SOURCE: "The Roman Plays and Timon of Athens" in Shakespeare and Social Class, Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988, pp. 143-64.

[In the following essay, Berry surveys class issues raised in Shakespeare's Roman plays and Timon of Athens.]

Titus Andronicus

Peter Brook, who in 1955 directed the play's most celebrated revival, described Titus Andronicus thus: "Everything in Titus is linked to a dark flowing current out of which surge the horrors, rhythmically and logically related—if one searches in this way one can find the expression of a powerful and eventually beautiful barbaric ritual."¹

His judgment makes Titus Andronicus a ritual drama, which later practice has largely confirmed as the best way of staging the play. The horrors are central, and the director's first duty is to determine the mode of presenting them. Little seems to propose a social context for the horrors, or suggests other than a remote and barbarous past. And yet there is an early sketch for a context.

Titus Andronicus opens with an embryonic explanation for itself in Saturninus's address to the Roman Senators and Tribunes:

Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms;
And, countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his first-born son that was the last
That ware the imperial diadem of Rome;
Then let my father's honors live in me,
Nor wrong mine age with this indignity.

(1.1.1-8)

This unadorned appeal to primogeniture is schematic in its clarity. From the authority of fathers, rooted in patricians, patrons, descends the title of the first-born son, which is imposed on followers. It is a clear vertical system. Set against it is Bassianus's appeal:

Romans, friends, followers, favorers of my right,
If ever Bassianus, Caesar's son,
Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome,
Keep then this passage to the Capitol;
And suffer not dishonor to approach
The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate,
To justice, continence, and nobility;
But let desert in pure election shine;
And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice.

(1.1.9-17)

Bassianus's plea, "let desert in pure election shine," opposes merit to primogeniture. It is the way of the future. It is also well justified, in its own terms. Saturninus is corrupt and wayward, while Bassianus is a man of honor and integrity. Still, the people would prefer Titus Andronicus to either. But Titus, granted a kingmaker's privilege, chooses "our Emperor's eldest son,/Lord Saturnine . . . Then, if you will elect by my advice,/Crown him, and say 'Long live our Emperor!'" (1.1.224-29). Patriarchy has endorsed primogeniture.

And that, really, is it. Ideas about the social origins of the tragedy go no further in this play than exposing the failings of patriarchy and primogeniture. There is a hint in the bickering between the unappetizing Chiron and Demetrius over the possession of Lavinia: "'Tis not the difference of a year or two/Makes me less gracious or thee more fortunate:/I am as able and as fit as thou" (2.1.31-33). That is Chiron, to whom his elder brother, Demetrius, makes this lofty response: "Youngling, learn thou to make some meaner choice:/Lavinia is thy elder brother's hope" (2.1.73-74). This is the precedence of louse over flea; and if one had to go on Titus Andronicus alone, one would say that Shakespeare regards primogeniture as an absurd system. Titus, who backs it, is a crazed patriarch. He disposes of his sons as though they were any other kind of chattel, and he kills his daughter, Lavinia, because of the shame done to her. In short, he symbolizes a system that is rigid and oppressive, but Roman society sanctions his acts, and there are no internal criticisms of Titus's conduct. In Titus Andronicus the patrician order needs and gets renewal from outside. Its salvation comes from a son of Titus and an army of Goths.

Julius Caesar

Titus Andronicus has total power over his children. In Julius Caesar, that power is exercised, as it were, from beyond the grave. The later play shows a fascinating shift of angle to address the same phenomenon, patriarchy. Sons are everywhere in Titus Andronicus—Titus's, Tamora's, and Aaron's. In Julius Caesar, nobody has children. Dramatically they are excluded from the cast, and the opening procession draws attention to Calphurnia's infertility. To compensate for their lack of children, the Romans have an abundance of ancestors, all of them male. And these ancestors are living presences. "I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho!" cries young Cato, twice (5.4.4,6). "Think you I am no stronger than my sex, /Being so father'd and so husbanded?" asks Portia (2.1.296-97). "But woe the while, our fathers' minds are dead," says Cassius (1.3.82). A father in Julius Caesar does not have to mean an immediate progenitor, a person one actually knows. The idea of father is absorbed into patres, city fathers, elders; he is an ancestor, a standard of conduct, an ideal. "I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor" says Cassius (1.2.112). Even over several generations, the patriarchal grip is fastened upon the minds of the Romans. "The dead are more powerful than the living," said Fontenelle.

Honor, therefore, is a patrician's acknowledgement of the claims of ancestry. Children make no competing claims, for they do not exist. Pride of ancestry has a clear field here, and determines conduct. It is the key to Brutus from first to last. His name is the reminder of the Brutus who led the opposition to Tarquín, driving him from the throne. Not to take up the challenge, not to lead the conspiracy against Caesar, would be a betrayal of his ancestors, his name, his identity. "Shall Rome, etc," the anonymous message left for him, is an enigmatic Rorschach on which Brutus at once prints his values. Brutus is fixed in the patrician cast of mind, imbued with a sense of family duty toward his country. That is easily seen. More interesting are the ways in which he interprets his license to do his duty, and the extent to which others cede to him their own rights. The central figure of Julius Caesar is a study in patrician dominance, in whose personal and class traits is rooted the failure of the conspiracy.

Peter Ustinov once defined "inflexible integrity" as "a quality which has led to as many errors of judgment as any other." That locates the problem nicely. Brutus has unswerving integrity and commits many errors. But why does he make them, and why do the others let him?

The point about Brutus is not that he is wrong part of the time, or even most of the time. He is wrong all of the time. Most of us can claim a few correct decisions here and there. It takes a Brutus to avoid the statistical chances of occasional success that mankind is prone to. From the initial decision to join the conspiracy, to his conduct at Philippi, the play is a catalogue of Brutus's errors. And yet he never questions his own judgment, not even at the end. He feels no regret. This cast of mind is surely class-based, revealing itself through an extraordinary personal arrogance. But Brutus is not "arrogant" as the world understands it, haughty in manner. His behavior toward his slave Lucius is exemplary. But in arrogating to himself powers and rights unjustified by performance, in making undue claims for himself, Brutus is the epitome of patrician self-confidence.

His actions are inner-directed and seem unaffected by others—unless one counts proposals from others, which elicit from Brutus a veto. His key soliloquy begins with a decision—"it must be by his death"—and thereafter consists of a laborious shunting around of available reasons until they are acceptably in position. To call this the record of an agonized dilemma seems to me a total misreading. The choice is already made; the mental process is a search for comfortable furniture. There follows the meeting with the conspirators, during which Brutus in rapid succession overrules proposals first, to bind them by oath; second, to bring in Cicero; and third, to kill Mark Antony with Caesar. No one has thought of bringing in Caius Ligarius, till Metellus Cimber mentions him, and Brutus is happy to vouch for the man, no further discussion being needed. All this is accomplished without significant opposition from the others, who capitulate in the face of Brutus's wishes. The decision to let Mark Antony speak at Caesar's funeral, and to speak second, is Brutus's alone. Throughout, the unspoken principle is that Brutus knows best. Nothing can shake that conviction, not even his 100 percent record of disaster. Brutus is every inch a leader—or, more exactly, one who accepts the role of leader.

His leadership extends to his method of paying his troops, an issue explored in the quarrel scene. The encounter between what the old commentaries used to call the "realist," Cassius, and the "idealist," Brutus, is about coins, which emblematically possess two faces.

Brutus: I did send to you
For certain sums of gold, which you denied me;
For I can raise no money by vile means.

(4.3.69-71)

MacCallum is good on Brutus's self-righteousness here: "What does all this come to? That the superfine Brutus will not be guilty of extortion, but that Cassius may: and that Brutus will demand to share in the proceeds."² One can see in this an exercise of the chain of command vital to Brutus's moral well-being. It is for subordinates to nourish the leader's sense of self Or one can see here the archetypal liberal, a man who knows the value of everything and the price of nothing. Whichever way, it is an aristocrat's insistence that the world conform to his sense of things.

In all this, class plays a decisive role. Why do the others let Brutus get away with it? They too are "noble Romans," and this is the record of their dispute within the patrician order. The only answer I can see is that Brutus is of a higher rank within that order. In Julius Caesar one cannot expect straightforward analogues to the class system elsewhere. Dukes, earls, and counts cannot be rendered in Roman terms. But there is family distinction, a title of nobility, which gives the patronymic "Brutus" immense standing among the conspirators and among Romans generally. "Let him be Caesar!" is the crowd's naive tribute to Brutus. The conspirators feel that they need his name, much as a company might like a letterhead peer on the board. Unlike that company, they also feel the need to defer to him. It is the conspirators who confirm Brutus's identity: he leads, they acquiesce in his leadership. Effectively, the family record is a special claim upon Romans. No one questions it, not even in the quarrel scene. Brutus's dominance over his fellows is based on family name.

Brutus's standing with the conspirators and with other Romans corresponds to the later reputation with audiences and scholars of Brutus the stage figure. There is a general, not a universal, readiness to take Brutus at close to his own valuation, with a few reservations. In my stage-going experience, only John Wood (RSC, 1972) has put forward a radical questioning of the claims Brutus makes for himself. And yet the play exposes those claims. "Honorable men" contains, in Antony's Forum speech, a widening base of irony. With "honorable" is linked "noble." Here as elsewhere the word unites two senses: the formal claim to belong to the order of the nobility and the qualities associated with magnanimity, or greatness of mind. And Brutus is noble. Cassius says it at the beginning, "Well, Brutus, thou art noble" (1.2.307), and Antony says it at the end, "This was the noblest Roman of them all," which puts the question back, with unwinking candor, to the audience. Brutus unquestionably has greatness of mind, if that faculty is held to be undisturbed by self-righteousness, self-confidence in the face of all evidence and experience, and a determination to lead the state his way whatever the consequences.

In all the circumstances, "noble" might seem to have had a battering in Julius Caesar. And yet it is the play's trick to leave audiences disinclined to contest Antony's eulogy. In part, of course, that is the nature of eulogies. One goes along with them. But in the main, it is because the criticisms of Brutus are unformulated in the dialogue. Brutus, an active politician, is supported or opposed but is never queried. The audience has to do it for themselves. "Julius Caesar," wrote Mary McCarthy, "is about the tragic consequences that befall idealism when it attempts to enter the sphere of action."³ Either Miss McCarthy is mistaken in linking idealism with Brutus, or she is drawing attention to conduct that used to give idealism a good name.

Antony and Cleopatra

Antony, the survivor of Julius Caesar, is the victim of Antony and Cleopatra. This play can scarcely be said to raise any class issues, unless one regards it as a phase of Roman decadence in which the patrician order turns to exogamy. Antony and Cleopatra is founded on the polarity of Egypt and Rome. And Antony can been seen as a proconsul succumbing to the lure of the East, as Beerbohm Tree did in his 1906 production. In following the text ("a tawny front," 1.1.6), Tree chose to play up this Roman-Egyptian cultural clash. But this view is not current. Suggestions of a cultural or ethnic divide are played down on the contemporary stage. The RSC's most recent productions, in 1978 and 1982, have concentrated on a "chamber" Shakespeare approach, avoiding the scenic splendors of Alexandria and Rome together with their cultural implications. The differences between Antony and Cleopatra belong to a different order of psychology.

The play's subject is a single relationship, Antony and Cleopatra's, which bypasses the categories of social class. The Queen and the Consul are of approximating eminence, and the question of the drama is their commitment toward each other. Throughout, there are hints of a domestic dimension far removed from the grandeurs of the imperial theme. In this, Antony and Cleopatra are simply people living together, endlessly bickering about the mistress's status as non-wife. It is an ordinary, even a commonplace story of a woman unable to marry her lover, in the end claiming him for her own. The culmination of the drama, in this reading, is "Husband, I come./Now to that name my courage prove my title!" (5.2.285-86). Between the splendors and duplicities of a single relationship this play oscillates. The great exploration of social class in Rome is left to Coriolanus.

Coriolanus

Namier, I have been told, was once asked the difference between Left and Right. "It is very simple. The Left invented the class war, and the Right implements it." Coriolanus depicts both sides in open and enthusiastic pursuit of the class war. On the one hand are the patricians, so termed throughout. On the other are the plebeians, referred to on one occasion as plebeii, with the sense of estate of the realm. The plebeians are led by tribunes, officers elected by the people. The story of Coriolanus personalizes a phase in the contest between the classes, set formally in the early history of Rome. The analogies between the politics of Shakespeare's Rome and those of any modern state are so obvious as to need no underlining, but neither do they bear much softening or reservation. The whole is presented with a hard clarity, as though incised upon marble. In Coriolanus there is no question, as with Twelfth Night, of undetermined social counters. The roles are fixed. The open question is what Shakespeare makes of these class transactions.

The opening, which looks like an insurrection, turns into a debate. The stage directions, reckoned to be Shakespeare's own and wonderfully expressive, give an immediate fix: Enter a company of mutinous Citizens, with staves, clubs, and other weapons. Surely this is a mob, such as we have seen before in Julius Caesar? No, and mob is not the word. The lynching mob that destroys Cinna the Poet is a refuge for the individual conscience, a collective able to do things the individual dare not. Here the members of the "company" (not a pejorative term) retain their identity, and fall to discussion which they prefer to serious stave-work. This is a Victorian Working Men's Institute, whose representative figures are 1st Citizen, patently of the militant tendency, and 2nd Citizen, the archetypal Working Class Tory. For the 1st Citizen, Coriolanus symbolizes the oppressive policies of "authority" (the ruling class) that are starving people: let him be put to death, and the price of corn will come down. The 2nd Citizen points out Coriolanus's distinguished military service. The matter is unresolved, and 1st Citizen is urging the company toward the Capitol, when Menenius enters. He defuses matters through a blend of calculated bonhomie and political sermonizing. First comes the straight party line: "I tell you, friends, most charitable care/Have the patricians of you" (1.1.63-64). The famine is the work of the Gods, not the patricians.

Then comes the prolonged Fable of the Belly, a discourse that provokes the crowd to listlessness. Economic theory usually does, and a later generation, which knows the same fable as the trickle-down theory, behaves in much the same way. At any rate, Menenius is allowed with minimal heckling to expound his view that the belly supplies the rest of the body. "'Though all at once cannot see what I do deliver out to each'" (1.1.140-41), all parts of the body benefit from the belly's work. Argument by metaphor is always a tricky business, and the 1st Citizen, of whom one could have expected something crisper, has only the lame "It was an answer" (1.1.145). The fable means that "The Senators of Rome are this good belly,/And you the mutinous members" (1.1.146-47). The discussion is halted by the entrance of Coriolanus, but the debate is eternal. Essentially, two theories of society are being offered.

The 1st Citizen sees a direct confrontation in class terms, patricians versus plebeians, the few against the many. Even without the intervening concept of the bourgeoisie (which has no standing in Coriolanus), the 1st Citizen is easily seen as a spokesman for proto-Marxism. Against him, the doubts and reservations of the 2nd Citizen—who simply does not care for attacking aristocrats with an outstanding war record—are expanded by Menenius into a theory of social interaction, in which the nobility and wealthy are vital to the well-being of the community. The unresolved debate between these two theorists of society, interrupted by the specific problem of Coriolanus, is the intellectual frame to the action.

The role of Menenius is central. He is a kind of party manager, the acceptable face of patrician rule. His manner, at once genial and patronizing, covers an astute blend of tactics. Note his early address to the Citizens: "Why masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbors" (1.1.60). "Honest neighbor" was also Leonato's address to Dogberry—and Dogberry's to the Watch. But the essential idea is in his opening line, "What work's, my countrymen, in hand?" with its subliminal suggestion that they ought to be working and the open appeal of "my countrymen," to patriotism as the binding social agent. Of Menenius as a person it is possible to hold diverse views. His qualities are a gift to the character actor. His functions are unambiguous. He is there to make liaison between the classes, to keep an eye on what the opposition is up to, and to present the actions and motives of his class in the best light. And Menenius would agree to that description of his functions, holding that they are essential to the decent ordering of society.

Against Menenius are set the two tribunes, Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus. Shakespeare's handling of his characters is not quite so modern here; party managers often get on rather well with their opposite numbers, who are ideally placed to sympathize with them in the burdens they carry. But in this early stage of social progress, Menenius has unmitigated loathing for the tribunes, which, if they reciprocate, they control far better. About the tribunes there is no question of function. Their duties are plain. There is, nevertheless, a question of judgment. They have usually had a bad press, being identified with agitators and troublemakers generally. On stage, they are usually played so as to resemble a contemporary trade union figure. And yet it is hard to see how they could discharge their duties otherwise, given the impending election of Coriolanus, who can only be taken at his own word as a tyrant to the plebeians. John Palmer's assessment of the tribunes' conduct is admirably judicious:

Their tactics in handling this very difficult situation are masterly. To denounce them as mean and contemptible is to forget that Coriolanus is a political play and to display a remarkable ignorance of the conduct of public affairs during a popular election. They do not oppose the nomination of Marti us as a consul, but suggest, not unreasonably, that, if he desires to be the first magistrate of Rome, he should show less contempt for her citizens.⁴

Sicinius and Brutus strike me as thoroughgoing professionals. They are realists and experts, categories that are beyond the question of likeableness, and they keep their temper in the face of extreme provocation from Menenius (2.1). "Here they are," as Granville-Barker says, "playing the game by its rules, yielding smoothly to their mastery, condoning no smallest breach of them.⁵ In them can be seen the general attachment of the Left to protocol, rules, forms, precedents. Sicinius and Brutus are not revolutionaries but constitutionalists, which may be why Menenius finds them so detestable.

The election of Act 2 is the political center of the play. In some respects the practices it depicts are not far removed from those of Elizabethan elections. J. E. Neale, whose The Elizabethan House of Commons is the authority, stresses that an election to the Elizabethans did not mean a choice between candidates; it was the confirmation of a candidate whom the governing circles had put forward.⁶ No direct analogue to Coriolanus seems recognizable among the records of Elizabethan elections, but similar situations can be traced in memoirs of the twentieth century—Harold Nicolson's, for example.⁷ Coriolanus wishes to be elected, but the humiliation of campaigning is beyond him. The need for, shall we say, door-to-door canvassing brings out the worst in him, a contempt for the plebeians with which is coupled nausea at their insanitary habits: "Bid them wash their faces/And keep their teeth clean" (2.3.59-60). He also proposes to remind the electorate of its military shortcomings against the Volscians. No wonder Menenius is aghast: "O me, the gods! /You must not speak of that." Only a devoted party worker would take on the job of campaign manager to Coriolanus.

The 1st Citizen has it. He may not be the same "1st Citizen" as in Act 1, but he has the same sense of the point, and when Coriolanus puts it to him, "Well then, I pray, your price o'th'consulship?" he answers grimly, "The price is, to ask it kindly" (2.3.72-73). I don't think a later generation can improve on that. The ritual humbling of the electoral process is the arch through which all leaders must pass, bowed. And the rules for war heroes remain the same as for everyone else. It is not surprising that Coriolanus should resist the rules; what is truly curious is the grounds of his revulsion against "most sweet voices":

Why in this wolvish toge should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick that do appear
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to 7.
What custom wills, in all things should we do't,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
And mountainous error be too highly heap'd
For truth to o'erpeer.

(2.3.112-18)

This, as Palmer mildly remarks, "is a strange observation to fall from the lips of a conservative nobleman."⁸ Coriolanus's attachment to hereditary privilege is unconnected with any general or principled devotion to tradition. Palmer again: "He dislikes having to seek the suffrage of the commons. Let the suffrage be abolished. His election is opposed later on. Let the tribunes be removed."⁹ At the heart of this play's politics is an odd paradox: the radicals are strict constitutionalists, the aristocrat is contemptuous of tradition. In accusing Coriolanus of being "a traitorous innovator" (3.1.174), Sicinius phrases the charge with consistency and precision.

In the electoral process, a certain humbug can be taken for granted. More nakedly revealing is the patrician reaction to the news of the Volscian approach in Act 4. Cominius and Menenius rend the plebeians, beginning with Cominius's "O, you have made good work!" (Again, the subliminal charge: "Now look what you've done: you should have stuck to your work.") Cominius expands it, cheerlessly cataloguing the disasters about to befall the ingrates of Rome:

You have holp to ravish your own daughters, and
To melt the city leads upon your pates,
To see your wives dishonor'd to your noses—

Menenius, who would like some hard news, tries to interrupt this torrent, but Cominius continues. He has a point to make:

Your temples burned in their cement, and
Your franchises, whereon you stood, confin'd
Into an auger's bore.

(4.6.80-88)

This, he says, is what comes of you people having the vote! Menenius takes up the cry:

You have made good work,
You, and your apron-men; you that stood so much
Upon the voice of occupation and
The breath of garlic-eaters

(4.6.96-99)

"Voice of occupation" means workmen's vote. That is what the patricians deride, even more than the tradespeoples' badges of work. "Stood upon" ("set store by") is the phrase both Cominius and Menenius use, to refer to the vote, and the message is emphatic: next time you vote, listen to the words of authority. The passage is really a single tirade, delivered in relays by Cominius and Menenius. Their objective is to enforce among the guilt-stricken plebeians a sense of their sin in banishing the noble Coriolanus. It succeeds, too. Against Menenius's jeer, "You and your crafts!" and Cominius's warning of the danger to Rome, the tribunes have only the limp, "Say not we brought it." There is naturally no admission from Cominius and Menenius that the patricians' selection committee has blundered in nominating an unelectable candidate, thus putting in jeopardy a safe seat.

Cominius and Menenius put forward the undiluted party line. The essence itself is Volumnia. This monster, whom Shakespeare draws with a fascinated blend of wonder and loathing, is fully stated in her opening scene. There is about her nothing further to reveal, only to recount. Volumnia tells her daughter-in-law, Virgilia, how she "was pleas'd to let him [Coriolanus] seek danger where he was like to find fame." And to Virgilia's "But had he died in the business, madam, how then?" Volumnia responds, "Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue" (1.3.12-21). She means it. When the news arrives of her son's triumphal return, her reaction is "Oh, he is wounded, I thank the gods for't" (2.1.114), at which point Menenius remarks compassionately, "So do I too, if not too much." The point of Volumnia's delight soon emerges: "There will be large cicatrices to show the people when he shall stand for his place" (2.1.139-40). She and Menenius engage happily in a wound-counting competition, leading to a positive incantation on her lips as the trumpets sound for the triumphal entry of Martius. As Vickers remarks, "It is one of the songs that the mother serving the fatherland sings when she sends her son off to the trenches."¹⁰ And indeed, Volumnia is extraordinarily reminiscent of certain posters of World War I.

Her teachings on the ordering of society are recalled by her son:

I muse my mother
Does not approve me further, who was wont

To call them woollen vassals, things created
To buy and sell with groats; to show bare heads
In congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder
When one but of my ordinance stood up
To speak of peace and war.

(3.2.7-13)

Nowhere in the canon is there a plainer statement of aristocratic contempt for the people. Their role in life is to listen, hats off, when a patrician speaks. But Coriolanus has misunderstood the drift of this doctrine. It must not come between a patrician and his assumption of power. Power is the point: "I would have had you put your power well on/Before you had worn it out" is his mother's advice. A formal submission to the people is perfectly in order, explains Volumnia, and she elaborates her position in this telling passage:

Volumnia: If it be honor in your wars to seem
The same you are not, which for your best ends
You adopt your policy, how is it less or worse
That it shall hold companionship in peace
With honor as in war; since that to both
It stands in like request?
Coriolanus: Why force you this?
Volumnia: Because that now it lies you on to speak
To th'people, not by your own instruction,
Nor by th'matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but roted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom's truth.
Now, this no more dishonors you at all
Than to take a town with gentle words,
Which else would put you to your fortune and
The hazard of much blood.
I would dissemble with my nature where
My fortunes and my friends at stake requir'd
I should do so in honor.

(3.2.46-64)

Honor has always to be redefined in whatever context it appears. Volumnia's exposition of aristocratic honor is especially fascinating for drawing on the imagery of war. In other words, "the class war" is with her not an overheated hyperbole, but a mental reality. Hence, the stratagems of war are admissible in dealing with the plebeians, since they constitute a threat to the patrician order. Coriolanus is to "spend a fawn upon 'em," rather than, through frowning, alienate "our general louts."

Coriolanus now stands explained. He is a creature formed by his class and his mother, who is herself the mouthpiece of her class. Coriolanus is not, in himself, vastly interesting. His few soliloquies have little individuality and no originality. His wife, Virgilia ("my gracious silence"), hints at unassuaged areas of his mind, emotions not fulfilled by the public career of a Roman hero, but these are necessarily undefined. The real interest of Coriolanus lies in this, that through his impossible pride and legendary shortness of temper he says the things no one else would admit under torture. Coriolanus tells the truth. It is a rare quality, and one which Shakespeare exploits to great advantage in the explosive scene of Act 3, scene 1, when Coriolanus reacts to the challenge of the tribunes. What follows is an exposition of patrician doctrine.

"It is a purpos'd thing, and grows by plot/To curb the will of the nobility" (3.1.38-39) is Coriolanus's reflex: the patricians' suspicions are ever on the alert for encroachment upon privilege by "foes to nobleness." The issue of corn, raised by Brutus, is inflammatory. Corn stands not only for food and the means of life, but also power—authority has it—and wealth, for it is controlled by business interests and "usury." Hence the word sets Coriolanus off, "Tell me of corn!" and he develops it into a metaphor for the dangers of plebeian encroachment:

In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our Senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves have plough'd for, sow'd, and scatter'd,
By mingling them with us, the honor'd number
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars.

(3.1.68-73)

The good corn of the nobles must not be mingled with the plebeian weed. The next, and fatal trigger word is "shall." Coriolanus has the faculty of instantly reacting to innocuous-seeming words, whose implications he understands. Sicinius has said, "It is a mind/That shall remain a poison where it is" (3.1.86-87). The assertion of "shall" is the point, and Coriolanus launches into a condemnation of divided authority:

You are plebeians,
If they be senators . . . and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by th'other.

(3.1.101-12)

The damage is done now. Cominius and Menenius cannot restrain their man. Coriolanus goes on to the standard position of the ultras through the ages: If we concede anything, all goes. Concession to "the greater poll" (3.1.134), the weight of numbers, leads to a general anarchy, "where gentry, title, wisdom, /Cannot conclude but by the yea and no/Of general ignorance" (3.1.144-46).

Holding these views, Coriolanus has no chance of accommodating the Roman citizens, and the rest of the play traces his banishment, return, and final departure to an exile's death. The only possible alliance is with a foreign aristocrat, Aufidius, and this too founders on Coriolanus's pride. The decisive insult that provokes Coriolanus to his final paroxysm of rage, being called "boy," is partly a class term: "boy" implies not merely youth, but subordination. Hence he transfers it upon Aufidius with the very meaning that Aufidius had intended, "'Boy'! O slave!" (5.6.104). Pride is indispensable as a partial explanation for Coriolanus's fall. The individual trait, however, is seen as a class trait, of which it is a magnification. The tragedy of Coriolanus is that he cannot think, except in class terms: he is defined by his class and his mother; there is nothing left over.

Coriolanus is patently a play of class. Less obviously it is a play of groups, and the stage directions show that Shakespeare had the identity of groups much in mind. The comprehensive term for the Roman leaders is "patricians," and this is widely used. The stage directions also refer to "Senators," and Nicanor refers to "the Senators, patricians, and nobles" (4.3.14). Not everyone within the class grouping could be a senator; and the effective distinction between the other terms is that "patrician" is an objective noun of rank, whereas "noble" retains the rich ambiguity of adjective and noun, rank, and quality. There is a curious stage direction at the beginning of Act 4: Enter Coriolanus, Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Cominius, with the young Nobility of Rome. Have the elders deserted him, asks Granville-Barker? Or is there a faction of young aristocrats, the ultras of their day, ready to back Coriolanus should he decide to fight?¹¹ It looks like an idea Shakespeare wanted to register in the text, but could not develop beyond the stage directions. I incline to couple this stage direction with that in the last scene (5.6.8): Enter three or four Conspirators of Aufidius ' faction. The principle is that groups are identified as having distinctive characteristics.

This applies even more strongly to the popular side, for their characteristics change. The initial company of mutinous Citizens becomes a rabble of Plebeians with the Aediles at 3.1.179. ("Aediles" are assistant officers to the tribunes.) There is a tumultuous moment, however, at which Menenius cries "On both sides more respect." At other times, the stage directions specify simply Citizens or Plebeians, and at 4.6.129, Enter a troop of Citizens. These collective nouns have varying inflections, and such simple plurals as Enter Citizens make a guarded point by contrast, declining the identity of a collective noun. But beyond that are the generic terms themselves. Plebeian here is a precise statement of class and political affiliation. Citizen is not a perfect synonym for plebeian, nor is it so neutral as it seems. It makes a claim, for in Coriolanus, city is a word of power (which it is not in Julius Caesar), mentioned many times, and ultimately with a value in sight. The city is the sum of its people. A citizen is a member of this community. It is not a mere linguistic curiosity that in the development of the English-speaking peoples citizen has driven out plebeian from general usage. "What is the city but the people?" asks Sicinius, and his hearers chorus back "True, /The people are the city" (3.1.199-200). A fair claim, one might think. But Shakespeare does not exactly grant it. The chorus of "The people are the city" is given the speech-heading All [Ple.], not Cits. The city is not coextensive with the plebeians. The patricians belong too.

Coriolanus is acidly objective in its account of the class struggle in Rome. Its subject is a military athlete, perfectly unfitted for political office, who is advanced as a front for the class interests he represents. These interests are given a fair run, however, and Coriolanus is allowed to expound at length his sincerely held views, which are those of the classic ultra. He embodies an issue that is crucial to all societies: the aristocrat-warrior is essential for the defense of the state, but may become too fond of practicing what he is good at, war. Coriolanus, his other defects aside, is ominously pleased with the news that the Volsces are in arms, "I am glad on't" (1.1.223). The plebeians, having no class attachment to warfare, appear less keen on it than Coriolanus. One small scene (1.5) shows Roman soldiers bearing off spoils. This seems a sensible precaution against the rigors of civilian life, given the bread discipline that their leaders like to enforce. At other times, the plebeians are shown as arguing intelligently (1.1) and exercising their ballot power with decency and good sense (2.3). Whatever else Coriolanus is, it is not a condemnation of the plebeians. It does show, however, a society in which the accommodation between the classes is still far off.

And what society is that? Roman, of course, as always in the Roman plays: Shakespeare was a stickler for historical accuracy there, knowing that Ben Jonson and others would not allow him the license of Navarre, Illyria, and Bohemia, where he could operate much as he pleased. And yet the analogies emerge. No play with such a plot can fail to suggest its parallels. The delicate flavor of English institutions is imparted, here and there: both the Volsces and the Romans have a commons, and Coriolanus's final entry is to Antium, the Commoners being with him. As pronounced by Sicinius, the word "commons" has weight and dignity:

Assemble presently the people hither;
And when they hear me say "It shall be so
I'th'right and strength o'th'commons."

(3.3.12-14)

Commons suggests something more than a loose collective of the common people. It signifies an estate of the realm, and the term vibrates in the same way as "the House of Commons" does. Gentry is cunningly worked into the texture. Brutus believes that Coriolanus wants the consulship only "by the suit of the gentry to him/And the desire of the nobles" (2.1.228-29). Coriolanus, in one of his rages, speaks of the ruling class as "gentry, title, wisdom" (3.1.144). And they are mentioned in the major stage direction which opens Act 3: Cornets. Enter Coriolanus, Menenius, all the Gentry, Cominius, Titus Lartius, and other Senators. It is an unmistakable thread, by which Shakespeare keeps hold of the English connection, and is realized most strikingly in Coriolanus himself. Exiled, disgraced, and nameless, when he is asked by a serving man at Aufidius's house to identify himself, he replies: "A gentleman" (4.5.27).

The English connection, tenuous though it is, keeps open this play's line of escape from Rome and into the future. Coriolanus was for centuries thought of as a right-wing play. It is now viewed benignly by the Left, and with some perplexity by stage directors. Tynan thought it best served when either everything in it was slanted, or nothing. To slant nothing, however, begs all the questions; and there is something oppressive in the play's stony detachment from its issues and its protagonist. Coriolanus himself is unarguably a disaster. But those who expect history to provide a final refutation of the 1st Citizen or Menenius are still waiting.

Timon of Athens

If city is the word that matters in Coriolanus, City is the compass bearing of Timon of Athens. Lower case city is the community, the polity of Rome. Capitalize it, and City means much what we mean by it, the financial center of London. This sense is what Timon invokes, as he bids his guests to be seated:

Make not a City feast of it, to let the meat cool ere
we can agree upon the first place. Sit, sit.

(3.6.66-67)

That is meant to suggest a banquet as given in the City of London. And the Folio, our only source for Timon, does in fact supply the capital, "Citie Feast." The Act 3 banquet is, like Macbeth's banquet, the symbolic center of the play. The secret equation is: Athens = London.

Timon goes on to strengthen the equation. The blasphemous grace before the feast begins:

The gods require our thanks. You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness. For your own gifts make yourselves prais'd; but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despised. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another; for were your godheads to borrow of men, men would forsake the gods.

(3.6.69-75)

The ironic "You great benefactors" covers the Gods, to whom the thanks are nominally addressed, and the City magnates at table, who are the targets of the satire. The men of money, "Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites" (3.6.90), are the leaders and emblems of what Athens has become, the type of a corrupt and decadent society. That is why Timon of Athens translates so well on stage into contemporary idiom. Jonathan Miller's 1984 television production, which retained Elizabethan costuming, nevertheless brought out, for example, the Pseuds Corner flavor of the Poet and Painter ("A thing slipp'd idly from me" 1.1.22), and the assorted hangers-on attending Timon's levée. The dialogue between Timon and the Cartier salesman (1.1.167-75) is pure Bond Street. What jewelers say to their clients does not vary much through the ages. The vignettes of the late friends avoiding contact with the servants of the distressed Timon are etchings of metropolitan hollowness and venality. Overall, the implied linkages between Athens and London are the essence of Timon, just as Volpone, its close contemporary, cannot be confined to Venice. And these linkages work just as well for productions held in Paris, or Rio de Janeiro, or New York. Shakespeare knew only one metropolis intimately, and the type is code-named "Athens."

In Athens, and later out of it, dwells Timon. At the heart of this play is a large question, and perhaps an emptiness. Who is Timon? The title, with that opaque clarity that is so Shakespearean, tells us merely that he is "of Athens," perhaps implying "formed by Athens." G. R. Hibbard views Timon as a figure easily recognizable in Shakespeare's day, one who

goes in for the "conspicuous consumption" which became such a pronounced feature of upper-class life in England during the last twenty years or so of Elizabeth's reign and continued under her successor. There was a passion for building new and elaborate houses; men appeared at court with "whole manors on their backs" in the form of rich clothes; they put on lavish and spectacular shows for their sovereign; and as a result "the great frequently found themselves short of ready money, and proceeded to borrow it."¹²

In this view, Lord Timon is simply a nobleman who carries to excess the extravagances of the day. And there was undoubtedly an Elizabethan sense that a nobleman should behave magnificently. But that in itself does not explain Timon's compulsive spending. Tyrone Guthrie, with his shrewd sense of the social landscape, chose to stress "the upstart element in Timon's genial distribution of largesse," as Tynan put it.¹³ That is an attractive coloration, but there is nothing in the text to support it; and "to Lacedaemon did my land extend" (2.2.155) is surely the mark of the landed gentry. There is no explanation of the origins of Timon's wealth, nor is other vital information forthcoming. We have no idea how old he is; while Timon is generally taken as around the middle years, Peter Brook cast him as a young man (M. François Marthouret), a member of the jeunesse dorée. Timon's sexual inclinations are enigmatic, though as a good host he entertains his guests with "Amazons." All that is shown is a man insulated by wealth from the world, giving his matinée performance of generosity each day. Timon buys his satisfactions with borrowed money; one can see in this the pattern of a parvenu, or one born to such wealth that he never understands it. The play steers clear of the question: Why does Timon want, and choose, to be so insanely generous?

The audience is left with a presented fact, which overshadows the explanations. The play's dominant feature is the great tirades of Part Two. Those are what everyone remembers of the play: Timon denounces a corrupt and decadent society. Part One exists to bring Part Two into being, a platform on which the tirades can be mounted. But in performance it does not work like that at all. Part Two is a villainous and largely intractable problem for the director and the title actor, who have to cope with monotonously high-pitched denunciations, lack of interesting incident, and a static storyline. Unless done with great expertise, Part Two is poor theater, astonishingly so for its author. Part One, on the other hand, is first-rate. The acrid Jonsonian comedy of Athenian high life is tellingly done. One thinks of the marking on Walton's score, con malizia. It has a glittering vivacity altogether lacking in the post-interval Timon. Hence there is, I think, a certain disjunction between form and content, between the dramatic effect of Timon of Athens and its message.

That message seems unmistakable: gold is the emblem of Athenian corruption, and usury its characteristic device. It is what Alcibiades denounces: "Banish me?/Banish your dotage, banish usury, /That makes the Senate ugly" (3.5.98-100), following up with a reference to the "usuring Senate." All the same, the play's targets are not nearly so well defined as might appear. The "usuring Senate," faced with a monstrous bad debt, has a case. The senator is allowed to make it:

My uses cry to me; I must serve my turn
Out of mine own; his dates and times are past,
And my reliances on his fracted dates
Have smit my credit. I love and honor him,
But must not break my back to heal his finger.

(2.1.20-24)

Fairly put: creditors have their rights too, as Shakespeare would know, having taken a man to court over the repayment of £1.15.10. There are always two sides to debts, that of lenders and that of borrowers. Still, the time to denounce usury is before a debt crisis, not after. The task of recycling Timon's debts might well daunt a consortium of creditors, the more so as he shows no understanding of the situation's gravity. Moreover, the many references to money are confusing. Since the sums spiral upward, they can be taken as signs of inflation, an objectively depreciating currency, or Timon's diminishing hold on reality. (He asks at one point for a thousand talents, an enormous sum.) The playgoer might well second Tynan's plea:

May I add how helpful it would be if the programme were to give some hint of the current exchange-rate in crowns, ducats, and talents? It is much easier to form an opinion of a man who owns five talents when you know whether he needs, to restore his credit, a thousand pounds or eight and sixpence. Few bank-managers in the audience . . . would be likely to trust a man who owed only eight and sixpence.¹⁴

All in all, the usury aspect of the play's arraignment is not unequivocal, nor could it be.

The same point holds good for gold. Marx greatly admired the passage on "Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?" (4.3.26-43), which he quotes in The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society, praising Shakespeare for anticipating his insights. Money, says Marx, is "the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my essential individual powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money."¹⁵ And a good thing too, many will feel. It simplifies life. But what matters here are Marx's fallacies of drama, not money. The cardinal sin of a commentator is to quote a speech, and to say: "This is what Shakespeare thinks." What Shakespeare does is to enter imaginatively into the minds of his characters. The Timon of Part Two is an embittered self-exile, unbalanced if not deranged, unable to form a relationship with any other human being. What he says about gold might passingly coincide with the opinions of a larger audience in a black mood. In itself, it represents nothing but Timon.

For Timon, as for Lear, all rank and position is provisional, a matter of luck and perspective. This is Timon's account of social gradation:

Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord,
The senators shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honor.
It is the pasture lards the brother's sides,
The want that makes him lean.

(4.3.9-12)

I paraphrase: "If beggars were raised in wealth and privilege, they would hold the esteem now granted to the nobility. The chance of being first-born makes one man fatter and wealthier than his brother." This is another gird at primogeniture to add to those in Titus Andronicus and As You Like It. Basically, Timon's attack denatures society. If chance and a lucky upbringing create social station, what is left of essence? Timon's diatribe is a nihilist rejection of all social order.

The play "protects" itself by not allying itself with Timon's outpourings. As Apemantus says, "the middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends" (4.3.301-2). The discriminations Timon cannot make are made by the action. Any sort of a moral code is left to two groups, servants and soldiers.

The servants are exemplary. Alone in a corrupt Athens, they cling to their master, doing their duty to the last ("Yet do our hearts wear Timon's livery" [4.2.17]). The affecting emblem scene of Act 4, scene 2, written in a noble and passionate blank verse, shows the Steward sharing the last of his money with his fellow workers, over their silent protest; "Nay, put out all your hands." His diagnosis of Timon is "undone by goodness." The same Steward seeks out Timon in the woods, to serve him still. Even Timon admits him "one honest man." So the relationship of master and man, which might seem to be founded on money, escapes the play's nihilism.

But that is a kind of static frame to the action. It changes nothing. Only a military coup can overthrow the Athens régime, which appears to be undefended against assault. Alcibiades, "noble and young," is the revolution incarnate. He comes over as no kind of saint, but a hard, just man, loyal to his friends, the necessary man in all circumstances. Alcibiades has only to march his followers to the walls of Athens, "Sound to this coward and lascivious town, /Our terrible approach" (5.4.1-2), and wait for the Senators to outbid each other's concessions. And there is in Alcibiades' triumph a sense of revolutionary energy backed with moral force:

Now the time is flush
When crouching marrow, in the bearer strong,
Cries, of itself, "No more." Now breathless wrong
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease.

(5.4.8-11)

He has the right to order the culling operation the Athenian leaders admit to be necessary—the decimation of the corrupt. And when the Resistance takes its toll in the aftermath of victory, its inspiration will be Timon. "Dead/Is noble Timon, of whose memory/Hereafter more" (5.4.79-81). In the end, blood-letting is the only cure for Athens, as Alcibiades' image promises.

Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive, with my sword;
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other, as each other's leech.
Let our drums strike.

(5.4.81-85)

"Leech" means physician and bloodsucker. English has both meanings, French must choose; and Peter Brook, in his 1974 production at the Bouffes-du-Nord, chose to end on "que l'une soit prescrite a Vautre comme sangsue et vice versa. Tambours, frappez. " As with Titus Andronicus, salvation must come from outside. It takes an invading army to cure the sickness within the City.

Notes

¹ Brook, p. 95.

² M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 264.

³ Mary McCarthy, Mary McCarthy's Theater Chronicles 1937-1962, p. 18.

⁴ Palmer, p. 268.

⁵ Granville-Barker 1946-47, vol. 2, p. 184.

⁶ J. E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons, 1949.

⁷ See Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930-62, ed. Nigel Nicolson, 3 vols. (New York: Atheneum, 1966-68), vol. 3.

⁸ Palmer, p. 269.

⁹ Ibid., p. 270.

¹⁰ Vickers, p. 396.

¹¹ Granville-Barker 1946-47, vol. 2, p. 237.

¹² G. R. Hibbard, ed., Timon of Athens, New Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1970, pp. 33-34.

¹³ Tynan 1961, p. 23.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 24.

¹⁵ Quoted by Anne Paolucci in "Marx, Money, and Shakespeare: The Hegelian Core in Marxist Shakespeare-Criticism," Mosaic, Spring 1977, pp. 147-48.

Select Bibliography

All references to Shakespeare's plays are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Edited by Peter Alexander. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951.

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968.

Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946-47.

Palmer, John. Political and Comic Characters of Shakespeare. London: Macmillan, 1945.

Tynann, Kenneth. Curtains. London: Longman, 1961.

Vickers, Brian. The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose. London: Methuen, 1968.