's masculine aggression and his eventual death at the hands of the Volcians.¹⁰ Because his mother failed to nurture him as a mother should, Coriolanus channeled his need for nourishment into phallic aggression. Because, again, it is Volumnia who makes the case for “great nature” in the supplication scene, this fleeting hope of redeeming, “female,” values is contaminated at the source. As Janet Adelman puts it,

When Volumnia triumphs over his rigid maleness, there is a hint of restitution in the Roman celebration of her as “our patroness, the life of Rome” (5.5.1). But like nearly everything else at the end of this play, the promise of restitution is deeply ironic: for Volumnia herself has shown no touch of nature as she willingly sacrifices her son; and the cries of “welcome, ladies, welcome!” (5.5.6) suggest an acknowledgment of female values at the moment in which the appearance of these values not in Volumnia but in her son can only mean his death.¹¹

The paradox of simultaneous redemption and destruction by the mother is explained by preoedipal theory: “the mother's body becomes the locus of fantasies of both union and separation, the mother herself the representative of both plenitude and loss.” Preoedipal theory, however, relies on a mother “lacking subjectivity,”¹² who is a pure construction of the threatened, longing, infantile unconscious. Stage performance emphasizes subjective agency; a Volumnia built according to this model is no more dramatically interesting than the most hardened child-abuser. But what about a Volumnia who shows not only a “touch of nature” in the final scenes but an agonized awareness of the costs of her actions? Can we be sure that the preoedipal fantasy is Shakespeare's, and not the critic's or the director's?

In the theater, Volumnia and Coriolanus are the “two leading players,”¹³ equally prominent and dramatically interdependent, so that it scarcely seems accurate to say, with Willard Farnham, that “the hero does not merely stand at the center of the tragedy; he is the tragedy. He brings no one down with him in his fall.”¹⁴ Such an exclusive focus on Coriolanus alone ignores Volumnia's competing claim on our attention and suppresses vital aspects of her role. In his analysis of the 1959 Peter Hall production, Laurence Kitchin remarks that

Volumnia, the stoical Roman matron, is too interesting a character to function merely as a symbol of antique virtue and yet not be defined as anything else. … If Paxinou undertook Volumnia she would no doubt find hypnotic splendour in the old harridan, but that could only be at the expense of the title part. The alternative is to give her straight, dignified playing, as [Dame Edith] Evans did at Stratford, and let the unsympathetic elements take effect, so that she doesn't encroach on the play's main theme.¹⁵

The rather unimaginative approach to Volumnia taken by Evans was clearly designed to avoid upstaging Olivier's Coriolanus. The final scenes won sympathy for the hero as a “‘boy’ under the sway of his Roman mother.”¹⁶ Yet to restrict the dramatic focus to Coriolanus is to ignore the play's presentation of a dynamic, powerful Volumnia. And to oversimplify Volumnia as either a castrating virago or “a symbol of antique virtue” is to miss the play's many hints at a fully developed figure with the capacity for psychic depth and change. A good deal of recent feminist criticism, by foregrounding Volumnia as mother-destroyer of her son, actually marginalizes her by denying her the full life afforded her by the text. This paper is an attempt to show that in Coriolanus, as Harriett Hawkins puts it, “the nature of woman would appear to be just as indeterminate, and as ‘capable of transforming itself,’ as the nature of man.”¹⁷

Volumnia's first appearance on the stage is both a shock and a relief. With a burst of tremendous energy, she ruptures the opening tableau of silent, dutiful women so idealized in Renaissance marriage manuals. As a “blood-lusting, teeth-baring”¹⁸ “she-wolf,”¹⁹ she is clearly “a complete negation of Renaissance womanly virtue.”²⁰ But this is surely a case where in the theater, as Hawkins puts it, “moral vices may manifest themselves as dramatic virtues,”²¹ and the psychological distortions of which Volumnia has so often been convicted fuel her ferocious vitality on the stage. Now this is not to return to the Romantic and Victorian Volumnia, to Anna Jameson's idealized “Roman matron, conceived in the true antique spirit.”²² A good Volumnia for the stage is made, not of marble, but of fire—as an eyewitness account of Sarah Siddons's famous Volumnia confirms: “She came alone, marching and beating time to the music; rolling … from side to side. … Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye and lit up her whole face that the effect was irresistible.”²³ As Michael Goldman said admiringly of Gloria Foster's Volumnia for the 1980 New York production, “She gave us not the cold Roman matron, but a fierce Mediterranean matriarch, a woman who could be Lear.”²⁴ Indeed, after the discordant voices of the citizens and the slippery tones of Menenius, the tribunes and Aufidius, we can hear again the “tragic music”²⁵ of Coriolanus in his mother's voice. It is a jangling music—the music of a military brass band—but it is also strong and rhythmic and thus brings relief. At the beginning of the play, Volumnia mirrors Coriolanus; only a critical double standard labels one a voracious matriarch, the other a proud and admirable hero.

Of course Volumnia's is not the only voice in the scene. Shakespeare begins by presenting two women who are utterly polarized—the gentle, “feminine” Virgilia and the powerful, “masculine” Volumnia. Yet the distinction soon blurs. Virgilia can also be strong and stubborn; Volumnia summons up powerful maternal feelings as support for their antithesis:

                                                                                          The breasts of Hecuba
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword contemning.

(I.iii.40-43)

The speech is usually invoked to show “the source of [Coriolanus's] anger in the deprivation imposed by his mother.”²⁶ But Hector does to Hecuba what the Grecian sword does to Hector; the lactating breast is compared to a bleeding wound, the infant's mouth to a weapon.²⁷ The metaphor, intended to show the wound as lovely as the breast, recoils to show the breast as vulnerable as the wound. The effect of this kind of mothering on Coriolanus has often been noted; what has been less commonly observed is the vulnerability underlying Volumnia's maternal self-denial. Here Shakespeare presents us with a character who, like Lear and like Coriolanus, is both enormous in will and profoundly self-ignorant. Unlike Lear's or Coriolanus's anger, which is more obviously a defense against their intolerable need for love, Volumnia's aggression explodes from some mysterious raw origin. She is certainly not a likeable character—neither is Lear nor Coriolanus in the early scenes—but Shakespeare carefully plants the seeds of natural affection even here. Her evocation and subsequent rejection of ordinary maternal feeling limit her emotional range and restrict our sympathy for her, while at the same time contributing to her extraordinary impact on the stage. In this early scene Volumnia reveals that, like other tragic heroes, she has sufficient strength to endure change and the dramatic stature to invite it. What is more, any deviation from this colossal single-minded energy will be registered with the minutest sensitivity.

Volumnia's subsequent appearances in the play are arranged schematically: she appears in variations on the triumphal procession and the supplication scene. By arranging Volumnia's appearances in repeated situations, Shakespeare is able to suggest subtle changes in attitude that might otherwise be hidden from us by a character who, like her son, lacks introspection.

The first of Volumnia's appearances in a series of three “processions” comes early in the second act. Coriolanus is on his way back to Rome after defeating the Volscians in the battle which has earned him his name. The entire scene culminates in his triumphant welcome by Rome and his family, but its initial tone is casual and expansive, as Menenius pokes fun at the tribunes. The comic mood thus established is not interrupted but extended by the entrance of the three women. Menenius's exaggerated comparison of them with “the moon, were she earthly, no nobler” (II.i.97), draws attention by contrast to their undignified scrambling haste on the stage, implied by his descriptive question “whither do you follow your eyes so fast?” (II.i.98). Indeed, throughout the scene, Menenius's comic hyperbole guides our response to Volumnia, as she counts up everything from Coriolanus's letters home to his wounds received in battle. Volumnia's language persistently distances her from the realities of war—“wounds” are transformed into “cicatrices” (II.i.147) or “hurts” (II.i.149) earned for “the oaken garland” (II.i.124) and his “place” in the senate (II.i.148). Her final interchange with Menenius is a comic escalating calculation of wounds whose arithmetic is deliberately confusing. The scene undercuts the force of Volumnia's final grand couplet—a verbal flourish which, along with the trumpets, ushers in Coriolanus—

Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,
Which, being advanc'd, declines, and then men die.

(II.i.159-60)

Despite the horrible encomium, Volumnia is less the terrible virago than, as a reviewer of the 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company production put it, “an exultantly bourgeois matriarch seen at her most typical when computing the number of her son's battle wounds as if they were cricket runs.”²⁸ The same comic tone crept into Maxine Audley's impression of the Volumnia she played in the 1979 Royal Shakespeare Company production as “a Jewish-American mother … like the one in Portnoy's Complaint.”²⁹ While the scene establishes Volumnia's overbearing attempt to control her son, it also humanizes her by suggesting that her hubris is potentially comic, a pathetic defense against life's realities.

Volumnia's illusions and defenses collapse with Coriolanus's banishment from Rome. At the beginning of the fourth act, she reappears in a scene that is an inverted echo of the earlier triumphal procession; the same group that welcomed Coriolanus's victorious return from battle now leads him into exile. Attitudes have changed with circumstances: the gloating “Jewish mother” of the previous scene now weeps with the rest of them. A confused Coriolanus enjoins his mother to “leave [her] tears” (IV.i.3), and reminds her of her “ancient courage”:

                                                                      You were us'd to load me
With precepts that would make invincible
The heart that conn'd them.

(IV.i.9-11)

He tries to re-evoke the mother for whom his hazards were her “solace” (V.i.128), but is contradicted by the distraught behavior of the woman on the stage before him; the formulaic “precepts” of stoic fortitude were untried by the blow of real human loss. Volumnia's responses, whose very brevity hints at some inner struggle, move from typical rage at “all trades in Rome” (IV.i.13) to ordinary maternal solicitude:

                                                                                                                        My first son,
Whither wilt thou go? Take good Cominius
With thee awhile; determine on some course
More than a wild exposture to each chance
That starts i' th' way before thee.

(IV.i.33-37)

The breathless rhythm of the speech shows a new awareness of life's harsh realities, as well as a new desire to soften them for her “first son.” Here Volumnia and Virgilia are both “sad women” who “wail inevitable strokes” (IV.i.25-26); their shared grief is later converted to shared anger. When Volumnia aggressively corners one tribune, Virgilia forces the other one to “stay too” (IV.ii.15).³⁰ When Volumnia threatens both tribunes, declaring,

                                                                                                    I would my son
Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him,
His good sword in his hand,

(IV.ii.23-25)

Virgilia chimes in with, “He'd make an end of thy posterity” (IV.ii.26), and Volumnia completes her sentence: “Bastards and all” (IV.ii.27). Editorial redistribution of speeches in this scene—inspired by John Middleton Murry³¹ and followed by Brockbank's Arden edition—robs Virgilia of the angry interpolations that are clearly hers in the Folio, and creates a more violent Volumnia than Shakespeare intended. For Volumnia, the pride and anger that seemed out of place in the early scenes have become appropriate responses she shares with Virgilia to a new, harsh world of political opportunism and personal loss. When Sicinius accuses her of masculinity with his question, “Are you mankind?” (IV.ii.16) Volumnia defends the appropriateness of her behavior, replying, “Ay fool; is that a shame? Note but this fool. / Was not a man my father?” (IV.ii.17-18). As woman was born of man, she has a natural right to his anger and aggression to express her loss. “Mankind” slips into its more modern meaning of “humankind” as Volumnia begins to reconcile two warring aspects of her nature—maternal feeling and “masculine” self-assertion.

Volumnia's third appearance in a procession is also her last appearance on the stage. A modern director's instinctive rendering of her silence as despair rather than triumph finds corroboration in a text which, most scholars claim, is close to Shakespeare's “foul papers.” In the previous scene, a relieved and exultant Menenius joins with the tribunes in anticipating Volumnia's triumphant return; the joyful noises of the crowd are heard offstage. In the procession itself, however, there is no entry recorded for Menenius, the tribunes, or the boisterous mob; since most of the company is probably needed to fill out the crowd in the next scene, the women are accompanied only by two senators and “other lords.”³² One of the senators urges:

Call all your tribes together, praise the gods,
And make triumphant fires. Strew flowers before them;
Unshout the noise that banish'd Martius;
Repeal him with the welcome of his mother:
Cry, “Welcome, ladies, welcome!”

(V.v.2-6)

But no noisy crowd carries out the senator's commands and guides our response; as its surrogate, we can only sit in uneasy silence. The quiet of the procession contrasts with other noisy processions in the play (notably with Coriolanus's in the following scene—V.vi.71) and with Plutarch's account of the “honorable curtesies the whole Senate, and people dyd bestowe on their ladyes.”³³ The effect is both ominous and deflationary. The 1981 Stratford, Ontario, production, directed by Brian Bedford, captured the mood of this oddly untriumphant “triumph” by using a frieze of citizens on the upper stage. As Ralph Berry tells it:

Bedford showed a cortege. Led by a grim, unsmiling Volumnia, the black-clad procession of the three women and young Martius moved rapidly across the stage. There were no words, no sounds of applause, only the electronic bells in Gabriel Charpentier's disturbing and moving soundscape. On the upper stage, a rectangle of harsh light picked out the citizens as in a film frame, the people soundlessly crying their applause for Rome's savior. The effect was ominous, tragic, heart-stopping.³⁴

If Shakespeare intended the scene to be staged less as a triumph than a dirge, a mournful Volumnia further reinforces the tension between word and image. Still wearing the dishevelled garb of the supplication scene, she casts—as a reviewer of the 1954 Old Vic production put it—“a mauve shadow on the optimism”³⁵ of the senator's words, and stands in opposition to other members of her class. A terse silence shared by Volumnia and the theater audience knits them together in common resistance to any simple view of the supplication scene, confirming its complexity. And if the scene is played as a rejection of public acclaim, it brings the wheel full circle; the mother's silence recalls her son's: “No more of this; it does offend my heart” (II.i.167).

Perhaps the most striking instance of structural repetition—and one which is crucial to our understanding of Volumnia—involves the supplication scene. The scene early in the third act in which Volumnia tries to persuade Coriolanus to retract his harsh words to the plebeians is a “rehearsal”—not so much for Coriolanus's submission to the plebeians, which never in fact occurs—but for the final supplication scene. Here Volumnia tries out on her son the rhetorical strategies she will use later: emotional pleas, political arguments, and feigned rejection. She even rehearses her own future role as supplicant by showing him how to plead. Coriolanus in turn rehearses his possible responses of unyielding resistance—“I will not do't” (III.ii.120)—and utter subjection—“Mother, I am going to the market-place” (III.ii.131). The scene is littered with references to acting, from Coriolanus's insistence on fusing role and reality in “I play / The man I am” (III.ii.15-16), to Volumnia's separation of the two in her demonstration of the “part” (III.ii.105) she wants him to play. Any hint of genuine maternal concern, of a desire to save her son from certain death off the “rock Tarpeian” (III.i.211) is swallowed up in this metatheatrical language, which distances both characters from personal and political realities. For Volumnia makes the act of supplication into a parody of itself; her long speech, in which she acts the part of the supplicant that she would have him play (III.ii.72-86) reduces humility to theatrical posturing. Coriolanus responds appropriately to this alternative as leading only to “a most inherent baseness” (III.ii.123); after this his capitulation at the end of the scene can seem only like defeat, the ignoble surrender predicted in his own vision of “schoolboys' tears” (III.ii.116). Yet Volumnia contaminates not only Coriolanus's options but her own. She pleads with her son presumably to save his life as well as to secure him the consulship, but she presents the act of pleading as pure hypocrisy and thus makes it impossible for him either to yield with dignity to her or to settle with the plebeians.

In the final supplication scene, the idiom of the theater reappears, but this time with a difference. Earlier, Coriolanus was to play the “part” of humble supplicant and hide the reality of his inner pride; here, his pride is the “part” which, “like a dull actor,” Coriolanus “forgets” (V.iii.40-41) when he begins to yield to “Great nature” (V.iii.33). In this scene, Coriolanus himself admits that his heroic self-sufficiency is merely role-playing. Indeed, it is clear from the beginning that Coriolanus will yield to Volumnia's plea: early on he cries, “I melt, and am not / Of stronger earth than others” (V.iii.28-29). The focus of the scene then shifts from Coriolanus, whose change of heart we expect, to those who have come to secure it.

In the first supplication scene (III.ii)—which has no counterpart in Shakespeare's source—Volumnia enters alone and is joined by senators and nobles; the case she presents is political rather than personal. In the later scene, Volumnia is one member of a collective of “all living women” (V.iii.97)—a collective dominated by the gentle wife who “comes foremost” (V.iii.22).³⁶ Coriolanus's startling lyrical transformation of the chatty busybody Valeria into a semi-icon, “chaste as the icicle / That's curdied by the frost from purest snow / And hangs on Dian's temple” (V.iii.65-67), evokes dramatic antecedents like the pleading of the virgins before Tamburlaine (1 Tamburlaine V.i), and distances the mother-son encounter. No longer a political strategist, Volumnia stands in opposition to the real political presence of Aufidius and his soldiers. And, in a play in which outward appearance is seen to reflect inner essence—in which, Brockbank points out, “all qualities of the spirit have a physical manifestation”³⁷—the women's change of “raiment” (V.iii.94) for this scene is full of meaning. Volumnia's pleading rags look back to two earlier moments—to the gown of humility worn by Coriolanus when he sues for votes (II.iii), and to the beggar-like disguise he dons when he turns to Aufidius and the Volscians (IV.iv). The double analogue suggests Volumnia's ambiguity throughout the supplication scene—her tattered garments may be at odds with her inner arrogance, as in Coriolanus's appeal for votes, or they may recall Coriolanus's reversion to the enemy, when his mean attire was “a potent visual suggestion that something in the man himself, not just in his circumstances, ha[d] changed.”³⁸ The latter echo may suggest that here Volumnia, like her son in Antium, bares herself to the enemy and finds herself in a situation for which her nature had never been prepared, requiring a compromise of absolute values which changes her fundamentally. The rags worn by mother and son in the last two acts connect their individual moments of crisis, when both make a choice to abandon pride and self-sufficiency and seek clemency in the bosom of the enemy—a choice of which both must later become victims.

As Volumnia begins to speak, Coriolanus anticipates and rejects the “colder reasons” (V.iii.86) he heard earlier; what he gets is not the approach that would divide heart from brain, but a verbal plea anchored in physical sensation. For, though the text of Volumnia's speech stays remarkably close to Plutarch's original, it is filled out by phrases which convey the physiological strain on the women, who “weep, and shake with fear and sorrow” (V.iii.100) at the bodily violence of Coriolanus, “tearing / His country's bowels out” (V.iii.102-103). Volumnia further identifies her own, mother's, body, with the “country” (V.iii.123) and sides with her “neighbours” (V.iii.173), in striking contrast to her earlier scorn for the people. Her equation of herself with Rome hints at penitence for personal as well as political injuries done Coriolanus when she asks, “Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man / Still to remember wrongs?” (V.iii.154-55). And some change in her perception is evident when the mother who sent her “tender-bodied” son to a cruel war desires “th' interpretation of full time” (V.iii.69) for her grandson.³⁹ The bathos of Volumnia's presentation of herself as a “poor hen, fond of no second brood” (V.iii.162-63), in its absurd incongruity comes close to domestic comedy, but may also suggest her clumsy approach to new feeling. If Volumnia is a consummate rhetorician throughout the scene—thus leaving her open to suspicion—she not only echoes Plutarch's virtuous widow, but also anticipates Shakespeare's Hermione during her trial in The Winter's Tale.⁴⁰ Much depends on an actress who can choose to deliver the speeches with anything from cynical manipulation to passionate conviction. But Shakespeare deliberately leaves the choice open, refusing to allow us to come to simple conclusions about Volumnia's motives. Does she still sincerely believe that peace is an alternative? It seems important that Coriolanus is finally convinced, not by the blatant emotional blackmail of the first part of Volumnia's speech, in which she outlines her dilemma and threatens suicide, but by the peace plan she sets out in the second part. Indeed, if Coriolanus senses that his yielding will prove “most mortal to him” (V.iii.189), he nonetheless goes on to implement her plan with calm self-assurance and some degree of success. A politically naive pacifist may hardly seem consistent with even a softened and changed Volumnia. But a fully cognizant Volumnia must leave us with a tangle of equally unresolved questions. Is she saving her own skin at her son's expense? Is she still the coldly patriotic virago of the first act, sacrificing Coriolanus for the sake of Rome? Or is her patriotic sacrifice made in conscious, agonized awareness of its costs for herself and her son? If so, it is a far cry from the one she gleefully imagines in Act I. Is it a sacrifice made, not for Rome, but for the young wife and child with her on the stage? Or is she committed to saving Coriolanus from his own inhumanity, even at the cost of his life? Actresses may choose to compromise and show a woman torn between hope and despair, but it seems far from Shakespeare's intention to present Volumnia as simply a primeval mother-goddess whose promise of loving union includes inevitable death for her son.⁴¹

If Shakespeare leaves Volumnia's motivation complex and open-ended, he uses two major dramatic strategies to deflect her guilt. First, throughout the supplication scene, Volumnia is the instrument of a greater theatrical good. She is perceived less as “a fantasy of maternal omnipotence in which the mother seeks the death of her son”⁴² than as a necessary and positive advocate for the natural bonds which Coriolanus has tried to ignore. Second, after the supplication scene, she is rapidly supplanted by Aufidius, the real agent of Coriolanus's destruction. Indeed, Coriolanus's yielding to his mother is a sufficient, but not a necessary pretext for Aufidius's revenge—in the previous act, Aufidius had cried, “When, Caius, Rome is thine, / Thou art poor'st of all: then shortly art thou mine” (IV.vii.56-57). In the 1984 National Theatre production, which reversed “the modern tendency toward nonpolitical interpretations of Coriolanus on the British stage,”⁴³ Volumnia emerged as a tragic figure whose “public ‘Roman’ front … almost cracked under the strain of her knowledge that she had destroyed her son” and Aufidius appeared a political opportunist, proof that “those who compromise survive; tragic heroes do not.”⁴⁴ When Aufidius ceases to be Coriolanus's homoerotic twin⁴⁵ and becomes his foil and destroyer, Volumnia is released from her position as Coriolanus's primeval enemy and can emerge as his equal. Politics, not his mother, kills Coriolanus.

Despite hints at her deep evolution and tragic recognition, Volumnia clearly remains the overbearing matriarch who threatens her son and Coriolanus is still the “overstrained child”⁴⁶ who simply gives in. But critics who see only “a child holding his mother's hand,”⁴⁷ are left with a play that forfeits its status as tragedy as well as a good deal of its power in the theater. Such an interpretation wins pity for Coriolanus as his mother's victim, but fails to arouse any concomitant fear at a dreadful choice made in favor of natural bonds. Even those critics who are prepared to accept change and complexity in Coriolanus deny them to Volumnia. While his silence at the end of her plea is seen as “a breaking-through into a new territory of value and of moral experience,”⁴⁸her silence is an inability “to voice the sympathy, approval, or affection the moment naturally invites.”⁴⁹ Yet one wonders whether Volumnia could give a more eloquent reply than the lengthy silence which contrasts so pointedly with her previous wordy praises. And if Coriolanus here is “more of a man” and “less than ever Volumnia's son,”⁵⁰ it is a paradox that the theater cannot afford—the scene's strongest visual image is that of the bond between mother and son. On the stage Coriolanus acknowledges himself Volumnia's; if the moment has dignity as well as pathos, both characters must contribute to it. Yet whatever their differences about the complex of motives underlying Coriolanus's change of heart, most critics see Volumnia as a monumental figure incapable of change and insist that “the resolution to the conflict in Act V must be read in the light of the resolution to the conflict in Act III.”⁵¹ Shakespeare may be using structural repetition, however, to suggest change as well as continuity in the relation between the two characters; this hypothesis is strengthened by the evidence of theatrical productions. A reviewer of the 1965 American Shakespeare Festival production remarked that “When she attempts to persuade her son that he must compromise, this Volumnia argues with a blazing temper but lets it be seen at once whence came his pride. When she leads the women to plead for mercy, she is a humble, piteous figure.”⁵² A commentator on the 1979 Royal Shakespeare Company production noted that, after the first supplication scene (III.ii), “Volumnia moves back into silence until, like Lady Macbeth, she makes a powerful final appearance which is contrary to the previous movement.”⁵³ I believe that the text allows us to trace an evolution in Volumnia, from the formidable virago of the first act to the powerful advocate of the last act, through the near-comic bourgeois matriarch of Act II, the “dissembler” of Act III, and the angry, devastated mother of Act IV. And, though the force of Act I lies behind the impact of Act V, it has been transmuted by the play. Volumnia begins by mirroring the hero and speaking his heroic tongue, then passes into a comic, anti-heroic phase in the second and third acts, only to return to her former strength in a different way. Maynard Mack identifies this tripartite journey with the Shakespearean tragic hero.⁵⁴ Like most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Volumnia places heavy demands on our sympathy. If she succeeds in securing it, she also enriches our experience of the play as a whole.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise specified, citations from the play refer to Philip Brockbank's Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1976).

2. Ralph Berry, “Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 13, 2 (Spring 1973): 301-16, 315.

3. Jacqueline Pearson, “Romans and Barbarians: The Structure of Irony in Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies,” Shakespearian Tragedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), p. 180.

4. I include in this paper evidence for four productions' interpretation of Volumnia's silence as devastation—the 1954 Old Vic, the 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company, the 1981 Stratford, Ontario, and the 1984 National Theatre. In a letter, Brian Parker tells me that, in the 1961 Stratford, Ontario, production “the scene was presented as a torchlit procession under cover of darkness, with black-garbed women hurrying home stony-faced among huge flickering shadows.” There may, of course, be other productions for which it is difficult to procure evidence.

5. Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 1984.

6. Michael Billington, Guardian, 17 December 1984.

7. John Barber, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1984.

8. Richard David, review of Coriolanus, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1972, Shakespeare in the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 146.

9. Harold Bloom, introduction to William Shakespeare's Coriolanus (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), p. 4.

10. Recent feminist attempts to defend Volumnia have treated her as either a mouthpiece for an oppressive patriarchal community (Lisa Lowe, “‘Say I play the man I am’: Gender and Politics in Coriolanus,” KR [Kenyon Review] 8, 4 [Fall 1986]: 86-95, 90) or “a product of the oedipally organized patriarchal imagination” (Madelon Sprengnether, “Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus,” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose [Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986], p. 106).

11. Janet Adelman, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency and Aggression in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. Jay L. Halio and David Bevington (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1978), p. 121 (n. 7).

12. For an account of preoedipal theory in its application to Coriolanus, see Sprengnether, pp. 106-107.

13. Michael Ratcliffe, Observer, 23 December 1984.

14. Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1950), p. 207.

15. Laurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 140.

16. This quotation is taken from Brockbank's account of the same production in his edition, p. 84.

17. Harriett Hawkins, The Devil's Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 145.

18. Michael Billington, Guardian, 23 October 1973, review of Royal Shakespeare Company Coriolanus, directed by Trevor Nunn, Aldwych, 22 October 1973.

19. Irving Wardle, Times, 23 October 1973.

20. Margaret B. Bryan, “Volumnia—Roman Matron or Elizabethan Huswife?” Renaissance Papers 1972, ed. Dennis Donovan and A. Leigh DeNeef (Durham: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1973), p. 58. But see also Harriett Hawkins's anatomy of this kind of criticism in The Devil's Party, p. 148.

21. Hawkins, p. 85.

22. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837), p. 282.

23. “Young the Actor,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee, 63 vols. (London: Smith Elder, 1897) 52: 198-99.

24. Michael Goldman, “Papp and Pacino in New York City,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 31,2 (Summer 1980): 192-95, 193.

25. The phrase is Maynard Mack's, from his essay, “The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies,” Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1 (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), p. 13.

26. Adelman, p. 111.

27. As Stanley Cavell puts it, “the suckling mother is presented as being slashed by the son-hero, eaten by the one she feeds” (“‘Who does the wolf love?’: Coriolanus and the Interpretations of Politics,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 254). My interpretation is directly opposed to Adelman's; in her view, “to feed is to be wounded; the mouth becomes the wound, the breast the sword” (p. 110).

28. Irving Wardle, Times, 12 April 1972.

29. David Daniell, “Coriolanus” in Europe (London: Athlone Press, 1980), p. 100. Ralph Berry also notes “the latent comedy of the mother-son domination scenes” that was brought out in the 1959 Olivier performance (Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare [London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1981], p. 28).

30. I must rely here on G. R. Hibbard's New Penguin edition of the play, which remains faithful to the Folio text.

31. John Middleton Murry, “A Neglected Heroine of Shakespeare,” Countries of the Mind: Essays in Literary Criticism (London: Collins, 1922), p. 44.

32. I am grateful to Brian Parker for pointing this out to me.

33. Plutarch's text is reprinted in Brockbank (p. 364).

34. Ralph Berry, “Stratford Festival Canada,” SQ 33, 2 (Summer 1982): 199-202, 202.

35. Edwin Brink, Truth, 5 March 1954.

36. The physical detail is from Plutarch, but Virgilia's prominence at the beginning of the scene is insisted on by Shakespeare: in Plutarch, he kisses his mother first; in Shakespeare, he first exchanges a long and passionate kiss with his wife (V.iii.44-45).

37. Brockbank, p. 46.

38. Joyce Van Dyke, “Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in Coriolanus,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 30 (1977): 135-46, 143.

39. Harold Goddard's interpretation of this line denies Volumnia any possibility of change: “we know she will not leave the ‘interpretation’ to time alone but will collaborate vigorously in molding the boy's future” (The Meaning of Shakespeare [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951], p. 608).

40. For precise verbal echoes, see The Winter's Tale (ed. J. H. Pafford [London: Methuen, 1963]) III.ii.22-23, and Coriolanus V.iii.87-89; also The Winter's Tale III.ii.40-42 and Coriolanus V.iii.159-60.

41. For this view see especially Sprengnether, p. 106.

42. Sprengnether, p. 98.

43. Samuel L. Leiter, Shakespeare Around the Globe (New York: Greenwood, 1986), p. 84.

44. Roger Warren, “Shakespeare in Britain, 1985,” SQ 37, 1 (Spring 1986): 114-20, 119.

45. For an account of the modern tendency to portray Aufidius as a homosexual partner for and dramatic parallel to Coriolanus, see Berry, Changing Styles, pp. 33-34.

46. Observer, 16 April 1967, review of 1967 Royal Shakespeare Company Coriolanus.

47. Adelman, p. 119.

48. Brockbank, p. 59.

49. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 171.

50. Kahn, p. 171.

51. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 102.

52. Howard Taubman, “Bosco Brings Passion to Role of General,” New York Times, 21 June 1965.

53. Daniell, p. 100.

54. See Mack, pp. 33-36.