[9 April 1947]
There is a certain oddity about Coriolanus. It is a favorite with most critics, it is rather ignored by the public, at least in English-speaking lands, and it is at the same time one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in France. Mr. Henry Norman Hudson, for example, one of the most dreary of critics, says the play shows Shakespeare at the maturity of his powers. Middleton Murry considers Coriolanus “a much finer Shakespearian drama than King Lear.” T. S. Eliot writes that “Coriolanus may not be as ‘interesting’ as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.” William Hazlitt regards Coriolanus as a great political play, and says that anyone who studies it “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.”
The play is more suited to the stage than most of Shakespeare’s other mature tragedies. The parts of Hamlet and Iago are largely unactable, and King Lear does not benefit from a stage performance. This leaves, among the mature tragedies, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, and Julius Caesar does not have a concentration of interest upon a single hero. Coriolanus does focus upon one hero, it is well-constructed, and it keeps within the bounds of what actors can do. There are certain sacrifices. The characters are not as exciting and interesting as Hamlet or Iago are. The poetry is more restrained and has less fireworks. Except for Virgilia, who is more or less mute, there is no really sympathetic character in the play. But the play does not deserve to be neglected. The language is extremely felicitous, if restrained. Though there are lines that are untranslatable, if we listen to some of its verse, we can see how it’s easier to translate into French than most of Shakespeare’s verse and why the French would be drawn to it. Coriolanus’s cry when he embraces Virgilia is one example: “O, a kiss / Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!” (V.iii.44–45). The fine couplet with which Volumnia describes Coriolanus’s power in battle is another:
Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy arm doth lie,
Which, being advanc’d, declines, and then men die.
(II.i.177–78)
The rhetorical style of the play is more advanced than Julius Caesar’s and more translatable than Antony and Cleopatra’s.
Coriolanus is a very public play. Even private life in the play is public. There is more noise, more official and public music, and less private music in Coriolanus than in any other play of Shakespeare’s. In the first Act alone the noises include: “a company of mutinous Citizens” as the play opens (I.i.), “Shouts within” in the same scene, “Drum and Colours,” “Drum afar off,” “They sound a parley,” “Alarum far off,” and sounds of fighting a few scenes later (I.iv), “Alarum continues still afar off,” and “a Trumpet” (I.v), “They all shout and wave their swords” (I.vi), “Alarum, as in battle” (I.viii) and successively in the following scene, “Flourish. Alarum. A retreat is sounded,” “A long flourish” as“They all cry, ‘Marcius, Marcius’” and “Flourish. Trumpets sound and drums” (I.ix). The final scene of the Act is introduced with another “flourish,” of “Cornets” (I.x). Throughout the play we hear flourishes and sennets, the sounds of armies and warfare, of noises “within,” of shouts, of riots. In addition to these sounds of battles and parleys, “Music plays” during the feast at Aufidius’s house (IV.v), ceremonial music that would be customary for such an occasion. “A dead march” is “sounded” at the very end of the play (V.vi), which we find also at the ends of Hamlet and Lear. There is no music for private life in the play, no music associated with Volumnia, for example, and the characters in Coriolanus don’t know one note from another. The music in the play is the music of public occasions, it is not appreciated as art.
It is a misconception that the theme of Coriolanus is class warfare between plebians and aristocrats in which Shakespeare takes the aristocrats’ part. The play might very easily have been mainly about that, since such class warfare is to be found in North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Life of Coriolanus,” Shakespeare’s source for the play. In North’s Plutarch, there is class struggle in both Antium and Rome, and Coriolanus wants to combine with Aufidius in part to save the aristocrats. North’s Plutarch states that in his march upon Rome, Coriolanus’s
chiefest purpose was, to increase still the malice and dissention betweene the nobilitie, and the communaltie: and to drawe that on, he was very carefull to keepe the noble mens landes and goods safe from harme and burning, but spoyled all the whole countrie besides, and would suffer no man to take or hurte any thing of the noble mens.
But Shakespeare makes no mention of these tactics and also makes it clear that Coriolanus has no special regard for the patricians. Near the end of the play, Cominius tells Menenius and the two tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, that in beseeching Coriolanus not to burn Rome,
I offered to awaken his regard
For ’s private friends. His answer to me was,
He could not stay to pick them in a pile
Of noisome musty chaff. He said ‘twas folly,
For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt
And still to nose th’ offence.
(V.i.23–28)
The main contrast in the play is not of aristocrats and plebians, but of the one and the many, of Coriolanus and the crowd. In between are the few—among the tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, and among the patricians, Menenius and Cominius. The play deals, in passing, with ideas of society and community. I have already discussed these terms in the lecture on Julius Caesar. A society is temporary according to its function, which may change, or to its individuals as they grow unfit and have to be replaced. A society is threatened by an individual who through his superior gifts demands an excessive function, one greater than is consistent with that of the society as a whole. A society is dangerous when it persists in continuing after it is no longer necessary—an army in peacetime, for example. In a family, which is a society as well as a community, a mother like Volumnia is dangerous when she persists in treating her son as a small boy after he has grown up.
A community, which is defined by its common desires, is threatened by an exclusiveness of race or class, which denies admission to people with the same desires. It is also threatened by including people who don’t share those desires: by a crowd, because its members are incapable of saying “I” and have no fixed desires, only fluctuating ones, and by an individual—person or society—who cannot say “we” and demands a special place. Communities are established by a common love, or negatively and more easily, by fear. Note how Audifius’s servants rail at peace:
1. Serv. Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It’s sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
2. Serv. ’Tis so; and as war in some sort may be said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied but peace is a great maker of cuckolds.
1. Serv. Ay, and it makes men hate one another,
3. Serv. Reason; because they then less need one another. The wars for my money! I hope to see Romans as cheap as Volscians.
(IV.v.236–49)
There is certainly tension between the plebians and the patricians in Coriolanus. One of the citizens states the plebians’ case against the patricians fairly and directly:
Care for us? True indeed! They ne’er car’d for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses cramm’d with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.
(I.i.81–89)
What is the case put by Coriolanus against the people? They refuse to participate in wars for the state, and in their “general ignorance” they demand the privilege of rule before they have learned to rule themselves, wanting to “lick / The sweet which is their poison” (III.i.146, 156–57). As Shakespeare shows, they’re a crowd associated by appetite and passion, not, mind you, by desire. In the war you see them running away and refusing to follow Coriolanus. He enters the city of Corioles alone. They loot, act constantly out of both fear and greed, and are easily moved by oratory. They rejoice, “wave their swords” and “cast up their caps” at Coriolanus’s triumph (I.vi), but their opinion of him is easily changed by the tribunes, who move them to go to the Capitol to “repent in their election” of him to consul (II.iii.263). “To th’ Capitol, come,” Sicinius says to Brutus,
We will be there before the stream o’ th’ people;
And this shall seem, as partly ’tis, their own,
Which we have goaded onward.
(II.iii.268–71)
The same mutability of opinion is cleverly shown on a small scale in Antium, in the scene in which Aufidius’s servants revise their view of Coriolanus. When they do not know who he is, they treat him as a beggar. After they learn his name and Aufidius has embraced him, they claim they sensed his identity all along: “my mind gave me his clothes made a false report of him. . . . Nay, I knew by his face that there was something in him. He had, sir, a kind of face, methought—I cannot tell how to term it.”(IV.v.156–57, 161–63).
For a crowd the present moment is absolute. It lacks memory. When I was in Germany two years ago, civilians would say to me, “I was always against Hitler, I was forced, etc.” This was not a lie in the ordinary sense of the word. It was not said to deceive. After what had happened, the tremendous destruction, all that remained was a sense of the moment, and they could not remember. Events had robbed them of their memory. We should not imagine such conduct is restricted to Germans. Most of us, if we are not careful, are members of the crowd. It has nothing to do with what class we belong to.
After Coriolanus returns to threaten Rome, the Roman crowd tries to renege on its earlier wish to banish him:
1. Cit. For mine own part,
When I said banish him, I said ’twas pity.
2. Cit. And so did I.
3. Cit. And so did I; and, to say the truth, so did very many of us.
That we did, we did for the best; and though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will....
1. Cit. The gods be good to us! Come, masters, let’s home. I ever said we were i’ th’ wrong when we banish’d him.
2. Cit. So did we all. But come, let’s home,
(IV.vi.139–45, 153–56)
Soon afterwards, a messenger reports, the crowd turns on the tribunes, capturing Brutus, haling
him up and down; all swearing, if
The Roman ladies bring not comfort home,
They’ll give him death by inches.
(V.iv.40–42)
In the following scene, in Antium, the Volscian crowd first greets Coriolanus with “great shouts,” and moments later yells, “Tear him to pieces” (V.vi.48, 120). The crowd is any of us when we’re not members of a society, with a definite function, or of a community, with a definite love or desire.
The tribunes have been badly used by critics. Being a politician is a dangerous trade for one’s character, and there is no suggestion that democratic politicians are worse than aristocratic politicians—the question is not raised. The tribunes see their power and party threatened by Coriolanus, and they naturally take steps to combat him. Their dishing of him is not a pretty sight, but the inside of politics never is. There is a lot of deception in politics. Volumnia and Menenius, for their part, try to persuade Coriolanus to trick the people by seeming humble, by using the kind of strategy he uses in war. Volumnia tells him
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 dishonours you at all
Than to take in a town with gentle words
Which else would put you to your fortune and
The hazard of much blood.
(III.ii.52–61)
The patricians can be differentiated from the tribunes in their sense of dignity. Menenius is a favorite of the people, partly because he doesn’t rule himself. The parts of a whole should be disciplined and restrained, and he is governed by humour. But he shows up well when he appeals unsuccessfully to Coriolanus to spare Rome and is mocked by Coriolanus’ guards. “He that hath a will to die by himself,” he says, “fears it not from another. Let your general do his worst” (V.ii.110–12). Coriolanus exhibits a similar patrician dignity when he takes leave of his family and comforts them after he is exiled:
What, what, what!
I shall be lov’d when I am lack’d. Nay, mother
Resume that spirit when you were wont to say,
If you had been the wife of Hercules,
Six of his labours you’ld have done, and sav’d
Your husband so much sweat.
(IV.i.14–19)
Come, my sweet wife, my dearest mother, and
My friends of noble touch. When I am forth,
Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you come.
While I remain above the ground, you shall
Hear from me still, and never of me aught
But what is like me formerly.
(IV.i.48–52)
Coriolanus is the object of much criticism in the play. In the opening scene, in a discussion between two citizens about his virtues and vices, the first citizen says of his service in war, “Though soft-conscienc’d men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue” (I.i.37–41). In a similar discussion between two officers, the second officer says of him that “to seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as that which he dislikes—to flatter them for their love” (II.ii.24–26). The tribune Brutus claims that Coriolanus agrees to be commanded by Cominius in battle because
Fame, at the which he aims,
In whom already he’s well grac’d, cannot
Better be held nor more attain’d than by
A place below the first; for what miscarries
Shall be the general’s fault, though he perform
To th’ utmost of a man, and giddy censure
Will then cry out of Marcius, “O, if he
Had borne the business!”
(I.i.267–74)
Aufidius, after he has taken Coriolanus in, says that
He bears himself more proudlier,
Even to my person, than I thought he would
When first I did embrace him.
(IV.vii.8–10)
Aufidius goes on to offer an analysis of the causes of Coriolanus’s exile:
Whether ’twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of; or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controll’d the war; but one of these
(As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him) made him fear’d,
So hated, and so banish’d.
(IV.vii.37–48)
In Rome Coriolanus is reluctant to go down and show his wounds to the people and be praised. “Your Honours’ pardon,” he says to Cominius and the patricians,
I had rather have my wounds to heal again
Than hear say how I got them....
I had rather have one scratch my head i’ th’ sun
When the alarum were struck than idly sit
To hear my nothings monster’d.
(II.ii.72–74, 79–81)
He tells the citizens themselves, more derisively, “’twas never my desire yet to trouble the poor with begging” (II.iii.75–76). After his exile, however, his behavior changes a bit, and he seems to welcome adulation and exaltation. Cominius reports that “he does sit in gold” (V.i.63) in the Volscian camp, and Menenius, after his visit to him, says, “He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finish’d with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in” (V.iv.22–26).
Coriolanus illustrates the difference between classical tragedy and Shakespeare more than any other play. It looks like a classical play, a misunderstanding that may account for its popularity in France, and Coriolanus’s behavior may look a little like hybris. But it’s not. Coriolanus has many virtues. He can rule his body and has great physical courage, he is chaste, not greedy, and he doesn’t actually crave the power over others that brings about his downfall:
Know, good mother,
I had rather be their servant in my way
Than sway with them in theirs.
(II.i.218–20)
His two flaws are (1) his passion to excel and (2) his passion for approval, to be approved uniquely. Why does he revolt at campaigning? Because to ask for approval suggests that approval is given not for the excellence of his acts but for his oratory and the display of his wounds:
To brag unto them, “Thus I did, and thus!”
Show them th’ unaching scars which I should hide,
As if I had receiv’d them for the hire
Of their breath only!
(II.ii.151–54)
And he hates the crowd because they are changeable and can approve of those who do not deserve approval or who do not deserve it as much as he does:
Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust ye?
With every minute you do change a mind
And call him noble that was now your hate,
Him vile that was your garland.
(I.i.180–88)
If Coriolanus had simply wanted to excel, he wouldn’t have stood for consul or spared Rome for the sake of Volumnia. If he had wanted approval only, he wouldn’t have minded showing himself to the people, and he would not have joined Aufidius. Coriolanus is not reliable. His loyalty is not absolute.
Armies are societies that do not exist by themselves. For an army to function, it has to have an enemy, and there is a curious bond between the leaders and individual warriors, such as fighter pilots, on each side. They can understand and get along with each other much better than with their own civilians, and Shakespeare uses sexual imagery to describe their respect for each other. Coriolanus says to Cominius,
O, let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo’d, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done
And tapers burn’d to bedward!
(I.vi.29–32)
Aufidius says similarly to Coriolanus, in an extended speech welcoming him to Antium,
Know thou first,
I lov’d the maid I married; never man
Sigh’d truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars, I tell thee
We have a power on foot, and I had purpose
Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn
Or lose mine arm for’t. Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me—
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat—
And wak’d half dead with nothing.
(IV.v.118–31)
In Troilus and Cressida, Achilles speaks in a similar vein of Hector:
I have a woman’s longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace;
To talk with him, and to behold his visage
Even to my full view.
(III.iii.237–41)
Coriolanus would have been a great leader of the patrician class, as well as a great soldier, had he not wished to excel so much, and he could have been a brave individual standing alone, in good fortune and bad, had he not been tied to others by his desire for unqualified and unique approval. He is completely at the mercy of words that are said to him, and everyone in the play knows what they have to do to work on him. Brutus tells Sicinius,
Put him to choler straight. He hath been us’d
Ever to conquer, and to have his worth
Of contradiction. Being once chaf’d, he cannot
Be rein’d again to temperance; then he speaks
What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks
With us to break his neck.
(III.iii.25–30)
Sicinius takes Brutus’s advice by calling Coriolanus “a traitor to the people” (III.iii.66), and, as anticipated, Coriolanus becomes enraged at the word “traitor.” At the end of the play, before an assembly of the Volscians, Aufidius also taunts Coriolanus and replays the earlier scene by calling him a “boy.” Again, Coriolanus becomes instantly incensed:
Boy? False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. Boy?
(V.vi.112–16)
In two critical scenes in the play, mirror images of each other, Volumnia makes Coriolanus do what she wants. In the first, she pleads with him to speak nicely to the people, in the second, to spare Rome. In each case, she first tries to argue with him. When the arguments have no effect, she adopts the tactics of scolding him and threatening to withdraw her love, which works. In the earlier scene she tells him,
I prithee now, sweet son, as thou hast said
My praises made thee first a soldier, so,
To have my praise for this, perform a part
Thou hast not done before.
Coriolanus answers:
Away, my disposition, and possess me
Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turn’d,
Which quier’d with my drum, into a pipe
Small as an eunuch or the virgin voice
That babies lulls asleep! The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboy’s tears take up
The glasses of my sight!
(III.ii.107–17)
When he then protests, “I will not do’t,” Volumnia dissociates herself from him:
Do as thou list.
Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me;
But owe thy pride thyself.
(III.ii.120, 128–30)
He immediately gives in:
Pray be content.
Mother, I am going to the market place.
Chide me no more. I’ll mountebank their loves,
Cog their hearts from them, and come home belov’d
Of all the trades in Rome. Look, I am going.
(III.ii.130–34)
Volumnia’s tactics in the later scene, in which she and his family plead with him to spare Rome, are the same. She says that he will forever stain his reputation in the annals, in which will be written, “‘The man was noble, / But with his last attempt he wip’d it out....’” (V.iii.145–46). When he continues to resist, she first kneels to him and then rises in anger and turns away from him in a physical gesture of rejection:
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioles, and this child
Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch.
I am hush’d until our city be afire.
And then I’ll speak a little.
(V.iii.178–82)
After this speech, as the stage direction tells us, Coriolanus, defeated once again, “holds her by the hand, silent.” At every point Coriolanus requires a relation where he is the only child—with the people as well as with his mother.
The character of Volumnia raises the point that any man who has achieved much in the world has had a dominating and demanding mother—a successful father is bad for him—but it is just as well that the mother die young. They must let go in time to allow their sons to set their own standards. They are apt to regard their sons as extensions of their egos. Volumnia wants power by proxy, and it is her wish, not Coriolanus’s, that he become consul, a political office to which he is unsuited.
The play gives us a frightening picture of Coriolanus’ little son, who would “rather see the swords and hear a drum than look upon his schoolmaster,” and who is described torturing a butterfly. “I saw him run after a gilded butterfly,” his aunt Valeria says,
and when he caught it, he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and up again; catch’d it again; or whether his fall enrag’d him or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it! O, I warrant, how he mammock’d it!
Volumnia responds, approvingly, “One on ’s father’s moods” (I.iii.66–72).
The real individual in this play is not Coriolanus, but Volumnia. His desire to excel and to be regarded as uniquely excellent makes him bound to the crowd as no other character in the play is, and he therefore hates them. He fears they will change their mind.