Coriolanus, the last of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is his most political play—not in the sense that it alludes openly to the politics of 1607–8, its probable date, but more abstractly. It is a study in the relationships between citizens within a body politic; the relationship of crowds to leaders and leaders to led, of rich to poor. The polis has its troubles: dearth, external enemies, enmity between classes. The patricians have a ruthless but narrow and selfish code of honour. The people are represented by tribunes who are in their own way equally ruthless, scheming politicians. The monarchic phase of Roman history has recently ended, the kings replaced by an oligarchy tending to be oppressive, committed to warfare as the ultimate proof of valour and worth, and largely indifferent to social obligation.
Coriolanus is their great warrior, bred to believe that personal merit can be measured by the number of wounds sustained in battle, saviour of the city but inept in dealing with the commonalty, an ugly political innocent. The early years of King James I had seen popular disturbances in England, and a royal proclamation of 1607 stated that “it is a thing notorious that many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.”* The virtues and defects of aristocracy had been demonstrated, towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, by the career of the Earl of Essex, a bold commander but a threat, ending fatally for himself, to state security. A sermon that William Barlow preached in 1601 characterised Essex as an ungoverned governor: “great natures prove either excellently good or dangerously wicked: it is spoken by Plato but applied by Plutarch unto Coriolanus, a gallant young, but a discontented Roman, who might make a fit parallel for the late Earl.” But Coriolanus is not a veiled comment on contemporary politics. Its application is far more general: it concerns the education of an elite, the relations of power and need in a state, the tragic end of a great but exorbitant hero. Shakespeare hardly looked further than his well-thumbed Plutarch for the story, but he imposed a scheme on the material (which he adapted pretty freely) and wrote the play in a harsh, rather cold style suited to its theme of glorious war and civic strife.
Indeed, this is probably the most difficult play in the canon, and it prompts one to think again about the problems it must always have set audiences and readers. It is true that the original audiences, many of their members oral rather than literate, were, as I mentioned in the Introduction, trained to listen and must have been rather good at following. Still, one might well ask what “following” entails. In Shakespeare’s plays, especially after 1600, say from Hamlet on, the life of the piece, the secret of personation, is in the detail, and we need to understand as much of that as we can.*
Coriolanus amply illustrates these new conditions. It has passages that continue to defeat modern editors, for example I.i.257–58, 276–78, and I.ix.45–46: “When steel grows soft as the parasite’s silk, / Let him be made an overture for th’ wars!” Philip Brockbank, a first-rate editor, needed a note of almost a thousand words to justify his reading of “ovator” for “overture”; whichever is right, the sense remains much too obscure for an audience to pick up in the theatre. There are many such passages in the late plays. Once in Stratford I asked a well-known actor how he would deliver some lines in The Tempest that still baffle commentators: “But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labors,/Most busil’est when I do it” (III.i.14–15). He said he would try to speak them as if he understood them perfectly. The idea was to prevent the audience from worrying about the meaning, the next best thing to making the meaning clear. Of course the actor mustn’t seem to be baffled, for that would be a false note in the characterisation. The meaning is best left to editors and commentators. I myself, when editing The Tempest, wrote a note of about a thousand words on the passage, to nobody’s great benefit.
However, there are times when obscurity is actually part of the personation, when a character is meant to be baffled and to show it. In Cymbeline Jachimo makes a bewildering speech to Imogen, ranting on about Posthumus’s imaginary bad behaviour in Italy, where, it is claimed, he was unfaithful to Imogen. Here is the latter part of Jachimo’s tirade:
It cannot be i’ th’ eye: for apes and monkeys
’Twixt two such shes would chatter this way, and
Contemn with mows the other; nor i’ th’ judgment:
For idiots in this case of favor would
Be wisely definite; nor i’ th’ appetite:
Sluttery, to such neat excellence oppos’d,
Should make desire vomit emptiness,
Not so allur’d to feed.
(I.vi.39–46)
The expression is so tortuous (and his subject so improbable) that Imogen cannot follow him and asks, “What is the matter, trow? … What, dear sir, / Thus raps you? Are you well?” (47,50–51). We must think of Jachimo’s speech as delivered at speed, an impression confirmed by the lines with weak endings (“and,” “would”), the strangeness of the language about apes and monkeys, and the complexity of the last two lines: confronted with such “Sluttery” (meaning Posthumus’s Italian mistress) sexual desire would strive to evacuate itself like someone vomiting on an empty stomach. The huddle of figures (apes, idiots, vomiting), the remoteness of the language from its theme, the mysterious air of disgusted excitement—considering these aspects, the response of Imogen and presumably of the audience is intelligible.
Such writing is very different from the tone of Richard II’s great soliloquy (see above, p. 43) and is most striking when it is used to imitate the actual movement of thought in a character’s mind. He may be studying a situation and deciding how to deal with it. Consider Brutus in the orchard (Julius Caesar, II.i). He is on the brink of a terrible decision, whether to spare Caesar or to kill him; but there is not much in the lines to suggest great perturbation:
It must be by his death; and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
(10–13)
Julius Caesar is dated 1599, just before what I take to be a sort of revolution in Shakespeare’s language. When we compare this with the speech from Coriolanus, written eight or nine years later, that I quoted in full in the Introduction (p. 14), we see clearly the change that had come over the language of the writer who dominated this great decade of English drama; we must infer that the change had affected the understanding of the “understanders” who heard it in the theatre. They had been trained to deal with such shifts. What we feel, even before we start to unpack the language, is its pace, its sudden turns and backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can grasp them. We recognise the representation of anxious thought, a weighing of possibilities, a weighing of Coriolanus. Aufidius proposes a theory or explanation but abandons or qualifies it almost before he has uttered it, as a person might do under the pressure of similar considerations. This kind of thing was now being done in verse for the first time. If one had to say where it was first achieved, one might say in Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet, III.iii.
The gradual toughening and gnarling of language, accompanied by a new freedom and variety of metaphor and a more rugged pentameter, are well-recognised features of Shakespeare’s later work. But Coriolanus illustrates another and less obvious change. As I have tried to show, the earlier plays do on occasion indulge a passion for particular words, their chimings and repetitions and their semantic range; Love’s Labor’s Lost is an instance. In that play, and in other comedies, there is a good deal of play with what I have called, in Virginia Woolf’s expression, “little language.” “The Phoenix and Turtle” is in this sense an exercise in little language. Not much later comes the intricacy of the lexical chains in Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Macbeth, and Timon of Athens. In Coriolanus we have this lexical and syntactic habit in its full maturity: stubborn repetition, free association, violent ellipses; in short, a prevailing ruggedness of tone.
The opening act as a whole is long and military. It begins with a prose scene in which the plebeians rehearse an uprising, but their complaints are interrupted by the arrival of Menenius, who makes his celebrated comments about the interrelation of the parts of the body politic, allegorised as parts of the single human body (I.i.96ff.). This speech has its origin in Plutarch but is also indebted to a contemporary publication, Camden’s Remains (1605). It is, like many Shakespearian overtures, a carefully composed thematic statement. The mutinous talk of the people is what the plot requires us to attend to, but without Menenius’s speech we should not have borne in mind the larger ideological context. More important, we should not have been ready for the extraordinary network of allusions to parts of the body in later scenes.
Once upon a time the limbs revolted against the belly because it seemed to do no work. Menenius, a jovial character, very loveable in his dealings with his peers, is trying to act as a go-between, though privately he detests the plebs. He explains the essential service done by the belly for the mutinous members (he calls the leading citizen “the great toe of this assembly” [155]). At the simplest level of plot this scene, despite its ostensible good humour, alerts us to the state of affairs between patricians and plebs; until the entrance of Coriolanus the tone is almost bantering. Menenius’s leisurely lines—one of the few seemingly leisurely passages in the play—quietly establish a kind of lexical grid. “The great toe of this assembly” is a joke, but it introduces language that is later no joke at all, when anger commands the scene and we are bombarded with body parts: breasts, hearts, palates, teeth, belly, and bosom, above all mouths and tongues and what issue from them, voices.
Voice, in the English of the time, was the word for “vote.” Shakespeare never uses the word “vote,” and it would have suited his purposes much less well, for “voice” relates the suffrage of the people to their disgusting bodies. When Coriolanus is forced to solicit the voices of the people by showing them his wounds he is reluctantly electioneering, and the bribe he offers is the most precious commodity of his caste, wounds sustained in battle. “I have wounds to show you … Your good voice, sir … if it may stand with the tune of your voices …” (II.iii.76—86). He must offer these in return for the voices of the people who, in his strong opinion, should not have voices or votes anyway. But the “voice of occupation,” that is, of the proletariat (IV.vi.97), has to be heard. It is Menenius, appalled at the news of Coriolanus’s approach, who uses that expression, and he associates their voice with their garlic breath so that their votes stink of their wretched diet. Soon their voices represent their whole bodies and certainly their power. Their voices exiled Coriolanus; they “hooted” him out of the city; Cominius adds that he’s afraid they will “roar him in again” (124). They will be paid for their “voices” (136); “Y’ are goodly things, you voices!” (146).
All these illustrations, coming from a single scene and all depending on a bold use of synecdoche as well as on the insistent repetition of “voice” and “voices,” are very deliberate. Coriolanus is a play about anger, but it is calmly plotted. To Coriolanus the crowd is an anonymous, diseased body made up of individual vile bodies that unfortunately can be transformed into potent voices that are capable of making intolerable demands on his honour. From his first lines he despises their vileness, while Menenius greets him as “noble,” an appellation very frequently bestowed on Coriolanus; it soon becomes tinged with irony. The epithet applies only to patricians; the opposite of “noble” is “vile.” “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues, / That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion / Make yourselves scabs?” (I.i.164–66). Here at the outset a plebeian political protest is represented as a bodily disease. The itch, a disease of poverty, along with stinking breath and sweat, stands for opinion, ever fallible and ever the word for ignorant popular thought.* Later the people are “measles” and “tetters.” “The wiser sort” of listener would recognise this opening as a kind of thesaurus packed with meanings to be fully realised only later. Such auditors, borne on by the stream of language, would remember this beginning in order to take their bearings.
The third scene, a conversation between upper-class ladies, is there solely to shed light on the causes of Coriolanus’s extraordinary, unbiddable intransigence. It has no source in Plutarch. His mother’s attitude to warlike achievement, beside which, in her view, nothing else counts, is expressed in her loving talk of reputation, blood, and wounds. Her language is violent because her love for her son is so involved in his heroically violent feats of arms that only thus can it be expressed. And he is as he is to please his mother. The boy, the son of the hero, also under the rule of his grandmother, is commended for violently tearing a butterfly to pieces: “One on ’s father’s moods,” says Volumnia contentedly; “Indeed la, ’tis a noble child,” says her friend Valeria (I.iii.66—67). They speak a familial and a class dialect.† In this society loss of blood in war is “physical” (curative) (I.v.18), and to look as if one had been flayed is a mark of honour (I.v.22–29, 57).* The hero’s wife, Virgilia, feebly opposes her pacifism to this upper-class military boasting.
In the campaign at Corioli, Coriolanus, as usual, treats the common soldiery as a diseased body and himself behaves less like a man than a war machine. As a result of this action he acquires the name “Coriolanus”—an “addition” that will have a part to play in his death. Names, always important, are now even more so. When Coriolanus asks as a favour that a poor prisoner from Corioli who had done him some service should be freed, the request is at once granted, but Coriolanus cannot remember his name. In North’s Plutarch the plea is on behalf of “an old friend and host of mine, an honest wealthy man” whom Coriolanus wishes to rescue from the fate of being sold as a slave. There is no mention in Plutarch—where this incident happens immediately before Cominius awards Titus Martius his new name—of Coriolanus forgetting the man’s name. Here is a small piece of evidence as to the way in which Shakespeare, working closely to a source, might find interesting interconnections where there are none in the original; Plutarch is not interested in the Volscian’s name or whether Coriolanus remembers or forgets it. In Shakespeare the “addition” of a name to Caius Martius involves the subtraction of a name from “a poor man.” When Menenius is turned away from the Volscian camp (V.ii) the guards jeer at this confidence in the power of his name, and “name,” as we shall see, becomes a central issue in the last scenes.
The tribunes are dismayed at the triumph of their enemy; Brutus (II.i.205—21) gives a wonderfully sour and animated account of Coriolanus’s reception in Rome; but they know his weakness and will politically exploit it. The language of the following scene is full of the energy this play derives from its “little language,” as in the speech of an “officer” whose role is simply to carry in cushions: “he hath so planted his honors in their eyes and his actions in their hearts that for their tongues to be silent and not confess so much were a kind of ingrateful injury,” plucking “reproof and rebuke from every ear that heard it” (II.ii.28–34). The speech of Menenius that follows has all the metrical roughness appropriate to a commendation of Coriolanus, and it suits the language of Cominius’s eulogy: “He was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was tim’d with dying cries” (109—10). Menenius can only exclaim “Worthy man!” (122).
Here begins the matter of soliciting “voices,” a part that Coriolanus says he will “blush in acting” (145).* He must now wear the “gown of humility” and act the suppliant. Were his scars received only to “hire” the “breath” of plebeians? (149–150). The scenes that follow are extraordinary in the relentlessness of their use of “voice” and related words such as “tongue” and “breath.” Should the citizens, they grotesquely but appositely ask themselves, put their “tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (II.iii.7)? Will they give their voices (36), their “own voices with [their] own tongues” (45)? Coriolanus hates their breath, wishes they would clean their teeth, but arrogantly “begs” their “worthy voices” (79–80) and says he will show his wounds “in private” (77).
The weight of the dialogue is always against this hero. All he needs to do to have the consulship, as a citizen temperately points out, is “to ask it kindly” (75). He need not even “counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man” (101), for the voices are his for the asking. But they are dependent on stinking breath and stand for plebeian bodies. The words “voice” and “voices” occur forty-eight times in the play, thirty-two times in this scene; such battering of the audience is unparalleled in the canon. “Voices” remains a synecdoche for citizens, for “poor people”:
Here come moe voices.—
Your voices? For your voices I have fought;
Watch’d for your voices; for your voices bear
Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
I have seen, and heard of; for your voices have
Done many things, some less, some more. Your voices?
(125–30)
The Third Citizen in his comment (166–73) uses “voices” five times. Brutus the tribune takes up the cry, adding “bodies,” “hearts,” and “tongues”:
Why, had your bodies
No heart among you? Or had you tongues to cry
Against the rectorship* of judgment?
(203–5)
Coriolanus will not play the part assigned him (124). Since he can only “play / The man I am” (III.ii.15–16), he is plainly not a politician. The opening of Act III repeats the litany of tongues, mouths, teeth, and voices, taste and palate. The plebs are to him merely a disease, physically repellent, and their voices, which sum them up, equally so. It is his failure to see that nevertheless they are the city (III.i.198) that changes the perspective and shows him to be the diseased part of the body politic. (“He’s a disease that must be cut away” [293].) The first two scenes of this act insist on this theme of disease: sores, gangrene, infection, an iteration consonant with the theme of the body politic as outlined by Menenius. Coriolanus is undone by choler (anger, one of the humours of the body, and when out of control the cause of illness and disease), and he ignores Menenius’s counsel: “Put not your worthy rage into your tongue” (240). Doing exactly that, he narrowly avoids execution and is banished from the city. His responses to the sentence are celebrated. “I banish you!” (III.iii.123) and “There is a world elsewhere” (135). Under the sway of the tribunes, scorned by Coriolanus (”You being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth?” [III.i.36]), the people turn into a mob, as Coriolanus turns into a mechanism of violence.
In the last two acts “voice” yields precedence to “name,” though one must remember that names are uttered by voices. With great deliberation Shakespeare states (or restates) the theme of names when Coriolanus meets Aufidius in his house at Antium:
AUF. Whence com’st thou? What wouldst thou? Thy name?
Why speak’st not? Speak, man: what’s thy name?
COR. If, Tullus,
Not yet thou know’st me, and, seeing me, dost not
Think me for the man I am, necessity
Commands me name myself.
AUF. What is thy name?
COR. A name unmusical to the Volscians’ ears,
And harsh in sound to thine.
AUF. Say, what’s thy name?
Thou hast a grim appearance, and thy face
Bears a command in’t; though thy tackle’s torn,
Thou show’st a noble vessel. What’s thy name?
COR. Prepare thy brow to frown. Know’st thou me yet?
AUF. I know thee not. Thy name?
COR. My name is Caius Martius, who hath done
To thee particularly, and all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus.
(IV.v.52–68)
His friends have forsaken him and suffered him “by th’ voice of slaves to be / Hoop’d out of Rome,” with no possession other than that name (77–78). “Only that name remains” (73). This extraordinary passage serves, with great economy, to remind us that the entire play is named after an “addition” to the name Caius Martius, and that the loss of this name will cause his death. It is impossible to imagine more deliberate writing; the confrontation of the generals is a pivotal moment in the play, certainly, but so to draw out the moment of mutual recognition beyond the necessity of the action is to compel attention to the matter of naming. The “little language” and the necessities of plot here coincide to wonderful effect.
The generals address each other in the second person singular, suitable for conversation with inferiors and children but also between lovers, and their language hereafter stresses the quasi-amorous nature of a relationship based on heroic fights, on envy. The life of such men is so simplified by their passion for fighting, for name and fame, that joy and pride in these qualities cannot be distinguished from emotions relative to love and sex. “Our general… makes a mistress of him” (194–95). But Aufidius also wavers between love and treachery.
The Roman exile has brought his name to the very city where his claim to it will be most resented. Meanwhile, Rome and the tribunes celebrate a phony peace. Threatened by Coriolanus, they might like to “Unshout the noise that banish’d Martius!” (V.v.4). “Unshout” is a monstrous, spectacular nonce-word, absolutely proper to this context, given that it has the support of all those shouts, roars, and hoots, as perhaps to no other. Meeting Cominius, the exile will not answer to the name “Coriolanus,” indeed he “forbade all names; / He was a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forg’d himself a name a’ th’ fire / Of burning Rome” (V.i.12–15). His identity can be retrieved only by the fame of victory, but this time the city to be destroyed is Rome, not Corioli. He has mistaken their names as well as losing his own. He can hardly aspire to be called “Romanus.”
He resolves to face his mother without proper filial respect, to behave “As if a man were author of himself, / And knew no other kin” (V.iii.36—37). But this desolation (to be titleless, nameless, kinless) is not sustainable. He gives in to “the most noble mother of the world” (V.iii.49) and to the presence of his son, who, as he is reminded, is destined “to keep your name / Living to time” (126—37). Not to yield, Volumnia tells him, would be to acquire a name “dogg’d with curses” (144), a name “To th’ ensuing age abhorr’d” (148). Moreover, he would lose the important epithet “noble” (145), preferring his surname “Coriolanus” to the prayers of his mother and wife (169—71).
The hero yields to his mother and Rome is saved, but he must now deal with Aufidius, whose lethal plot is consummated simply enough by a taunt concerning names—by his calling Coriolanus merely “Martius” and saying the Roman had “whin’d and roar’d away” (V.vi.97) a Volscian victory.
COR. Hear’st thou, Mars ?
AUF. Name not the god, thou boy of tears!
(99–100)
Martius got his original name from Mars. The insult to his name, and the insult of “boy”—a man at the beck and call of his mother—together with the sneer about whining and roaring like a plebeian, are intolerable:
“Boy,” false hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there
That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. “Boy”!
(112–16)
The terminally stressed “I” at the end of line 114 and the “Alone I did it” of the last line emphasise the self-regard of his claim to fame and to his surname. His enemies end the play with concessive talk of his “noble” nature, for they, too, are in this respect like him, soldiers and destroyers; the word “noble” tolls ironically through the last lines of this savage play, probably the most fiercely and ingeniously planned and expressed of all the tragedies.
The planning, like the ferocity of manner, has largely to do with words. They are so used as to ensure that in this bleak landscape no one is accorded true respect, not the generals, not the populace, not the tribunes, not the mother, not Menenius, and not Coriolanus himself, unless we mishear the undertones of such words as “noble,” “fame,” and “report.” Like his son, who “mammocked” the butterfly, he has been reared to follow a way of life that despises mere civility. He complains that the Romans once “godded” him, but there is no middle way, and when not a god he is a beast, a fitting inhabitant of “th’ city of kites and crows” (IV.v.42), until he takes a treacherous refuge with another treacherous hero, in a country which has good cause to hate him, no less for his name than for his fame.
Aufidius, in the last lines of the play, gives his murdered rival a military funeral and promises him “a noble memory” (V.vi.147–53). But the word “noble,” and the words “name” and “fame,” have acquired dark and changing colours from their disposition in the language of this play; and we are left to consider the mental puzzles so deliberately made to involve us in daunting ambiguities.