Coriolanus
The last and most uniformly political tragedy in the canon can be dated by a number of topical allusions. Shakespeare’s interest in the story of the legendary Caius Martius and his antipathy towards the hungry mob may have been stimulated by the food riots which took place in the Midlands during 1607 and 1608, while two minor details point to other recent events: the great frost of December 1607–January 1608 (alluded to at 1.1.171) and Hugh Middleton’s project to bring water to the City of London via the artificial ‘New River’, only completed in early 1609, though under preparation some time beforehand (alluded to at 3.1.99–100). The play cannot have been written before 1605, since its first scene draws on William Camden’s Remains of a Greater Work Concerning Britain, published in that year, nor after 1609, when it was itself echoed in two separate works by authors associated with Shakespeare’s company, Robert *Armin’s The Italian Tailor and his Boy (entered in the Stationers’ Register that February), and Ben *Jonson’s Epicoene (completed later in the year). All stylistic tests place the play later than The History of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, and it probably appeared shortly after Pericles, in spring or summer 1608.
Ralph Fiennes directs himself as an austere, visceral Martius in an austere, visceral, Balkan-set adaptation of Coriolanus (2011).
Text: The dating of the play in 1608 is further confirmed by two details of its sole authoritative text, published in the Folio in 1623, namely the specification of cornets in some of the musical stage directions and the division of the play into acts. Both of these features are associated with indoor theatres (which could use smaller brass instruments than the public amphitheatres, and needed pauses in the action for the changing of footlights), and suggest that Coriolanus may have been the first of Shakespeare’s plays to have been written with the *Blackfriars theatre, acquired by the King’s Men in 1608, in mind. The text printed in the Folio preserves a few idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s *foul papers (such as the occasional spelling of ‘Scicinius’ for ‘Sicinius’, which matches other examples of Shakespeare’s preference for ‘sc’ spellings elsewhere), although other accidentals appear to be scribal. It also gives unusually full stage directions, some of them apparently the result of authorial directions being clarified and duplicated for theatrical use. It probably derives either from a promptbook transcribed from foul papers, or from a transcript of such a promptbook.
Sources: The play’s depiction of the semi-legendary Caius Martius (banished from the early Roman republic in 491 bc, not so long after the events Shakespeare had narrated in The Rape of Lucrece) closely follows *Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’ in his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans: several major passages, notably Volumnia’s appeal in 5.1 (95–183), are taken almost verbatim from Sir Thomas North’s translation. Shakespeare, however, greatly expands Volumnia’s role (inventing all the other episodes in which she appears), as he does that of Menenius, while Menenius’ fable of the belly (1.1.85–152) shows a familiarity with other versions of this parable than Plutarch’s: from Camden’s Remains, from *Livy’s version of the story in his Annales, and from William Averell’s Meruailous Combat of Contrarieties (1584).
Synopsis: 1.1 Mutinous Roman citizens have banded together to avenge their hunger on the aristocrat Caius Martius, but are intercepted by Menenius, a more sympathetic patrician, who attempts to dissuade them from rebellion by telling a fable of how the parts of the body once mistakenly rose against the belly, accusing it unjustly of selfish greed. Martius himself arrives and harangues the citizens, wishing the Senate would let him kill them, and regretting that they have instead conceded the people two tribunes as representatives, Sicinius and Brutus. News arrives that a Volscian army is approaching Rome, and the senators, arriving with the tribunes, appoint an eager Martius as second-in-command under Cominius to lead a Roman force against the Volsces and their leader, Martius’ arch-enemy Tullus Aufidius. Left alone, Sicinius and Brutus resolve to watch Martius, sworn enemy of their political interests, carefully.
1.2 The senators of the Volscian city Corioles, aware that the Romans have sent an army to meet their attack, send Aufidius and his troops to meet it.
1.3 Volumnia, Martius’ mother, is sewing with his wife Virgilia. Delighting in Martius’ military record, Volumnia has no sympathy with Virgilia’s anxieties about his safety, nor, when her friend Valeria arrives to invite them out, with her refusal to leave the house while her husband is away. Valeria congratulates Virgilia on the resemblance between Martius and his young son (whom she has recently watched chasing and dismembering a butterfly), and has heard that Martius, along with his fellow commander Titus Lartius, is now besieging Corioles while Cominius leads the other half of the Roman army against the Volscian expeditionary force.
1.4–8 At the battlefront Martius reverses a Roman retreat, haranguing his soldiers and leading them into the Volscian city: the gates close behind him alone, but he survives to lead the successful taking of Corioles. Though wounded, he then joins Cominius’ temporarily withdrawing force, leading a fresh and decisive assault on Aufidius’ army.
1.9 Martius duels with Aufidius, driving back both him and the unwelcome fellow Volscians who take his part.
1.10 Before the victorious Roman army Cominius, despite Martius’ complaints that he hates to be praised, gives Martius the title of Coriolanus for his deeds.
1.11 Aufidius, disgusted by the peace terms the Volscians have had to accept, determines to destroy his vanquisher Martius by any means, honourable or not.
2.1 Menenius is bickering with the tribunes about Martius’ vices when Volumnia brings the news of his victory: to Virgilia’s horror they gleefully count up how many scars he now bears. Martius, garlanded with oak and ceremonially renamed Coriolanus, is triumphantly welcomed into the city with Cominius, Lartius, and the army, and they set off for the Capitol: the tribunes, anxious that their enemy will be made consul, resolve to prevent this by provoking Coriolanus into alienating the people.
2.2 In the Capitol, Cominius gives an oration about Coriolanus’ heroic deeds, which Coriolanus himself refuses to hear: the Senate name him as a consul, but this, to Coriolanus’ distaste, will oblige him to appeal to the people for their acceptance by showing them the wounds he has received in their defence.
2.3 Wearing the gown of humility, Coriolanus is brought to the market place by Menenius, where he unwillingly and disdainfully requests the people’s voices, which they give. After his departure, however, the tribunes persuade them to change their minds.
3.1 On their way to his investiture, Coriolanus and the senators are stopped by the tribunes, who tell him the people have withdrawn their consent: infuriated, Coriolanus rages at them, asserting that the people do not deserve political representation, and the tribunes, supported by a crowd of citizens, attempt to arrest him for treason. After a scuffle Coriolanus is persuaded to withdraw, while Menenius promises the tribunes that Coriolanus will soon answer the people’s accusations in the market place.
3.2 At a patrician’s house Volumnia rebukes her son for prematurely exposing his political objectives: she and the senators persuade him to speak mildly to the assembled people in order to regain the consulship he has nearly lost.
3.3 In the market place, however, the tribunes’ accusations of treason goad Coriolanus into ranting against the people once more, and he is sentenced to banishment.
4.1 A stoical Coriolanus bids farewell to Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Cominius, and the patricians.
4.2 Volumnia rails against the gloating tribunes.
4.3 A Roman informer tells a Volscian of Coriolanus’ banishment, certain the news will encourage the regrouping Volscian army to launch a fresh attack on Rome.
4.4 Disguised, Coriolanus arrives in the Volscian city of Antium, and seeks out Tullus Aufidius.
4.5 Refusing to be denied entry by servants, Coriolanus reveals himself to Aufidius and announces that he wishes to defect to the Volscians and avenge himself on Rome. Aufidius welcomes him eagerly, to the amazement of the servants, who fear that Coriolanus will displace their master.
4.6 The mutual congratulations of Roman tribunes and people are interrupted by the news that a Volscian army, led by Coriolanus, is approaching: Menenius tells them they have deserved their impending destruction.
4.7 Aufidius, warned by his lieutenant that he appears to be Coriolanus’ subordinate in their campaign, confides that he is only waiting for Coriolanus either to defeat or to refuse to attack Rome before moving against him.
5.1 Cominius returns from a wholly unsuccessful attempt to persuade Coriolanus to spare Rome, and Menenius sets off on another such embassy.
5.2 Menenius, though scorned by the Volscian watchmen, gains access to Coriolanus and Aufidius, but Coriolanus refuses to yield to his plea for mercy.
5.3 Watched by Aufidius, Coriolanus receives one last embassy from Rome before the next day’s attack: Virgilia, Volumnia, Valeria, and his son Young Martius. Though he greets them with duty and love, he resolves not to accede to their request. Volumnia pleads eloquently for mercy, and at the conclusion of her speech she, Virgilia, Valeria, and Young Martius kneel before him: finally Coriolanus holds Volumnia silently by the hand before conceding, crying, that he will make peace, however dangerously to himself.
5.4 Menenius is assuring Sicinius that Coriolanus will not yield to his mother when the news arrives that he has done so.
5.5 Volumnia, Virgilia, and Valeria are welcomed back into Rome in triumph.
5.6 In Corioles, Aufidius rallies his supporters before Coriolanus arrives to report to the Volscian lords his success in obtaining a submissive peace from the Romans. Aufidius accuses him of treachery for calling off the Volscian attack at his mother’s entreaty, and further provokes him by calling him ‘boy’: the enraged Coriolanus reminds Aufidius how often he has scarred him, and of his many victories against the Volscians. Despite the lords’ attempts to keep the peace, the Volscian people cry out for Coriolanus’ death: two of Aufidius’ party fatally stab him and the rest, along with Aufidius, trample his corpse. Aufidius seeks to justify the killing, but, subsiding, grants that despite the casualties he inflicted on Corioles, Coriolanus should be buried with full military honours.
Artistic features: The play is unusual for the single-mindedness with which its action builds up to a single, decisive, wordless moment, Coriolanus’ yielding to Volumnia (5.3.183), while its virtuoso crowd scenes almost make the Roman people into its hero’s single collective antagonist. The play has a distinctively harsh and gritty vocabulary and poetic tone throughout, thriving on rough monosyllables.
Critical history: Hazlitt’s essay on the play, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), continues to set the agenda of much discussion of the play’s political concerns. Hazlitt praises the thoroughness with which Shakespeare articulates the rival claims of aristocracy and democracy (‘anyone who studies [Coriolanus] may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own’), though he fears that Coriolanus demonstrates that poetry is innately liable to prefer dictators to the abstract claims of social justice. Before Hazlitt, commentators had tended to complain—as in their different ways did adaptors—of what *Johnson called the excessive ‘bustle’ of the early scenes and the inadequate business of the last, which *Dennis and other neoclassical critics had also accused of violating poetic justice. During the 19th century and the first part of the 20th much criticism of the play was similarly dedicated to showing how and why it was inferior to the earlier tragedies, with A. C. *Bradley commenting on the critical distance Shakespeare maintains between audience and characters by ironic humour and Harley *Granville-Barker praising the play’s supreme, focused craftsmanship at the expense of its vitality. Frank *Harris pioneered one recurrent strain in 20th-century criticism in The Women in Shakespeare (1911) when he claimed that the intense mother–son bond between Coriolanus and Volumnia must have a basis in Shakespeare’s own experience, and since the advent of *Freud many commentators have applied a psychoanalytic vocabulary, with greater and lesser degrees of sophistication, to the exploration of the relationship between the play’s protagonist and the most fully developed older woman in the canon: the most influential example would be Janet Adelman.
Stage history: Apart from the early allusions by Armin and Jonson, there are no records of specific performances of the play before the 1680s, and its stage history thereafter is largely one of more and less propagandist adaptations until the early 19th century: Nahum *Tate’s anti-Whig *The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (1681), John *Dennis’s anti-Jacobite The Invader of his Country (1719), in which Coriolanus becomes a figure for the banished Stuarts, and, later, Thomas Sheridan’s version, Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron (1754). This hybrid of Shakespeare’s play and James Thomson’s 1748 work on the same subject was still being used, in successively rewritten forms, by J. P. *Kemble for his highly successful productions (with himself in the title role and Sarah *Siddons as Volumnia) between 1789 and 1817. It became Kemble’s favourite role, his own perceived arrogance and singularity in the face of his mass audience’s expectations finding its perfect counterpart in Martius’ imperious defiance of the Roman mob. Occasional attempts at reviving the original—in 1719, 1754, and, with Edmund *Kean as Coriolanus, in 1820—were unsuccessful, but it returned to the repertory when William Charles *Macready took the title role at Covent Garden in 1838, a part in which he was succeeded by Samuel *Phelps in 1848. Frank *Benson played Coriolanus with some success between 1893 and 1910, but the role was a disaster for Henry *Irving, who chose it as his final Shakespearian role at the Lyceum (with an equally miscast Ellen *Terry as Volumnia) in 1901. Over the 19th century as a whole the play was more successful in the republican United States, where the original had supplanted the Sheridan version (staged in Philadelphia in 1767) as early as 1796. It was the highly physical and aggressive Edwin *Forrest’s greatest role, from 1831 to 1863, and he was even sculpted in the part, though some commentators preferred his successor John E. McCullough, who played Coriolanus in a more intellectually superior style in 1878.
Despite some notable revivals at the Old Vic in the 1920s, the play did not enjoy particular prominence in the 20th century until the rise of fascist movements across Europe brought it a renewed topicality. In France in 1934 the Action Française party induced the Comédie-Française to stage a version of the play which treated it as an all-out attack on democracy (stimulating violent demonstrations outside the theatre, though these failed to provoke the hoped-for military coup), and in Moscow the following year a version approved by Stalin’s propagandists instead treated Coriolanus as a wholly contemptible, aristocratic, Western-style enemy of the people. The Nazis’ enthusiasm for the play, which they regarded as a hymn to strong leadership, led to its banning in occupied Germany until 1953: Bertolt *Brecht’s anti-Coriolanus adaptation was not acted until 1963, seven years after his death. Back in England, where attitudes to the play’s protagonist have been more ambivalent, Laurence *Olivier achieved one of his greatest successes as Coriolanus, with Sybil *Thorndike as Volumnia, at the Old Vic in 1938, a role he repeated in Peter *Hall’s production at Stratford in 1959, with Edith *Evans as his mother. With characteristic physical bravado Olivier made Coriolanus’ death resemble the throwing from the Tarpeian rock threatened earlier by the tribunes, falling precipitately from an upper stage to dangle upside down by his ankles. His notable successors in the role have included Richard *Burton (at the Old Vic in 1954), Alan *Howard (at Stratford and on an acclaimed international tour in 1977), Ian *McKellen (in Peter Hall’s uneasy modern-dress production in the National Theatre’s Olivier auditorium, with a powerful Irene *Worth as Volumnia, 1984), Kenneth *Branagh (outclassed by Judi *Dench’s Volumnia at Chichester in 1992) and Toby Stephens, who played Coriolanus as a sneering Regency public-school prefect in David Thacker’s RSC production, with Caroline Blakiston as Volumnia, in 1994. This intelligent production was one of very few to produce the play in neither modern nor Roman dress, taking up an idea of *Hazlitt’s by setting the production in the era of the French Revolution. In homage to Peter Hall’s 1959 production at the same venue, Gregory *Doran’s 2007 Coriolanus, with William Houston in the title role and Janet *Suzman as Volumnia, was the last RSC production staged in the proscenium-arch *Royal Shakespeare Theatre before its remodelling. In 2013 the fan frenzy around Tom *Hiddleston ensured Josie Rourke’s Donmar production was packed to the rafters each night, though it was broadcast to cinemas around the world to relieve some of the pressure on the building’s aching joints and the bereft souls out in the cold. Hiddleston’s performance, variously and arrestingly characterized by composed charm and a willingness to explore complex emotional drives, divided opinion, with as many finding it unsuited to the austere gravity of the part as found it insightful and refreshing.
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
On the screen: The play was serialized in three parts of The Spread of the Eagle series (1963) for BBC TV. The BBC TV production (1983) featured Alan Howard and Irene Worth. Ralph Fiennes directed himself in the title role of a stirring modern-dress version in 2011, with Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia.
Anthony Davies